Category: Campaign 2024

Campaign 2024, Politics, Trump

The Fall of the House of Trump

Jay Reding |

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

A New York judge has issued an order that essentially gives the Trump Organization the corporate death penalty. Judge Arthur Engoron’s order rescinds the Trump Organization’s business charters and puts Trump’s corporate empire into a receivership. Ultimately this may do just as much or more to end Donald Trump’s reign as the many criminal indictments against him.

The Trump Organization is in the bullshit business. Real estate is just the side hustle. Trump shamelessly slapped his name on anything he could—golf courses, steaks, a failed airline, even vodka (which tee-totaling Trump does not drink). Trump is right that the main source of his revenue was through his “brand,” a brand which is now synonymous with right-wing extremism. But ultimately Trump is incredibly cash poor and highly leveraged. His real-estate empire was basically an attempt to get more and more money from lenders to keep his incredibly-leveraged empire afloat.

Now, that scheme is falling apart. Trump was already radioactive to most banks, forced to go to less savory banks connected to Saudi and Russian oligarchs. But Trump needed legitimate assets to do that, including Trump Tower and his Mar-a-Lago club. Now, Trump has run out of both legitimate assets and likely the revenue streams he needs to keep his secured creditors at bay.

Trump’s money, real or imagined, is what kept everything together. Now Trump has a voracious need for cash, not only to keep his quasi-campaign afloat, but to pay his lawyers in his numerous criminal cases and keep his standard of living going. Right now Trump is quite adept at fleecing his followers with everything from t-shirts to worthless NFTs. But that is likely not going to be enough. While their may be a sucker born every minute, Trump needs a lot of suckers to keep himself afloat, and sooner or later that well will run dry.

The question becomes what happens next. Trump will certainly appeal Judge Engoron’s ruling. That appeal is highly unlikely to change anything, but it may delay the process. However, no matter what happens, Trump’s access to credit through conventional means is likely to be incredibly curtailed. That leaves Trump even more at the mercy of Saudi autocrats, Russian oligarchs, and other unsavory characters than he already is. Whether Trump can get enough support outside of banks depends on whether the Saudis, Russians, etc. see him as a valuable investment or simply damaged goods. The more legal hot water Trump gets into the less his “Teflon” appearance becomes.

Just as in Hemingway’s quotation above, Trump’s downfall could be gradual then incredibly sudden. Trump has so far been incredibly adept at avoiding the consequences of his actions, but this ruling strikes at the heart of who he is and who he makes himself out to be. At some point Trump’s luck and bluster will run out. His only hope at this point is to win the Presidency and use the power of his office to make his legal troubles go away. Sadly for the country, there remains a precipitously high chance that could happen. But the entire Trump mystique is based on him being the world’s greatest businessman. That has never been true, and the collapse of Trump’s empire of bullshit might be more personally devastating to him than even a jail sentence.

Campaign 2024, Politics

CBS Poll Shows Trump Barely Ahead – But Do The Polls Matter Now?

Jay Reding |

A rather shocking CBS/YouGov poll shows 91-count felony defendant Donald Trump leading President Biden by a 50-49% margin. The fact that Trump has been indicted in multiple jurisdictions, including crimes related to harming the national security of the United States seems to be less of a concern to voters than the fact that Joe Biden is old. And while it is certainly true that Joe Biden is old, the candidate with the clearest cognitive difficulties is Donald Trump. So why is it faced with such an obvious, stark choice that the American public is split down the middle?

The fact is that political polling in this country is broken. Pollsters still rely largely on phone calls to conduct polls. As technology has moved on that method of polling has become less and less reliable. And even when polling methods were much better a poll taken a full year prior to an election is hardly worth the paper it’s printed on the bandwidth used to transmit it. As the CBS article notes, in past polls at this time showed Bob Dole beating Bill Clinton and Barack Obama at risk of losing. We all know how those elections turned out.

What this poll really measures is less about the horse race of the election and more about political partisanship. The people who are answering pollster phone calls a year prior to the election are more likely than not the most partisan Americans. The “normal” voter is not paying attention except in the most general terms. And it would not be shocking at all if Trump has an edge—even a significant edge—in terms of partisan intensity. But as 2020 showed us, elections are not won by riling up the most partisan MAGA base. And even among the most tuned-in members of the electorate, the people crazy enough to answer a pollster’s phone calls, the vote is split evenly.

Now, if this were September 2024 rather than September 2023 that would be causing all sorts of alarm bells to ring in the Biden camp. But over the next year just about anything could happen. And the normal voter is just not paying attention, and it’s the normal voter that decides elections in this country. That’s why those very early polls showing Bob Dole up and Barack Obama down ended up not mattering at all. Plus there are a whole flock of black swans in the 2024 cycle. We already saw how suburban women punished the GOP for the Dobbs case in 2022, and that anger is not going away. We already saw how toxic Trump was with ordinary voters, especially moderate suburbanite voters, and that has not gone away either.

The real fear the Democrats should have is that Trump will motivate his base, which is only in the low 40% range of the electorate, but Democrats will decide to stay home. That would be a much bigger problem for the Democrats in a normal election year against a normal GOP candidate. But Biden isn’t going to be running against a normal GOP candidate, he’s going to be running against Donald Trump. And Trump motivates the Democratic base too.

The polls just do not matter right now except for generating clicks. What it does tell us is that among the most politically active Americans the race is evenly split. What happens when the rest of the country tunes in will decide how the 2024 race proceeds.

Campaign 2024, Politics

Kevin McCarthy’s Deal With The Devil Comes Due

Jay Reding |

In order for Kevin McCarthy to win his position as Speaker of the House after 15 ballots, McCarthy had to make a deal with the devil—he had to agree to ridiculous concessions that would give the most radical members of the House the power to force his hand on key issues. McCarthy was narrowly able to avert a government shutdown earlier this year, but now the GOP’s Caucus of Crazies have demanded that McCarthy launch a politically disastrous attempt to impeach President Joe Biden. McCarthy, with his Speaker’s chair turned into a Siege Perilous, has acquiesced to the insane demands of the most radical members of his caucus.

The claim is that President Biden has fostered a “culture of corruption.” The problem with this claim is that there is precisely zero evidence of it. Yes, his son Hunter Biden was clearly trading on his family name. However, that may be unethical, but it is absolutely not illegal. If you think that Jared Kushner got his $2 billion payout from the Saudi Royal Family on the basis of his business acumen, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. There is simply zero evidence that Joe Biden did anything wrong other than have a son with some very deep personal problems. The claims that President Biden somehow received a “bribe” or that he interfered in Ukraine on behalf of Burisma are both completely false. There is no evidence of either, as a GOP probe already determined. But the lack of evidence has not prevented the GOP from desperately trying to find a pony in that giant pile of right-wing horseshit.

Logan Roy from Succession saying "you are not serious people"
As Logan Roy from Succession might say, the GOP is not made up of serious people.

Ultimately, a clearly politically-motivated impeachment is a gift to President Biden. The impeachment investigation is likely to go nowhere. It it is not at all clear that McCarthy would have enough votes in the House to actually impeach Biden. Any impeachment would be DOA in the Senate. Instead, impeachment will demonstrate to independent and swing voters that the GOP is just not a serious party. Impeachment is a distraction, a base play for a base that is already shrinking. A serious GOP would be thinking of ways to win back the suburban voters that it lost during the Trump years. Issues like crime and inflation may not be quite as powerful as they were when the GOP’s “red wave” turned into a ripple, but at least they are real issues. Trying to paint Joe Biden as some kind of nefarious crime lord is just ridiculous. Voters did not care about Hunter Biden in 2020, and they’re not going to care in 2024.

Kevin McCarthy made a deal with the devil to become Speaker of the House, Not giving the radicals like Marjorie Taylor Green and Matt Gaetz the impeachment they demand mean losing his position as Speaker. But giving them what they want might well do the same. There are enough GOP candidates that won districts that were Biden leaning that will be made incredibly vulnerable by this quixotic impeachment campaign to swing the House. The problem with deals with the devil is that the devil always wants his due. Kevin McCarthy is finding that out the hard way.