Month: July 2024

How dangerous would a second Trump term be? The conventional wisdom says that after learning his lesson during his first term, Trump would be unleashed in a second term to do anything he wants with no one to push back against him. Maybe so. But I've never been too sure about this. For starters, keep in mind the three main things that motivate Trump:

• Appearing tough and getting the best in negotiations.
• Retribution against those who have laughed at him (elites) or who caused him real or perceived harm.
• Flapping his mouth and always being the center of attention.

Given all this, what is Trump likely to do in a second term? I'm reluctant to confess this, but my take has long been that it won't be a lot worse than his first term. Let's break this down by all the actions he might take. These are in no particular order:

1. Stop aid to Ukraine. He might. A lot of Republicans would be on his side, and he's always been mad at Zelenskyy over the events surrounding his first impeachment.
2. Appoint lunatic cabinet members. Yes, to some extent. But even a Republican Senate full of loyalists will place limits on this.
3. Build the wall. This makes him look tough, so he'll probably do it. Republicans prevented this in his first term but won't in a second term. However, although this is a waste of money, it's not likely to do lasting harm.
4. Deport 20 million illegal immigrants. This is big talk, like "Mexico will pay for it." But it's not feasible. It would require enormous manpower and enormous expenditures, and even at that it wouldn't work. What's more, the business wing of the party would fight hard against it. In the end, Trump might beef up ICE, but not a lot more.
5. Place 10% tariffs on everything from everybody. It's unclear what Trump really wants to do on tariffs, but the maximal version isn't workable. National security goes only so far as a justification, and Trump is bound by treaty obligations just like any other president. I wouldn't be surprised if he tightened tariffs on China, but not much more.
6. Appoint lots of conservative judges. Yep.
7. Cut taxes on businesses and the rich. Yep.
8. Kill the Inflation Reduction Act. He might very well try to do this. It's a signature Biden initiative, so it would fit his retribution motivation, and green spending is unpopular among Republicans.
9. Tell the Justice Department to indict his political opponents. This is mostly big talk, used as a campaign device. Once he wins, he won't really care that much.
10. Tell the Justice Department to end its cases against him. Absolutely yes.
11. Repeal Obamacare. This is hard to call. He might want another crack at the one big piece of retribution that failed in his first term. But with the ACA now ten years old, it's not clear if he'd have the votes.
12. Replace 4,000 civil servants with political loyalists. Again, this is mostly big talk, though Trump would probably love to do it. The problem is that he'd likely need congressional approval, and I think there would be some Republican holdouts. Plus Democrats would filibuster it. Plus there are practical issues involved in trying to hire this many people. In his first term Trump (along with every other president) had trouble even filling the thousand or so presidential appointees already on the books. Plus Democrats would get to do the same thing the next time they're in office.
13. Drill for oil everywhere. Yes. But honestly, we pretty much do this already.
14. Ban abortion nationwide. Trump knows this would be political suicide, and he cares way more about his own reputation than he does about abortion. He won't do it. Nor could it pass Congress anyway.
15. Project 2025. This has gotten lots of attention recently, but it's really just standard boilerplate from the Heritage Foundation. Trump has given no serious sign that he plans to use it as a blueprint, and he isn't really a blueprint guy in the first place.
16. Refuse to leave office after four years. This won't happen. The Constitution requires him to leave and there's no way around that. There is zero possibility of amending the Constitution and zero possibility of Trump rounding up the physical force necessary to stay in office illegally.
17. Destroy democracy. Trump's assault on the 2020 election was obviously an enormous assault on democracy. But everything else Trump did was handled in the ordinary way. Bills passed through Congress. Supreme Court justices were confirmed by the Senate. Court orders were obeyed. This will continue.
18. Endless chaos. Absolutely yes. This is all part of Trump's pathological desire to always be the center of attention.
19. Pull out of NATO. Trump has mostly gotten what he wanted from NATO (bigger defense spending), and in any case NATO is pretty popular in Congress. He'll keep up the big talk, but he won't seriously try to leave our oldest and most basic military alliance.
20. Freedom cities. Oh please.
21. Sending the National Guard into high-crime cities. This is big talk, but it won't happen. Crime has plummeted since Trump left office, and if he gets back in it won't be long before he proclaims America safe once again.
22. Close the Department of Education. Congress has to do this, and it probably won't since plenty of them would object (it's a source of power). And even if Trump did manage to close it down, it's meaningless unless he also shuts down all the programs currently managed by the department. He's given no indication that he plans to do that.
23. Roll back Biden-era rules on electric vehicles. Yes, he'll probably do this. He has the authority; it would be a poke in the eye to Biden; and Republicans are mostly on board with it.

Aside from the usual Republican practice of cutting taxes and appointing conservative judges, Trump will probably build the wall, increase some tariffs, gut the environment, and appoint some nutballs. He might try to overturn Obamacare, kill IRA, and end aid to Ukraine.

That's it. That's my best guess about what a second Trump term will be like. Unlike most incoming presidents, I don't think Trump has anything that could seriously be called a policy agenda. He just wants to prove he can win. Once in office he'll preside over a potpourri of unrelated bad policy initiatives, but probably not anything too out of the ordinary for a Republican president.

Plus endless chaos. And, admittedly, a lot of tail risk that you wouldn't have with an ordinary Republican.

But by far the most likely outcome is that a second Trump term would be bad but not catastrophic. The United States is a very big ship, and even Trump can't turn it much in only four years. There's even an upside: If Trump wins, maybe it will give Democrats some time sit back and think seriously about why so many people refuse to vote for them even when the alternative is Donald Trump.

This is a late afternoon look toward the San Jacinto mountains a few miles west of Palm Springs.

Here is J.D. Vance on the fentanyl crisis:

Thanks to these policies that Biden and other out-of-touch politicians in Washington gave us, our country was flooded with cheap Chinese goods, with cheap foreign labor— and in the decades to come, deadly Chinese fentanyl. Joe Biden screwed up, and my community paid the price.

Let's roll the tape:

When Donald Trump took office, he was bequeathed a fentanyl death rate of just under 30,000 per year. That's a lot!

When he finally retired to Mar-a-Lago at the end of his term, he left Joe Biden a fentanyl death rate of about 70,000 per year. That's a lot more.

So who exactly is it that screwed up and did absolutely nothing about addiction deaths for four years?

Joe Biden appears to have lost the support of pretty much every leading Democrat. Few of them have publicly called for Biden to drop out of the race, but multiple reports say that privately at least four leading Dems are urging him to exit:

• Barack Obama
• Chuck Schumer
• Hakeem Jeffries
• Nancy Pelosi

In addition to Adam Schiff, nearly two dozen members of congress have publicly asked Biden to step down. Even Bernie Sanders, who publicly supports Biden, admits forthrightly that he's not up to the job.

Aside from his inner circle, it doesn't appear that Biden has any real support left. How long can he continue to hold out?

Here's the latest Trump-Biden polling:

It's impressive that Joe Biden has durably sustained only a 2-point drop since the debate. That's not good enough to maintain a serious chance of winning, but it's still kind of remarkable.

Need another reason to stay up to date on your COVID vaccination? Here are the results of a new study on the incidence of long COVID:

You are about half as likely to get long COVID if you've been vaccinated. If that's not sufficient motivation, I don't know what is.

BY THE WAY: It turns out the official name for long COVID is postacute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2. How about that?

I watched some of J.D. Vance's speech tonight at the Republican convention, and it was full of all the usual red meat about Democrats and Joe Biden. That's pretty normal for a convention speech and nothing to get too riled up about. But there was one small bit that truly threw me for a loop.

Towards the end, Vance reeled off a list of terrible things Biden had done, and one of them was that he supported the Iraq War. This earned Biden a big round of boos. Boos! From Republicans! Does anyone remember this?

Back in the day, Republicans were the ones who drove us to war. They favored it by 84% to 14%, a net favorability of 70%. This was the era of freedom fries and aluminum tubes. It was gonna be shock and awe against Saddam Hussein, and it was fashionable among Republicans to accuse anyone who opposed the war of treason and soft-headedness.

Now, 20 years later, here is J.D. Vance at a Republican convention blaming it all on "Joe Biden and the elites." You'd think George W. Bush had never existed. I have to say, I was shocked and awed.

Would you like something to take your mind off of politics? I've got just the thing.

You've probably noticed that lots and lots of cars are white today. But how many? And has it really increased lately? Here's my best guess at an answer for North America:

The '70s were an era of colorful cars, but white started to take over toward the end of the decade. Green and silver had brief flings in the '90s and noughts, and finally in 2010 white surged into the lead permanently.

Taken as a whole, color has gone the way of the dinosaur in the car world. Neutral tones—white, black, gray, and silver—now account for 78% of all sales in North America. Blue is the only actual color that breaks single digits at 11% of sales.

Around the world, white, black, and gray/silver hold the top three spots in every single region. White is the most popular color in every region except Europe, where gray holds the #1 spot.

I recently bought a couple of minor new doodads for my telescope, but they were just—barely—important enough that I figured I should test the whole setup and make sure everything still worked. So I hauled everything into the backyard and connected it.

On a scale of Bortle 1 to Bortle 10, I live in approximately a Bortle 11 area. This means the light pollution is so bad that practically everything is too washed out to photograph. What's more, my backyard is hemmed in by trees, so I have only a small part of the sky visible. But I wanted to run a real test on a real object.

I ended up with M71, a smallish globular cluster also known as the Angelfish Cluster. Since a globular cluster is just stars, they're visible even in lousy light. All things considered, it didn't turn out too badly, and all my new stuff worked perfectly. Huzzah.

California has 11.7% of the nation's population. It has 10% of the votes in the Electoral College.

Just saying. If we switched to a straight popular vote for president, big states would have only slightly more influence than they do now.