I readily agreed that positive news about jobs, G.D.P., and Biden’s efforts to stimulate manufacturing investment—of which there was plenty—wasn’t receiving as much attention as it deserved, particularly compared with the voluminous coverage of inflation. But I also pointed to governments from across the political spectrum in other countries, such as Britain, Germany, and France, that had experienced big rises in consumer prices. Inflation, it seemed, was poison for all incumbents, regardless of their location or political affiliation.

According to the network exit poll, conducted by Edison Research, seventy-five per cent of the voters in last week’s election said that inflation had caused them moderate or severe hardship during the past year, and of this group about two-thirds voted for Donald Trump.

According to the Financial Times, “Every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years.”

Immigration, the culture war, Trump’s reprobate appeal, and other factors all fed into the mix. But anger at high prices clearly played an important role, which raises the question of what, if anything, the Biden Administration could have done to counteract the global anti-incumbency wave. This is a complex issue that can’t be fully addressed in a single column. But one place to start is at the White House itself, where staffers at the Council of Economic Advisers (C.E.A.) and the National Economic Council spent a lot of time analyzing the inflation spike and examining options to deal with it.

Why, despite falling inflation, was public sentiment about the economy and the President still so sour? “We quickly realized that wasn’t just about the inflation rate,” Ernie Tedeschi, a former chief economist at the C.E.A. who left the Administration earlier this year, told me. “People were still going to the store and seeing high egg prices and high milk prices.” Even when an inflationary period peters out, prices don’t magically return to where they were before it began.

Most U.S. economists, including those associated with the Biden White House, remain skeptical about the efficacy of price controls, which they believe can lead to serious distortions and shortages. “I try to be humble, but I don’t know how they would have helped,” Tedeschi said. “People complained about inflation. If we had done price controls, they would have complained about shortages. It would still have been pinned on the President.”

Even if there was no simple policy fix for the political problems facing the Biden Administration, could it have done a better job of addressing voters’ concerns rhetorically? William Galston, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked in the Clinton Administration, said last week that Biden should have pivoted much earlier from emphasizing job creation to focussing on the cost of living. “He was trapped in a very traditional ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ mind-set,” Galston said. “It was a fundamental mistake.”

Though Biden’s record on G.D.P. growth and employment creation is genuinely praiseworthy—since January, 2021, the economy has added sixteen million jobs—there is perhaps something in this criticism. For a time, it did seem that the White House wasn’t sufficiently acknowledging the frustration and anger that the inflation spike had generated. Still, beginning last year, Biden spoke out a lot more about high prices, and he sought to place some of the responsibility on corporate graft. He announced measures to crack down on “junk fees,” and criticized “shrinkflation” and “price gouging”—getting very little credit for it in the media or anywhere else. The Administration also tried to advertise the pathbreaking steps it had taken, through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, to lower health-care costs: capping the price of insulin for retirees, empowering Medicare to negotiate the prices it pays for some drugs, and introducing limits on out-of-pocket costs.

After Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, she vowed that reducing the cost of living would be her first priority. She also outlined a number of proposals designed to help low- and middle-income families, which included expanded child tax credits, a new subsidy for first-time home buyers, and allowing Medicare to help cover the cost of home care.

Ultimately, however, none of these things dislodged the public perception that over-all prices were still too high and that Biden and Harris, if not entirely responsible, were convenient vehicles for voters to take out their frustration on.

Here’s a warning and an admonition written in January 2019 by author and organizer Jonathan Smucker: “If the Dem Party establishment succeeds in beating down the fresh leadership and bold vision that's stepping up, it will effectively enable the continued rise of authoritarianism. But they will not wake up and suddenly grasp this. It's on us to outmaneuver them and win.”

There are a million surface-level reasons for Kamala Harris’s loss and systematic underperformance in pretty much every county and among nearly every demographic group. She is part of a deeply unpopular administration. Voters believe the economy is bad and that the country is on the wrong track. She is a woman and we still have some work to do as a nation to overcome long-held biases.  But the real problems for the Democrats go much deeper and require a dramatic course correction of a sort that, I suspect, Democrats are unlikely to embark upon. The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right.

The lie that fueled the Iraq war destroyed confidence in the institutions that were the bedrock of this neoliberal order and in the idea that the U.S. could or should remake the world in our image. Even more devastating, the financial crisis left home owners destitute while banks were bailed out, revealing that there was something deeply unjust in a system that placed capital over people.

These events sparked social movements on both the right and the left. The Tea Party churned out populist-sounding politicians like Sarah Palin and birtherist conspiracies about Barack Obama, paving the way for the rise of Donald Trump. The Tea Party and Trumpism are not identical, of course, but they share a cast of villains: The corrupt bureaucrats or deep state. The immigrants supposedly changing your community. The cultural elites telling you your beliefs are toxic. Trump’s version of this program is also explicitly authoritarian. This authoritarianism is a feature not a bug for some portion of the Trump coalition which has been persuaded that democracy left to its own devices could pose an existential threat to their way of life.

On the left, the organic response to the financial crisis was Occupy Wall Street, which directly fueled the Bernie Sanders movement. Here, too, the villains were clear. In the language of Occupy it was the 1% or as Bernie put it the millionaires and billionaires. It was the economic elite and unfettered capitalism that had made it so hard to get by. Turning homes into assets of financial speculation. Wildly profiteering off of every element of our healthcare system. Busting unions so that working people had no collective power. This movement was, in contrast to the right, was explicitly pro-democracy, with a foundational view that in a contest between the 99% and the 1%, the 99% would prevail. And that a win would lead to universal programs like Medicare for All, free college, workplace democracy, and a significant hike in the minimum wage.

On the Republican side, Donald Trump emerged as a political juggernaut at a time when the party was devastated and rudderless, having lost to Obama twice in a row. This weakened state—and the fact that the Trump alternatives were uncharismatic drips like Jeb Bush—created a path for Trump to successfully execute a hostile takeover of the party.

Plus, right-wing populism embraces capital, and so it posed no real threat to the monied interests that are so influential within the party structures.

The Republican donor class was not thrilled with Trump’s chaos and lack of decorum but they did not view him as an existential threat to their class interests

The difference was that Bernie’s party takeover did pose an existential threat—both to party elites who he openly antagonized and to the party’s big money backers. The bottom line of the Wall Street financiers and corporate titans was explicitly threatened. His rise would simply not be allowed. Not in 2016 and not in 2020.

What’s more, Hillary Clinton and her allies launched a propaganda campaign to posture as if they were actually to the left of Bernie by labeling him and his supporters sexist and racist for centering class politics over identity politics. This in turn spawned a hell cycle of woke word-policing and demographic slicing and dicing and antagonism towards working class whites that only made the Democratic party more repugnant to basically everyone.

The path not taken in 2016 looms larger than ever. Bernie’s coalition was filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump: Working class voters of all races, young people, and, critically, the much-derided bros. The top contributors to Bernie’s campaign often held jobs at places like Amazon and Walmart. The unions loved him. And—never forget—he earned the coveted Joe Rogan endorsement that Trump also received the day before the election this year. It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real! While that has always been used as an epithet to smear Bernie and his movement, with the implication that social democracy is just a cover for or gateway drug to right wing authoritarianism, the truth is that this pipeline speaks to the power and appeal of Bernie’s vision as an effective antidote to Trumpism. When these voters had a choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them now that the choice is between Trump and the dried out husk of neoliberalism, they’re going Trump.

Maybe I will be just as wrong as I was about the election but it is my sense that with this Trump victory, authoritarian right politics have won the ideological battle for what will replace the neoliberal order in America. And yes, I think it will be ugly, mean, and harmful—because it already is.

increasingly, a broad collection of conspiracy groups, extremist movements, political and commercial interests, and at times hostile states, coalesce around crises to further their agendas through online falsehoods, division and hate. They exploit social media moderation failures, gaming their algorithmic systems, and often produce dangerous real-world effects.

Some of the largest accounts sharing falsehoods about the hurricane response – including those with more than 2 million followers – have actively engaged with other forms of mis- and disinformation and hate. This includes anti-migrant conspiracies, false claims of electoral fraud, and antisemitic discourse around the so-called ‘Great Replacement.’ Their role as amplifiers here reveals how diverse groups converge on moments of crisis to co-opt the news cycle and launder their positions to a wider or mainstream audience.

Falsehoods around hurricane response have spawned credible threats and incitement to violence directed at the federal government – this includes calls to send militias to face down FEMA for the perceived denial of aid, and that individuals would “shoot” FEMA officials and the agency’s emergency responders.

“The important thing is that you’re informed on issues you care about.” Of course, finding good information is increasingly difficult. Decades ago, there were just a few channels on television; the Internet has broadened the choices and lowered the standards. “Now people might seek out information about a particular candidate on a particular policy and think they have genuine info, but they’re being misinformed or misled,” Kalla said. The decline of newspapers has led to a decrease in split-ticket voting: voters know less about the candidates in their districts, so they simply vote along party lines. This has helped to nationalize politics. Cable news, which voters increasingly rely on, “carries a lot less information than the New York Times,” Schleicher said.

Trump realized modern GOP politics aren't about policies or governing well -- it's more akin to cutting a pro-Wrestling promo. His audience isn't waiting on a profound insight on the state of the republic, they're waiting to see who Trump will hurt and they'll cheer him on when it's the right people.

Americans can overwhemingly agree that Trump creates a negative tone but are drawn to it and support him. It's why in pro-wrestling the heel (or bad guy) can have the most dye hard fans. Trump is the modern Stone Cold Steve Austin and making a mockery of doing the equivalent of repeating "what? what? what?" when people talk -- thereby discrediting discourse itself, and finishing by never apologizing "that's the bottom line because I said so" is Trump's appeal.

Trump doesn't have to have policies, the GOP doesn't have to have a platform, there isn't any specificity of what they'll do with power, all that matters is they can own the libs.

The fundamental failure of Donald Trump’s effort to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election was that it was predicated on complete nonsense. Trump and his attorneys — particularly Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis — seized upon any allegation of fraud or any analysis that presented an opportunity for skepticism about the results and offered them up as valid. Even, in many cases, after it had been made obvious that the claims were not valid.

That the claims were debunked or irrelevant didn’t matter. His supporters treated subsequent claims as more credible in part because they landed in an environment where people were inclined (thanks to that blizzard) to believe that fraud had occurred.

Noting that individual snowflakes were fake was often too slow and too limited to make people realize that, in reality, the sun was shining — that Giuliani was just shaking a box of soap flakes above their window.

Dubious claims from unreliable actors were used to amplify questions about fraud; those questions were then used to present those and subsequent claims as reliable. Ellis was simply one spigot for the misinformation, one who now claims that she did so unconsciously. In representing Trump, she helped add layers to this house of cards.The core problem, again, was that it was almost all nonsense, that almost none of it was credible. But credibility wasn’t the goal, utility was. So lots of useful, false things were offered up, having the effect of making other false things more useful and making those original false things more useful still. Layers upon layers of nonsense. A blizzard in a snow globe held in Donald Trump’s hand.

The men and women of the Senate might not need their government salary to survive, but they needed the stimulation, the sense of relevance, the power.

Perhaps Romney’s most surprising discovery upon entering the Senate was that his disgust with Trump was not unique among his Republican colleagues. “Almost without exception,” he told me, “they shared my view of the president.” In public, of course, they played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behavior

“The media” (or “mainstream media”): a meaningless phrase because there are countless very different media, which don’t act in concert.

“Gets it”: a social media phrase that is used to mean “agrees with me”.

Usually, though, people who claim to have been “cancelled” mean “criticised”, “convicted of sexual assault”, “replaced by somebody who isn’t an overt bigot” or simply “ignored”.

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,” wrote George Orwell in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” (the complete guide on how to write in just 13 pages). He lists other “worn-out and useless” words and phrases that were disappearing in his day: jackboot, Achilles heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno. The same fate later befell words overused in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks: “heroes” (a euphemism for victims) and “greatest country on earth” (meaning largest military and GDP).

"And just get to the bigger issue that is on my mind whenever I see this stuff in the policy space, which is, again: Who are you trying to help? Who are you trying to make better off? And what public policy problems do you get up in the morning thinking about how to solve?"

There is the "just asking questions" rhetorical trick, where someone asks something that sounds a lot like an outlandish assertion, and then defends themselves by suggesting they don't actually believe this thing — they're just asking if maybe it's worth considering.

There is also the “firehose” trick, which essentially amounts to saying so many untrue things in such a short period of time that refuting them all is nearly impossible.

Much more difficult, for all of us, is to engage the best ideas you disagree with, think about them honestly, and explain clearly why you don't agree. And even more difficult is to debate honestly, discover that the other person has made stronger arguments, adapt your position and grow.

Omitting key information in arguments, or omitting counter-evidence to central claims, is just one bad argument style that is common in politics.

The curse of whataboutism is that we can often do it forever. If you want to talk about White House nepotism, it'd take weeks (or years) to properly adjudicate all the instances in American history, and it would get us nowhere but to excuse the behavior of our own team. That is, of course, typically how this tactic is employed.

Bothsidesism: Naturally, this is what I get accused of the most. I'd describe bothsidesism as a cousin of whataboutism. Wikipedia defines it as "a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports." An example might be presenting a debate about human-caused climate change and giving equal air time to two sides: Humans are causing climate change vs. humans aren't causing climate change.Given that the scientific consensus on climate change is robust, arranging an argument this way would lend credence to the idea that scientists (or people in general) are evenly divided on the issue, even though they aren't.

A straw man argument is when you build an argument that looks like, but is different than, the one the other person is making — like a straw man of their argument. You then easily defeat that argument, because it’s a weaker version of the actual argument.For instance, in a debate on immigration, I recently made the argument that we should pair more agents at the border with more legal opportunities to immigrate here, a pretty standard moderate position on immigration. I was arguing with someone who was on the very left side of the immigration debate, and they responded by saying something along the lines of, "The last thing we need is more border agents shooting migrants on the border."Of course, my argument isn't for border agents to shoot migrants trying to cross into the U.S., which is a reprehensible idea that I abhor. This is a straw man argument: Distorting an opposing argument to make it weaker and thus easier to defeat.

"The straw man is a terrible argument nobody really holds, which was only invented so your side had something easy to defeat. The weak man is a terrible argument that only a few unrepresentative people hold, which was only brought to prominence so your side had something easy to defeat."

This is classic moving of the goalposts. We went from “there weren't classified documents” to “they were classified but not that serious” to “they may have been classified but the raid was unjust unless there were nuclear secrets” to "okay, but he wasn’t selling the nuclear secrets to Russia."

The "prove a negative" argument is when someone insists that you prove to them something didn't happen or isn't true, which implies that they have evidence something did happen or is true — but they don’t actually present that evidence.For instance, if I asked you to prove that aliens don't exist, you might have a hard time doing it. Sure, you could argue that we don't have an alien body locked up in some government facility (or do we?), but you’d have a hard time listing the contents of every government facility. And if you could somehow do that, you haven’t proved that aliens don't exist at all, or even that they've never been to Earth. But the burden of proof isn't on you to show me that aliens don't exist, it's for me to show you evidence that they do.This was, in my experience, one of the most frustrating things about some of the early claims that the 2020 election was stolen. A lot of people were alleging that Dominion Voting Systems was flipping votes from Trump to Biden, and then insisting that someone must prove this didn't happen. But the burden of proof was not to show that it didn't happen (proving a negative), it was to show that it did happen. Which nobody ever did.

"The United States has prosecuted dozens of former governors, cabinet members and lawmakers. These prosecutions are essential in reaffirming the principle that no one — and especially no political leader — is above the law."

"This is far graver than the previous indictment by a rogue New York prosecutor, and it will roil the 2024 election and U.S. politics for years to come," the board said. It is "striking" and "legally notable" that the indictment never mentions the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which "allows a President access to documents, both classified and unclassified, once he leaves office... The indictment assumes that Mr. Trump had no right to take any classified documents," the board said, which doesn't fit the spirit or letter of the PRA. "If the Espionage Act means Presidents can’t retain any classified documents, then the PRA is all but meaningless. This will be part of Mr. Trump’s defense."

In particular, Special Counsel Jack Smith hits a few key points: "First, that Trump handled the classified material exceptionally sloppily and haphazardly, including stashing documents in a shower, a bedroom, and—as depicted in a striking photo—onstage in a ballroom that frequently held events,” Graham said. "Second, that Trump was personally involved in discussions about the documents, and in directing their repeated relocation. Third, that Trump was well aware of both the laws around classified documents and the fact that these particular documents were not declassified. Fourth, that Trump was personally involved in schemes to hide the documents not only from the federal government but even from his own attorneys. The indictment carefully lays out its case with pictures, texts, and surveillance footage."

Nuclear and military secrets among the documents? Check. Knew the documents were classified, and confessed he hadn't declassified them? Check. Instructed lawyers to lie and conceal the documents' existence? Check. Showed off classified information to people without clearance? Check. Kept them in insecure locations? Check.

"However cavalier he was with classified files, Mr. Trump did not accept a bribe or betray secrets to Russia," the board said. Is that the standard? That a president can only be charged if he's found selling state secrets to Russia post-presidency? No thank you. Not in a country where people spend years and years in prison for markedly less than what Trump did.

As lawyer and conservative columnist David French noted (under "What the right is saying"), this is the "Comey test." This was the standard he set. Based on the indictment, the allegations against Trump very obviously meet that standard. The Justice Department is alleging his conduct was willful and that he obstructed justice.This was also the standard Trump himself set. Nobody is really talking about this for some reason, but please remember that Trump spent his entire 2016 campaign demanding Clinton go to jail for her email server. "Lock her up" became a rallying cry at his campaign rallies, and some of Trump's own quotes about the need to protect classified information were helpfully collected in the indictment (again, this was a cornerstone of his 2016 campaign)

Many Trump allies say that prosecuting Trump will make us a "banana republic." But the rest of the democratic world is actually much better at holding its leaders accountable than we are. If anything, there is a better argument that both Clinton and Trump should have been prosecuted than that Trump shouldn’t be prosecuted because Clinton wasn’t.

France, South Korea, Israel, and Italy have all prosecuted former leaders for alleged crimes. Just this weekend, Scotland arrested its former leader Nicola Sturgeon for financial crimes. Why shouldn't we hold our leaders accountable?

As Barr noted, the documents’ degree of sensitivity was shocking, and Trump could have avoided all of this by simply returning them. Instead, he appears to have obstructed, lied to, and misled investigators over and over. Yes, we have to wait to see what the defense says, but as Barr also said: "If even half of it is true, then he's toast."

it is totally reasonable to prosecute him for what appears to be egregious and unbelievably negligent behavior. Trump has nobody to blame for his actions and decisions here but himself, and we should set the standard, for our future leaders, that this conduct is unacceptable.

People subscribe to a set of beliefs because they identify themselves as members of a tribe—the left-wing or right-wing tribe. Thus they support whatever policy their team happens to support at a given moment. As Lewis puts it, “if the right-wing team is currently in favor of tax cuts and opposed to abortion, then those who identify with that team will adopt those positions as a matter of social conformity, not because both are expressions of some underlying principle.”

Issues like abortion, tax policy, immigration, criminal justice, and environmental regulation are mostly unrelated, so believing that (say) abortion is immoral, shouldn’t commit you to believe that (say) taxes are too high. Yet as Lewis points out, people’s opinions on these issues tend to travel together, as it were. Tribalism is a good explanation for why many Americans’ constellation of policy positions often are what they are: people first come to identify with a political party and only later do they come to accept all or most of its policy positions, even when the issues themselves are orthogonal to each other.

to approach the left/right split it might be best to start by wholly abstracting from political practice in order to enter the realm of political theory. In this context, political practice refers to the actions of politicians, social movements, and other political actors in the real world. Political theory, meanwhile, refers to the written or spoken articulation of political doctrines, either by writers (in their treatises) or politicians (in their speeches). Practice refers to what political actors actually do; theory refers to the normative justifications given for what ought to be done.

The main distinction between left and right is that the left advances a politics of egalitarianism, while the right opposes the left and attempts to defend some other value—tradition, for example, or individual freedom, or public order.

whatever its language, form, and following, it makes the assumption that there are unjustified inequalities which those on the right see as sacred or inviolable or natural or inevitable and that these should be reduced or abolished.

Consider some of the political ideologies we now refer to as leftist: socialism, radical feminism, and anti-racism. The three of them share a commitment to eradicating some system of power that is deemed to be unequal and hence unjust—respectively wealth, gender, and racial inequality.

leftists derive more egalitarian policy prescriptions from their view of equality than conservatives do, even if both can agree that all humans are of equal moral worth.

this analysis of the left/right split works best at the level of theory, as an ideal-type representation of both camps. The left claims to fight on behalf of equality, while the right claims to oppose the left and fight on behalf of individual freedom, or of social order, or some other value different from equality. In practice, both sides often fail to live up to their ideals; sometimes they even betray them entirely.

Across both time and space, leftists have sought to promote some strong version of equality, while rightists have sought to defeat the left and defend some other primary value.

Theories are helpful to the extent that they explain certain phenomena, and the left/right political spectrum does explain two of the main political-philosophic camps in modern history: those whose highest value is equality, and those whose highest value is both different from equality and, in their view, at odds with it.

"Even a cursory dip into the statistics of social and economic well-being reveals that Florida falls short in almost any measure that matters to the lives of its citizens. More than four years into the DeSantis governorship, Florida continues to languish toward the bottom of state rankings assessing the quality of health care, school funding, long-term elder care, and other areas key to a successful society," Kleinknecht said. Teacher salaries are among the lowest, unemployment benefits are stingier than any other state’s, and wage theft flourishes.

So you just go through the whole range of policy issues, and there's nothing so essential to the right wing tribe today that it wasn't at some point considered part of the left-wing tribe, and vice versa. Since what the left and right mean are always changing, you can't move towards something that's constantly evolving in its meaning.

Adolf Hitler was a socialist and he's considered extreme right-wing. George W. Bush was the most radical expansion government president in my lifetime, and he's considered right-wing.

There is certainly a tribe that calls itself right-wing, there's no question about that. And there's a tribe that calls itself left-wing, no question about that. But what these tribes stand for is constantly evolving. So why don't we just throw out the terms right-wing and left-wing, and say Republican and Democrat. That would clarify so much, and get rid of the illusion that there's some kind of philosophical core behind what each party believes because that's simply not true.

People say, "well, the one issue is change versus permanence. Liberals and progressives and the left, they like change. And conservatives like to preserve.” It's just simply not true. Who was it that wanted to change the Roe v Wade decision? Who is it that wants to change tax rates to make them lower? Who was it that wanted to change Europe to create a thousand-year German Reich?

a few years back, [social scientist] John Bargh at Yale said, I've got it. I figured out what it is that divides liberals and conservatives. All conservative positions are about fear. If you're afraid, you're a conservative. See, that's why conservatives went to the war in Iraq, they were so scared of terrorists. That's why they created the Department of Homeland Security, they were scared, they were afraid. And they would say, giving up a little bit of our freedom is a small price to pay for security because we're scared. Ha! Got it, says John Bargh, I figured it out. That's what a conservative is. A fraidy cat. Scared.

It's as if we went to the grocery store and they were sitting out in the front with two carts of groceries for us and said, what do you want, Cart A or Cart B? Now, you'd probably pick the cart that had more of the products you like, naturally. We all would. That's how it is when I go into the voting booth. I pick Republicans sometimes, pick Democrats other times. Sometimes I'm just trying to balance power between the two. But what I try not to do is to pick the cart of groceries, and then after the fact delude myself that all of these groceries are related, they all share an essential characteristic, and make up a fairy tale about how they all are essentially, philosophically bound. That's what our ideologues and pundits in America today are doing. They're inventing fairy tales after the fact to try to explain why all these unrelated positions are related when in fact they are not.

So let's say you are strongly in favor of tax cuts. I would seek out the strongest possible argument for tax increases and what those might be. Maybe that will persuade you, maybe it won't, but at the very least you'll open your mind up a little bit more.

What if we had someone who said, I believe in the minimum wage, but in order to make my research more careful, and to find my blind spots, I'm going to bring in somebody to help me design the study to set out the falsification parameters, and so forth, who is against the minimum wage. And then we're going to work together and we're going to establish ahead of time what it will look like and then we're going to conduct the research.

The Republican Party’s fetishization of guns and its fetishization of insurrection — one that’s reached a hysterical pitch since Donald Trump’s presidency — go hand in hand. Guns are at the center of a worldview in which the ability to launch an armed rebellion must always be held in reserve. And so in the wake of mass shootings, when the public is most likely to clamor for gun regulations, Republicans regularly shore up gun access instead.

As it happens, in the hours after the Oklahoma City bombing, before the authorities knew who McVeigh was, he was pulled over during a routine traffic stop and then arrested for carrying a gun without a permit. In 2019, however, Oklahoma legalized permitless carry. Under the new law, McVeigh would have been let go.

"Questioned about the 2005 'Access Hollywood' tape, he actually defended his comments about grabbing women by their genitals without consent," Cevallos wrote. He said the rich and famous have been able "to get away with" that behavior, unfortunately or fortunately. "What part of that was fortunate, exactly?" Cevallos asked. Both moments "featured prominently" in Kaplan’s closing arguments, and both were evidence "that didn't exist before Trump offered them up on a platter."

Then I imagined if one of those women sued Clooney, took him to trial, and Clooney had to get deposed. During his deposition he reaffirmed that for "millions of years" rich and famous people have been able to grab women by their genitals and "unfortunately or fortunately" that is how it works. I imagined Clooney mistaking the woman accusing him of sexual assault for his ex-wife. I imagined him, during the deposition, being asked if he cheated on his first wife and saying, "I don't know." I imagined if there were two women willing to testify against Clooney in a trial, under oath, that he sexually assaulted them.

He has claimed on social media he and Carroll don't know each other and have never met, despite photographic evidence of the opposite — nevermind the corroborating fact Trump and Carroll were running in the same circles in New York City in the 1990s and 1980s.