23 Thoughts About All The Sh*t I Missed
Kind of a lot's happened...
Two weeks is a long time, particularly in the news business, and double-particularly in the Trump era. As best I can remember, I haven’t taken two weeks time-off since 2010, and haven’t been abroad for more than two weeks since 2007. I wouldn’t be able to recap everything even under normal circumstances. But it really does feel like tons of momentous stuff happened the last week of May and the first week of June.
So in lieu of a more systematic recounting, I decided to compile the thoughts that occurred to me as I brought myself up to speed, and use it as an opportunity to build up some mailbag questions.
What news developments struck you most? Whether backward or forward looking, what would you like me to drill into as I return to regular production? Consider this an open box for all questions, suggestions, and complaints, and an invitation to join our community.
Upon my departure, Donald Trump had just begun to regain the public-opinion ground he’d lost in the maelstroms of his economic maladministration and unpopular, authoritarian immigration actions. (cf )
As of now, Trump has gained back almost all of it, leaving him still historically unpopular, but no longer spiraling into a crisis. He may not view it as a blessing, but it is in some sense his salvation that he was able to shit the bed so many nights in a row and only lose perhaps two percent in public approval on net.
Perhaps this has some mechanical connection to the fact that Trump retreated in his trade war, and thus merely weakened the economy when he’d been poised to crash it. (I understand a TACO meme erupted in my absence? I have some thoughts on that, too, I suppose…)
But surely much of it is attributable to the fact that Democrats stopped attacking. In particular, guided by their consultants, they stopped pressing for Trump to comply with court orders and return Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
At the peak of that confrontation, Democrats dragged Trump’s immigration approval underwater. Instead of viewing their quick success as an invitation to continue pressing their advantage, they viewed it as the perfect time to quit while they were ahead. Once they relented, though, Trump’s numbers floated back up.
Chuck Schumer had an early theory that Trump would “screw up” and it would take care of the Democrats’ opposition politics for them. He leaned further on that theory to mollify concerned members after he whiffed the government funding fight. It has not borne out. Trump has screwed up. But it matters little if most people aren’t tuned in, because there’s only minor conflict or controversy surrounding it.
All of this forms the backdrop for the three biggest recent developments: The turbulent advance of the Republican budget-reconciliation bill, the acrimonious Donald Trump-Elon Musk divorce, and Trump’s impeachable decision to mobilize National Guard troops against American citizens.
I do sympathize to some extent with Democrats who are genuinely worried the Trump budget bill will become law and kick 10 million people off Medicaid, many of whom are frustrated that getting the public to focus on what’s at stake amid all the menace and drama is very hard. It’s harder still that Republicans lie about the contents of the legislation so promiscuously.
But the impulse to (thus) blow off everything else Republicans say and do as a distraction (also under the influence of consultants) is badly misguided—even if it happens to be true that Republicans really do engage in diversionary antics, and create chaos to build pretexts to advance horrendous legislation. (And I do believe that’s true: Here’s Stephen Miller, who orchestrated the invasion of Los Angeles, suggesting the crisis he manufactured can’t be resolved unless Republicans pass the Trump budget bill.)
It is actually a big deal, as a first-order matter, that Trump gave all of our federal data, along with many lucrative national security contracts, to his top donor, who then absconded with them in a fit of pique. It’s an important national security story, it’s an important corruption story, it’s an important story about the functioning of the White House, and an important revelation regarding the vulnerabilities of the MAGA coalition.
Politically speaking, it was all very damaging to Trump—or at least it had the potential to be. His most powerful ally made incredibly serious allegations about him and said he should be impeached! And to the extent that Democrats love to concretize everything in pocketbook terms, it could have been a big setback for the budget bill: These are the people writing and trying to pass it! We can’t trust them with anything, let alone with the health care of 10 million people, or with setting their own tax rates, to say nothing of the nuclear codes.
This is not how Democrats saw it. They saw it like this instead:
And like this.
The idea, I guess, is that everything on the periphery of Democrats’ strongest issue is a ruse, or presumptively unimportant. Apart from the uncanniness of ignoring elephants as they stomp across the room, it’s also a misapprehension of opposition politics.
There’s no sense in which Trump’s power resides along various axes, where the implosion of his White House might make him “weak” on personnel matters, while he remains strong on the reconciliation bill. If that were the case, it would indeed be very important to try to re-deflect attention away from Trump-Musk and back on to health care. But that’s not correct. It all runs together. By all means, talk about the bill when it’s contextually natural to do so, and try to create those moments. But if you want the bill to fail, Trump has to be made toxic, and that means exploiting weakness on all fronts.
That doesn’t mean Democrats needed to offer up takes on the Trump-Musk feud.
Their options were to drive wedges deeper, or stand back from the fight while pointing and shouting about all the spilled blood. So there’s redacted information about Trump in the Epstein files? The reconciliation bill is a disaster? Trump’s tariffs will cause a recession? Who are the DOGE employees dispatched to various agencies loyal to, the president, or his disgruntled donor?
Not on their list of options: Inviting Elon Musk back into the Democratic Party.