Welcome to August Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, August 1, 2024
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82 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor 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).
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The Florida headline of the day- West Palm Beach police arrest man they say broke into City Hall and left cocaine
The headline of the day- 25 seagulls died after a man is accused of deliberately running over them on a Washington beach
Seeing as I did not see it until this AM, a reply to @Paine‘s comment in yesterday’s A Little Self-Immolation post:
Correction:
He comes across like a guy who knows he has 44% of the voters locked down BECAUSE of whatever racist, offensive, outrageous nonsense he spews.
No JD, they don’t have children because they know it might turn out to be psychotic. deranged sociopath like you.
From USA’s Katie Ledecky makes Olympic history with gold in 1500m freestyle comes this little tidbit:
I’m sure JJ will get to this soon with a post, but until then: Russia prisoner swap involving US journalist Evan Gershkovich under way
Gershkovich and ex-marine Paul Whelan have been freed and are en route to a destination outside Russia, say reports
@OzarkHillbilly: Trump will somehow try to take credit for this.
@Jax:
Of course he will. Or the MAGAs will give him credit.
Josh Marshall has a thoughtful take on Trump’s bizarre and racist outburst yesterday in which he cautions against thinking this is some sort of 12 dimensional chess move on Trump’s part. FWIW, I don’t think the motivations matter. I think at most he is doing a quick mental calculation and concluding that while it might cost him 10-15% of the share of the Black vote he hoped to get, that’s only 10-15% of the 10% of Blacks who are registered to vote, so about 1%. In exchange, he motivates his base and gets a boost in turnout from them. I think that’s correct as far as it goes and it probably will work out a net positive. Where I think such calculus goes wrong is on neglecting how many leaners it will turn off or how much it will rally the overall Dem base. I hope to god it will be a net negative but I’ve lost all faith in the US electorate over the past 10 years.
Remember the good old days on this blog when people would chide me for imputing racist motivations to Republicans because that old style of racism was dead and no educated person subscribed to it anymore?
Someone needs to ask Trump whether, based on his heritage, he is German or Scottish. He can say “both,” thus normalizing Harris’s situation or he can say “white” and demonstrate it has nothing to do with culture, just skin color.
@Joe:
I always wondered how he managed to acquire a Scottish coat-of-arms for a German name like Drumpf.
One thing Felon trump’s attack on Harris’ race shows, it that he doesn’t know the difference between nationality and race. In the Felon’s mind, Harris isn’t black because her birth certificate lists her father’s nationality, Jamaican.
Demented moron.
Anecdote is not data, but a good anecdote can help to set data in perspective. Helen Lewis has a piece in The Atlantic (no subscription required) about how we people who are tuned into politics are actually the unusual ones, not just here in the US but all over the world, and she does a good job of setting off data with an anecdote.
First the data:
I often allude to my theory that only 30% or less of voters have any real clue as to what is at stake in a Presidential election (and substantially less for down ballot offices) and I wonder if the correspondents here think I mean to show cynism or contempt when I say that. I don’t. It’s just a reality, and it has to be factored into any equation.
Now the anecdote:
Londoner, yes, but an expat and someone who spends all day talking to a wide group of people about everything under the sun. And he is unsure if there was an assassination attempt on the President of the United States.
This is… weird.
@MarkedMan: Speaking as a layman, I would think that anyone who saw his performance at the conference and liked it was already 100% in the tank for Trump, and was very motivated to vote for him. I can’t imagine anyone who was on the fence watching this and thinking “I wasn’t sure, but now I’m definitely voting for Trump”. I can certainly imagine someone watching this and thinking I can’t vote for him, he’s a racist nutjob.
For Daddy Reynolds:
As seen on a trans discord:
@MarkedMan:
I don’t think Trump is even playing two-dimensional chess. As @Lucysfootball: points out: he already had the racists. He simply cannot control himself when directly confronted by a Black woman. He’s enraged by losing Biden, furious that the convention and the ear didn’t do him any good, furious that he has to spend campaign money on the campaign rather than using it to pay his fines. He can’t believe ‘they’ are doing this to him. He can’t believe he, the MAGA god, has to sit there and listen to some uppity n—- bitch question him.
And he’s terrified. Not only may he not be the SCOTUS’ anointed king, Kamala may be queen. He’s trying to figure out how he can mobilize his minions to steal an election when he has no power, and Joe Biden is still President. It may even have begun to penetrate his chowder brain that gutting the RNC and installing his toadies is not going to be helpful. 170,000 new volunteers? And fundraising that dwarfs his own?
A second loss? A double loser? OMG, he’s shitting bricks.
@Beth:
That makes two of us.
@Beth:
Inside out is a movie purporting to show humans lack free will, by showing how emotions, presented as humans/humanoids with free will, actually run things. Most of the movie takes place inside the mind of a pre-teen girl named Riley, but we do get glimpses of other minds now and then, including a dog and a cat.
I’ve no idea what any of the rest means.
@Michael Reynolds: “It may even have begun to penetrate his chowder brain that gutting the RNC and installing his toadies is not going to be helpful”
Agree completely with everything you say… except this. Because it would require him to admit — even to himself — that he had made a mistake.
Now when he can figure out someone else to blame for the decision, then maybe…
@Michael Reynolds:
I didn’t know it at the time, but this is a better response than I could have imagined. I’ll be laughing to myself about this as I am stuck in zoom court.
@Kathy:
This is also a phenomenal response.
In other news, I think I need a different breakfast. My ADHD meds are hitting like a truck right now and if the replacement judge shows up in the next 10 minutes I’m gonna look like a tweaker.
Last week may go down in history as a major turning point*. Thus far, there are two things one can say for sure about it:
1) Last week was a very long month.
2) The GQP completely forgot the existence of Hunter Biden.
*Or maybe not. It’s hard to say what relevance a given event or short period may have months from now, much less a century hence.
@MarkedMan: What you were imputing could still be true. How many truly educated Americans do we believe there are?
And no matter how cynically one takes the question, there are still probably fewer than that.
Trump’s MO all along has been to be outrageous and appeal to his base hoping for turnout. He hopes to peel off a few in the middle because they are unhappy about the Democrats. He really hasn’t made much effort to broaden his appeal so I wouldn’t expect him to change just because he is being interviewed by a black woman. He clearly thinks he is better than that woman and probably all women but then he thinks he is better than all men too.
Steve
@CSK: There’s a cottage industry that makes them up out of whole cloth. My mom bought one ages ago purporting to be the registered coat of arms of our Italian family with the misspelled name courtesy of the Kittitas County clerk who filled out my grandfather’s citizenship papers.
@wr: You don’t think the MAGAts would buy it’s the fault of Junior, Eric, and Eric’s ex-wife, or don’t think it’ll occur to him to try blaming them?
@just nutha:
He apparently got permission from the Scottish heraldic authorities for the device, according to Mother Jones. How, I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense, given that Trump/Drumpf is a German name.
Just saw a news flash: Evan Gershkovich is free.
@CSK:
I don’t know about coats-of-arms, which notoriously may bear arms, but years ago I read a piece about highland mythology, which is apparently a lot like our western mythology, and very much a tourist thing. It said clan tartans were for sale. There’s a perhaps genuine clan tartan for my very Scandanavian last name, but the article said there are also tartans for clans like Yamamoto. Toward which, I suppose, I should raise a dram of Suntory.
@MarkedMan:
If it’s calculated at all, I think it’s looking at recent events and internal polling and realizing their only hope is a Hail Mary effort to drive MAGA turnout. If so, my guess, worth what you paid for it, is any focus on the MAGA will remind everybody else how repellant Trump was and it will drive D turnout, as it did in ’20 when memories of Trump were fresh.
@steve: @Michael Reynolds: @MarkedMan: I’m leaning towards steve’s and mr’s response. There was no chess-playing, and there was definitely no calculus involved (Trump doing math? Ha!). But what he does know, and many of us keep falling for, is that any attention is good attention. At least for turning out his base.
@Michael Reynolds: Agree with your comment about black women. He seems to have a real problem with blacks in authority, and especially a strong black woman. My guess is deep down he can’t understand why this woman isn’t washing floors at Mar-a-Lago.
@Kazzy: He swings…. And misses. The count is now 0-2.
eta: and yes, he really is that weird.
@CSK: Huh, I just always assumed he’d co-opted the coat of arms from his mother’s side. This definitely falls under things I don’t really give a fig about…
@MarkedMan: I really think the answer to why Trump went to NABJ was simply that he’s a very dumb man who thought that he would win them over.
If you listen to his explanation for “Black jobs”, at the heart of it is an acknowledgement that far too often Blacks are the last hired and the first fired. It’s then covered in a layer of racism and xenophobia, as it is about how waves of invading Mexicans from South America* are swarming over the border and taking those jobs that would otherwise go to Black people.
If he made the case in a less racist way, it’s something that one could plausibly believe would go over well with a Black audience — illegal immigrants take jobs at the margins of society, and because of racist hiring policies, that’s going to affect poor Blacks more than anyone else.
Would that argument be accurate? I don’t think it’s nearly that simple, but I can see why someone could believe that and how if they just explained it to Black folks they would agree. And that’s what I think Trump was hoping for.
And then he goes and starts saying “Black” in a bizarre way, stretching out the vowel like he does with the I in “Biden”, because he’s a very weird, racist man.
*: not an actual phrase he uses, but it really captures the feeling.
@MarkedMan:
A lot has happened since then, I can really see not being sure of anything.
Or maybe he’s not uninformed, and is just an Ear Truther. Jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel girders, and people don’t regrow their ears!”
@CSK: Apparently the “Scottish heraldic authorities”–whoever they might be–can be bought off. And at relatively low cost, I would guess.
@Michael Reynolds:
He’s aware he might lose to a black woman, the man is s&^ting bricks.
@Jen:
It’s just another example of Trump’s pathetic efforts at social climbing.
@Jen: Another factor to consider, especially your closing comment.
I spent ten minutes of my life I’ll never get back on Twitter this morning…my god, the MAGA types are tripling down on the “Kamala SAID she’s Indian not Black” line of Birtherism 2.0 nonsense and how TF do they think this is a winning strategy?? (Also worth noting that JD Vance’s kids are biracial and what in the ever-lovin’-hell is going on in the Trump campaign messaging camp???)
Holy. Sh!t.
@Beth:
The movie actually went under my radar completely, until a few years later while reading one of Yuval Noah Harari’s books, either Sapiens or Homo Deus. For some reason he brings it up, claiming something like “Disney says humans don’t have free will.” This intrigued me.
In one of life’s little coincidences, it was being shown often on some cable channel right about then.
It’s a charming movie, but one shouldn’t take the metaphor too seriously. Even the dog’s emotions talked and thought with full intent, after all. Anyway, I expect I’ll see the sequel when it shows up on streaming.
@Gustopher:
He does the same thing with China.
@Jen:
That’s because Republiqans are not obsessed over identity politics.
As further evidence to just how mistaken you would be to assume even half of people are aware of what Trump says or how Harris responds, I’ll use an example: me. Now, I consider myself to be pretty deep into politics. Further, I think that the farther down ballot you go, the more likely the race is going to have immediate impact. I felt I was tuning into the available sources, especially around election time. Despite this, I voted for the long term councilman, largely because of his record for constituents services when we’ve reached out to him. However, I did notice that he endorsed a Baltimore ex-mayor who was running again to head the city after serving jail time for corruption the last time she had that office and that gave me pause, before I finally checked the box for him. In the end, he lost by 40 votes to a new guy, and that spurred me to find out more about the now ex-councilman. It appears like he is part of the corrupt crony network, although he hasn’t been charged with anything himself. How could I not know that beforehand? I’m tuned in! I read my local paper (The Banner, i.e., the good one) every day! Imagine how little my neighbors who are not politically involved at all would know!
Did see this gem on X though…
Anthony Scaramucci: “Don’t be surprised if Donald Trump drops out of the race.”
Response, from Liz Reusswig: “Maybe…is he included in the Russian prisoner swap?”
I’m dead.
@Kathy: Amazon offered me a free copy of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. As I had intended to read it, I happily accepted. I’m a few chapters into it. It’s a more rigorous treatment of something different, but really the same. Intuition rather than just emotion. He posits the mind operates as two systems:
He illustrates it with the old baseball and bat brain teaser. If a ball and bat cost $1.10 and the bat costs a dollar more than the ball, what does the ball cost. System 1 immediately says $0.10. It takes System 2 to step in and say “Whu? a dollar isn’t a dollar more than 10 cents.” Many people insist on $0.10. I’m finding it fascinating. Well worth every penny.
He talks of how input to System 1 triggers a cascade of recollection, intuition, emotion, most of which won’t rise to System 2. I’ve come to trust intuition more since someone described it as the mind unconsciously continuously running what-ifs. I haven’t seen anyone address it, but I wonder if there isn’t an analog to AI as like System 1 without a system 2. So far.
Heh.
Republicans Want Someone Younger Than Donald Trump as President: New Poll
@Jen:
Since Harris is almost young enough to be his daughter, the contrast is pretty striking.
@gVOR10:
That one’s been in my to read list for a few years now. I expect I’ll get to it eventually. It’s odd, because I’ve read a bit on Kahneman’s work with Tversky on biases and heuristics, too.
I’ve no idea what AI does or how. I can say that, thus far, it tends to be coherent, even when giving absurd advice or outright making sh*t up (lately Copilot displays a disclaimer that generative answers may be in error; but only when no sources are linked to).
I’d be cautious in making comparisons between human and machine intelligence. I’m sure there are similarities, but there are also many differences. Kind of like human vision isn’t like a camera, even though both employs lenses, focus light, use light receptors, etc.
@CSK: She is young enough to be his daughter, 59 to his 78.
I once dated a gal who became a grandmother at 32.
@Kazzy: I saw a comment today that said, “If you take this out of context, that’s actually the nicest thing Trump has ever tweeted.”
@Jen: Raw Story is reporting this about Vance’s response:
Link: https://www.rawstory.com/amp/jd-vance-2668855534-2668855534
returning to the historic inflation comments from a few weeks ago, recent reading points to much higher rates of inflation in the UK and France over the 20th century.
Here’s a graph showing comparative inflation between the US, France, the UK, and Germany from 1700 to the 2010s.
The period marked 1913-1950 includes the two world wars and the reconstruction after each one (including payment of reparations and debts incurred). But note the very high inlfation in the UK and France in the 70s and 80s.
And yet they still stand.
@Monala: I thought there was no way I could think less of him…and yet, here we are…
@Monala: Vance calling anyone a “chameleon” is the absolute galactic zenith of shameless projection.
The Sports headline of the day- Italian Boxer Quits Bout, Sparking Furor Over Gender at Olympics
I have been seeing a few social media posts that Trump may drop out . I’m sure this is BS, but I’m stilled puzzled. There are a few things different takes on this:
1. It’s just BS. OK, but to what end? What strategic electoral goal does it serve exactly?
2. It’s wish-casting by some in the Republican party. Really? Why? It seems to be there is a sizeable contingent of the Republican party who are Trump or bust. Swapping Trump out now would just be handing the keys over to the Democrats. They have to know they would utterly lose this group.
3. It’s being started by a group who think a younger MAGA will have that exact appeal Trump has. OK but there was a long list of Not Trump MAGA that couldn’t get a bite from anyone during the primary, who is the masked man? Maybe Nikki Haley voters are wish-casting.
4. Maybe it is Trump himself. Not bloody likely because winning the election is his only get out of jail card (other then the Supreme Court). This is a non-starter. Never going to happen unless one of his Russian \ Mob connections gets to him and makes him an offer he can’t refuse.
5. It’s a Trial Balloon to see if anyone bites. No one will bite, if the Republican party was thinking strategically, they wouldn’t have Trump in the first place. but this is probably the reason we are seeing these in the wild.
Anything I have missed?
@Rick DeMent:
It’s the Felon himself behind the rumor. He wants the GQP to beg him to stay in the race. it would feed his insatiable vanity.
Or maybe seeing how well dropping the nominee is working out for the Democrats, some in the GQP figure their only chance is to dump the Orange Turd and go with… well, not JD Vance.
@Rick DeMent: I think it’s a lot of those things. I don’t see it happening, mostly because given the timing I’m pretty sure that’d leave Vance in the top spot (remember, the Republicans have already had their convention). I also don’t think Trump would want to leave the cash flow into the Republican Party.
We’ve been here before, remember. When he was polling behind Hillary, and after the Access Hollywood tape came out, there was discussion about him dropping out of the race.
I think mostly it is wishcasting by Republicans who have watched the past couple of weeks and are desperately hoping to push reset somehow.
@Kathy: I think they already had their convention 🙂
But I’d expect they’re trying to figure out how to have a last-minute nominee in four years.
News from Britain, which is rather painful to recount.
On Monday a man armed with knife carried out a frenzied attack at nursery school in Southport, Lancashire.
Three children, ages six, seven and nine died.
Eight children and two adults were seriously injured.
And then social media got to work on the idiot tendency.
The narrative quickly spread that the culprit was a radical Muslim asylum seeker who’d come in on a “small boat” crossing. Complete with (fake) identification and photographs
On Tuesday, around 300 far-right EDL types turned up in Southport, and promptly started a riot, in which 27 police were hospitalized, a mosque attacked, vans set on fire, local property vandalised, etc.
On Wednesday afternoon/evening “copycat” mobs were acting out in several locations.
As it turns out, the killer was a 17 year old, Axel Rudakubana, born in the UK.
His parents were immigrants from Rwanda; and it’s highly likely, though not certain they were, therefore, Christians.
Police have now been issued “Section 60 orders” orders in Southport.
Formally, enhanced “stop and search” and questioning powers without requirement for “reasonable grounds of suspicion”.
Informally, to come down like a ton of bricks on any actual or suspected trouble-makers.
Idiocy piled on top of tragedy.
With the internet agitators caring only for the clicks, and a vicarious thrill of stormtrooping-by-proxy, and not whit for the agony of the bereaved parents.
@JohnSF:
It was headline news here, too. Awful. Those poor children.
@Jen: And yet, they had close to a dozen choices and preferred none of them to him. Talk about a day late and a dollar short.
Still, I suspect that this is one of those things like happened in 2016 with Democrats where a significant percentage of people polled suggested that they would prefer that Hillary had competition for the nomination yet liked none of the available choices.
Paging Generic Republican. Paging Generic Republican…
@CSK:
A glimmer of light in the dark: after the riot, the local people got together, cleared the street of debris, repaired windows etc.
The mosque and people’s garden walls were rebuilt by local builders and bricklayers volunteering their labour, and some donating materials.
One brickie outside the mosque:
“We’ll fix it. And if they knock it down again, we’ll fix it again.”
(white guy, btw, the area is 95% white)
Another local (paraphrased from memory of Xitter comment):
“And to the scrote who sucker-punched me when I told him to leave my bins alone: you can’t punch for shite, lad. I’m not even bruised. Though you can run fairly well. Anytime you want round two, I’ll be here.”
Proper Lancastrians.
(I used to live about seven miles south of where it all happened. )
Apparently, the fate of the Harris campaign as the first Jamaican/Indian female president lies in the hands of the white college-edumedicated voters.
Ruy Teixeira
Harris seems to be running for president of online America
@Rick DeMent:
First, it’s the internet chattering to itself, so there is no way to judge whether it has any basis in reality whatsoever. But even given that, I found myself wondering, “What would have to happen for Trump to drop out?”, and I started spinning all kinds of things about whether he believed the Supreme Court has given him absolute immunity for everything, and adding in other combinations of things along that line. But then I realized there is one thing that I am as close to absolutely certain as I can get on a hypothetical: if Trump believes he is very likely to lose, he will drop out. Full stop. I’ve seen how this cartoon show of a man operates since the 1980’s. Above all else, ALL else, Trump hates to lose. It happens all the time, and he has given up over and over again and inwardly accepted defeat. He never admits it, and it causes him to go off and sulk for anything from 6 months to a couple of years, and to shut Trump up that long means it pains him beyond anything else. In his head the idea that Donald Trump, THE Donald Trump, would lose to a woman, a black woman, an average looking black woman, is beyond bearing. It would be the worst defeat of his life. If he thinks it is likely to happen, he will come up with an excuse and drop out.
@JKB: you’re adorable, don’t ever stop.
But, while you’re here, since you’re one of the few people here up on right wing talking points… when JD Vance, JD says that Trump is responsible for the release of the American hostages Putin was holding, what does he mean? What did Trump do?
@Beth:
Inside Out is basically the 90s sitcom Herman’s Head, but Pixar so it’s for feels instead of for funny.
One thing I did like about it is it’s probably the best movie representation of what the internal experience of having a depressive episode is like and how depression is completely different from just feeling sad.
The sequel has a similarly great representation of what the internal experience of having an anxiety disorder is like.
Both movies are 4/4, would catharsis cry in the theater again
Harris seems to be running for president of online America
Trump is running for president of white racist christian America…
@Gustopher:
Well, quite obviously, Putin and others are clearing up their problems in anticipation of Trump winning the election. Like the Iranians in 1980, they don’t want to be holding Americans when Democrats lose power.
Or Trump is just controlling the news cycle by triggering the Democrat pet journalists.
@Bill Jempty:
But it’s not against any religion
To want to dispose of… a pigeon
— Tom Lehrer
@JohnSF: tho they did provide us with a clip of a flashy guy getting a brick to the dome, then the nuts.
@gVOR10:
ALL modern AI is, essentially, System 1. We train models to have hunches, based on patterns generalized from whatever data they were trained on. No analysis, no reasoning — pure gut reaction.
“How can we get some System 2 into our powerful generative AI models without crippling them” is the hottest research topic in AI at the moment.
@JohnSF: I saw your news, too. Hideous behavior. Hopefully it triggers some sort of backlash against the hate groups. I won’t pretend that anybody will learn an actual lesson from it.
@JKB: You seem to have misunderstood or misremembered what happened with the Iran hostage crisis. “Like the Iranians in 1980, they don’t want to be holding Americans when Democrats lose power”–is not what happened. Instead, the hostages were not released under Carter’s watch, but rather the day after Reagan was inaugurated. In fact, there’s a conspiracy theory that Reagan plotted with the Iranians to delay releasing the hostages while Carter was still in office in order to not give Carter any advantages from the release. So how exactly does this prisoner exchange help Trump?
@Thomm:
Much of Brit-twitter is currently sniggering at that lads misfortunes.
Bricked-nuts berk will live long in interwebs mockery.
And hopefully will be up before the beak shortly to add judicial insult to his injuries.
@MarkedMan:
What happens if he drops out after the deadline for placing the candidate’s names on the ballot passes? I know this varies by state, but in a scenario where Orangefuhrer withdraws rather than face ignominy, one would expect it to take place rather close to election day, even possibly after early voting has started.
Part of the answer, I expect, is that voters don’t choose candidates, but electors. Fine, but what about states with laws regarding faithless electors? Can they still simply give their EC votes to Generic Republiqan, or must they give them to Orange Felon regardless of whether he’s even running or wants their votes?
If Harris wins, then it’s academic who comes in second place. The alternative though, would cause Orangefuhrer to throw the biggest tantrum in the history of the Universe. Imagine if he drops out, and some compromise dark horse candidate, if any exist, wins the election? Can you imagine him not demanding the presidency by divine right or something?
I don’t think he’ll drop out. I do think he’ll try to stage another coup when he loses. He’ll find it very hard to do without military support.
@Kathy:
After the inflation of the late 70s, early 80s settled out, somebody did a study of who had energed hurt by inflation. The only identifiable group they could say was hurt long term was college faculty. I think it was Galbraith who said the real risk from inflation was that sooner or later somebody would do something stupid to fight it.
@gVOR10:
I have doubts.
There were people on fixed incomes from pensions or investments who were badly affected, including a lot of not especially wealthy people.
Though, obviously, not absolutely poor, either.
And also those in employment who were not able to bargain higher incomes.
That’s why when higher unemployment hit, a lot of people felt pain.
And high (ie over 10%) inflation in itself seems likely to induce sufficient economic dislocation to produce increased unemployment quite promptly.
I’ve seen several studies that indicate moderate (up to 5%) inflation is not too bad; but once you go north of 10, it gets very nasty very quickly.
There is also the international trading value and investment worth of the currency to consider.
Lose that, and bad things may follow.
The US has a considerable cushion in that regard, being THE global reserve/trading currency, which holds down relative interest rates and eases debt trading.
But such things often have limits; and it’s generally not a good idea to discover those limits by experiment.
@gVOR10:
@JohnSF:
IMO, it’s like poison: it’s a matter of dosage, or magnitude.
The same would go for other economic indicators, like shareholder value, tax cuts, deficits, debt, etc.
@Kathy:
Just to be clear, I don’t think he’ll drop out either. I was just trying to come up with something that would cause him to drop out.
I actually took it a bit further and decided it couldn’t happen even if he wanted to. Dropping out after being nominated is unprecedented and would be complicated and require concerted effort, paperwork, lawyers etc. Even if Trump wanted to, who would help him navigate that? So I change my “If…” to: if he believes Harris will beat him, he will declare that the election is irredeemably rigged and retreat to Mar a Lago, ceasing to campaign. Again, not a prediction, just a scenario.