Getting the sharp end

Posted on August 9, 2024 by Joe Weber

Cartoonists make their points about Trump et al.

For many of us, words are everything. We delight in them, we excoriate with them, we lavish praise with them. We struggle to find just the right ones.

But for cartoonists, the challenge is tougher. In a small space their images can — and must — speak volumes. Even as they may hit a few targets at a time, they must make a single, sharp point. They carry an extraordinary burden.

Consider Donald J. Trump’s propensity for lying. By the count of The Washington Post, during his tenure as president, he logged 30,573 false or misleading claims. Each requires many words to debunk, an exhausting task that, too often, is ignored by Trump’s followers.

At his Thursday press conference in Florida, for instance, Trump told some whoppers.

“As is typical for the former president, his remarks were littered with falsehoods,” wrote The New York Times. “He falsely accused Democrats of violating the constitution by replacing Mr. Biden on the ticket. He said nobody was killed on the Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol, when in fact several people died, including one Trump supporter, who was shot dead by the Capitol Police.”

As reported by The Associated Press, Trump insisted there had been a “peaceful transfer of power” in 2021. He argued, too, that the results of the 2022 ruling that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision pleased Democrats, Republicans and “everybody.” To quote the news service, “He also falsely claimed he drew more people to his speech at a ‘Stop the Steal’ speech before the riot than the famous March on Washington in 1963, the iconic event at which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”

Note that journalists routinely include the word “falsely” in their reports. Sad.

Explaining his falsehoods, though, can take a lot. Indeed, a long page on Wikipedia is devoted to his lies. Scholars have written papers and journalists have opined at length about them. “Jeremy Adam Smith wrote that ‘lying is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s campaign and presidency’. Thomas B. Edsall wrote ‘Donald Trump can lay claim to the title of most prodigious liar in the history of the presidency.” George C. Edwards III wrote: “Donald Trump tells more untruths than any previous president. There is no one that is a close second.”

So many words. But Dan Piraro’s cartoon above gets to the point far more simply. Plato thought there were universal truths. For Trump, by contrast, the truth seems to be whatever notion he can conjure up that serves him at the moment. Even for folks who know little of Plato (perhaps like Trump), the cartoon works.

A cartoon, ideally, can endure even as it nails feelings of the moment. Piraro’s work above is eight years old, yet it still is fresh. So, too, is a memorable bit of Mike Lukovich’s work from 2016, an Olympic year like 2024. This image is circulating with new life on the Net:

Trump, of course, earlier this spring suggested he may not accept this fall’s election results, as he repeated his claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. “If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that,” he said. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

The Olympics have offered fertile ground for other cartoonists, too. New York Daily News artist Bill Bramhall saw the July 28 election in Venezuela as a chance to pillory Trump. Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro lied about his hefty defeat at the polls and, so far, has clung to power. In an image drawn from a great collection of cartoons by U.S. News and World Report, Bramhall also invoked the infamous shirtless images of Russia’s Vladimir Putin to cast Trump as a third-rate would-be dictator:

Bramhall also is very much in the moment with an image that reflects the recent stock market turmoil and the trouble that Trump got into with his infamous suggestion that Vice President Kamala Harris only recently decided she was Black.

Trump’s incendiary commentary about Harris also inspired Chris Britt, a longtime editorial cartoonist for several newspapers who also works as an author and illustrator:

Lukovich, too, generates powerful cartoons that speak to the moment. As vice presidential hopeful Tim Walz has made “weird” the operative word for Trump and his peculiar running mate, JD Vance, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution cartoonist leapt into the fray. He used Trump’s frequent references to a 1988 movie cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, and Vance’s memorable cat ladies line to underscore the pair’s oddness:

A few cartoonists have plumbed The Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a conservative administration to great effect. Despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, Trump has maintained he knows nothing of Project 2025 and has sought to distance himself from it. So Chris Britt saw the topic this way:

Pulitzer Prize winner Walt Handelsman of The Advocate, and formerly of the Times-Picayune, took on the topic, too:

The boldest cartoonists are willing to push their themes to the edge of acceptability and sometimes beyond. Lukovich was irked by Trump’s use of the term “Black job.” Trump’s usage has been widely ridiculed, of course, including recently by Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles, who said she loved her Black job. Here was Lukovich’s take, which managed to both salute Harris and criticize Trump:

Race and gender were useful themes for Dave Whamond when Harris jumped into the race:

And gender, in particular, touched a nerve with Ed Wexler:

When Harris tapped Walz, she inspired several folks. Consider the riff The Plain Dealer’s Jeff Darcy took on JD Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” tapping into Walz’s Nebraska origins:

Handelsman also had an interesting take on Walz joining the ticket:

So, too, did Clay Jones:

For better or worse, this election will surely provide lots more fodder for these talented artists. As they poke, needle and ridicule, they may especially get under the humorless Trump’s thin skin.

The limits of labels

Posted on August 7, 2024 by Joe Weber

Trump has struggled to pigeonhole Harris and Walz

“Thrice-wed philandering felon, fraud and sexual abuser” has a certain ring to it and offers a helpful summary value. The phrase is useful shorthand for social media.

But such a label has limits.

While that description of Donald J. Trump is accurate, for instance, it falls short. It omits qualities of his such as racism, sexism, demagoguery and ignorance. Such a tag, label or meme may have a bumper-sticker utility, but can go only so far and can often mislead or be misused.

On that point, Trump and his aides have scrambled to come up with pithy terms to attack Vice President Kamala Harris and her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Trump has tried out “the most Radical Left duo in American history.” And one of his campaign videos says Walz “will be a rubber stamp for Kamala’s dangerously liberal agenda.” Parroting that, House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik lambasted “the most radical Far Left-wing ticket in history.” And, of course, there’s the “DEI hire” label.

Will such terms stick?

Under Trump’s guidance, Republicans have sought to reduce people to such abusive monikers and juvenile nicknames, such as Trump’s “Crazy Kamala” or the bizarre “Kamabla.” Presumably, they believe such caricatures will cement identities in voters’s minds. As a clever marketer, Trump knows that this gimmick, born of consumer advertising, locks in simple associations (think “soft” for Downy or “electric” for Tesla).

But, really, will anyone who looks even slightly beyond them buy those reductions? Will most Americans, particularly all-important independent voters, warm to Trump’s approach? Writing for the conservative news site, The Free Press, columnist Joe Nocera sketched out the flaws in Trump’s tack for Walz under the headline “Tim Walz is no radical.”

“He signed a bill that provides free breakfast and lunches for Minnesota public schoolchildren. An advocate for fighting climate change, he took a page from the Republican playbook and championed legislation to reduce government red tape for renewable energy projects,” Nocera writes. “On his watch, abortion rights, a critical issue for Democrats, were enshrined in state law. An NRA darling in Congress (he’s a lifelong hunter), Walz as governor supported expanded background checks and red flag laws. They are also now the law in Minnesota. Plus paid parental and medical leave. Plus a ban on non-compete agreements (giving workers the ability to easily switch jobs). Plus bills to strengthen worker safety.”

Joe Nocera, source: Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Are those measures the sort that most Americans will scream “radical” about? Certainly, a Trump Administration would revile such moves, but do they make one swallow Trump’s belittling sobriquets? As Nocera put it, “Call me crazy, but I think a lot of voters will find this ‘progressive,’ ‘extremist,’ ‘socialist’ agenda attractive.”

As Walz said of this caricature of him in an interview on CNN, “What a monster! Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn, and women are making their own healthcare decisions, and we’re a top-five business state and we also rank in the top three of happiness … Look, they’re going to label whatever they’re going to label.”

To be fair, Walz came up with a very sticky label for Trump and his running mate, JD Vance. He memorably called them “weird,” a word that emphasizes the essential oddness of both men. It also reflects the sort of Midwestern folksy jargon and commonsense judgment that Walz is known for. Indeed, some observers credit his use of the word for getting him the VP choice or, at least, moving him up the ladder.

“Weird,” moreover, is apt and avoids the incendiary tones of more provocative labels for Trump and Vance. It makes them look ludicrous, just the type of characterization that the thin-skinned and humorless Trump can’t abide.

Still, such a term, like other labels thrown about by both camps, can do only so much. More sophisticated critiques are necessary, and we will surely see them.

Some on the right have already attacked Walz, for instance, for being slow to deploy the National Guard to contain the riots that followed George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in 2020 – a slipup Walz fessed up to. “Walz and his team have said they dealt with the issues as best they could,” Reuters reported. “The two-term governor acknowledged his decision to delay deploying the National Guard and called the city’s response an ‘abject failure,’ during a press conference a few days after protests gripped the Twin Cities and the greater Minneapolis area, causing extensive damage to buildings, businesses, and a police precinct that was overrun by rioters and set ablaze.”

To many, a single misjudgment in a long career hardly seems like a fatal flaw. Of course, we will never see an acknowledgement of a mistake by Trump, who lacks the capacity for self-criticism. But we will see Walz’s hesitancy highlighted on Fox and other venues.

Voters will have to evaluate the successes and failures of both Harris and Walz, since both folks have histories to assess. Similarly, they will need to evaluate their characters and resumes.

What sort of judgment will people apply? For Walz, they can assess his background as a teacher, long-term congressman, governor and champion of legislation that seems to have helped people’s lives. For Harris, they can evaluate her role as being in the room for three and half years when Presidential decisions were made and for traveling the world to shore up relationships that Trump damaged, as well as her record in law enforcement.

Do these things paint a bold, bright contrast with a chaos-inducing criminal who killed a bipartisan effort to reform border regulations just to advance his candidacy? Do they differ from Vance’s comparison of Trump to Hitler, as well as his labeling the man an “idiot” and “reprehensible” before Trump elevated the young opportunist to his ticket?

If we get the chance to see debates between Trump and Harris, as well as between Vance and Walz, we may better be able to evaluate these folks. Certainly, they would in those settings toss labels and memorable lines at one another, some of which could easily stick.

Recall the folksy “there you go again” phrase Ronald Reagan used in his 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter and Reagan’s 1984 quip against Walter Mondale: “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Then there was Lloyd Bentsen’s jab against Dan Quayle in 1988: “I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” And Barack Obama’s memorable phrase in a faceoff with Hillary Clinton in 2008: “You’re likable enough, Hillary.”

It’s hard to imagine Trump or his staffers having the wit for such lines. And, indeed, since Trump has sought to rig a debate by changing rules he earlier agreed to for a faceoff with President Biden, one may not happen between the top candidates. As for Walz and Vance, both men seem to be spoiling for a fight.

When Harris jumped in after Biden stepped out, she seemed to set Trump back on his heels. He and his team can’t seem to quite pigeonhole her as they would like to and he has gone off-script at times (“she happened to turn Black”). Now, Walz’s arrival has “terrified” Trump, says the former president’s niece, Mary Trump.

“You can see why Donald is terrified,” the clinical psychologist said, according to Newsweek. “Because his criteria for a running mate included somebody who would lick his boots, subjugate himself, and exhibit the kind of cruel weirdness that Donald, and the base of the Republican Party, revel in. Vice President Kamala Harris picked someone who has executive [experience] and actually wants to work to make the lives of Americans better.”

Is Mary Trump, whose book about Trump labels him “the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” onto something? Voters will have to decide.

Is life in 2024 a cabaret?

Posted on August 5, 2024 by Joe Weber

A look at what a 58-year-old musical says about today’s politics

Cabaret’s 2024 Broadway production; source: NY Public Library for the Performing Arts

As the counterculture movement was heating up in the 1960s, the musical Cabaret debuted on Broadway. An ironic and challenging study of the blend of decadence and poverty of 1929-30 Berlin, the award-winning show carried a heavy warning, as it depicted the way the Nazis insidiously tapped into anti-LGBTQ sentiments, nationalism, economic strain and antisemitism to drive their rise to power.

Last night, we saw a production in Breckenridge, Colorado. This was our local version of a far more elaborate revival of the show now running in New York City and the one that is a hot ticket in London; it opened in the U.K. in late 2021 and is slated to run there at least until early 2025. The musical – an odd mix of sly entertainment and depressing political cautions — left me with many questions.

For one, why is a 58-year-old show being revived now? What resonance could it have in our day, compared with the 1960s?

For another, would audiences and critics warm to it again, as they did in its first run (1,166 performances in New York and eight Tony Awards)? And why did the 1972 movie, featuring Liza Minelli and Joel Grey, win a slew of “best” awards, including best picture and best director prizes? How impressive was it that, in 1995, the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”?

The answers it seems, are complicated. First, the new production of Cabaret, in London and New York, is not the first major revival, as the theatre collection curator of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts recounts. New York productions were staged in 1966, 1987, 1998 and 2014, and others were mounted in London. So, the core message of the piece has long been with us, requiring a reminder every decade or so.

The original director, Hal Prince, “wanted the audience to understand that the musical was not only about the hedonism and antisemitism of Berlin in the interwar period, but also about the United States in the mid-1960s,” library curator Douglas Reside writes. “Both cultures indulged in a drug-fueled sexual revolution at a time in which basic civil rights were denied to minority groups.”

How contemporary was the show then – and now? “Prince often recounted his memory of bringing an image of shirtless young men snarling at the camera to rehearsal,” Reside adds. “He noted that his cast suggested the image came from Nazi Germany, when in fact it was a photo from a recent Life magazine issue—white supremacists protesting the integration of a public school.”

So, the theme of being drawn in by seductive and entertaining escapism at a time when repression is just around the corner, sadly, has long had an appeal. Perhaps that’s because the forces of such repression – the Nazis in the 1930s, the white supremacists of the 1960s and, perhaps, the would-be oppressors of today’s GOP (supported by modern Nazis and supremacists) – have long been with us. Until they can dominate, they prowl about on the fringes of society and culture.

Think about the forms today’s reactionaries take. On the social front, we have book-banning (not all that dissimilar to burning), antisemitism (moving in from the fringes to show up on college campuses), anti-LGBTQ sentiments (often driven by right-wing religious ideas), rekindled racism against Blacks and other minorities, including immigrants, and antiabortion efforts (also religiously motivated).

And on the political front we have a party that uses such themes to gain a following. The Trumpist Republican party is keen to centralize federal power in the presidency (dictator for a day, as the former president put it, as well as his Supreme Court’s effort to grant exceptional immunity to the chief executive). We also have promises to remake the federal workforce into one answerable to political masters. And we have open admiration of autocrats around the world and disdain for democracy among the politicians and their supporters.

Consider the comments of Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who long supported now-vice presidential nominee JD Vance and the GOP. He gave $1 million to Trump in 2016 and spoke at the GOP convention back then, pulled back on his political donations for a time afterward, and now seems to be moving back toward supporting the Republican nominee. While he hasn’t endorsed Trump again, before President Biden’s withdrawal Thiel said he would vote for Trump over the president.

“I don’t think we’re ever in a cyclical world but there are certainly certain parallels in the U.S. in the 2020s to Germany in the 1920s,” the German-born Thiel said in a podcast in February. “Liberalism is exhausted, one suspects that democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted, and that we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window.”

As Newsweek reported, the Overton window means the range of views or opinions considered politically acceptable at a given time.

Cabaret, of course, reflects some of those parallels, but in much the opposite way to the manner in which the Stanford-educated Thiel sees them. The show at once celebrates the sexual freedoms of pre-war Berlin even as it suggests that the self-indulgences and, in some cases, the depravity of the era were a narcotic blinding people to the rise of the Nazis.

Those sexual freedoms would be condemned, of course, by many in Trump’s legions, even as they overlook their candidate’s long-known hedonism. It’s perhaps ironic that Thiel is married to a man, since the show aims in part to condemn the victimization of gays by the Nazis. But Thiel seems willing to overlook the anti-gay sentiment that drives so many in the Trump coalition in favor of broader political aims.

As The New York Times wrote, Thiel’s politics have mutated over time, though he has long had a libertarian bent. In 2009, Thiel wrote that he had come to “no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He argued that American politics would always be hostile to free-market ideals, and that politics was about interfering with other people’s lives without their consent. Since then, the Times noted, he has hosted and attended events with white nationalists and alt-right figures.

Scary stuff, frankly. The main Nazi character in Cabaret, smuggler Ernst Ludwig, comes across for most of the piece as a decent fellow. Ultimately, of course, he turns on the American writer protagonist, Clifford Bradshaw, and on a Jewish-Christian couple. Ludwig is reminiscent of the true believers one now sees all around Trump, people whose peculiar world views drive them into illegality, into believing that democracy is a failed system better scrapped.

One thinks of a recent commentary by Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson. “It is up to us to decide whether we want a country based on fear or on facts, on reaction or on reality, on hatred or on hope,” she writes. “It is up to us whether it will be fascism or democracy that, in the end, moves swiftly, and up to us whether we will choose to follow in the footsteps of those Americans who came before us in our noblest moments, and launch a brand new era in American history.”

Like our politics, Cabaret is filled with contradictions (or, perhaps, ironies). How can a musical both celebrate sexual freedom and blame its excesses for political myopia or willing blindness? By the same token, how can a candidate who has been as licentious as they come be a hero to the religious right? How can otherwise bright people — many in Trump’s camp boast Harvard educations — be drawn to a man who boasts of loving the underschooled? How can anyone be drawn to a convicted felon, one found to be a sexual abuser, whose dishonesty is legendary?

Liza Minelli, singer of “Life is a Cabaret”

In the show, the most memorable song, the one featuring the line, “Life is a cabaret, old chum,” sounds at first like a joyous celebration of life, of course. But we see how it becomes all about fear and sorrow. Its downbeat lines have been trimmed from some popular recorded versions, but they linger in the stage production, an ode to a friend who was an alcoholic prostitute who died early.

Based on a 1951 play that was rooted in Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 novel, “Goodbye to Berlin,” Cabaret makes one think hard about the effects of politics that one can’t ignore. It has done so for decades so far, as it has spoken to a few generations. Let’s hope that the show remains cautionary and thought-provoking. The great fear is that it could prove prescient.

Has grace forever departed the GOP?

Posted on August 3, 2024 by Joe Weber

Trump continues to show a lack of style, basic manners and common decency

In the heated 2008 presidential election, a supporter of the Republican candidate, Sen. John McCain, told him that she couldn’t trust Barack Obama. The woman called Obama “an Arab” at the height of a conspiracy movement that claimed the Democrat was not a natural-born American citizen and therefore ineligible for the presidency.

“No ma’am, he’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about,” McCain said to applause.

That’s called grace. It’s something many Republicans once had.

Before McCain, there was President George H.W. Bush. In 1993, he left a handwritten note in the Resolute Desk in the White House for his successor, Bill Clinton.

“When I walked into this office just now I felt the same sense of wonder and respect that I felt four years ago,” Bush’s note said. “I know you will feel that, too.”

“I’m not a very good one to give advice,” the note continued, capturing Bush’s genuine strain of humility. “Don’t let the critics discourage you or push you off course,” he wrote, and ended by saying, “Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you.”

Contrast such basic good manners and decency with Donald J. Trump’s reaction to the release of Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan and others unjustly imprisoned by Vladimir Putin.

“Are we also paying them cash? Are they giving us cash (Please withdraw that question, because I’m sure the answer is NO)?” he said. “Just curious because we never make good deals, at anything, but especially hostage swaps. Our ‘negotiators’ are always an embarrassment to us!” he added in his social media post.

No congratulations. No best wishes.

Graceless? Trump is the embodiment of gracelessness.

Of course, his absurd attack on Kamala Harris about whether she was Black or Indian was another recent example. His racist boorishness, apparently aimed at eroding her support in Black communities while stoking white resentments at the gains minorities have made, may have played well with a few supporters.

But for many folks, it confirmed the same sort of oafishness he demonstrated with his birtherism claims about Obama.

NY Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, Trump’s mockery; source: CNN

Need other examples of his callous buffoonery? Recall his mockery of a disabled journalist, New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, in late 2015. Of course, there was his incessant nicknaming of opponents, which continues today.

His incitement of a mob to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was perhaps the most dangerous – and deadly – case of his asinine behavior. Recall that the mob called for the assassination by hanging of Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, whom he had pressured to invalidate the election results.

Then, consider Trump’s absence at the January 2021 inauguration of President Joe Biden. The move broke with over 150 years of tradition, showed scant respect for the office and made a mockery of the peaceful transition of power.

And give some thought to the opposite, the reactions of Biden and Harris to the attempted assassination of Trump. Harris labeled it “heinous, horrible and cowardly.”

For his part, Biden called Trump personally after the shooting. “I told him how concerned I was and wanted to make sure I knew how he was actually doing,” Biden told NBC’s Lester Holt. “He sounded good. He said he was fine, and he thanked me for calling…. I told him he was literally in the prayers of Jill and me, and his whole family was weathering this.”

Would Trump have done the same were the situation reversed? Hard to imagine that from a man who doesn’t appear to know the meaning of even basic manners, much less the graciousness that once was a hallmark of many of his party’s leaders in years past.

Will we again get back to such common decency? It seems likely that the only way that will happen is if Trump and his party are soundly trounced in the upcoming election, the numerous prosecutions of him move forward and the toxin that is Trumpism is purged from the GOP.

All that, of course, is a tall order. But, for anyone with a sense of basic manners, it would seem to be within reach.

Will free(r) trade survive?

Posted on July 25, 2024 by Joe Weber

This presidential election is putting globalization into the crosshairs again.

Stanford University economist Thomas Sowell offered a profound thought: “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

As we ponder the appeal of Donald J. Trump, this insight is worth considering. While he stitches together various discontented groups in his bid to retake the White House, the former president seeks to turn the clock back even further on globalization, among other things. By imposing stiff new tariffs on imports, he maintains that this would restore jobs in hard-pressed Middle American communities.

But would it? Would restricting imports boost the numbers of factory jobs, especially in the states Trump hopes to win? And have similar efforts by President Biden – no friend of globalization himself — paid off for most Americans?

The Tax Foundation, a business-friendly but nonpartisan group in Washington, contends that such tariffs under both Trump and Biden have had a contrary effect – at least for Americans overall. Indeed, it’s not clear that they even helped voters in hollowed out manufacturing communities.

The foundation estimates that if imposed, Trump’s proposed tariff increases would hike taxes by $524 billion annually and shrink GDP by at least 0.8 percent. The group finds that the levies would slash employment by 684,000 full-time equivalent jobs. And that’s all before counting the effects of retaliation in this potential escalation of an ongoing trade war.

As president, Trump imposed nearly $80 billion worth of new taxes on Americans by levying tariffs on thousands of products valued at approximately $380 billion in 2018 and 2019, the group calculated. This amounted to one of the largest tax increases in decades.

And things actually worsened under Biden. That’s because the Biden administration kept most of the Trump administration tariffs in place, and in May 2024, announced tariff hikes on an additional $18 billion of Chinese goods. The cost amounted to an additional tax increase of $3.6 billion.

“We estimate the Trump-Biden tariffs will reduce long-run GDP by 0.2 percent, the capital stock by 0.1 percent, and employment by 142,000 full-time equivalent jobs,” the foundation says.

But have the levies benefitted folks in protected industries? Have they kept open factories in the industrial Midwest that otherwise would shut down? Is the tradeoff worthwhile?

As WABC-TV broadcaster Warner Wolf used to say, let’s go to the videotape, (well to the stats, anyway):

The number of manufacturing jobs climbed during Trump’s tenure, rising from 12.383 million in January 2016 to a high of 12.828 million in January 2019, before slipping a bit (perhaps seasonally). This suggests that his policies (perhaps) helped add a relatively small 445,000 such jobs. Thanks largely to Covid, the tally dropped to 12.188 million by January 2021, the beginning of Biden’s term, but then climbed to a high of 12.966 million by this past January before slipping back to a preliminary estimate of 12.950 million by June.

The figures suggest that Biden’s policies (perhaps) helped restore more manufacturing jobs – as few as 122,000, if one counts from the Trump-term height, or as many as 760,000, if one counts from the Covid-dampened figure in 2021.

But do tariffs deserve the credit for gains in either administration? Not according to economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research. As The New York Times reported, a nonpartisan working paper by four such researchers examined monthly data on U.S. employment by industry. Their finding: tariffs that Trump placed on foreign metals, washing machines and an array of goods from China starting in 2018 neither raised nor lowered the overall number of jobs in the affected industries.

Worse, those additional costs did hit many Americans, who paid higher prices for such goods, fueling inflation. Moreover, they incited other countries to impose their own retaliatory tariffs on American products, making them more expensive to sell overseas, and the levies had a negative effect on American jobs, the paper finds. As the Times reported, that was particularly true in agriculture: Farmers who exported soybeans, cotton and sorghum to China were hit by Beijing’s decision to raise tariffs on those products to as much as 25 percent.

Trade wars of the sort that Trump launched, that Biden exacerbated, and that Trump promises to accelerate don’t appear to help even the people they are designed to help. And, overall, consumers and workers pay the freight for this, bearing the burden of higher prices for both imports and domestically produced competing products, the academic work suggests.

“Historical evidence and recent studies show that tariffs are taxes that raise prices and reduce available quantities of goods and services for U.S. businesses and consumers, which results in lower income, reduced employment, and lower economic output. For example, the effects of higher steel prices, largely a result of the 2002 Bush steel tariffs, led to a loss of nearly 200,000 jobs in the steel-consuming sector, a loss larger than the total employment in the steel-producing sector at the time,” the Tax Foundation contends.

So, what accounts for the recent rise in jobs in manufacturing? Well, part of that may be normal economic growth. The number of manufacturing jobs had been rising since at least 2014, predating both Trump and Biden. And, under Biden, assorted industrial policies may have helped boost the tallies, irrespective of tariffs.

Researchers at the Center for American Progress point to investment programs that Biden championed. Singling out three, the group, which styles itself as “progressive” but independent, lists the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The measures were aimed at undoing decades of disinvestment in American communities, the group says.

The efforts were designed to rebuild the nation’s physical, digital, and utility infrastructure; retake the global lead in advanced semiconductor manufacturing; speed the nation’s transition to electric vehicles (EVs) and green energy; and create high-quality jobs, the center notes. These three policies combined direct public spending with grants, loans, tax incentives, and other financial assistance for private companies to promote key sectors, especially manufacturing, using public investment as a way to “crowd in” private investment.

To be sure, there can be little doubt that globalization in recent decades cost some people dearly, even as it benefitted most Americans. While low-cost imported goods helped most consumers, and access to the U.S. market lifted the economies of many other countries, this didn’t help some people – particularly those in industrial states that turned to Trump for relief.

Listen to the liberal Economic Policy Institute: “Globalization of our economy, driven by unfair trade, failed trade and investment deals, and, most importantly, currency manipulation and systematic overvaluation of the U.S. dollar over the past two decades has resulted in growing trade deficits—the U.S. importing more than we export—that have eliminated more than five million U.S. manufacturing jobs and nearly 70,000 factories.”

And consider the disproportionate effect this has had on working-class white voters in the most hard-pressed states – the sort of voters one sees packing into Trump rallies. As The New York Times reported, economic mobility for many of them declined in recent years, even as it improved for many Black Americans.

“Over the past few decades, globalization and changes in technology have caused many jobs to go from the United States to China, India and elsewhere,” the newspaper reported, drawing on a new Harvard study. “These shifts appear to have pushed white people out of the work force, while Black people found other jobs.”

The Times suggests several explanations for the racial disparity.

“White workers might have had more wealth or savings to weather unemployment than their Black counterparts did, but at a cost to their upward mobility,” the newspaper suggests. “They might also have been less willing to find another job. A steel mill that shut down could have employed not just one worker but his father and grandfather, making it a family occupation. People in that situation might feel that they lost something more than a job — and might not settle for any other work.”

Moreover, the Harvard study found that the places where Black workers live were generally less affected by job flight than the places where white workers live. And it noted that, compared with earlier generations, Black workers today are less likely to face racial prejudice in the labor force, making it easier for them to find work. Certainly, this could only fuel the racist demagoguery so rampant nowadays.

As for globalization, even as it has brought big advantages to most Americans — and to many folks overseas — more open trade has been under assault worldwide for years. It was a tough slog for free-trade warrior Clayton Yeutter and President Ronald Reagan to open the way to freer trade back in the 1980s, and many have sought to retrench since. Indeed, the Republican party under the economic nationalist Trump has rejected the concept almost altogether, while Democrats have been only slightly less disapproving.

It’s not clear what a President Kamala Harris would do in this regard. The Tax Foundation, of course, has an idea for what she should do: “In the context of the ongoing trade war, the rise of digital services taxes, and the global minimum tax, U.S. policymakers should seek to build consensus through multilateral negotiations and the rules-based trade system rather than pursue harmful, tit-for-tat retaliation that threatens to compound the harms to U.S. businesses and consumers.”

For his part, Trump has been clear on his route, and it’s not what the foundation would prefer: As the foundation notes, he has proposed a new 10 percent universal tariff on all imports and a 60 percent tariff on all imports from China, as well as potentially higher tariffs on EVs from China or across the board.

As they battle for votes, particularly in key industrial states, Harris and Trump could easily race to the bottom in attacking world trade. The vote in states that they both need — Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, for instance — may turn on the issue. Unlike Trump, however, Harris has some training in economics — it was one of her majors at Howard University as an undergraduate — and her father is an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University. She should know better.

Will either candidate “disregard the first lesson of economics” and indulge in pandering on the point? Will Harris’s greater degree of economic sophistication keep that impulse in check? Their stances will bear watching.

The gloves are off

Posted on July 23, 2024 by Joe Weber

If Trump’s edge has been plain speaking, he’s about to meet his match

Some of my relatives in New Jersey have liked one thing above all about Donald J. Trump. As one put it, “he talks like us.” The meaning: unlike politicians whose insults are measured and almost diplomatic, whose criticisms on sensitive topics are muted, the blunt New Yorker “tells it like it is.”

Unburdened even by basic manners, the former president is given to fixing labels on opponents such as “lightweight,” “dumb” or “dummy,” “a dope” or “dopey,” “weak,” “a loser,” “boring” and so on. Like a grade school bully, he bandies about terms such as “Crooked Hillary,” “Crooked Joe,” “Pencil Neck,” “Birdbrain” and “Little Marco.”

Well, Trump may meet his match in Kamala Harris. Addressing her campaign staff, the vice president said that, as a longtime prosecutor, she dealt with perpetrators of all sorts: “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said. “So, hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Diplomatic? Hardly. Blunt to a fault or coarse? Well, no. Harris is too smart and too — well, adult — for that. On point, though? Unquestionably.

To be sure, Harris’s prosecutor-versus-predator theme isn’t exactly new. She indirectly called Trump a “predator” in the 2020 campaign in her comments in the virtual Democratic National Convention. But, with his 34 felony convictions since then, along with a fraud judgment of $454 million against him and the $88.3 million in a pair of judgments against him for his sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll, her barbs underscoring Trump’s venality hit home much harder now.

Harris won’t have to sink to Trump’s schoolyard level. Don’t look for her to call him “Dumb as a Rock,” as he, flailing for a label, said of her. Of course, she could do so, with ample evidence: a former prof of Trump’s at Wharton reportedly said of him: “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!” and his former White House colleagues have called him an “idiot,” “dope” and “moron.”

But she won’t hold back, either. It’s clear that the gloves are off in this race and Harris and her compadres won’t be anywhere near as politic as former President Biden has been in dealing with Trump and his vice presidential hopeful, JD Vance. Already, potential Democratic vice presidential nominee Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has called Vance “a phony.”

And just how this all plays out will be fascinating to watch. Despite the relative genteelness of most recent presidential races, strong language has a long history in American political campaigns. A promoter of Thomas Jefferson, for instance, in 1800 referred to the nation’s second president, John Adams, as a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” And in 1828, supporters of Andrew Jackson called John Quincy Adams, the sixth president, “a pimp,” accusing him of providing women to the Russian czar while serving as the U.S. minister to Russia. For their part, Adams’s supporters caricatured Jackson’s mother as a prostitute.

Nikki Haley, source; Getty Images via CNN

In today’s take-no-prisoners contest, the more Harris and her colleagues provoke Trump, the more he may be tempted to respond like the thin-skinned brute he is. As The New York Times has suggested, the attacks could provoke him to drop even lower, particularly because women, Blacks and other minorities seem to especially infuriate him. Recall that “Birdbrain” was his term for Nikki Haley, “Pocahontas” was his moniker for Elizabeth Warren, and “Crazy Nancy” was Nancy Pelosi. Trump used the less elegant “that bitch” for former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Certainly, obvious racism and sexism — if Trump and his backers descend into them — will play well with some of the former president’s supporters, perhaps even with many. Indeed, we already are hearing strains of both in comments such as that of Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett, who called Harris a “DEI vice president” and “a DEI hire,” invoking the common right-wing attack on diversity, equity and inclusion programs at universities. Another Republican, Rep. Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, said the Democratic Party backed Harris only “because of her ethnic background,” while one right-wing commentator claimed she is not a natural-born citizen because her parents were immigrants (she was born in Oakland, Calif.).

The theme of such critics will be that Harris got where she is as a kind of affirmative action baby. Never mind that Harris is the gifted daughter of an economics professor and a cancer researcher, and that she earned a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley. They will ignore the fact that she served as a deputy district attorney in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office from 1990 to 1998, that she was elected in 2004 as district attorney of San Francisco, that in 2010 she was elected as California’s attorney general and then, in 2016, was elected as a U.S. Senator from California. They will play down her work on the Senate’s judiciary and intelligence committees, on which she sat until Biden tapped her to join him in the 2020 race.

Even as he seems increasingly addled by age, Trump may be too clever – or too well-advised – to be flagrantly racist and sexist in his dealings with Harris. While others may be more cloddish, Trump knows just how to stop short of being fully outrageous, how to avoid being too explicit.

Charlottesville, 2017; source: AP, via NPR

Recall that Trump saw “some very fine people on both sides,” among the white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville in 2017. Remember that in 2020 he told a far-right extremist group to “stand back and stand by.” Recall that he urged on insurrectionists on Jan. 6, 2021, telling them to “show strength” in the march on the Capitol, after telling them to “be there, will be wild!” And remember that Trump pressed Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State to “find 11,780 votes” to try to overturn his loss in the state in 2020.

But, if Harris gets under his skin, Trump could well go too far. How will mainstream voters – particularly women – respond then? How will they react to dog whistles about race and gender? How will they react to more explicit assaults on those grounds by Trump devotees?

Harris is brilliantly positioned to take advantage of such attacks. And she is well-seated to launch far more precise – and well-founded – volleys at Trump. His flaws are legion and we can expect that she will expose, dissect and pound away at all of them.

Indeed, as my relatives may find, Harris will “talk like us” as she shines a bright, bold light on Trump’s foulness. But she may do so far more sharply — and effectively — than Trump ever could.

Is decency returning to our politics?

Posted on May 31, 2024 by Joe Weber

Trump’s conviction may herald a swing back to morality

In mid-1954 the chief counsel of the U.S. Army, Joseph N. Welch, asked two questions that triggered the end of the paranoid, conspiracist-dominated era of McCarthyism. With those queries, both Washington and America generally began a slow road back to respect for law, due process and simple reasonableness. “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” Welch asked Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy. “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Now, with the conviction of Donald J. Trump as a felon in his tawdry case involving a porn star, a Playboy model, dishonest lawyers and accountants and infidelity, one might ask: “Is America again beginning a return to decency?” Is it possible that, in time perhaps, we will get back to a point where longstanding American virtues can prevail in our civic lives, where our leaders can be moral and fundamentally decent? Does the return begin with the careful judgments applied first by a state grand jury that indicted Trump and then by 12 trial jurors, one of whom spoke favorably of him before the trial? She, along with the others, apparently was persuaded about his perfidy by the mountain of evidence she saw.

Roy Cohn and Trump, 1983, source: Vanity Fair

With its attack on the Washington establishment for a fabricated infiltration by Communists, McCarthyism preceded Trump’s assaults on the “deep state.” It is not accidental that the period saw the rise of Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel – the same oft-disciplined Roy Cohn who taught Trump how to play the legal and PR games that helped him survive financial disasters and rise to the presidency. As a writer for Politico put it, “Trump was Cohn’s most insatiable student and beneficiary.” His techniques included refusing to apologize and never backing down, but instead sticking by lies even as they are debunked, counting on a gullible public to buy them.

Indeed, whether out of calculation, willful blindness or narcissistic self-delusion, Trump continued such deceit in a press conference Friday. He insisted, for instance, that the case was orchestrated by President Biden, though, in fact, it was a state case, not one involving the federal Department of Justice or the president, as a CNN fact-checker noted. Trump argued that the judge barred his lawyers from calling an elections expert, when, in fact, the judge would have permitted the man to testify, though he limited the scope of questioning to issues in the case, so the defense withdrew him. And Trump claimed that the prosecutors were bringing his case, while not dealing with crime that is occurring at levels never before seen in New York (something statistics show is false, with the early 1990s a far more deadly time in the city).

Of course, Trump is given to wild overstatement (a charitable term for it), as he again showcased. He said that his witnesses were “literally crucified” by Judge Juan Merchan, a man he said who “looks like an angel but he’s really a devil.” No crucifixions, literal or otherwise, were reported.

As Trump again derided the trial as “rigged,” he drew the first public rebuke on the case from Biden. The president asserted that the “American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed.” Speaking from the White House, Biden said: “It’s reckless, it’s dangerous, it’s irresponsible, for anyone to say this was ‘rigged,’ just because they don’t like the verdict.”

“Our justice system has endured for nearly 250 years, and it literally is the cornerstone of America,” Biden added, as reported by The New York Times. “Our justice system. The justice system should be respected. And we should never allow anyone to tear it down. It’s as simple as that. That’s America. That’s who we are, and that’s who we’ll always be, God willing.”

America’s justice and political systems haven’t always been respectable, of course. They have been subject to cycles, moving in Hegelian lurches from nuttiness to comparative sanity. The move in the 1950s from the darkness of McCarthyism to a sunnier Eisenhower/Kennedy era marked one such turn, for example. That shift required courageous people who stood up to fear mongering and dishonesty.

Someday we may look back on the New York prosecutors and the jurors as similarly gutsy people, folks who separated the facts from the BS. Depending on how the election goes, we may see those dozen men and women as ordinary citizens who turned the wheel of history.

We have a long way to go first, of course. The sort of rot that McCarthy brought into parts of the GOP in the 1950s has resurfaced to dominate the Republican party today. An opportunistically paranoid view of reality, as so eloquently described by Richard Hofstadter, now reigns in the party that Trump seems to own. It never really went away there, of course (recall Barry Goldwater, the John Birch Society and Richard Nixon), but it was suppressed by such leaders as Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush – men of basic decency and morals, even if one disagreed with them.

As it has driven out reasonable people, today’s party of Trump has come to lack respect for morality and shun decency. His lapdogs, such as VP-hopefuls South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance and New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, along with House Speaker Mike Johnson and No. 2 House Republican Steve Scalise, wasted no time in rising to Trump’s defense. Such prominent figures in the self-described party of law-and-order dissed the judicial system, managing to be simultaneously hypocritical and cynical – a far cry from the Republican leaders who persuaded Nixon to quit in 1974.

To his credit, former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who is running for the Senate, seemed like a lone voice on the right. Ahead of the verdict, he urged the public to “respect the verdict and the legal process.” “At this dangerously divided moment in our history, all leaders — regardless of party — must not pour fuel on the fire with more toxic partisanship,” Hogan posted on X. “We must reaffirm what has made this nation great: the rule of law.”

But the Trumpy response came swiftly, echoing the sort of cancellation that Trump delivers to GOP officials who cross him. “You just ended your campaign,” said Chris LaCivita, a senior Trump advisor, on X. (As it happens, Hogan could turn the Senate red if he wins, so LaCivita may have helped undermine that GOP effort).

Unless something momentous happens, we will witness the spectacle of a convict becoming the presidential nominee of his party in mid-July, only days after his scheduled July 11 sentencing. Even felons can run for office and take the job if they win. Of course, in Cohn-inspired style Trump will appeal, something that will drag out the process well into the next presidential term. Trump, who knows how to play the legal system like a fiddle, could even win a reversal (if his apologists at The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere are right about the legal questions the case raises).

All along, Trump will do what he does best – stay in the news, oozing or muscling his way past President Biden in the headlines. He is a master of attention-getting stunts as shown by his vice-presidential sweepstakes, which has kept him in the public eye for months. He will stay in the limelight, overshadowing the real achievements Biden can point to from his time in office.

If issues come into the race, Trump will use them in his manipulative fashion to generate rage. In the din, it could be hard for Biden to remind voters, for instance, that Trump in February sank a promising bipartisan effort to fix the southern border, a bit of naked demagoguery designed to give the GOP an issue to run on. And Trump will hammer away at inflation, ignoring its decline and counting on voters’ ignorance that it’s the independent Federal Reserve that operates the levers on inflation through interest rates.

Certainly, as a product of a normal political culture, Biden would like to run on the issues. Indeed, while Trump courted the press as he played the victim in his pathetic legal melodrama, Biden was on the job as president, endorsing a plan to help resolve the Gaza war. Such diplomatic efforts seem far more newsworthy.

Until this conviction, in fact, Biden has been loath to speak about Trump’s many legal woes and it remains unclear just how hard the president will hit his rival over them, going forward. Will Biden make much of the twice-impeached Trump’s remarkable legal woes in their June 27 debate? Certainly, Biden is all too aware that the conviction is not a knockout punch for the GOP contender and that only voters can deliver that in November. Indeed, Trump and his minions already are trying to turn the conviction to their advantage with supporters, raising funds by playing the persecuted outsider-victim role that resounds with his die-hard backers.

Stormy Daniels, Trump, Karen McDougal; source: Getty Images, via syracuse.com

There’s no question that Trump has upended our electoral system and much of our culture, politically and otherwise. It wasn’t so long ago that voters would shun a potential candidate for being divorced (Reagan broke that barrier). Now many would tolerate a philanderer who cheats on his third wife while she is pregnant and pays hush money to suppress information about his infidelities. Also, despite widespread evidence to the contrary, Trump has managed to cast doubt on the integrity of elections (as he would certainly do again if he loses in the fall). Not incidentally, he has managed to drive suspicions about science and institutions.

But perhaps focusing on the conviction is taking a too-narrow view, as is dwelling on polls that show a close presidential contest. It’s possible that the national return to decency began in 2020, with Biden’s defeat of Trump, or in 2022, when the GOP lost the Senate and many Trump-backed candidates in competitive areas lost races up and down the political ladder. If there is, indeed, a return to decency in our political culture, history will have to fix the turning point. While, the climb back appears likely to remain uphill for a while, Trump’s new description as a felon surely helps.

A Spoiler Alert

Posted on February 6, 2024 by Joe Weber

Could a real third-party candidate mean a Trump victory?

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce – or so goes the saying attributed to Karl Marx. This year we may see a sorry mixture of both, if a credible third-party candidate arises to threaten to do what one arguably did 32 years ago, that is to unseat an unpopular incumbent president.

A friend, a committed Republican of the old-school sort, wrote me recently to say she has become an elected officer of the No Labels party in Maryland. “No Labels is likely to put forth a Unity presidential ticket that will work to deliver commonsense solutions to this country’s many problems,” she wrote. “It is my hope that we can all commit to working together for the greater good, while celebrating the differences that enrich us all.”

What is troubling is that if No Labels launches a serious contender and gains traction, he or she may do what H. Ross Perot did in 1992. The billionaire outsider’s third-party candidacy garnered just under 19% of the popular vote back then, the largest share of the vote for a third-party contender since an election in 1912. While Perot didn’t grab a single Electoral College vote, he served as the spoiler who helped to oust President George H.W. Bush and install William J. Clinton in the White House.

“Dissatisfied voters of all stripes flocked to his call, creating one of the most powerful third-party movements in American history,” wrote Prof. Russell L. Riley of the UVA Miller Center. “Although Perot drew support from both Republicans and Democrats, he probably hurt Bush disproportionately more than Clinton, owing to his harsh attacks against the incumbent and the timing of both his departure and re-entry into the 1992 campaign.”

Joe Lieberman considers Haley, Source: AP

Could this happen again? Could President Biden be unhorsed by Donald J. Trump thanks to a third-party spoiler? Well, No Labels has gained access to the ballot in at least 13 states so far and is aiming for all 50. It doesn’t have a presidential candidate yet, but depending on how things go in the GOP primaries in coming months, it could land someone such as former South Carolina Gov. and presidential hopeful Nikki Haley to lead its ticket. Founding party chairman Joseph Lieberman said that she “would deserve serious consideration.”

While a campaign spokeswoman, responding to Lieberman’s mid-January comment, said Haley had no interest in No Labels, that was before her loss to Trump in New Hampshire. If she loses in her native South Carolina, as expected, on Feb. 24, her view could change, of course.

Haley has polled ahead of Biden in head-to-head matchups. In a recent Quinnipiac poll, for instance, the former governor tops the president by 47% to 42% in a two-person contest. By contrast, Biden tops Trump in a two-way race, 50% to 44%, making one wonder why a GOP in its right mind would stick with Trump instead of Haley. (Of course, the operative phrase in regard to the MAGA-dominated party is “in its right mind.”)

When one tosses in other independent candidates (Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein), the results get murkier, according to Quinnipiac. Haley drops to 29%, but Biden also drops, to 36%. Of course, it’s not clear how many votes Haley might siphon off of Biden (or Trump) if she ran with No Labels in a three-way race, but Democrats fear she would do more damage to their man. As the Wall Street Journal reported in analyzing a couple polls last fall, “When voters are given options beyond Biden and Trump, the president tends to bleed the most support …”

Let’s look back to 1992 for some guidance, though. The erratic Perot quit the race in July 1992, but re-entered in October. That gave him just enough time to take part in three debates, where he impressed some voters with his phrase “giant sucking sound,” describing a feared loss of jobs to Mexico if the NAFTA treaty went into effect. At the end of the debates, his chances seemed so good that we at BusinessWeek had to prepare three cover stories in advance of election day, so we’d be ready for anything.

In the end, Clinton won, of course. But he took office with the support of substantially less than half the electorate, collecting just 43% of the vote to Bush’s 37.4% and Perot’s 18.9%. Clinton prevailed because he won in the states where it mattered, swamping Bush in the Electoral College vote – with 370 to Bush’s 168. The president carried only 18 conservative states, including Texas and Florida, both rich in Electoral College votes, but Perot gave them both a run for their money in a couple states, finishing second in Maine (which Clinton won) and Utah (which was Bush country).

Ironically, my friend now helping the No Labels group served in the Bush Administration that Clinton tossed out. She saw first-hand the scorching effect a third-party candidacy can have. As I described in a biography of the late Clayton Yeutter, who was a top adviser to Bush, despondency was widespread in the Bush ranks in mid-1992 and things didn’t get much better as Election Day neared. The president’s approval rating, according to Gallup, dipped to 29% that July and rebounded, but only to 34% soon before he lost the election.

As things stand today, Biden is in better shape than Bush was, but not by much (the Quinnipiac poll, notwithstanding). One can only imagine the depression afflicting his camp. Biden’s approval rating now stands at a disappointing 41%, according to Gallup, though it dropped to 37% last April, October and November. The numbers are reminiscent of those logged by one-term Jimmy Carter, who averaged a 37.4% approval rating in his third presidential year (Biden’s third-year average approval rating is just 39.8%).

Many things can happen between now and November, of course. No Labels, in fact, may not find a credible candidate, especially if Haley demurs or (as seems unlikely) wins enough primaries to be a viable GOP contender. Would Sen. Joe Manchin be a potent contender for the group? Also, Trump may finally be nailed on any number of criminal charges, which likely would erode his support outside of the MAGA diehards (and could force the GOP to seek an alternative). Trump could even be ruled off the ballot in some states, though his appointees to the Supreme Court would shock the world with such a decision.

One thing seems pretty certain, though: a successful third-party candidacy would be a pipe dream. While many Americans don’t like the idea of a Biden-Trump rerun, history suggests that a real third alternative would likely not get very far – but, troublingly, perhaps far enough to make for a repeat of 1992.

The Big Picture

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