Trump v. Arithmetic

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. Trump completes the comeback with his inauguration today.

He faces big challenges as he becomes president again. These challenges have one thing in common: arithmetic.

Trump has promised “the largest deportation program in American history,” targeting millions of undocumented immigrants. According to the American Immigration Council, it would cost up to $88 billion to deport a million immigrants in a year. And that’s just the direct cost of finding, detaining, and removing them. Americans would have to pay billions more to replace the labor that undocumented immigrants currently perform.

Trump also wants to cut taxes and raise military spending. Together with the cost of mass deportation, these decisions would increase the federal deficit, now nearly two trillion dollars a year. Those deficits would add to the federal debt, which currently stands at an astounding thirty trillion dollars. American taxpayers must pay a trillion dollars a year for interest on this debt.

How will Trump offset his tax cuts and spending increases? He proposes new tariffs, claiming that other countries will pay them. That is false. American importers pay tariffs, and they pass the cost to American consumers. The result will be higher prices. Inflation led to Joe Biden’s defeat and would make Trump unpopular, so do not expect him to follow through with this policy.

Trump has named Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head a commission to fight wasteful spending. (Ramaswamy, however, will reportedly leave the commission to run for governor of Ohio.) There have been many such commissions over the years, and they have never had much impact on the deficit. Do not expect Musk to fare any better. He has no government experience or any expertise in the federal budget.

Perhaps the best thing for the United States would be for Trump to break his promises on taxes and spending.

Poisoning the GOP

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  The 2024 race has begun.

Trump: They’re poisoning the blood of country.. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world not just in South America… but all over the world they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia pic.twitter.com/fv38EABo1a

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 16, 2023

Sophia Cai at Axios:

It's not just Trump. Even as the GOP has recruited more minority prospects for public office — this year's initial field for the presidential race was historically diverse — more Republicans are latching onto Trump's racially divisive rhetoric.

• Vivek Ramaswamy, the son of Indian immigrants, has won fans among white nationalists for promoting the "Great Replacement Theory," a racist conspiracy theory that nonwhite people are being allowed into the U.S. and other Western countries to replace white voters.
• Ramaswamy, who among the GOP candidates has been particularly reluctant to criticize Trump, also has campaigned with former Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican who has said that U.S. culture can't be restored "with somebody else's babies" and called for an America "so homogeneous that we look a lot the same."
• Last summer, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' team fired a speechwriter who created campaign material with neo-Nazi imagery, then shared it on a pro-DeSantis Twitter account.

More recently, some far-righters, conservative groups and others have begun calling former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley — whose parents were Indian immigrants — "Nimarata," her first name, rather than Nikki, the middle name she has gone by for most of her life.

• The emphasis on Haley's Indian heritage has escalated as she has risen in GOP polls and cast herself as a less chaotic, more sensitive conservative than Trump.
• Ramaswamy has called Haley "lying Nimarata Randhawa," referencing her family name before marriage.
• The Florida Standard — a now-defunct pro-DeSantis blog — has done so as well, as did a recent straw poll at a convention of the conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA.

Nixon Redux

Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.  

Ian Ward at Politico:

“He is by and away the most underappreciated president of our modern history in this country — probably in all of American history,” said Ramaswamy, without a hint of irony.

Ramaswamy’s homage to America’s most disgraced ex-president perplexed some liberal commentators, for whom Nixon remains the ultimate symbol of conservative criminality. But Ramaswamy is far from alone in rethinking Nixon’s divisive legacy. Among a small but influential group of young conservative activists and intellectuals, “Tricky Dick” is making a quiet — but notable — comeback. Long condemned by both Democrats and Republicans as the “crook” that he infamously swore not to be, Nixon is reemerging in some conservative circles as a paragon of populist power, a noble warrior who was unjustly consigned to the black list of American history.

Across the right-of-center media sphere, examples of Nixonmania abound. Online, popular conservative activists are studying the history of Nixon’s presidency as a “blueprint for counter-revolution” in the 21st century. In the pages of small conservative magazines, readers can meet the “New Nixonians” who are studying up on Nixon’s foreign policy prowess. On TikTok, users can scroll through meme-ified homages to Nixon. And in the weirdest (and most irony laden) corners of the internet, Nixon stans are even swooning over the former president’s swarthy good looks.

“Everything you read about him is from us,”

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  The  2024 race has begun.

Alex Isenstadt at Politico:

The top strategist for Ron DeSantis’ super PAC privately told donors that Vivek Ramaswamy posed a threat to the Florida governor — and bragged that the super PAC was behind an avalanche of opposition research targeting the rival candidate.

“Everything you read about him is from us,” Jeff Roe, the leader of the DeSantis-aligned Never Back Down told the gathering of donors. “Every misstatement, every 360 he’s conducting or 180 that he is going through in life, is from our scrutiny and pressure. And so, he’s not going to go through that very well, and that will get worse for him.”

Roe was speaking just hours before the first GOP primary debate, in remarks captured in an audio recording obtained by POLITICO. During his question-and-answer session, he conceded that if Ramaswamy had “a big night” at the debate, it could prove problematic for DeSantis. “That’s not great for us, short term,” he added.

Hours later, Ramaswamy would become a focal point of the debate, with the multimillionaire entrepreneur and first-time candidate trading barbs with former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence.

Campaigns and allied super PACs often peddle opposition research on their opponents to the press in hopes of landing negative stories. But it is exceedingly rare that a top strategist is caught on a recording admitting as much. And Roe is no mere operative. Never Back Down has taken on a central role in trying to secure the nomination for DeSantis, spending tens of millions of dollars to support a major voter persuasion and advertising operation.

In 2011, 2008 presidential candidate Fred Thompson wrote:

People may think that news organizations have legions of Woodwards and Bernsteins fanned out across the country, poring through old courthouse records or public business records and talking to anyone they think may have some dirt to dish on a candidate. They don’t. They don’t have the money, for one thing. No, the days of Woodward and Bernstein, intrepid investigative reporters, are over. Investigative reporters have been replaced by people who keep a big basket under the transom to catch the dossiers and other materials that the various campaigns drop on opposing candidates.

Campaigns that can afford it often spend lots of money on “opposition research.” The research can be for perfectly legitimate things, such as positions candidates have taken on issues. Or it can be for personal dirt, substantiated or otherwise. If they pass it to the media, the campaign, of course, wants to keep its role secret. In this way, reporters are seldom investigators. More often they’re facilitators. It’s easier work.

In Devil's Bargain, Joshua Green describes how Steve Bannon used the press. In a 2015 report, a slightly updated version of which appears in the book, he wrote:

[Breitbart editor Wynton] Hall peppers his colleagues with slogans so familiar around the office that they’re known by their abbreviations. “ABBN — always be breaking news,” he says. Another slogan is “depth beats speed.” Time-strapped reporters squeezed for copy will gratefully accept original, fact-based research because most of what they’re inundated with is garbage. “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs,” says Bannon. “You wouldn’t get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We’re working as a support function.”

The reason GAI does this is because it’s the secret to how conservatives can hack the mainstream media. Hall has distilled this, too, into a slogan: “Anchor left, pivot right.” It means that “weaponizing” a story onto the front page of the New York Times (“the Left”) is infinitely more valuable than publishing it on Breitbart.com. “We don’t look at the mainstream media as enemies because we don’t want our work to be trapped in the conservative ecosystem,” says Hall. “We live and die by the media. Every time we’re launching a book, I’ll build a battle map that literally breaks down by category every headline we’re going to place, every op-ed Peter’s going to publish. Some of it is a wish list. But it usually gets done.”

Once that work has permeated the mainstream—once it’s found “a host body,” in David Brock's phrase—then comes the “pivot.” Heroes and villains emerge and become grist for a juicy Breitbart News narrative. “With Clinton Cash, we never really broke a story,” says Bannon, “but you go [to Breitbart.com] and we’ve got 20 things, we’re linking to everybody else’s stuff, we’re aggregating, we’ll pull stuff from the Left. It’s a rolling phenomenon. Huge traffic. Everybody’s invested.”

Week of Offensiveness

Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Trump has praised Vivek Ramaswamy, done interviews with Tucker Carlson, and dined with Nick Fuentes.

Vivek Ramaswamy: “I find it offensive that we have professional politicians on this stage that will make a pilgrimage to Kyiv to their pope Zelensky without doing the same think for people in Maui or the south side of Chicago…”

pic.twitter.com/3A23aG6vaX

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) August 24, 2023

I missed it but holy shit my Catholic friends are PISSED at Vivek for his Pope comment.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) August 24, 2023

My Jewish friends are as pissed at Ramaswamy as my Catholic friends. Holy cow.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) August 24, 2023

MacGregor goes full Der Stürmer in this interview with Tucker, blaming the war on Ukraine on American Jews holding a multi-generational grudge against Russia. (Watch the video below.)

Disgusting and disturbing that a sitting senator like JD Vance would endorse. https://t.co/MJK2WWOGCZ

— Christian Vanderbrouk 🇺🇸🇺🇦🌻 (@UrbanAchievr) August 23, 2023

White supremacist and Trump loyalist Nick Fuentes called the former president's mugshot a "symbol" people can "rally behind" -- like the swastika.https://t.co/cRSJe0gU6W

— Eyes on the Right (@EyesOnTheRight) August 26, 2023

First GOP Debate

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun.

Lloyd Green at The Guardian:

On Wednesday night, eight Republicans clashed in Milwaukee. The debate was more than simply an audition to be the former guy’s running mate. Over the course of two hours, real differences emerged within the field. Donald Trump’s impregnable lead remains intact.

Ron DeSantis dodged the question of whether Mike Pence did the right thing on January 6. Florida’s governor emerged diminished. Tim Scott won the vice-president wannabe contest. An oleaginous and belligerent Vivek Ramaswamy repeatedly puckered-up to Joe Biden’s predecessor.

Nikki Haley, Trump’s UN ambassador, jabbed at the Trump administration’s spending record, called him the “most disliked politician in America”, and defended aid to Ukraine.

Chris Christie dinged Trump and Hunter Biden. New Jersey’s former governor also reminded the audience of the Trump-Putin bromance and Russia’s lawlessness.

On January 6, a mob prepared makeshift gallows for Mike Pence to his former boss’s delectation. With the cameras rolling, Pence again embraced the “Trump-Pence” label.

As the 45th president avoided his competitors, his legal woes mount. His bail in Georgia is set at $200,000, conditioned on not threatening witnesses or co-defendants.

On Tuesday night, a filing by the special counsel’s office laid out a failed effort to destroy Mar-a-Lago videos when faced with a federal grand jury subpoena. Trump as mob boss, Goodfellas repeats itself.

His interview with Tucker Carlson, where he reveled in the prospect of civil war and bloodshed, did not confer the immunity he so badly craves.

Candidate Caught in a Lie

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The early stages of the 2024 race have begun.

Daniel Dale at CNN:

Newly released audio disproves Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s claim on CNN that he was misquoted by The Atlantic about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Ramaswamy’s inaccurate insistence that he was misquoted about 9/11 in the magazine’s Monday article came during a contentious on-air exchange that night with Kaitlan Collins, anchor of CNN’s “The Source.”

Collins told Ramaswamy, “Speaking of another comment that you’ve made that is getting attention today, about 9/11 – a report in The Atlantic, that you gave an interview to. You said, quote, ‘I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers. Maybe the answer is zero. It probably is zero for all I know, right? I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero. But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely [that] should be an answer the public knows the answer to.’”

What Vivek Ramaswamy said last night regarding his quotes to the Atlantic about 9/11 compared with the audio that disproves his claim that he was misquoted. pic.twitter.com/FXNJjRovJ8

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) August 23, 2023