An interesting (and scary) New York Times about Trump’s cognitive decline:
Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age
With the passage of time, the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years.
Just to lighten my mood, I have been re-reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. A line she gives to a character struck me:
Observing that the percentage of mail-in votes was down does not explain why the total numbers were down 20 percent. Republican numbers were also down, but not so much.
petrushka,
Did you look at the chart I linked? It shows Dems votes about the same total except 2020. How do you explain this?
In 2020, what a Trump presidency was like was fresh in the minds of the voters, and turnout was extraordinary. But in the interim memories have faded, and we’ve had Fox News telling their audience daily for 4 years that a great economy is actually terrible, that low unemployment is high, that low inflation is high, that the Biden administration (which produced the world’s healthiest economy) was an unmitigated disaster, and so on. People whose salaries doubled in the last 4 years told pollsters they were better off back then because Fox News told them they were better off. And Harris was out there telling people what people KNEW wasn’t true (per Fox) and promising another four years of the same misery everyone knew everyone else was suffering, even though they weren’t personally suffering.
As Viktor Orban said, modern autocracy rests on the state propaganda – uh, media. In two years, we’ll find if the voting public believes Fox or their own lying eyes. My money is on Fox. I should note that the Trump vote was about the same as the last two elections, and those voters are impervious to a non-Fox reality. The challenge was to get non-Trump voters to the polls, to perpetuate what they were told was a nation going in the wrong direction. What the great “undecided” population decided was to sit this one out.
@Flint
I agree that Biden’s *actual* economy is probably the best America has seen this century. The economy that America has now is different from Obama’s recession and deflation (which continued under Trump). The inflation, prompted by Covid, first, it absolutely had to come at some point after a decade of deflation, and second, it was handled very competently by Biden administration and the inflation is where the Fed wants it to be, which is good, definitely when compared to the rest of the Western world (the entire world had the pandemic and inflation, so we can objectively compare how different countries handled this). Also not to mention a set of laws that benefitted the working class in particular: Rescue Plan Act to keep people afloat during Covid, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (a trillion!), adding reportedly 600,000 manufacturing jobs (the ones that Trump says he’d bring back home, Biden already did) etc.
Given all this, the voting result is flatly wrong. Either Trumpish false propaganda managed to brainwash Americans or the psyche of American people is genuinely messed up. I tend towards the latter (though of course it is rather a mix of both), because there’s no way Americans were making an un-informed choice this time. Trump had already had a term in office and it was easily worse than either Obama’s or Biden’s.
One particularly demonstrative point: the Teamsters union. Biden personally had saved Teamsters’ pension fund https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/dec/14/kevin-brady/bidens-36-billion-to-save-teamsters-fund-from-inso/ yet Teamster members voted for Trump https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/18/teamsters-favor-trump-harris-endorsement-00179879 which in my opinion definitely proves beyond reasonable doubt the sick psyche of American people. Many commentators say, “It’s the economy, stupid” yet the voter behaviour is literally like people look at what’s good for them and then deliberately cast their vote in the opposite direction. Americans outright punish the president and the party who created the best economy for them! (Democrats may easily take the following lesson from this: Thou shalt NOT make the economy good! You must talk about the economy in a whiny way how bad it is and how you’re going to make it better if you were the dictator, but you must pay attention to not make the economy *actually* good.)
As to the media space, in USA it is much more diverse than in Hungary or Russia. What seems to have happened is that the Republican side (Fox News and everything new that has crept out recently to the right of it) is, certainly ever since W’s era, far more brazenly partisan brainwashy propaganda than anything to the left of Fox News. Most mainstream media (say NYT, NBC) tries to keep a centrist line, but when the right is lunatic extreme far right then there is really no centre to be had. Moreover, I’m not sure people watch cable news anymore. Cable costs money and money is allegedly tight when you are American (at least this is what they keep saying), so they are probably consuming more “independent media” like Youtube podcasts. And what are those podcasts? Most prominently Joe Rogan, who was scared into the conspiratorial rightist abyss by Covid.
On this point, there is again a difference in behaviour between the two major parties. Both Trump and Vance showed up for Joe Rogan and were interviewed by a bunch of other youtubers/influencers (Trump even hung out with Laura Loomer for a whole week or more), in addition to “town halls”, media conferences and interviews at/for mainstream outlets. Whereas Democrats (the candidates and their campaign staff) exclusively appeared on the mainstream outlets and absolutely failed to show up for podcasters-youtubers-influencers. Democrats fail to approve and legitimise the “alternative” leftist media landscape. Now, real journalism is ideally objective and neutral, but when rightists have both their mainstream outlets and “alternative” minions properly institutionalised in the service of major party propaganda, then Republicans have a serious advantage over Democrats.
I have no explanation for 2020. 2020 is my question.
In Florida, which has long had “no reason required” absentee voting, the total votes cast are almost the same in 2020 and 2024. The gap between Harris and Biden is about half what it is in other states.
Somehow I don’t think so. I am attaching a graph to illustrate an important point, and I hope it is readable. What it shows (according to polls) is that during the entire Obama administration, the public perception was that the economy was terrible and getting worse. On the very day Trump was elected this perception reversed, and during the entire Trump administration the public perceived that the economy was excellent and getting better, even during the heart of the pandemic! The day Biden was elected, the perception reverted to the Obama years – suddenly the economy was perceived once again as terrible and getting worse! Note that the perception changed overnight! while the real economy takes at least years for such a large change.
What I think we should notice is that the perception and the reality are unrelated, while the correlation between current president and perception is almost perfect. Now, very few Americans have the perspective to grasp the state of the entire economy, complete with GDP, unemployment rate, inflation rate, real wage growth, business startup rate, average credit card debt, stock market performance and so on. And so Americans must derive their general understanding of the state of the economy from what they see on TV, read on social media, hear on podcasts and so on. And somebody has convinced the polled public of an imaginary state of the economy based solely on partisan political depictions. Who could that be?
And if a presidential candidate depicts the American economy the way it really is, voters must decide who they think is lying. Who do you think they’ll choose? Well, who DID they choose?
(I guess I don’t know how to attach an image.)
Here is another attempt at attachment: Um. I click on “choose file” and then the file to upload but nothing happens. I double click on the file, same non-result. Should I copy the file and try to stick it into the choose file box? Nope, the choose file box doesn’t have a paste option. The file is quite small (about 45K), so that’s not the problem. The image link below doesn’t have a paste option. I welcome any help. Also, I notice that the post edit button doesn’t allow image upload either. Is there supposed to be some way to tell if a file has actually been uploaded? I tried pasting into the comment box, and while the paste option appears in the windows menu, clicking on paste doesn’t do anything visible.
Erik,
The economic and political issues were
-inflation due to stimulus and regulation. Higher interest rates making homes hard to afford
-An open border that lead to fentanyl deaths and additional crime plus costs to support
-Wars in the Middle East and Ukraine
-A re calibration of hiring numbers right before the election that showed a big slowdown.
-High crime rates in many democratic cities.
–
We know the problem with polls. Only people reachable by pollsters get polled. The polls told that the race was close. It was not. Apparently there were pro-Trump voters who were not reachable by pollsters even though the pollsters reportedly already corrected themselves in Trump’s favour due to a reasonable guess that there were voter groups out of reach, likely pro-Trumpers.
You can say that Americans are brainwashed by media. It is certainly true. And I say the psyche of Americans is messed up. Part of it has to do with brainwash, part of it may be something more.
Brainwashedness of Americans is larger than a media problem. For example, American schoolchildren recite Pledge of Allegiance every day. This is outright Nazi level brainwash. Actually worse, because in Nazi Germany schools did not have daily Fuehrer-worship and neither did schools in Soviet Union, yet you can definitely say that Nazi Germany and Soviet Union had institutionalised propaganda by the government. It is appropriate to recognise that USA has it too and in some ways more pervasively than in Nazi Germany and Soviet Union.
Here’s how some Americans themselves understand it. Most of course understand none of it and refuse to understand it even when pointed out strictly based on facts. There is a well-rehearsed socially conditioned cognitive dissonance going on among Americans and most of them never resolve it.
You have been lied to and you swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Facts are not that hard. Try them sometimes.
Depends on the poll, and on what the poll was looking at. If you’re looking at polls to predict election outcomes, you should be aware that 2-3% error (within the published margin) one way or the other will be called a landslide. In other words, the election WAS close – Trump got about 2% more of the popular vote nationwide. And people on the right have been advised not to respond to polls, since polls are biased! Which is exactly what non-response makes them!
Now, the chart I was not able to upload showed that during the Obama years, the poll indicated that about 70% said the economy was bad, and about 6% said it was good. During the Trump administration, these percentages were almost exactly reversed. No, polls looking at a 2% difference won’t be precise enough. But when the poll is looking at a 65% difference, this really does tell you something, and what it tells you is that in politics, perception is reality. The media are illuminating the reality using gaslighting, not daylight. Colewd illustrates the perception effect.
Now, in some less democratic nations, the government controls all the media, but this is not true in America. In America, people can choose whether to watch Fox or MSNBC, and network ratings generally indicate that Fox’s audience exceeds the sum total of CBS, ABC, NBC, and PBS. Fox is telling people what they wish to hear and like to listen to. Multiple liberal attempts were made to compete with Rush on talk radio, and all failed. The Fox universe’s idea of what “news” is causes the very selection of material to fail to overlap what other sources consider important.
Recently published Department of Labor statistics showed that in real buying power (adjusted for inflation), the lower 95% of income earners made more money 52 years ago! This and other indicators are telling us that the voting public is justifiably angry and frustrated. They’ve been voting according to established norms and laws for 50 years and getting nowhere, while the richest 1% has been doing great (I read that with Trump’s election, the 5 richest billionaires in the world overnight made 64 billion dollars!).
And during this time, jobs have moved overseas en masse, and while employment rates are just as high, current jobs pay less – we have moved from a manufacturing to a service economy (and when you call customer service, you get someone in India, right?)
And so one party runs a flat-out autocrat who promises drastic changes to improve everyone’s life (but without a single detail), and the other party is known for promoting boys to claim to be girls, share girls’ locker rooms, play on girls’ teams, etc. The Democrats are seen as the party of DEI and CRT, both drastically misrepresented by Fox. For better or worse, these positions are both profoundly unpopular and irrelevant to what voters want. I think we underestimate the bigot vote, while the broad voting base is seeing too many high paying jobs being “stolen” by “the other” (people who look different from whites, and outsiders like that are instinctively presumed to be inferior). So too many voters sense (without articulating specifically) that democracy ain’t workin’, maybe a strongman will work better, even if the chosen strongman is borderline insane. The appeal to hate works much better than the appeal to joy. The large majority really IS better off than they were 4 years ago, but they do not FEEL better off. And people vote their feelings.
Conceivably, it’s possible that some of this downward trend to dictatorship could be reversed, but it would be necessary to select the right issues, framed in the right way, and communicated to voters effectively (while Fox refutes it all). We have much to learn from, for example, the scandinavian nations, where the large middle class enjoys a higher standard of living than the US, much better medical systems, more vacation time. They accomplish this with much higher taxes, a much more progressive tax structure, and no defense budget at all. The US could copy some of this in principle, but in practice this would be seen by the uber rich as a mortal threat, and money talks. So someone must be blamed for our death march. It can’t be us voters, and it can’t be the rich, so … Ah! it’s the Jews and the immigrants. THEY are the ones poisoning our blood, and besides they look and talk different and come from shithole countries. Who else could it be?
What has not happened for decades in American elections is that one party gets all branches of government. It’s more one-sided than usual. One-sided against voters’ interests and they voted for it.
Autocratic details are details too. Trump said he’d become the dictator, shoot/jail political opponents, censor mainstream media, deport immigrants (and legal immigrant are actually illegal in his opinion), solve the economy with tariffs and then you don’t have to vote anymore. These were his campaign promises.
And the strongman isn’t actually a strongman. In an earlier age, Trump was seen as a narcissist whino liberal elite – and he was Democrat too, which perfected the image. But being the same on Republican side makes you a strongman somehow.
Where democracy failed Americans is that Trump was on the ballot at all for a second time. He should not have had the chance. People should not have had to vote for a rapist serial adulterer convicted felon business fraudster insurrectionist nepotist dictator wannabe, peddler of state secrets and election thief. None of the famous American checks and balances worked when he was in office (well, impeachment never once worked) and that he now has SCOTUS in his pocket. It’s a failure of the judicial system that he was not properly convicted of his biggest crimes and locked up as law requires for what he did. It’s a failure of the Republican party that Trump is their leader.
In normal countries, when one party makes a coup attempt that fails, that party gets banned. USA is clearly not normal.
Erik,
What is your source of information? There are no wars? Inflation is not up? The last unemployment number did not drop significantly? Crime rates are not up in larger cities?
I live near Oakland and San Francisco. I can see the issues here.
What is your source of information?
You need to question your own source of information, because everything you say is wrong. I’m half a globe away and I know everything about America better than you. This should make you think a bit.
There always have been. This is not specific to Democrats. The first wars this century were started by W, a Republican. Ukraine war and Gaza/Israel were not started by either Democrats or USA. If you want to play the blame game on this, you lost. Yet, assuming that you voted for Trump and Republicans, you voted based on the false blame game on this point.
Inflation occurred in the entire world in connection with the pandemic. It was not Biden’s fault. In USA it was brought under control by Biden’s administration more efficiently than anywhere else in the world. So, will you count this as his job well done? You don’t, because you are partisan hypocrite.
Nation-wide both unemployment and violent crimes are trending towards the better https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2023-crime-in-the-nation-statistics
Other than partisan hypocrisy, why is this a concern?
Erik,
I am a registered independent and the only person I financially supported in a local election is a democrat.
We agree on the facts at this point. I have rationalised facts in the past as you are now but I was wrong. Clinton was our last physical conservative president. Biden, Trump, Bush and Obama were not.
The country is 35 trillion in debt with the debt service now equal to the defence budget given current interest rates. Who is most likely to move in the direction of solving this?
This last happened in the 2008 election, and Obama had both houses of Congress for 2 years.
Yes, but they are not details, they are rather vague undefined political goals. HOW, exactly, will tariffs solve the economy? How are the deportation logistics going to be addressed? What specific actions will be done to censor the mainstream media? Trump isn’t providing details, he’s citing grievences.
I think it might be useful to distinguish Trump from trumpism. Trump himself is a half-insane buffoon. But he has attracted a cult large enough to control the whole government. How did this happen? We might laugh at his crazy and anti-democratic rants, but it’s a mistake to laugh at the 70+ million cult followers. He is selling something a majority of voters find appealing. But why?
Nobody “had to” vote for anyone. From where we sit, it would be hard to find a more unqualified candidate – if you were writing fiction, people would reject it as totally implausible. But people aren’t voting their needs or their knowledge, they are voting their anger and frustration. They are voting strongly against “more of the same”. If Trump had been assassinated, people would probably have voted for his corpse. The actual person isn’t the issue.
I partially agree. The Republican party could have easily sent Trump out to pasture, except for the terrifying political power he commands. Recall that those who voted to impeach him were promptly defeated in the next primaries. The Republicans know that criticizing Trump in public is political suicide. Failure to confirm his appointees is political suicide. That’s real power. I don’t know what it would take to discourage his cult — people thought the economy was great throughout the pandemic! And they think it’s terrible when it’s the best in the world. Yeah, we can point to the right-wing media, but why are they so popular? Why do people WANT to hear that the US is a cesspool of garbage? Why do people prefer hate to joy?
In normal countries, when one party pulls off a successful coup, people are satisfied. In the US we had what amounted to a successful coup – the perpetrators won big at the polls at every level. Plenty of major Republican politicians said awful things about Trump for 2 weeks or so after January 6, because they had made the political bet that a failed coup would be fatal. After 2 weeks, it became obvious that the attempted coup made Trump more popular than ever, and those politicians hastened to kiss the ring to save their careers.
Remember when Trump announced that he could shoot someone on 5th avenue in broad daylight and not lose a single vote? Turns out he was right. There must be some powerful reason for this.
You can only vote for items on the ballot. You cannot vote “Trump’s corpse” when it’s not pre-printed on the ballot or can you?
America is a two-party system. This is less choice than in other Western countries. Moreover, the way you have to “register to vote” for a particular party before voting further limits the options in most states.
This was only party takeover, not a coup against the government.
A hundred years ago in Germany there was also a failed coup-maker. He was at least jailed for a while, even though released soon again in less than a year, so he could reorganise and eventually get enough votes to lead the government. Trump was not jailed. An utter failure of the judicial system, of all checks and balances, of law and order, and of due process.
I’m not really rationalising other than pointing out that this election result makes no sense. It does not make sense for voters to vote against their own interests. Rationalising would be to construe it so that Trump was somehow a reasonable choice from the voters’ point of view. He was not.
In fact, I believe that the election system is so restricted that a reasonable choice cannot be made in the first place. Just two parties in USA. This is as restricted as it gets without being totalitarian. You can be “independent” but this only means your vote will never get through.
From the government point of view, Trump is plainly unqualified and should not have been on the ballot. For example, he does not qualify to get access to government secrets, yet without the access he cannot govern effectively. This should be considered a severe government crisis. (Of course, this will be solved by granting him access anyway. Wrong solution.)
Oh, so you are that kind of conservative: Austrian school economic conservative. Well, let me tell you that Austrian school is baseless. It has no leg to stand on. Just like you had the wrong idea about inflation above (“Inflation due to stimulus and regulation” is a nonsensical statement in real-life finances/economics. It makes only sense as a talking point in a political campaign, i.e. it makes no sense, period. It is particularly nonsensical about the current inflation: The surge in inflation was global, so was the whole world having stimulus and regulation?) you also have the wrong idea about government debt here.
But if you mean that Trump is not the kind of guy who would reduce government debt and deficit, you are right on the money.
Erik,
I agree with you here as we are getting a series of bad candidates on both sides. Our system is also very vulnerable to corruption.
I agree the debt is a separate issue from inflation. It is a problem for the long term economic strength of the US. The budget mismanagement is a bi partisan screw up.
I think your point of inflation being a global issue is true. This does not stop it being an issue that made re election for the current administration more challenging.
Every ballot allows for write-in votes. In some local races, the write-in candidate has actually won the election. There is no restriction on who you can write in, and people have written in dogs, fictional characters, and in a couple of cases actual dead people. I vaguely recall someone who died after their name was printed on the ballot, and won!
What makes America a two-party system is a combination single-member districts, and winner-take-all. It’s not a system with “at-large” candidates. I’m aware that in some countries you can vote for multiple candidates running in a nationwide jurisdiction, and top N vote-winners are elected. In America, there are no nationwide offices anyone can run for. At one time, even US Senate races were not decided by popular vote within any state.
Whether you have to register for a party depends on the state you live in. I’ve lived in a number of states, none of which had party registration, only voter registration. Google tells me that one “can” indicate party preference when registering in 30 states. However, declaring a party preference when registering doesn’t limit voting options in the general (November) elections. What it does is constrain voters to vote only in the party primaries for their chosen party. In 20 states, anyone can vote for anyone in any primary.
I strongly disagree. Trump attempted to stay in power after losing the election. That is, stay as president of the entire nation, not just as informally recognized head of a political party. It’s not unreasonable to say he attempted to depose the legitimate president, who won the election.
Note that you can’t “take over” a party in any formal or legal sense. The best you can do is be widely recognized by the public and the media as holding the primary position of leadership in a party. So a party can have multiple leaders, or disputed leaders, at any given time.
Here I agree with you, for the most part. The American judicial system has always had serious flaws, and someone who understands them can abuse the system. In America, they say, you can get as much due process as you can afford, and if you are wealthy, you can (like Trump) live an entire life of crime, and be taken to court thousands of time, and never pay any consequences. What Trump has shown us is that a hefty percent of what we consider democracy is actually a matter of practice and tradition, not black letter law. Democracy in America rests almost entirely on the good will and intelligent practices of those with power, and is distressingly helpless in the face of deliberate violation of those traditions.
But unfortunately, the US is a litigious country, with armies of lawyers well paid to find ways to violate the spirit and intent of the law without violating the letter of the law. The story is told of a robber baron who wanted to do something illegal, so he called in his lawyer and asked how he could do it. The lawyer said no, you can’t do that, it’s illegal. And the robber baron replied, “I didn’t ask if it was legal or not. I asked for a legal way to do it!”
And historically, two of those ways are (1) buy the politicians necessary to change the law; and (2) fill the judiciary with judges who will ignore the law for partisan political or ideological reasons. So for example the US Constitution prohibits presidents from accepting emoluments from foreign governments, and from holding office after attempting to overthrow the government. Trump pocketed millions in emoluments, and attempted to overthrow the government.
BUT the Constitution only prohibits these things, it doesn’t contain any mention of what to do if someone violates them. Presumably that’s up to the Supreme Court, which decided in the first case to simply not accept lawsuits about emoluments, and in the second case ruled that the Constitution doesn’t mean what it says unless Congress passes a law saying “yes indeed, the Constitution really DOES mean what it says!” Of course, the justices were well aware that Congress could never pass any such law, and thus (as we’re now learning) the US Constitution is nothing more than a body of free advice, to be taken or ignored according the political winds of the day.
But the American founders were well aware of this. No nation can remain free or democratic without the good will and intentions of its leaders. They worried that the nation would fail if its leaders’ lust for power exceeded their belief in the democratic republic system of government. We’re watching this failure, for just this reason, in real time.
I have for some years, expected Hispanic voters to trend more conservative, and that seems to have happened.
In terms of family values? In this sense they always were conservative. If anybody thought any different, they were under delusion.
Meanwhile, voters are under delusion if they think that voting for somebody brings about favourable policy decisions. Those in position of power behave according to their character and this is the only thing they do. If the president is mellow like Biden, then you get mellow times. If you vote for a narcissistic psychopath like Trump, you get global trade wars, disruption of alliances, assault on constitutional institutions etc.
Americans clearly do not care about character. Neither do they care about competence and qualifications. What other explanation can there be for voting for a liar and felon than the love of being lied to, the pleasure of being ignorant about reality and the hope of committing some felonies oneself?
And then in the general elections you only get to vote for whoever won the primaries. Since there are just two parties of any relevance, your choice is, even for all those who declare themselves “independent”, between what the two parties pre-picked.
To be fair, this is what it ends up to be almost everywhere. Even when you don’t belong to a party (and the overwhelming majority don’t), your vote is simply validating the picks of particular parties. Therefore for more choice it is good to have more parties and a proportional system.
Really? “Public and the media” determine who is or is not the leader of a political party? Sounds like a non-system. Surely you must be forgetting something, such as Republican National Committee and its chairman.
The Supreme Court also decided that the president has “absolute immunity”. Unfortunately, Biden did not make any use of this decision. Trump used it as a(n il)legal argument before there was such a decision and will definitely make full use of it in office.
Several swing states report numbers of early votes received by party. Not votes, just ballots by party.
For the last four elections, including 2020, the outcome could be predicted by looking at early voting. This is one reason why the gambling sites were able to call the election early on Election Day.
Harris was slightly ahead in early voting, but failed to get out the vote on Election Day.
Democrats used to have massive operations on Election Day, but seem to have switched to early voting. The thing is, you know the day before the election how many votes you need.
As I explained, you can vote for anyone, regardless of who either party chooses to put on the ballot. Given that the US Constitution essentially locks in a 2-party system (as I explained earlier), it’s hard to get more open than this.
While it’s not clear to me that proportional representation always results in better government (I see a lot of fluid coalitions and nonresponsive government), I note that ballots have candidate names on them in ANY system where the people vote. So how do those names get there, and why are the names on proportional representation ballots somehow less restrictive – candidates printed on ballots generally win elections anywhere. If we had competitive green, or independent, or pro-healthfood, or whatever “parties”, who selects THEIR candidates? Would you prefer a ballot that listed the office and instructed the voter “vote for someone” and provided a blank space?
Two factors you seem to ignore. First, the national committees make recommendations but those aren’t always the names on the ballots and there’s no law that their candidates must be on any ballot. Second, public and the media are instrumental in determining the makeup of those committees. If the committee-chosen candidates keep losing, the committees change membership and leadership, to reflect the sorts of people voters keep voting for.
This seems a bit garbled. What prompted the Supreme Court to examine the question of Presidential immunity was that Trump was the first to actually and flagrantly violate clear laws. Not even Nixon did that. Biden had no need for immunity because he didn’t break any laws. And let’s face it, Trump always has and always will ignore any laws he finds inconvenient, whether the Court blessed this behavior or not. To be binding, a law must be enforceable and enforced. Whoever controls the cops controls enforcement. And the Court struck down laws whose enforcement would have violated their partisan preference.
(And please note that the Court did not grant “absolute immunity.” They only granted immunity for acts which are part of the President’s normal Constitutional duties, or derive from those duties. The Court couldn’t quite decide which duties and acts those were, so left it up to lower courts to define and implement, after which the Supreme Court will (unpredictably) accept or overrule these lower court decisions on a case-by-case basis. Since this applies only to Trump (other Presidents believe in the rule of law), chances are the immunity IS absolute, just for Trump. But right now, we have to wait to see how absolute the Court decides it is.)
I admit I have never heard of any such thing. Can you provide an example? Where early voting is practiced, there are estimates of how many early ballots have been submitted, but this has nothing to do with party. Parties do not “receive” early votes.
You must live in a different world. In 2020, the mail-in ballots for several states could not be counted (or even opened) until after polls closed. And some of those states had winners different from the election-day totals, while others did not.
I don’t know what this even means. Some states (like Colorado) have used early voting almost exclusively for a long time, but most votes are not counted (noted: counted, not processed) until election day. And until they are counted nobody knows how many votes anyone will end up needing.
Here is a breakdown, if you’re interested
https://ballotpedia.org/When_states_can_begin_processing_and_counting_absentee/mail-in_ballots,_2024
In the details we see that several states CAN start counting votes before election day, but no state can publish the results, which (if published) would surely influence the election day voting.
Yes, you said that people can put Trump’s dead body on the ballot. But this is looney and random and there is neither sure win or legitimacy in it.
E.g. Trump’s dead body can win if a critical mass of voters agreed to put it on the ballot, which would in effect be a political party. Other than that, I don’t see how Trump’s dead body could win or how it could even be a legitimate thing to put on the ballot. Where I live, if we put stuff on the ballot that is not meant to be put there, the ballot will not be counted. The vote will be invalid. The result of elections cannot be “X% of voters voted for their cat to be the president.” It can be X% were invalid ballots.
No. In (parliamentary elections at least in) Europe all candidates are assigned *numbers* and people write *numbers* instead of names on the ballot. Write a name and your vote is invalid and will not be counted. Draw a face, even if photo-realistic, and your vote is invalid.
Proportional versus any other system maybe doesn’t make much of a difference in presidential elections where there is just one person who can get the office (it’s the same principle globally – one president at a time). Well, actually it does because you (can) get more than two viable candidates. And it makes an enormous difference in parliamentary elections where you absolutely get more than two parties into the parliament and usually more than one party into the government.
The result is not “better government” in terms of stability or longevity, but it’s certainly more choice for voters, more checks and balances for the government, and it’s more reflective of the way people actually vote. Over here there’s never any “lost the popular vote, but won the presidency” kind of thing.
This sounds fundamentally broken. Does party membership work just by self-declaration? “I identify as a Republican, therefore I am and nobody can take this away from me” and the law allows for this?
When a party already exists, normally you are either accepted or rejected, i.e. there is a an established party committee who decides whether you belong to the party or not.
Otherwise it’s not normal. Otherwise the result would be: You can get elected as a Republican because you say you’re a Republican even though no other Republican recognises you. And other Republicans have no way to exclude you when your voting record is not in line with other Republicans or Republicanism. Is this how it really is in USA? It’s sick and perverse and it’s very good we do not have it here. Parties need to be constituted as legal entities and they need some ideological coherence (brand identity).
What I get for now is that there is lots of talk of Republicans versus Democrats in USA while these parties do not actually exist. Everybody is under the delusion that there are parties in USA, two major ones or otherwise. No, there are just factions, such as the Trumpite Q/MAGA cult with their overtly fascist and KKK ideology, then other factions such as pro-establishment faction, progressive faction, an elusive “deep state” faction that the Trumpite faction opposes etc.
The American “system” seems like roughly the way parties worked in Ancient Rome and medieval Italy. You were a “patrician” or “plebeian” by descent, not by conviction (and registration), but your convictions and allegiance may place you in some narrower faction.
Whoah. Nixon definitely and absolutely did that! And back then, Nixon was alone with the idea that “When the president does it, then it’s not illegal.” It was explained to him that of course the president can be a law-breaker too and treated accordingly.
Except that he was pardoned. Note that pardon is clearance from punishment. In other words, the pardon absolutely shows that he was guilty and would have been punished except for the pardon.
Alright, you are the one who is garbled here. Immunity is not about breaking laws. Pardon is. Immunity is about the security of holding an office. E.g. in old times, including in USA, when a congress representative is on his way to a session, then police (or anybody else, be it national guard or local governor or whoever) cannot arrest (or detain or delay) him. No law-breaking needs to be involved. Police may have in mind just “questioning as a witness” or whatever, but this cannot be done: The congress representative has immunity! This is what immunity means: Think of diplomatic immunity.
And, sure enough, in the Supreme Court decision we are talking about, they failed on the meaning of immunity so badly that the decision is utter hogwash, a royal screwup.
A slight correction: They granted not just immunity, but literally absolute immunity. This is a quote from the decision that SCOTUS “held”, i.e. affirmed and confirmed:
“…the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority.”
And the way Trump interprets it is so broad (of course it is directly justified by the word “absolute”) that it (in his mind, not in the lower courts’ mind) applied in both E. Jean Carroll and Stormy Daniels cases, e.g. Trump’s tweets are immune. And for now it seems to have worked in the secret documents case. Seems that it is part of the president’s normal constitutional duties to grab boxes of secret documents (i.e. documents/boxes specifically marked as secret – this is an important difference from Biden’s incident with government secrets) while leaving office and not return them, and then not to get prosecuted everafter. Whereas according to the correct meaning, one may have immunity when having a certain office, just that, not being a “former” anybody.
This SCOTUS decision gets immunity very wrong. What they mean is not immunity but pre-emptive pardon. The way “absolute immunity” is presented in the decision is a legal innovation by Trump himself. Nixon’s “When the president does it, then it’s not illegal” has become the law of the land.
For the purposes of prediction, it’s only necessary to know the party affiliation of early ballots, something that is published by three swing states.
It was known before election morning that Harris was down by 10-20 percent compared to Biden. Trump was down by much less, compared to 2020.
That was enough for the gambling sites.
On Election Day, Florida published live updates of ballots by party affiliation. Enough information to see that turnout favored Trump. Florida was not in question, but the relative turnout held for all states.
This model also works for 2020 as a predictor of the popular vote. It is not able to predict very close state races, where the margin is less than half a percent.
The numbers are publicly available.
??? How in the hell can you tell the “party affiliation of a ballot” by looking at an envelope that was put in a drop box? Are there states where each party has its own separate drop box?
Seriously, I need a link to something that describes what you are trying to say here. I tried to follow all this closely, and I have seen nothing close enough to what you describe even to misrepresent it that way.
Note the passive voice: “it was known”. OK, who knew it, and how did they know it, and what was the source of their information? Until election day, all ballots could be votes for anyone for any office (many are split). What the hell are you talking about?
Link, please. I have seen endless live updates of VOTES (not ballots) by CANDIDATE (not party). The closest I have seen is the observation that ballots from the military from overseas TEND to run Republican. But nobody knows for sure until votes for candidates (not ballots for parties) are opened and counted.
Such a vote here is referred to as a “protest vote”. It’s legitimate and valid, and in general elections we find at least many hundreds of votes written in for the sake of protest, for hundreds of names, some of them for primary losers, some for fictional characters, etc. These votes aren’t intended to elect anyone, but a large enough “protest vote” is considered meaningful.
Hard to speak in general terms in an area where specific details differ everywhere. I’m going to assume that someone who writes a number has some idea whom that number represents. As such, it’s a name for my purposes. In the US, protest votes are only meaningful based in the sheer number of such votes cast. Enough of them and we have an indication that both major party candidates are unpopular, or that someone running unopposed is not popular.
And so I observed that more viewpoints being represented in the legislature doesn’t necessarily lead to better government in any way. And as I read it, in some European systems, there is no actual vote for President (prime minister, head honcho, whatever the office is called). Instead, the top vote-getters who are thus elected to the legislature then get to select a leader to be top dog, often resulting in strange coalitions when no single individual commands a majority of those elected.
For individual voters, party selection is entirely by self-declaration. For candidates for office, the 2-party system provides mechanisms (which vary by states) as to how to get your name on a ballot. Once elected, you are free to change parties, and this happens often enough.
Every state has at least two primary party organizations. There is no set standard across states for who gets to be in the organization, how the organization is structured, how they select candidates, etc. Such things change from one election to the next. There are legal protocols for getting your name on a ballot if neither organization chooses you. Most ballots in major elections have 3 or more candidates listed for major offices (I have seen as many as six). Where nobody gets a majority, there is generally a run-off election between the two top vote getters.
I’m reminded of a lyric from Gilbert and Sullivan:
“I grew so rich that I was sent by a pocket borough into parliament;
I always voted at my party’s call and I never thought of thinking for myself at all”
I have read that, at least in Britain, if you are elected as a Tory you WILL VOTE the Tory line on every issue, and nobody steps out of line. In the US, things are very different. We have a good many representatives whose votes on particular issues aren’t predictable, and party affiliation doesn’t rule. In Congress, straight party-line voting is rare.
I suppose technically parties are factions. But for a bill to pass in Congress and become an act, it requires a majority of the votes and there is also a quorum of necessary votes. So while the number of what you call factions might be large, every member of Congress must vote yes or no, and so we end up with two factions – the yes faction and the no faction. Where multiple factions come into play is in writing the bill in the first place. Lots of horse trading there.
It’s clear that Nixon at least condoned the break-in. It’s likely that he suspected that it was going to happen, but considered unlikely that he was involved in planning it. And the break-in itself was minor; what brought Nixon down was his attempt to pretend it didn’t happen and/or that he knew nothing about it. However, failure to report a crime is not itself a crime.
Technically, accepting a pardon is tacit admission of guilt. There has been a good deal of speculation as to what might have happened without the pardon. No subsequent scenario would have been certain.
OK, I’ll go along with your terminology. Immunity here is intended to mean that one can break a law with impunity, and cannot be held legally liable for doing so.
I don’t think they agree with your definition. Their intent was to insulate the president from concern about whether, maybe, in someone’s eventual opinion, they violated some law during the performance of their constitutional duties. Most legal observers considered this argument preposterous (as do I). It has never been necessary to violate a law to be a good president, which is why this issue never arose before. As I said, this is to protect Trump alone.
I guess this is a matter of debate and opinion. The word “absolute” isn’t doing as much work here as you imply. As an example, let’s say that you have “absolute immunity” from the speed limit laws. This applies ONLY to speed limit laws; it does NOT make you immune from, say, laws against theft.
But you are also confusing de jure immunity with de facto immunity. Trump is most definitely NOT immune from the cases you mention. Raping women and stealing classified documents are definitely NOT defensible aspects of his official presidential duties. But he escapes punishment because judges he appointed succeeded in delaying trials until it was too late. Almost surely if his judges had let these cases reach trial, he’d have been found guilty. Now, whether a guilty finding means punishment is another issue – he will probably die of old age before paying any of the fines where he’s already been found guilty.
https://countyballotfiles.floridados.gov/VoteByMailEarlyVotingReports/PublicStats
https://apnews.com/article/early-vote-records-trump-harris-1c219d0d27d56996388f2e2be5a58fac
https://www.newsweek.com/early-voting-2024-election-polls-1973504
Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania reported early ballots by party affiliation. Maybe others, but NC and PA were key swing states.
No, you’re not getting it. It’s not that hard: While you’re in office, you’re immune from law enforcement (if immunity is provided with that office). But you’re not immune from law and it can be enforced once you’re out of office. And normally e.g. parliamentary immunity is removed by parliamentary decision from parliament members who broke law, see recent examples in US Congress with Menendez and Santos.
The same applies to the president of USA via impeachment. Impeachment would remove the president from office and normal prosecution would follow. Now, impeachment has never been successful, but normal prosecution would also follow as soon as the presidential term ends. This is the constitution of USA. SCOTUS is heavily engaged in legal activism on this point, making constitution null and void.
It’s not up to debate in the least. It is rather a matter of might makes right. When SCOTUS insists that black is white, there is no authority that could correct them. However, for sane people, black remains black and white remains white.
Anyway, I don’t really want them to be correct either. Once Trump assumes office again, USA can implode and vanish from the surface of the earth for what I care.
Okay, this is how little you know the law. I forgive you, for you do not know what you’re talking about.
Along with special privileges of certain offices, such as immunity, there come also special duties, such as the obligation to report breach of law. Think e.g. police officer. They have to notice, report, investigate, etc. Higher offices have more such duties, not less.
Government leaders, not just presidents, are immune because they make decisions that can result in deaths or financial loss.
Military decisions, public health decisions, police decisions, etc.
Some of these are going to be bad decisions, and government could not function if every bad outcome resulted in lawsuits.
In USA, the president is the only government leader. You have failed the basics of USA civic education. And given that, nothing else you say deserves any attention.
Will you be able to raise a legitimate point some day, instead of Q/MAGA propaganda?
There are other countries.
I’m not aware of any country that has prosecuted a sitting leader for starting or participating in a war.
We provide immunity to vaccine manufacturers.
There are all kinds of situations.
You meant the other way around, right?
For instead of to?
Ah, I think I see what’s going on. Ballots in the US are secret, so we can’t know exactly who was voted for on any particular ballot. However, in most states a voter registers with a party preference (to vote in that party’s primary). This makes it possible to know the party preference of anyone who requests a (secret) mail-in ballot. So we can fairly confidently say we know the candidate chosen by voters who register a party preference (not affiliation).
I don’t think we’re communicating. Politicians in office in the US can indeed be prosecuted for violating laws, and this happens fairly commonly. They can also be expelled from office, and this happens as well. But it’s possible (and happens) that politicians convicted of crimes retain their seats, and that politicians are expelled who are not convicted of any crimes. It’s possible that a sitting legislator can do legislative business from jail, and I believe this has happened. Menendez and Santos need not be expelled to be found legally guilty.
OK, you should understand that an impeachment is an accusation, not a conviction. Impeachment has happened many times (Trump himself was successfully impeached twice). Be aware that impeachment (and conviction in the Senate, if it should occur) is a political and NOT a legal process. No punishment from impeachment and conviction is entailed, other than eviction from office. Any subsequent legal action is entirely separate.
I don’t think you understand what SCOTUS was trying to do. I’ll explain below.
I am amused by your presumption. Failure to report a crime is generally not a crime. We might regard it as morally corrupt, but that’s not the same thing. However, google tells us that
What makes this slippery is, most people are not criminal lawyers. You or I may witness a crime without knowing it. However, we are legally obligated to respond truthfully to police questions even if the questions don’t relate to a crime.
You are consistently guilty of blanket statements, which you regard as absolute and which allow for no exceptions. In reality, immunity is limited to specific situations, and reporting obligations are in practice very flexible. Maybe things are different where you are, but here there is only the haziest relationship between police reports and what actually happened – when there is a report at all.
But one more attempt here: What SCOTUS was specifically concerned with was that a President might fail to perform his constitutional responsibilities properly if he’s too concerned that, after leaving office, he might find himself in legal jeopardy. So they attempted to distinguish between official constitutional duties and personal behavior having nothing to do with the President’s core responsibilities. And therefore, if a President should (perhaps all unknowingly) violate some law in pursuit of his official duties, he need never fear any legal repercussions down the road. Conversely, if he commits a crime in his role as a private citizen or as a candidate for office or for doing something unrelated to his office, he has no immunity and can be prosecuted and found guilty.
There was understandable confusion on the court as to just how unrelated anything might be given that the President holds office at the time. One might argue that everything a sitting president does is part of his official duties, or that very little is. The legal scholars complain that there can be legitimate debate as to whether hypothetical act X is or is not official – and that adjudication of X might be determined along party lines!
Well, sort of. It’s not all that hard to distinguish between a good-faith decision with unexpected (and undesirable) consequences, and actual deliberate crime. Nobody is going to be prosecuted for bad tax policy, but accepting bribes is illegal.
I’m willing to bet that if you asked political science professors (or sitting legislators) if the Senate Majority Leader or the Speaker of the House was a government leader, you would be assured that yes indeed, these are powerful positions of government leadership. You might wish to consult a civics text.
The power of a committee chairman to table or report a bill out to the floor is a real governmental power, which is why committee chairs are highly coveted. You might also consider whether SCOTUS exercises government leadership.
In the US, there are three branches of government, each with their own leader(s). Currently the US does not have a king with absolute power over all branches and agencies, and I hope we can stay that way.
Not in official capacity. Somebody very passionate about legislating can do it in all situations, like Hitler wrote his famous book in jail, but a parliamentarian is not a parliamentarian while in jail. Not in USA and not in any other country either.
But to be jailed, they’d need to be expelled. And also, if the punishment is only fine, the fine cannot be enforced/collected until they are expelled.
Says the guy who just issued a blanket statement that failure to report a crime is not a crime in itself, which is particularly wrong in the current context: Elected officials are definitely obligated to know the law, observe the law, and react when their fellow officials break it.
Correct, even for presidents. Therefore it should be easy for you to grasp that when SCOTUS “entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution” they got it wrong. Very wrong. Even absolutely wrong. As a start, the word “former” does not belong there and neither does “absolute”.
Think of military officers, generals and sergeants and the like. They send people to die in battle. Do they have “absolute immunity”? No. It’s within their authority to do what they do. It may be against higher orders (or, in case of generals, against state interests) to charge or attack at a certain time and place and they may be court-martialed for it, but the families of the deceased soldiers don’t get to sue them for the dead soldiers. And for the military it is not normally even called immunity (much less “absolute immunity”). It’s part of the military profession as profession. Come on, it’s not hard to understand.
This is why petrushka’s suggestion to legally protect presidents from any and all prosecution is Q cultist dictator-worship. President has far wider authority than ordinary citizens, but no citizen, including the president, has authority to break the law. Moreover, presidents (and other high officers) are, normally/ideally, elected/appointed partly because of their well-known law-abiding character.
Except from now on in USA: Take a rapist nepotist tax-evading state-secret-leaking coup-organising dictatorship-promising business fraudster and give him “absolute immunity”, something that even kings of the old did not have, and nuke codes to boot. Way to go!
Arguably there are even five branches of government: Add the Fed and mainstream journalism. But you do not speak of them as “government leaders”, do you? Neither do you speak about SCOTUS, who are the leaders of the judicial branch, as government leaders. Because there is really just one government. The legislative branch does not really govern; they legislate. The judicial branch does not really govern; they judge. Only *the government* really governs, despite the other branches being called “branches of government” too.
See? I know all this, whereas petrushka needs to be educated on every little point every step of the way. I’m not even American and don’t care to know about this in such detail, but it’s truly outrageous how he gets it all fundamentally wrong. And of course, he gets it wrong in specific brainwashed Q/MAGA cultist way, because that’s where he is coming from.
I disagree that it is easy. Gulf of Tonkin comes to mind. I was personally affected, and friends died. Altogether, nearly half a million people died.
I apologize. I was just being flippant: Vaccine manufacturers provide immunity to us.
It wasn’t very good, I know, but these dark times can do with a little relief.
Both things can be happening at the same time.
The Golf of Tonkin incident was not engineered with criminal intent, or with the personal enrichment in mind for those who made that call. The point is that not even terrible decisions (or those that had very undesirable downstream consequences) are done with the intent of violating a law.
Agreed about the US. I’m not familiar with every nation.
Yes, I think this is true
I provided an explanation (in boldface even). We are today watching how Republican elected officials are reacting to the testimony of multiple people that Gaetz broke the law bigtime. I note that they didn’t say anything until the accusers went public, though they were well aware of the Congressional testimony. And they are STILL fighting to keep secret the report and evidence the committee collected. And you can bet that not one of them will ever suffer any legal consequences for not just failing to report known crime, but actively covering it up.
You are still carefully misrepresenting this. The goal was to protect the President from fear (or any concern) that something he did while performing the duties of his office could be used against him after he leaves office. This protection is not absolute (the Court carefully exempted actions not part of the official duties), and “former” is the key point – that the President should not be inhibited from action NOW, for fear of retribution LATER.
No, it’s not. Those in any legal profession should not fear actions taken according to the requirements of that profession. So even poor military leaders who get soldiers killed unnecessarily are indeed immune from legal action, as you say. But soldiers are obligated to follow legitimate orders.
I don’t recall him making this exact argument. Presidents (why do I need to keep repeating this to you?) are not legally protected from “any and all prosecution.” I think we are in agreement that the immunity decision was confusing, unnecessary, and possibly dangerous. In my opinion, it should never be be necessary to violate any law to be a good President.
Sigh. Once again (why is this so hard for you?), Trump does not have absolute immunity, he has specific immunity in specific cases. But realistically, immunity from specific examples of law-breaking are beside the point. Trump is not trustworthy. Alas, it is entirely possible to wreck the country and destroy all democratic traditions and principles beyond recovery without breaking a single black-letter law.
Bullshit. Saying that the executive branch of government is the only branch that governs doesn’t make it so. You clearly have no clue what a government does, how it’s organized, how programs and policies are implemented, where the locus of responsibility lies for any of the million things a government does, which sorts of decisions are made by whom according to what rules, which of all these activities require leadership (hint: all of them) which is performed by leaders (duh!). You seem to have gone to simpleton school.