Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

SECOND

Wednesday, March 12, 2025 6:16 PM

Does Trump Know Why He Was Elected?

The public wants the economy humming, the border secure, and an end to woke lunacy — not tariffs and irrelevant indulgences.

By Charles C. W. Cooke | March 11, 2025 1:34 PM

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/03/does-trump-know-why-he-was-elec
ted/

President Trump is at risk of blowing his second term before it has hit the two-month mark.

Go on. Shout at me for saying that. I don’t care. Who does? Outside of a handful of terminally online zealots who do more harm than good to their side, nobody is invested in today’s presidential side quests. Early on in his tenure, Joe Biden forgot the lesson that had made him president: that neither social media nor the activists who dominate it are representative of real life. Astonishingly, Donald Trump is on the verge of making the same mistake. Within a year of his victory, Biden had lost sight of why he’d won, inoculated himself against feedback, become insular in his political outlook, and, worst of all, given in to the temptation to prioritize his pet projects over the elementary building blocks atop which all successful administrations are built. By advancing his chaotic, capricious, contradictory tariff agenda, Trump is making a similar mistake. Absent a genuine crisis, such as a world war or stagflation, it is invariably smart for presidents to begin with the quick wins, gain the trust and support of the public by yielding stability, and only then turn to the unpopular or tricky parts of their brief. Trump, like Biden, has reversed this order. It’s not working out any better for him.

When one observes this aloud, one is typically called names, tarred as a chronic pessimist, or even cast as an omnipotent wrecker. But the thing is: The electorate doesn’t — and never will — have any interest in any of that. As was the case with the Democrats, the MAGA movement’s preoccupations, presumptions, and put-downs are wholly irrelevant to the average American’s life. The public wants the economy humming, the border secure, an end to the illiberal lunacy that was wokeism — and that’s about it. It will not be distracted from those core aims by memes, inside jokes, or the obsequious insistence that the president is “based.” Canada becoming the 51st state, the purchase of Greenland, how people currently perceive Tesla, the “Gulf of America,” the real or imagined infractions of random legislators, the grudges and conspiracy theories of Truth Social users — these are all stupid, extraneous indulgences.

So, too, is the desire now being expressed by some to “remake” America’s economy in the image of 1890 or 1970. Americans want the economy to be strong, and, beyond that, are not especially interested in the details. Telling those who are dissatisfied that the stock market has dropped as the result of tariffs they overwhelmingly oppose that, instead of complaining, they ought to be thankful for Trump’s brilliance is not going to help. Telling them that this development is an act of “love” will irritate them yet more. Telling them that the only people who care about such things are “globalists” or “billionaires” or “elites” is a recipe for disaster. The people who voted Donald Trump back into office wanted him to bring back 2019. They did not sign up for a trade war with Canada, the resurrection of William McKinley, or an endless game of red light/green light that tanks their 401(k) and makes it harder for their kids to buy a house.

Nor, indeed, are voters even one-quarter as invested in Trump and his success as his fans are. It may be important to Trump’s acolytes to defend him at all costs, but it is not important to the electorate — which, to its credit, is almost always unmoved by the bullying, lying, and indignant self-aggrandizement that works so well on Twitter/X. Americans don’t care what “influencers” have to say, they do not consider themselves to be represented by them, and they do not believe that they are a part of some world-historical revolutionary vanguard. They disliked the Democrats and wanted the basics fixed, so they ch

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SECOND

Wednesday, March 12, 2025 8:42 PM

Here Are the Arguments for Why Senate Ds Should Vote Yes and Why They’re Wrong

By Josh Marshall | March 12, 2025 12:57 a.m.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/here-are-the-arguments-for-why-se
nate-ds-should-vote-yes-and-why-theyre-wrong

Over the last week a few TPM Readers have written in with contrary arguments about how to deal with the “continuing resolution” that just passed the House and will soon be voted on in the Senate. These weren’t critical or acrimonious letters but frank constructive counters, which I appreciate. I wanted to discuss them because they line up pretty closely with the arguments that seem to have strong advocates in the Senate Democratic caucus.

Let me summarize them briefly.

• Democrats are in a tough messaging environment and they’ll get blamed for the shutdown. Trump might even get to blame a recession on them.

• The White House will get to control the pace of the shutdown. In other words, the executive gets flexibility in just how things get shut down, things that will get more or less helpful press attention. Thus he’ll be able to engineer lots of bad press cycles for the Democrats.

• Quite simply, Trump’s presidency and the economy are imploding. Why rush in to make ourselves the story when every day is a bad day for Trump?

• It’s too soon. The public isn’t engaged enough yet. By the fall the economy will likely be in recession and it will be a debate on Medicare, Medicaid, etc. — that’s the time to have the fight.

• Trump and Musk probably want a shutdown. After a shutdown goes on for 30 days, the law opens up new legal avenues for layoffs. A shutdown is actually what they want and they will use it to accelerate the process, get people used to it. In other words, risking a shutdown is a trap because nothing would make them happier.

I’ve thought a lot about each of these arguments. On their own a number of them are compelling and point to very real risks. Indeed, last week I briefly started questioning my own position because Democrats had done nothing to lay any groundwork for why they were choosing this confrontation. And that makes a fight much, much harder.

But I think each of these arguments is mistaken. Indeed, as a whole it’s a bit like sitting in the mess hall in Treblinka planning an escape when someone says, “But if we try to escape they’ll kill us all!”

First, I think Republicans are going to get wrecked in the midterms. I think that’s highly likely whatever happens. As a narrowly electoral calculus I think there’s a decent argument Democrats should just let everything happen, let Trump and Musk go wild. In this sense, James Carville’s argument that Democrats should just do nothing is right, by a narrowly electoral calculus. But there’s more than just an electoral calculus. Trump and Musk are methodically dismantling the republic day by day. Absent some major change in the trajectory of events the government Democrats might half-inherit in a midterm sweep would be all but unrecognizable, a smoldering heap of faits accompli. Democrats need to take some real risks to at least slow the process of destruction and reshape the trajectory.

The same basic argument applies to the “it’s too soon, things aren’t ripe” argument. There’s a political logic. Trump is likely to be much less popular. Popular programs will be on the line in the fall. The public will have had a lot more time to internalize what Trump’s doing. I just don’t think the opposition has the luxury of time. Same argument as above.

On controlling the pace of a shutdown, that is an advantage for Trump. There will be a lot of game playing. But I don’t think that’s decisive.

Will Democrats get blamed? Maybe. It’s impossible to know how public opinion will evolve. But there are good reasons to doubt they will. First, Republicans almost always get blamed for a shutdown and not Democrats. And that’s for a simple reason: nobody buys the idea that the Democrats want to shut down the government. They’re the party of government. Everybody knows that. It’s basically the Trump Republicans’

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SECOND

Wednesday, March 12, 2025 9:10 PM

There Is a Liberal Answer to the Trump-Musk Wrecking Ball

By Ezra Klein | March 9, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/opinion/musk-trump-doge-abundance-a
genda.html?unlocked_article_code=1.204.YKRY.xLjxe6aO2xys&smid=url-share

Trump could have run on bringing Texas housing policies to the nation. In Houston, there’s no zoning code, so building is easy, and the median home price is over $300,000. Compare that with Los Angeles, where the median price is around a million dollars. Or look at Austin, which has been a popular destination for many fleeing San Francisco’s housing costs. In November 2024, San Francisco’s metro area authorized the building of 292 housing structures; Austin authorized 3,059.

In the 2024 campaign, Trump and Vance ran on none of that. Instead, the housing crisis became a cudgel against immigrants. “Illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country,” JD Vance said in the vice-presidential debate. Trump sounded the same theme. Voters “cannot ignore the impact that the flood of 21 million illegal aliens has had on driving up housing costs,” he warned.

Trump could have run on the success Operation Warp Speed had in speeding up the Covid vaccines. Instead, he’s slashing government funding for science and medical research. He could have run on making it easier to build energy generation of all kinds in America. Instead he is trying to destroy the solar and wind industries. He could have run on making it easier for Americans to make things and trade them with the world. Instead, he’s trying to cut international trade by imposing tariffs and alienating partners. Musk is rich because of SpaceX and Tesla — companies that are built on federal subsidies — but he is slashing what government does rather than reimagining what it can do.

There is a reason Trump has chosen this path. The populist right is powered by scarcity. When there is not enough to go around, we look with suspicion on anyone who might take what we have. That suspicion is the fuel of Trump’s politics. Scarcity — or at least the perception of it — is the precondition to his success.

The answer to a politics of scarcity is a politics of abundance, a politics that asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government to make sure there is enough of it. That doesn’t lend itself to the childishly simple divides that have so deformed our politics. Sometimes government has to get out of the way, as in housing. Sometimes it has to take a central role, creating markets or organizing resources for risky technologies that do not yet exist.

Abundance reorients politics around a fresh provocation: Can we solve our problems with supply? Valuable questions bloom from this deceptively simple prompt. If there are not enough homes, can we make more? If not, why not? If there is not enough clean energy, can we make more? If not, why not? If the government is repeatedly failing to complete major projects on time and on budget, then what is going wrong, and how do we fix it? If we need new technologies to solve our important problems, how do we pull these inventions from the future and distribute them in the present?

But if Democrats are to become the party of abundance, they have to confront their own role in creating scarcity. In the past few decades, Democrats took a wrong turn. They became the party that believes in government, that defends government, not the party that makes government work.

Liberals spent a generation working, at every level of government and society, to make it harder to build recklessly. They got used to putting together coalitions and legislation that gave everyone a bit of what they wanted, even if it meant the final product was astonishingly expensive or was decades late or perhaps never found its way to completion at all. They explained away government’s failures instead of fixing them. They excused their own selfishness, putting yard signs out saying no human being is illegal, kindness is everything, even as t

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