After realizing how much longer Trump’s second term in office would last, I took a long and sober look at New York at what might happen, and what might restrain Trump from doing his worst:

Donald Trump has a flexible attitude toward truth and facts, typically embracing whatever version of reality that suits his purposes. His latest rally speech in Pennsylvania was something of a “greatest hits” display of fact-checker challenges on a wide range of issues. But he said one thing that no one should doubt or deny: “You know what? We have three years and two months to go. Do you know what that is in Trump Time? An eternity.”

So what will America look like after three more years of this barrage? As always, the administration’s intentions are opaque. But there are several outside variables that will dramatically shape how much Trump is able to do by the end of his time in office (assuming he actually leaves as scheduled on January 20, 2029). Here are the factors that will decide the outcome of this three-year “eternity.”

The midterms could shift the balance of power

One huge variable is the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections. If history and current polling are any indication, Democrats are very likely to gain control of the U.S. House and bust up the partisan trifecta that has made so much of Trump 2.0’s accomplishments (for good or ill) possible. With a Democratic House, there will be no more Big Beautiful Bills whipped through Congress on party-line votes reconfiguring the federal budget and tax code and remaking the shape and impact of the federal government. A hostile House would also bedevil the administration with constant investigations of its loosey-goosey attitude toward obeying legal limits on its powers, and its regular habits of self-dealing, cronyism, and apparent corruption. The last two years of the Trump presidency would be characterized by even greater end runs of Congress, and in Congress, by endless partisan rhetorical warfare (as opposed to actual legislation).

It’s less likely that Democrats will flip control of the Senate in 2026, but were that to happen, Trump would struggle to get his appointees confirmed (though many could operate in an “acting” capacity). We’d likely see constant clashes between the executive and legislative branches.

Conversely, if Republicans hold onto both congressional chambers, then all bets are off. Trump 2.0 would roll through its final two years with the president’s more audacious legislative goals very much in sight and limited only by how much risk Republicans want to take in 2028. You could see repeated Big Beautiful Bill packages aiming at big initiatives like replacing income taxes with tariffs or consumption taxes; a complete return to fossil fuels as the preferred energy source; a total repeal and replacement of Obamacare and decimation of Medicaid; a fundamental restructuring of immigration laws; and radical limits on voting rights. Almost everything could be on the table as long as Republicans remain in control and in harness with Trump. And with his presidency nearing its end, you could also see Trump tripling down on demands that Republicans kill or erode the filibuster, which could make more audacious legislative gains possible.

The Supreme Court could curb or enable Trump

The U.S. Supreme Court will also have a big impact on how much Trump can do between now and the end of his second term. Big upcoming decisions on his power to impose tariffs will determine the extent to which he can make these deals the centerpiece of his foreign-policy strategy and execute a protectionist (or, if you like, mercantilist) economic strategy for the country. Other decisions on his power to deport immigrants and on the nature and permanence of citizenship will heavily shape the size and speed of his mass-deportation program. The Supreme Court will soon also either obstruct or permit use of National Guard and military units in routine law-enforcement chores and/or to impose administration policies on states or cities. And the Supreme Court’s decisions on myriad conflicts between the Trump administration and the states could determine whether, for example, the 47th president can sweep away any regulation of AI that his tech-bro friends oppose.

A separate line of Supreme Court decisions will determine Trump’s power over the executive branch — most obviously over independent agencies like the FTC and the Fed, but also over millions of federal employees who could lose both civil-service protections and collective-bargaining opportunities.

The economy and foreign war could be wild cards

Even a president as willful as Trump is constrained by objective reality. His economic policies make instability, hyperinflation, and even a 2008-style Great Recession entirely possible. If that happens, it could both erode his already shaky public support but also encourage him to assert even greater “emergency” powers than he’s already claimed.

Trump’s impulsive national-security instincts and innate militarism could also lead to one of those terrible wars he swears he is determined to avoid. It’s worth remembering that the last Republican president was entirely undone during his second term by economic dislocations and a failed war.

America could get the full MAGA makeover

Let’s say Trump has the power to do what he wants between now and the end of his second term. What might America look like if he fully succeeds, particularly if his policies are either emulated by state and local Republicans or imposed nationally by Washington?

• A country of millions fewer immigrants, with immigrant-sensitive industries like agriculture, health care, and other services struggling.
• A more regressive system of revenues for financing steadily shrinking public services.
• A fully shredded social-safety net feeding steadily increasing disparities in income and wealth between rich and poor, and old and young, Americans.
• Cities where armed military presence has become routine, particularly during anti-administration protests or prior to key elections.
• Elections conducted solely on Election Day in person, with strict ID requirements and armed election monitors, likely on the scene during vote counting as well.
• A new “deep state” of MAGA-vetted federal employees devoted to carrying out the 47th president’s policies even after he’s long gone.
• A world beset by accelerated climate-change symptoms, particularly violent weather and widespread natural disasters, and a country with no national infrastructure for preventing or mitigating the damage.
• An economy where AI is constantly promoted as a solution to the very problems it creates.
• A world beset by accelerated climate-change symptoms, particularly violent weather and widespread natural disasters, and a country with no national infrastructure for preventing or mitigating the damage.
• A scientific and health-care research apparatus driven by conspiracy theories and cultural fads.
• A public-education system hollowed out by private-school subsidies and ideological curriculum mandates.
• And most of all: a debased level of political discourse resembling MMA trash talk more than anything the country has experienced before.

Some of these likely effects from Trump 2.0 are reversible, but only after much time and effort, and against resistance from the MAGA movement he will leave as his most enduring legacy.

And if Trump bequeaths the presidency to a successor (either a political heir like J.D. Vance or a biological heir like Don Jr.), then what American could look like by 2032 or 2036 is beyond my powers of imagination.

From “New poll paints a grim picture of a nation under financial strain: Rising costs are crushing Americans — and they’re running out of room to adjust” by Erin Doherty at Politico:

Americans are struggling with affordability pressures that are squeezing everything from their everyday necessities to their biggest-ticket expenses.

Nearly half of Americans said they find groceries, utility bills, health care, housing and transportation difficult to afford, according to The POLITICO Pollconducted last month by Public First. The results paint a grim portrait of spending constraints: More than a quarter, 27 percent, said they have skipped a medical check-up because of costs within the last two years, and 23 percent said they have skipped a prescription dose for the same reason.

It’s been a wild week in the Texas U.S. Senate race, but it’s a good idea to understand the Democratic options in terms of an old strategic debate, as I suggested at New York:

One of the truly ancient debates in U.S. political circles is whether candidates in highly competitive partisan elections can best win by persuading swing voters or mobilizing base voters. There’s no absolute identity between ideology and strategy, but speaking generally, right- or left-wing ideologues tend to adopt base mobilization strategies that don’t require any accommodation of the other party’s views. Republican or Democratic “moderates” generally hew to the “median voter theory” that winning over a swing voter is especially effective because it adds a vote to one’s own column while denying a vote to the opposing candidate. So they value crossover voting as much as turnout advantages.

Hardly anyone would deny that in the Trump era, Republicans have gone over almost completely to the base-mobilization strategy. To the extent MAGA candidates try to persuade swing voters, it’s mostly via vicious attacks on the opposition as extremists, encouraging a lesser-of-two-evils voting or even non-voting by moderates. But among Democrats, the base-versus-swing debate rages on, and we may be about to see a laboratory test of the two approaches in a red-hot Texas Senate contest.

Thanks to an unusually poor landscape and a current three-seat deficit, Democratic hopes of gaining control of the Senate in 2026 depend heavily on winning an upset or two in red states. And Texas looks promising thanks to an intensely cannibalistic three-way Republican primary involving two MAGA challengers to Republican incumbent John Cornyn.

Two early Democratic Senate candidates embodied (in somewhat different ways) the swing-voter strategy. There was 2024 Senate nominee and former House member Colin Allred, a bit of a classic moderate Democrat. And then there was state senator James Talarico, who gained fame for his battle against the Trump-engineered congressional gerrymander in Texas earlier this year. Talarico actually has a fairly progressive issue profile and is from the progressive hotbed of Austin. But he has gained national notoriety for being conspicuously religious (he’s actually attending a seminary aside from his political gigs) and for reaching out to Trump voters (e.g., via a successful foray onto Joe Rogan’s podcast). Last week, Allred abruptly dropped out of the Senate race, and now Talarico is facing a primary contest with the all-time-champion advocate of base mobilization, Representative Jasmine Crockett.

Crockett is far better known than any other second-term House member, mostly because she has a jeweler’s eye for viral moments and dominates them regularly. In May 2024, she became the acknowledged master of the clapback during a high-profile exchange of personal insults with the most famous third-term House member, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and has subsequently drawn the attention of Donald Trump, as Crockett reminded us in a launch video that simply recited Trump’s insults aimed at her.

Crockett’s vibes-based approach to politics has made her a fundraising magnet and a pop-culture celebrity, but the question is whether that will make her potentially competitive in a statewide race in Texas as compared to Talarico. And it’s not just a matter of issue positioning. Crockett is popular among progressives but has made combativeness rather than progressive policy commitments her signature in a brief career in legislative office. She very clearly believes all the heat she can bring to a tough general election will not just mobilize Texas’s Democratic base but expand it. She has apparently sought the counsel of Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, who pursued a base-mobilization strategy in two unsuccessful but exciting bids for governor of Georgia. And as you might expect from even a moment’s exposure, she is very sure of herself, as HuffPost reports:

“Early on in her kickoff speech, Crockett said she was running because ‘what we need is for me to have a bigger voice …’

“She reiterated her top priority would be turning out otherwise apathetic voters, a strategy even many other progressives have backed away from. ‘Our goal is to make sure that we can engage people that historically have not been talked to because there are so many people that get ignored, specifically in the state of Texas,’ she said. ‘Listen, the state of Texas is 61 percent people of color. We have a lot of good folk that we can talk to.’”

The idea that there is a “hidden majority” among non-voters that a loud-and-proud partisan can identify and turn out at the polls is a staple of base-mobilization advocates in both parties, though they rarely take into account that such tactics help the opposition mobilize its base as well. There is certainly enough ammunition in Crockett’s brief political history to energize Texas Republicans, particularly her reference to the wheelchair-bound Greg Abbott as “Governor Hot Wheels” (she subsequently claimed this was a reference to his aggressive transportation measures to get rid of migrants, not to his disability). Asked how she might reach out to Trump voters in a state that he carried by over 13 percent in 2024, Crockett offered an interesting theory in a CNN interview: “We are going to be able to get people that potentially have voted for Trump even though I, obviously, am one of his loudest opponents, because at the end of the day, they vote for who they believe is fighting for them.”

It’s hardly unusual for progressive Democrats (or for that matter, MAGA Republicans) to argue that disengaged voters prefer “fighters,” but Crockett appears to be suggesting that the content of one’s message — as opposed to its tone or vibe — doesn’t much matter at all.

You get the sense listening to Texas Democrats that Crockett is very likely to beat Talarico for the party’s Senate nomination and can mount a well-financed, much-watched general election campaign. But the idea she’s going to win that general election by turning up the volume to 11 isn’t widely accepted. She has been in exactly three general elections in her Dallas base, none of which were remotely competitive. And it’s not just about the Senate race, given Texas’s role in determining control of the House. And as the Texas Tribune reports, Republicans love the idea of facing Crockett and pinning her to House Democrats they’re hoping to unseat in the midterms.

Candidates arguing about Crockett won’t be able to focus as much on Trump’s broken promises and poor record. And Jasmine Crockett will never be the sort of politician who deflects attention. Like her or not, she’ll be the big issue in the Democratic primary.

New York Times essayist Thomas B. Edsall explains “Why the ‘Affordability Hoax’ Is a Trap for Trump,” and writes; “For President Trump, the affordability crisis is a “hoax” perpetuated by Democrats. For the customer checking out at Costco or Walmart, it’s a rising grocery bill threatening already fragile household finances…I originally set out to try to put a dollar figure on how much the median family has lost this year as a result of Trump’s tax and spending policies, his tariffs and immigration restrictions and their effects on growth, inflation, wages, taxes and wealth…This is no easy task, with multiple variables in play, each of which can worsen or lessen the cumulative effects…Nonetheless, when I put it all together for the median household, I came up with an estimated net loss of $2,250 in 2025 spending power…The median household income after taxes was $72,330 in 2024, according to the census. The $2,250 amounts to a 3.1 percent loss in spending power, more than enough to persuade quite a few voters that the economy under Trump has gone sour, an assessment confirmed by poll after poll. This disenchantment has begun to spread to Trump’s own voters…To reach this estimate, I combined the calculations of the costs and benefits of major Trump policies by the Yale Budget Lab; the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution; the Federal Reserve; the American Enterprise Institute; and the Penn Wharton Budget Model. I also contacted economists and public policy experts from these and other institutions.”

Edsall continues, “As I dug into the research, something far more important than the specific dollar estimate of an average family’s loss emerged: Trump’s economic policies have put the nation on a long-term path of decline, in terms of gross domestic product, employment, capital investment and wage growth…Jonathan Haskel, a professor of economics at Imperial College Business School in London, and Matthew J. Slaughter, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, drew similar conclusions in their Foreign Affairs article “America’s Brexit Phase: Trump’s Tariffs and the Price of Economic Uncertainty,” which appeared in June:

Unless Washington changes course fast, the United States will suffer many of the same consequences that the United Kingdom did in the aftermath of Brexit. If Washington continues to embrace “strategic uncertainty,” the United States, too, will likely face years of stagnating investment, sluggish growth in its economic output, and flat or even falling standards of living.

The biggest lesson of Brexit, Haskel and Slaughter concluded, “is that policy uncertainty can chill business investment, growth in productivity, and incomes — quickly, lastingly, and painfully. The supporters of Trump’s ‘strategic uncertainty’ approach have been forewarned.”

Edsall adds, “The Yale Budget Lab calculated the combined financial costs and benefits of two signature Trump policies, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on taxes and spending and his substantial tariff increases. It found that the net effect of the tax cuts with the higher costs from tariffs leaves a family in the middle of the income distribution roughly $480 poorer…Those with incomes in the bottom three deciles lose the most — $2,160, $1,320 and $1,060 — according to the Yale Budget Lab’s calculations — while those in the top three deciles are the only winners, at $170, $830 and $9,670…That’s just for starters. The lab’s analysis pointed to adverse impacts on economic growth and employment:

Tariffs slow real gross domestic product growth by 0.5 percentage points in 2025 and 0.4 percentage points 2026. In the long run, the U.S. economy is persistently 0.3 percent smaller, the equivalent of $90 billion annually in 2024 dollars.

The unemployment rate rises 0.3 percentage points by the end of 2025 and by 0.6 percentage points by the end of 2026. Payroll employment is about 460,000 lower by the end of 2025.

On the plus side, the Yale Budget Lab calculated that as a result of the tariffs, “U.S. manufacturing output expands by 2.9 percent,” but it cautioned that “these gains are more than crowded out by other sectors: construction output contracts by 4.1 percent and agriculture declines by 1.4 percent.”

Edsall concludes, “As 2025 comes to a close, the damage the models predict is starting to become reality…Last Thursday, for example, The Wall Street Journal reported in “This Year’s Layoff Tally Nears 1.2 Million, Highest Since Pandemic” that from “January through November, firms have laid out plans to cut 1.17 million posts. That’s the highest year-to-date level since 2020.”…Equally foreboding, Paul Krugman, in “MAGA’s Affordability Crisis Will Soon Get Worse,” which was published last week on his Substack, cited the looming prospect of a sharp rise in fees for health coverage under the Affordable Care Act…Without congressional action, which appears very unlikely at the moment, Krugman presented data showing that premiums for those with coverage in Florida under the Affordable Care Act, to give one example, would more than double, to $2,200 from $899 a month for a married couple 40 years old and earning $130,000 with two children. For a 64-year-old couple making $90,000, monthly premiums would rise to $3,176 from $637, or to $38,112 from $7,644 a year…These developments have prompted growing numbers of elected Republicans, along with White House aides and advisers, to pressure Trump to recognize and acknowledge publicly Americans’ deepening concerns over jobs, inflation and affordability…For Trump to accede to these pressures would, however, require him to admit that his grandiose claims about how his policies would produce a bountiful explosion of prosperity were wrong…He is not going to do that.”

This stub of the following article, “The Left’s Project Has Just Begun” by John B. Judis, author of “William F. Buckley: Patron Saint of the Conservatives” and other works of political analysis, is cross posted from compactmag.com:

Liberal and conservative commentators have rushed to downplay the importance of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory in the New York City mayoral election. “The odds are that Mamdani’s victory is actually less significant than you think,” declared New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. The Third Way, a Washington thinktank, urged “Democrats at all levels to resist the pressure to align with Mamdani’s politics and agenda.” And my sometime co-author Ruy Teixeira, writing in The Liberal Patriot, went further and declared the seeming triumph of the left an illusion. “The left’s 21st century project has failed,” he wrote.

I’ll grant that in 2028, Democrats should recognize that a politics and a persona that wins voters in New York City or in Seattle, where socialist Katie Wilson was elected mayor, may not play as well in York, Pa. or Green Bay, Wis. But for all its limitations, the Democrats’ left wing is now the principal source of the party’s energy and ideas. After Donald Trump passes from the scene, the battle for the nation’s political future could as well be fought between the Democratic left and the Republican right, with the centrists from the Third Way watching from the sidelines.

Teixeira, who is the most dismissive of the American left’s accomplishments, traces its trajectory and fall over the last 125 years:

The 20th century encompassed the era of social democracy followed by an attempt to resurrect the left through the Third Way after that era’s ignominious end. In the 21st century, the left embarked on a new project they hoped would remedy 20th century weaknesses and inaugurate a new era of political and governance success.

 “The American left, by any reasonable measure, has enjoyed a revival in this century.”

This project, he contends, “has failed and failed badly.” He cites, among other things, its failures “to stop the rise of rightwing populism,” to “retain its working-class base,” and to “create durable electoral majorities.” This history identifies the left with the Democratic Party, and that party’s rise and fall in the 20th century with that of social democracy. But in fact, the American left, by any reasonable measure, has enjoyed a revival in this century after having been dormant for much of the last century.

More here.

Monica Potts interviewed Kentucky Governor Andy Beshaar and shares insights gained in “How Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear Thinks Democrats Can Win Rural America” at The New Republic. A taste: “M.P.: One of the things that I thought that President Joe Biden was underappreciated about was that he did make a big effort to bring new plants, especially to red states, and to reform American industrial policy through the Inflation Reduction Act. He did talk a lot about the day-to-day economic concerns that people had. He walked with unions, and he tried to reach out to workers. Why do you feel like that message wasn’t convincing, even when Vice President Kamala Harris took it up in her race in 2024?A.B.: Well, I think two things. First, as Democrats, we got to get dirt on our boots, and we’ve got to show up in the areas where our policies are creating new jobs, new opportunities, more accessible health care, safer infrastructure, better schools. The signing in the Rose Garden isn’t real anymore. A signing of a bill in Frankfort [Kentucky’s capital] doesn’t directly impact people on that day. So we’ve got to be there at the announcement, at the groundbreaking. And you know, people make fun of it, [but] the most important one is the ribbon cutting. Why? Because the jobs are there, because the future is better for families. We’ve got to make sure that people in rural America see Democrats and see the results of the policies that we’re pushing for…The second piece, though, is we’ve got to do things faster. The Biden administration passed a lot of good legislation that has spurred a lot of economic development in my state, but the Democrats need to admit that there are times when we are over-regulated, and we’ve created so many rules that some programs that we believe are essential for the American people simply take too long. American people don’t see and feel now the Internet for All program. It’s been three years, and we don’t have a single inch of fiber in the ground. So if you’re a Democrat or a Republican and you believe that the internet is essential, then we should be able to develop a program that gets it out much, much faster.” More here.

Alex Samuels explains “What Tennessee’s special election tells us about 2026” at Daily Kos: “Historically, special elections can act as bellwethers. In the 2017-18 cycle, Democrats beat benchmarks in special elections by about 11 points before winning the House popular vote by almost 9 points in the 2018 midterm elections. Tennessee’s 7th mirrors that pattern: a sizable swing leftward in a previously safe district, signaling early momentum for Democrats as they look to 2026…The results cut both ways: a warning light for Republicans and a welcome bit of reassurance for Democrats. Districts that once seemed comfortably red are showing some slippage, and even places that backed Trump by big numbers may be more competitive than they look on paper…As the 2026 midterms approach, Tennessee’s 7th offers a blueprint of the political terrain ahead—high stakes, energized voters, and an electorate increasingly willing to defy expectations.” Also, Samuels notes, “It’s not just Latino voters drifting from Trump. Even parts of his MAGA base are wincing after he accused several Democratic lawmakers of sedition and suggested they should be put to death. A new poll from The Economist/YouGov found only 60% of Trump’s 2024 voters support his comments, while 29% disapprove—unusually large dissent for a group that rarely opposes him. It’s an early sign that even his most loyal supporters have limits. And the trigger was hardly radical: A brief video from six Democratic lawmakers noting that “No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

From “Trump Is Coming for Veterans’ Disability Benefits” by Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early at The American Prospect: “On October 29, a disabled Navy veteran and blogger named Theresa Aldrich, who keeps other former service members informed about developments at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), tuned in to what seemed to be a routine session of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee (SVAC). The hearinghad an innocuous title, “Putting Veterans First,” and SVAC members invited a panel of witnesses to discuss the question “Is the Current VA Disability System Keeping Its Promise?”…Instead, Aldrich discovered, it was a Republican response to a four-part series in The Washington Post, which accused veterans of bilking the taxpayer out of billions of dollars. Little of the ensuing discussion focused on any needed improvements in the VA disability system, as opposed to just echoing the sensational claims of the Post—that there is an epidemic of veterans defrauding the disability system. All of this, she warned her readers, would “set the stage to cut benefits for 6.9 million veterans.”…As the Prospect has reported in detail, over the past decade, Republicans in Congress have been fighting—and too often winning—on their first front, namely the campaign to privatize the VA-run Veterans Health Administration (VHA)…Until now, however, the veterans disability system—operated by the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA)—has been a sacred cow for politicians of all stripes on Capitol Hill. If anything has united Republicans and Democrats, it has been that combat veterans and other former service members who sustained injuries or illnesses while serving in uniform deserve compensation. Alas, no longer.” More here.

In “Health care fight heads to fever pitch,” Jared Gans writes at The Hill: “The battle over the extension of critical health care subsidies may come to a head this week as time is running out before prices are set to spike for millions of Americans…Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) plans to force a vote this week on his own proposal for a three-year extension of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits, which are set to expire at the end of the month. He has said he expects every Democrat to support it…But the legislation will fail without support from at least 13 Senate Republicans to reach the required 60-vote threshold to advance…Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is also expected to introduce House GOP leadership’s own health care proposal, with the goal of receiving a vote before the end of the year. The details of the plan aren’t clear, but Republican leaders have signaled it will focus on alternative health care affordability provisions to the subsidies…GOP leadership has for months been stuck between moderates looking to extend the subsidies in some form and staunch conservatives who want them to end, arguing that the ACA has failed to lower health care costs. That battle is reaching a key moment this week, The Hill’s Mike Lillis and Emily Brooks report…Republican and Democratic moderates have been working together to try to put forward a plan that would extend the subsidies with some reforms, like establishing an income cap and eliminating plans without premiums.” Read more here.

The following article, “The Future of the Left in the 21st Century: Part one of three” by Ruy Teixeira, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Recently I wrote a widely circulated piece arguing that “The Left’s 21st Century Project Has Failed.” By that I didn’t mean that parties of the left cannot win elections. They have, and they will! Already, Democrats look well-positioned to take back the House in 2026, and they may well pick up a seat or two in the Senate (though attaining control of that body still looks out of reach). And if the unpopularity and poor results of the Trump administration continue into 2028, they’ll certainly have a decent chance of recapturing the presidency three years from now.

But a continuation of the electoral see-saw between Democrats and Republicans is not what the left should have in mind. It has been and would be little more than a holding action against right populism. Taking advantage of the thermostatic reaction against your opponents’ overreach and failure to manage the economy effectively is a very low bar—especially given how egregiously flawed that opponent is. It would hardly indicate a revival of the left and a new political project to replace the one that has limped along for a quarter of a century. Rebuilding the left’s base among the working class and forging a durable majority coalition will require a genuinely new project based on core principles that break with the failures of the past.

Those principles should be based on the fundamental fact that the left has lost touch with baseline realities of how to reach ordinary working-class voters, what policies could actually deliver what these voters want, and what kind of politics accords with these voters’ common sense rather than the biases of their own base. The left needs to course-correct toward realism to give themselves a serious chance of decisively defeating right populism and achieving the good society they claim they are committed to.

Here are two such principles. I will discuss five other principles in parts two and three of this series.

Energy realism. This is an important one. As I have noted, the left has spent the first quarter of the 21^st century obsessed with the threat of climate change and the need to rapidly replace fossil fuels with renewables (wind and solar) to stave off the apocalypse. In their quest to meet arbitrary net zero targets, they have made this transition a central policy goal and structured much of their economic program around this.

A dubious crusade to begin with, albeit much beloved among their Brahmin left base, the wheels are now coming off the bus. A detailed article by Tom Fairless and Max Colchester in the Wall Street Journalsummarizes the European situation:

European politicians pitched the continent’s green transition to voters as a win-win: Citizens would benefit from green jobs and cheap, abundant solar and wind energy alongside a sharp reduction in carbon emissions.

Nearly two decades on, the promise has largely proved costly for consumers and damaging for the economy.

Europe has succeeded in slashing carbon emissions more than any other region—by 30 percent from 2005 levels, compared with a 17 percent drop for the U.S. But along the way, the rush to renewables has helped drive up electricity prices in much of the continent.

Germany now has the highest domestic electricity prices in the developed world, while the U.K. has the highest industrial electricity rates, according to a basket of 28 major economies analyzed by the International Energy Agency. Italy isn’t far behind. Average electricity prices for heavy industries in the European Union remain roughly twice those in the U.S. and 50 percent above China. Energy prices have also grown more volatile as the share of renewables increased.

It is crippling industry and hobbling Europe’s ability to attract key economic drivers like artificial intelligence, which requires cheap and abundant electricity. The shift is also adding to a cost-of-living shock for consumers that is fueling support for antiestablishment parties, which portray the green transition as an elite project that harms workers, most consumers and regions.

Such have been the wages of the green transition. No wonder countries around the world are increasingly reluctant to sign on to getting rid of fossil fuels, as shown by results of the recent COP30 deliberations. Projections from McKinsey, the International Energy Agency, and so on now see strong fossil fuel demand through 2050, with these energy sources not zeroed out but rather providing close to or an outright majority of the world’s primary energy consumption. Indeed, based on recent trends, these projections are, if anything, too optimistic about how fast the fossil fuel share will decline from its current 81 percent level.

These realities, plus awareness of the importance of development to poor countries, have led even erstwhile climate warrior Bill Gates to remark, “[C]limate change…will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will…thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future….[F]or the vast majority of [poor people in the world] it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been.”

When Bill Gates starts sounding like Bjorn Lomborg, you know things are really changing!

Here in the United States the relative strength and copious energy resources of our economy, plus somewhat more modest policies, have spared us from the worst that has befallen Europe. But the direction of change is clear. Even during the green-oriented Biden administration, domestic oil and gas production hit record levels. It is unlikely with AI data centers juicing energy demand that this upward trend will be reversed.

Read more…

Don’t know if this post from New York about Trump’s immaturity will get me onto the White House list of enemy media, but there’s a chance.

Veteran political journalist Jonathan Martin has a new rant at Politico Magazine with the self-explanatory headline: “The President Who Never Grew Up.” Nothing he said is the least bit revelatory; it’s all about things we know Donald Trump has done and said but lined up in a way that illustrates how very much the president resembles a child, and a not-very-well-behaved child at that. A sample:

Trump is living his best life in this second and final turn in the White House. Coming up on one year back in power, he’s turned the office into an adult fantasy camp, a Tom Hanks-in-Big, ice-cream-for-dinner escapade posing as a presidency.

The brazen corruption, near-daily vulgarity and handing out pardons like lollipops is impossible to ignore and deserves the scorn of history. Yet how the president is spending much of his time reveals his flippant attitude toward his second term. This is free-range Trump. And the country has never seen such an indulgent head of state.

Yes, he’s one-part Viktor Orbán, making a mockery of the rule of law and wielding state power to reward friends and punish foes while eroding institutions.

But he’s also a 12-year-old boy: There’s fun trips, lots of screen time, playing with toys, reliable kids’ menus and cool gifts under the tree — no socks or trapper keepers.

Martin is just scratching the surface here. He doesn’t even mention the president’s inability to admit or accept responsibility for mistakes, which is reminiscent of an excuse-making child, or his tendency to fabricate his own set of “facts” like an incessant daydreamer bored by kindergarten. Now to be clear, the essentially juvenile nature of many of Trump’s preoccupations and impulses has struck just about everybody who’s forced to watch him closely and isn’t inclined by party or ideology to jump into the sandbox with him to share the fun. But since he’s the president, it’s more seemly for critics to focus on problems deeper than immaturity. There are the many worrisome “isms” he is prone to embrace or reflect (nativism, racism, sexism, authoritarianism, jingoism, cronyism, nepotism). And there’s also his habit of surrounding himself with cartoon villains like Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, Stephen Miller, and J.D. Vance who are the stuff of grown-up nightmares.

But still, I find myself wondering regularly how Trump’s own followers process his rather blatant lack of seriousness about the most serious job on the planet. If there’s such a thing as negative gravitas, the toddler president has it in abundance. So what are the excuses MAGA folk make for him? There are five major rationalizations that come to mind:

Trolling the liberals

Whenever he says something especially outrageous or embarrassing, we are quickly told by his defenders that he’s just having an enormous joke at the expense of humorless liberals. This dates back to pro-Trump journalist Salena Zito’s famous 2016 dictum that his followers “take him seriously but not literally.” Where you draw the line between the stuff he means and the stuff he’s just kidding about can obviously be adjusted to cover any lapses in taste or honesty he might betray. The “he’s just trolling the libs” defense is a useful bit of jiujitsu as it happens. It turns the self-righteousness of his critics into foolishness while neutering any fears that whatever nasty or malicious thing Trump has said reflects his true nature and inclinations. You see this tactic a lot with Trumpworld social-media takes on mass deportation that exhibit what some have called “performative cruelty” in depicting ICE violence against immigrants, which predictably shock liberals who are then mocked for not understanding it’s all a shuck. Meanwhile, the most radical of Trump’s MAGA fans bask in the administration’s appropriation of their worst impulses.

Playing chess, not checkers

A second rationalization you hear from Trump’s defenders, particularly when he says or does something that makes no sense, is to argue that he’s operating on multiple levels that include some higher strategies his critics simply don’t have the mental bandwidth to grasp. If, for example, he insults a foreign leader, he may secretly be setting off a diplomatic chain reaction that results in foreign-policy gains somewhere else. Similarly, if he defames federal judges, Democratic elected officials, or mainstream journalists, he may simply be trying to manipulate public opinion in a sophisticated way to overcome those who thwart or undermine his substantive agenda. Trump himself set the template for the “chess not checkers” theory by telling us his most incoherent speeches and statements reflect a novel rhetorical style he calls “the weave.” You do have to admire his chutzpah in telling people they simply aren’t smart enough to follow him as he fails to complete thoughts and sentences.

He’s a man of the people, and the people are as childish as he is

An even more common excuse for Trump’s worst traits is that he is focused on communicating with the people, not the media or other snooty elites. If he’s crude or impulsive or irrational, so, too, are the people. As one liberal writer ruefully admitted of Trump circa 2016:

He liked fast food and sports and, most importantly, he shared all their gripes and complaints and articulated them in the same terms some used themselves. For all his crowing about his money and showing off, he really didn’t put on airs. He was just like them.

And he behaved just like they would if they were given a billion dollars and unlimited power. Thus his childishness and even his cruelty could be construed as efforts to meld minds with the sovereign public or, at least, key parts of it. This became most explicit in 2024 when Trump’s crudeness and fury about diversity were transformed into a shrew pitch for the support of the “manosphere” and the masses of politically volatile younger men who spend much of their lives there. It could even serve as an excuse for his destruction of the White House as we’ve known it. Gold plating of everything in sight and the construction of a huge, garish ballroom might disgust aesthetes and history buffs with postgraduate degrees and no common sense. But with the White House set to become a venue for UFC fights, why not go big and loud? Nobody elected architecture experts to run the country, did they?

Trump is an insurgent leader with an insurgent style

A parallel excuse for Trump’s uncouthness is that transgressions are central to his mission. He’s there to overturn the Establishment, not respect its silly rules of what’s appropriate for presidents. His distractors ruined the country, so who are they to complain when it requires someone unconventional to set things aright? Trump campaigned in 2016, 2020, and 2024 as a disrupter and thrilled his followers by refusing to be domesticated in office. When returned to power most recently, he hit Washington like a gale-force wind defying all precedents and expressing an exasperated public’s disgust with the status quo and the people who led it. So why would anyone expect this Robespierre to play by the rules of Versailles? That’s not who he is and not what he was elected to do.

He’s saving America, so he should be able to do any damn thing he wants

The president himself has best articulated the standard by which he judges himself and expects to be judged by his followers, and by history, in a Truth Social post this past February: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” From the MAGA point of view, the 47th president is bending history, reversing a long trend toward national decline, and raising the economic aspirations and moral values of America to heights thought to be long lost. Perhaps the most powerful rationalization for Trump’s many excesses ever written was the famous 2016 essay by Michael Anton comparing those supporting Trump’s challenge to Hillary Clinton to the desperate and self-sacrificing passengers of the hijacked September 11 flight that brought the plane down by rushing the terrorists in the cockpit:

[I]f you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

It’s Trump, warts and all, or the abyss, to many Trump fans, today as in 2016. So if he wants to have some boyish fun while he’s saving America, and perhaps civilization, who are we to deny him?

Here’s an excerpt of “The Biggest Heist in America Is Being Sold as a Gift to Children” by Sean Carlton at Counterpunch:

America loves a good illusion. It loves the performance of generosity from people who built their fortunes on systems that leave everyone else scrambling. That’s why the country is celebrating Michael and Susan Dell dropping $6.25 billion into “Trump Accounts.” Twenty-five million kids will get $250 each in a special savings account that they can’t touch for almost two decades. It sounds like generosity. It plays like hope. It sells like opportunity. But it isn’t any of that. It’s a corporate heist dressed up as philanthropy, and America is too exhausted or too desperate to notice.

The Dell announcement isn’t about helping children. It’s about normalizing a future where the only people who can fix failing systems are the same corporations and billionaires who helped break them. The government could’ve built real support for families. It could’ve raised wages, stabilized housing, funded public education, or given parents actual resources instead of symbolic ones. Instead it built a program where kids get locked into market accounts, and then it waited for a billionaire to swoop in and finish the job. That isn’t policy. It isn’t progress. It’s the privatization of the public good.

A one-time $250 deposit isn’t lifting anyone out of anything. At best it turns children into unwilling investors in a financial system that’s already eaten their parents alive. At worst it shifts the entire idea of welfare into something that only functions if wealthy people feel like playing savior for a news cycle. This isn’t social support. It’s a handshake between private wealth and a government that no longer knows how to govern unless the market approves.

The trick here is simple and old. You starve the public systems until they’re so weak that anything looks like relief. Then you let a billionaire deliver a drop of water and call it a miracle. Americans have been trained to applaud the spectacle. They forget to ask why one of the richest men in the country gets to decide how twenty-five million children experience their first introduction to money. They forget to ask why the richest people get public praise for giving back pennies compared to what they extract. They forget to ask why children need investment accounts instead of stable housing, food, medical care, and schools that aren’t falling apart.

More here.

I can hardly believe the possibility mentioned in the headline, but with the 47th president, you never know, as I explained at New York:

Donald Trump’s superpower, if he has one, is to assert wildly counterfactual things over and over and somehow convince people his version of reality is gospel, or at least plausible. His 2024 presidential campaign was a master class in shameless fabrication: He invented a violent crime wave even as crime statistics were falling nearly everywhere; he invented a nationwide crisis of voting by noncitizens despite almost no evidence it was happening at all; he accused his opponents of consciously betraying the country by deliberately herding violent felons across open borders and directing them to rape, kill, and plunder a helpless population of law-abiding Americans, a narrative supported by little more than anecdotes; and he asserted that all his many legal problems, capping a career marked by vast legal problems, were in fact perversions of justice orchestrated by his enemies. Ultimately, his many lies and exaggerations combined to paint a portrait of a nation that had been on the brink of never-before-imagined glory just a few years earlier but was now on its knees and near to total destruction.

This cartoonish version of current affairs was immensely gratifying to his MAGA base of true believers, and didn’t unduly trouble swing voters who were inclined to believe all politicians make stuff up and who mostly just wanted a change of administration. But now that Trump is totally in charge of the federal government and exhibiting every single day his domination of national affairs, he wants the public to acknowledge the astonishingly bright prospects he has given them, and forget all the troubles that led them to vote for him in the first place. That’s the only sensible interpretation of his fury towards the subject of affordability.

Anyone who can read polls or follow off-year election returns is aware that concerns over the steadily rising cost of living, which contributed powerfully to Trump’s 2024 victory, have not at all gone away. There is, in fact, a growing sense of dismay, within and beyond the MAGA ranks, about Trump’s campaign promises that he wouldn’t simply slow down inflation but would actually reduce prices for the most important goods and services. Many voters give him low marks on that front, which is why addressing affordability has emerged already as the Democratic Party’s key message for the 2026 midterms. It was very successfully introduced in this year’s offyear elections, which were a fiasco for Trump and his party.

For a moment, Trump seemed to understand and accept the assignment to look less interested in ending or beginning overseas wars and more interested in “affordability.” He even got chummy with New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in claiming a shared focus on the issue during their congenial Oval Office visit on November 23. But as this November 29 Truth Social post indicated, Trump treats the “affordability” crisis as a marketing problem rather than anything he really needs to address in a substantive manner:

“Because I have invoked FAVORED NATIONS STATUS FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, DRUG PRICES ARE FALLING AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, 500%, 600%, 700%, and more. No other President has been able to do this, BUT I HAVE! This is also the answer to much less expensive, and far better, HEALTHCARE! Republicans, remember, this was done by us, and nobody else. This is a revolution in medicine, the biggest and most important event, EVER. If this story is properly told, we should win the Midterm Elections in RECORD NUMBERS. I AM THE AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT. TALK LOUDLY AND PROUDLY! President DJT”

Americans didn’t need Obamacare subsidies or Medicaid benefits or lower tariffs or regulations on AI to thrive; they just needed to realize how lucky they were to be alive at this time of restored American Greatness, the “story” that needed to be “properly told” to them. As with his fable-making in 2024, Trump wanted to impose his own version of the facts on everyone his voice could reach. But in this case he isn’t talking about overseas threats or large impersonal forces shaping events or elite conspiracies, but the lived experiences of people who won’t easily be convinced their troubles are a figment of their imaginations.

Politically attuned people in Trump’s inner circle must have cringed inwardly during Tuesday’s televised Cabinet meeting when the president denounced affordability concerns as a hoax, as the New York Times reported:

“President Trump on Tuesday downplayed the cost-of-living pains being felt by Americans, declaring that affordability ‘doesn’t mean anything to anybody’ as his political edge on the economy continues to dissipate….

“After ticking off what he claimed were trillions of dollars of investments and other economic accomplishments, Mr. Trump called the issue of affordability a ‘fake narrative’ and ‘con job’ created by Democrats to dupe the public….

“Mr. Trump has tried to claim he has brought down inflation, glossing over the fact that it ticked up slightly in recent months and some of his policies were contributing to high costs, like his tariffs.

“’There is still more to do,’ Mr. Trump acknowledged on Tuesday. ‘There’s always more to do, but we have it down to a very good level. It’s going to go down a little bit further. You want to have a little tiny bit of inflation. Otherwise, that’s not good either. Then you have a thing called deflation, and deflation can be worse than inflation.'”

Trump appears to be making the same mistake his predecessor Joe Biden made: talking trends and macroeconomics to people who just want prices to go back to where they were before the pandemic — conditions for which Trump himself took so much credit. Worse yet, he’s talking down to Americans, accusing them of being dupes by feeling what they’re feeling and seeing what they’re seeing. It’s not a good look for a billionaire president to become visibly impatient with his subjects and their concerns.

Perhaps his advisers will prevail on him to get on the right side of the affordability issue before the midterms. But it’s possible that after years of telling tall tales about conditions in the country, Trump is beginning to believe his own hype, and is spinning himself as well as the media and the country. If that happens, he and his party are in deep trouble.