Ungoverning

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum at Foreign Affairs:

He is pursuing “ungoverning”: the comprehensive and intentional destruction of state capacity. As we described in Foreign Affairs in late January, ungoverning is rare in the history of politics. Authoritarians generally want to take over a state so they can use it, not so they can destroy it. They need loyalty and select for it, but they also need competence. Trump, by contrast, shreds regular procedures, shrugs off the expertise needed to bring policies to life, and promotes administrative incompetence in order to eliminate any authority other than himself. None of his decisions are about slashing bureaucratic red tape or privatizing parts of the state. Instead, he issues capricious commands and negotiates deals that serve his whims. From his first days back in the White House, Trump made it clear that he will reward anyone who breaks the law in support of him. It is why he pardoned all the January 6, 2021, insurrectionists, declaring later that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

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Prizing incompetence over expertise also explains the sweeping powers Trump gave to the billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE was not about cutting $2 trillion from the deficit, as Musk originally promised, or $1 trillion, as he later pledged, or even $150 billion, the amount he finally settled on. Instead, DOGE was the sharp end of a battering ram directed at the so-called deep state, which includes both essential operations, such as tax collection, and apolitical employees, such as the National Weather Service scientists who gather weather data. Its purpose was to hollow out the administration.

NatCons Repudiate Lincoln, Embrace Buchanan

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is has been full of ominous developments.  Forty years ago, conservatism reflected Reagan's sunny optimism about America.  Trump is taking conservatives to a dark place.

At Gettysburg, Lincoln said that this nation was "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."  At the National Conservatism Conference, Senator Eric Schmitt repudiated Lincoln:

If America was a universal proposition, then everything we inherited from our specific Western heritage had to be abolished. So the statues come down. The names are changed. Yesterday’s heroes become today’s villains. The story of the nation has to be rewritten to align America with its true creed.

On the Right, the situation wasn’t all that different. The truth is, by the 1990s, too many on the Right had come to accept the same basic worldview as the liberal elites they claimed to oppose.

In foreign policy, trade, immigration and the domestic culture wars, too many conservatives defined the American identity as nothing more than an abstract and vaguely-defined proposition. Even if you didn’t want to immigrate here, you would be made to submit to that proposition anyway, via military crusades to bring Madisonian democracy to the furthest corners of the world.

For years, conservatives would talk as if the whole world were just Americans-in-waiting—“born American, but in the wrong place.” America was, as one neoconservative writer put it, “The First Universal Nation.”

That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract “proposition,” but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests.

 Ben Jacobs at Politico:

At the National Conservatism Conference in Washington this week, perhaps the second biggest applause line came when Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) discussed his effort to award Buchanan the Presidential Medal of Freedom on the stage. The only bigger reaction came when Trump border czar Tom Homan espoused the hardline immigration rhetoric that once made Buchanan an outlier within the GOP.

For Moore, Buchanan deserved the highest civilian honor in the United States because “he was right about pretty much everything 20 years before most people realized it.” In contrast, he told POLITICO Nightly, George H.W. Bush was “wrong about almost everything.”

The conference wasn’t exactly a welcoming venue for those who adhere to the brand of Republican politics that had dominated at the end of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st century. Even the speaker delegated to defend Trump’s airstrikes against Iranian nuclear sites, Max Abrahms, a professor at Northeastern University, took pains to insist he was not “a neo-con” — an even more deadly pejorative than “liberal” at the venue.

“Buchanan has been revered by the under-30 crowd basically the entire time that I’ve been working in professional politics,” explained Nick Solheim, the head of American Moment, an influential right wing nonprofit. “[P]eople have been posting vaporwave edits of Pat Buchanan since 2016.”

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David Tell, a former aide to Bush on his 1992 campaign, agrees that Buchanan’s platform is eerily similar to the policies of Trump’s GOP. However, he added, there’s now a “Huey Long element not previously present in American conservatism.”

Bread and Butter, War and Peace

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

 For Republican prospects in 2026, the economy is a problem.

 CNN:

• The US economy added just 22,000 jobs last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. The unemployment rate rose to 4.3% from 4.2%.

• Friday’s report is the first data under a new leader at the BLS, after President Donald Trump fired the previous one for producing data that Trump baselessly claimed must be “a scam.” Just 73,000 positions were added in July and previous monthly totals were substantially revised down.

• Friday’s data was far worse than expected, with economists having forecast around 76,500 jobs added in August.

• It’s the latest snapshot of the US economy under Trump’s aggressive trade agenda, as inflation continues to tick up and there are now more unemployed people than jobs for them.

Dubious military action can also pose a problem.

 Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper, Alan Feuer, Charlie Savage and Edward Wong at NYT:

The Trump administration declared the start of a new and potentially violent campaign against Venezuelan cartels on Wednesday, defending a deadly U.S. military strike on a boat that officials said was carrying drugs even as specialists in the law of war questioned the legality of the attack.

The U.S. Navy has long intercepted and boarded ships suspected of smuggling drugs in international waters, typically with a Coast Guard officer temporarily in charge to invoke law enforcement authority. Tuesday’s direct attack in the Caribbean was a marked departure from that decades-long approach.

The administration has said 11 people were aboard the vessel. It was unclear whether they were given a chance to surrender before the United States attacked.

The Trump administration has not offered any legal rationale. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in an appearance on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday that administration officials “knew exactly who was in that boat” and “exactly what they were doing,” although he did not offer evidence.

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Congress has not authorized any armed conflict against Tren de Aragua or Venezuela, and several legal experts said they were unaware of any precedent for claiming that a country could invoke self-defense as a basis to target drug trafficking suspects with lethal force.

Trump Calls Epstein Survivors a Hoax

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist.

Lauren Peller, Jay O'Brien, and John Parkinson at ABC News:

President Donald Trump on Wednesday cast the Jeffrey Epstein controversy as "irrelevant" amid an effort on Capitol Hill to force a vote to release all files related to the deceased sex offender.

"This is a Democrat hoax that never ends," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office when asked about the push for more transparency in the Epstein matter.

"From what I understand, I could check, but from what I understand, thousands of pages of documents have been given," the president said. "But it's really a Democrat hoax because they're trying to get people to talk about something that's totally irrelevant to the success that we've had as a nation since I've been president."

The comments came as a group of survivors joined House members in a push to compel the Justice Department to release records so far withheld from Congress.

ABC News Capitol Hill Correspondent Jay O'Brien asked the victims for their reaction to Trump's characterization that it is a "hoax."

One survivor, Haley Robson, said it felt like "being gutted from the inside out."

"Mr. President Donald J. Trump, I am a registered Republican -- not that that matters because this is not political -- however, I cordially invite you to meet me in the Capitol in person so you can understand this is not a hoax. We are real human beings. This is real trauma," she responded.

 

 

HFC in Decline?

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Kate Santaliz at Axios:

The House Freedom Caucus is on the cusp of an identity crisis.

Why it matters: The rabble-rousing group of hardline Republicans who once ousted a speaker and have held GOP leadership hostage over the past decade is shrinking in size and clout as several prominent members head for the exits.

The HFC is struggling to reconcile loyalty to President Trump with its own budget-cutting priorities — and the former often takes precedence. That's raising doubts about whether the group can remain an independent force on the party's right flank, rather than increasingly, after some grumbling, caving to Trump.

Driving the news: At least six of the HFC's most high-profile members are eyeing departures, sparking questions about who, if anyone, will fill the void.Rep. Chip Roy, one of the group's biggest agitators, is running for state attorney general in Texas. Three other especially vocal members — Reps. Byron Donalds (Florida), Ralph Norman (South Carolina) and Andy Biggs (Arizona) — are mounting gubernatorial bids. Rep. Barry Moore is running for Alabama's open Senate seat, while there have been reports that Rep. Andy Ogles is jockeying for a Senate appointment if Marsha Blackburn's bid to be Tennessee's governor is successful.

Several other HFC members, including Rep. Scott Perry (Pennsylvania) and caucus chair Andy Harris (Maryland), could face tough reelection battles in 2026.Internal strife has further thinned the group's ranks: Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (Florida) decided to leave the HFC in March, while the group voted last summer to kick out Rep. Warren Davidson (Ohio) for breaking with its leadership, prompting Rep. Troy Nehls (Texas) to resign in protest.
Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was kicked out in 2023 after publicly feuding with fellow HFC members over her support for then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Bad News, Good News for GOP

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

 For Republican prospects in 2026, the economy is a problem:

Alex Isenstadt:

Republican operatives and lawmakers are increasingly anxious about how inflation could affect the GOP in the 2026 midterms, and want President Trump to take more aggressive steps to address rising prices.

Why it matters: GOP insiders and lawmakers believe the cost of drugs and consumer items — and how the White House deals with Trump's tariffs potentially turbocharging prices and creating shortages — will be key to whether the GOP keeps control of Congress next year.

Zoom in: Republicans on Capitol Hill and beyond praise Trump's recent focus on crime, but many are alarmed by internal polls and focus groups showing persistent — and increasing — concerns about prices.

Katherine Hamilton and Alison Sider:

For the American middle class, it has been a summer of cooling confidence.

Consumer sentiment dropped nearly 6% in August, after trending up in June and July, according to a closely watched index from the University of Michigan. Pessimism about the job market increased, with more people surveyed saying they expect their income to decline, according to polling done by think tank the Conference Board.

The middle class—generally considered to include households making roughly $53,000 to $161,000 a year—is playing an outsize role in that waning optimism. After months of tracking high-income earners’ increasing confidence about the economy, households making between $50,000 and $100,000 made an abrupt about-face in June. They now more closely resemble low-income earners’ gloomier views, according to surveys done by Morning Consult, a data-intelligence firm.

“There was a period of time, briefly, where the middle-income consumer looked like they were being dragged up by all that was going well in the world,” said John Leer, chief economist at Morning Consult. “Then things fell off a cliff.”

But....

At Politico, Lisa Kashinsky, Elena Schneider and Nicholas Wu write that Democrats are "hamstrung by constitutional restrictions or independent commissions in some states, while Republicans are generally free of those legal barriers and have leadership trifectas in Indiana, Florida, Missouri and Ohio, promising state lawmakers fewer restrictions to draw Democratic rivals out of their seats. Florida’s constitution has language restricting partisan gerrymandering, though its conservative-majority state Supreme Court recently upheld a GOP redraw."

Nate Cohn at NYT: "[If] the new maps are enacted in all of these states, Democrats will need to win the national popular vote by two or three percentage points to be favored to retake the House, according to projections based on recent congressional and presidential election results."

Trump v. Labor

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is on an ominous course.  Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he did not like a jobs report.

Steven Greenhouse at The Guardian:

Despite his vow to help coal miners, Trump halted enforcement of a regulation that protects miners from a debilitating, often deadly lung disease. He fired the chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), leaving the US’s top labor watchdog without a quorum to protect workers from corporations’ illegal anti-union tactics. Angering labor leaders, Trump stripped one million federal workers of their right to bargain collectively and tore up their union contracts.

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Trump has hurt construction workers by shutting down major wind turbine projects and ending Biden-era subsidies that encourage the construction of factories that make renewable-energy products. In moves that will harm some of the nation’s most vulnerable workers, the Trump administration has proposed ending minimum wage and overtime protections for 3.7 million home-care and domestic workers. It has also killed a Biden plan to prevent employers from paying disabled workers less than the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage.

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Trump has taken numerous steps that will weaken safety protections for workers. He is cutting staffing by 12% at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha). His administration has proposed eliminating a requirement for adequate lighting on construction sites. It is reducing the fines that small businesses pay for violating safety rules. It has proposed blocking the government’s mine-safety district managers from ordering upgrades in mine ventilation and safety. It has slowed action on Biden’s effort to protect workers from high temperatures.

He even trashed paid holidays: