Another strike

The last line in this opening to an otherwise reasonable conclusion on Trump in the coming election, and hopes it can turn back to something of a referendum on him, tells us why things continue into some cluelessness.

Just another night in Trumpland: At a rally over the weekend in Texas, Donald Trump was talking about the leak last spring to Politico’s Josh Gerstein of Samuel Alito’s draft decision in the Dobbs case, and he said that the way to find the leaker was to haul in the publisher or the reporter and explain to whichever one was in custody that he was going to jail, and “when this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner,” he’ll spill the beans.

So, typically Trump in every way—boorish, ignorant, rooted in an idea of frontier justice that he probably gets from the movies, and homophobic in that 1970s locker-room way to which his sense of humor, if we can call it that, remains relentlessly captive.

Rule number one: everybody everywhere is stuck in every decade. Can we knock off this particular conclusion in knocking a supposed bit of nitwittery? Rule number two: No one cares about the vulgarness of a backroom statement, and I would be stunned if nothing ever came from the Clintons along these lines. The substance may be another matter. This point is separate from the rest of these concerns, and need to be identified as such.

The Dobbs leak is a curious matter, because we have the right who think it is self a evident it was the left that did it for political ends — a matter that parsing meanings I have no clue regarding — supposing it was either side just excited / fretful on this history and that the practical conclusion of the leak was it shut down any possibility of a Roberts convincing a member of the right to language upholding Roe.

A recent New York Times/Siena College poll—a survey that feels like it’s becoming a kind of self-fulfilling doom-scenario prophecy for Democrats and liberals, found that while 71 percent of respondents agreed that democracy was at risk, only 7 percent called it the most important problem facing the country.

It tends to be a curious dilemma where everything is on the ballot. Parse out and dig into data to find what percentage think tax payer support and educational curriculum supporting “drag queen story hour” is the matter that puts democracy at risk.

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