Author: Kevin Drum

Can we please keep this simple? When Donald Trump told a bunch of evangelical Christians that after 2024 "you won't have to vote anymore," all he meant was:

Just vote for me this year. I don't care what happens after that.

That's it. Trump doesn't care about anything but himself. He doesn't genuinely care one way or the other about abortion. He doesn't care about immigration. He doesn't care about being Christian. He doesn't care about either Israel or Ukraine. There are things that personally annoy him. And there are people he wants revenge on. But that's about it. His public stands are whatever he thinks will win him fans.

Everyone knows this. Trump is all about Trump, full stop.

Today's big headline:

Fed Opens Door Further to a September Rate Cut
Officials held rates steady, but made an important pivot by highlighting a more equal focus on employment and inflation goals

Fer chrissake. "Opens door"? An "important pivot"? What more does the Fed want? Every measure of inflation has been hovering between 2-3% for the past year, and estimates of underlying inflation are around 2%. It's time to declare victory and go home.

The Wall Street Journal informs us today that inflation affects some household more than others. Their example is Nicole Lewis, a mother of three who lives north of Flint, Michigan:

Pay raises since the pandemic helped Lewis and her husband, now a city manager, double their earnings to what had previously seemed unattainable: more than $90,000 a year. But price hikes for everything from groceries to auto insurance still forced the couple to siphon funds from savings.

The 35-year-old Lewis now buys many basics on credit, juggling cards to protect her credit score without letting outstanding debt snowball. Trips to the beach and bowling alley are out. Shopping at thrift stores is in.

This is nuts. Their earnings doubled but they're allegedly having trouble with price hikes that amount to about 20%? There's obviously a lot more going on here than inflation.

Since 2019, inflation has raised prices by 19.2%. Here is CBO's estimate of how that breaks down by income level:

There's practically no difference. The Lewis family is in the middle quintile and experienced inflation of 19.3%.

The Journal, of course, doesn't bother with actual evidence, even though it's quickly and easily available. That might ruin a good story, after all. It's just vibes and more vibes.

Watch this short clip of Kamala Harris at a campaign rally on Tuesday:

What's important here isn't what she says. It's how she says it. She's talking like a normal person and she's obviously having fun. It's been a long time since we've seen that from a presidential candidate of either party.

So far Harris hasn't really had to navigate any tough wedge issues, like Gaza or immigration. That will come, and when it does we'll find out how good a politician she really is. In the meantime, though, she's building up a lot of political capital just by being excited, buoyant, and playful in the way she attacks Trump. It's a huge contrast to the dour doomsaying of Trump and Vance, and they have no answer for it.

I ignored this when I first saw it this morning:

I ignored it because I hadn't paid attention to the name and figured it was just some rando on Twitter. It's not. It's Kimberlé Crenshaw, a longtime law professor at UCLA and Columbia who's influential and extremely well known as a pioneer of intersectionality.

And yet she wrote a post that isn't within light years of being right. She must know that by now, but she hasn't deleted the post or corrected it. According to the Washington Post's database, here are police killings over the past decade:

Black women make up 0.85% of all police killings since 2015. Not one-third. Here's the armed/unarmed breakdown (not counting six undetermined cases):

Sonya Massey is the only unarmed Black woman killed by police in the past three years. Overall, unarmed Black women made up about 11% of the total among Black women, not a majority. Not even close.

Kimberlé Crenshaw is way too famous and influential (188,000 followers on Twitter) to post recklessly incorrect stuff like this. Where does it come from?

Are Republicans weird? Minnesota governor Tim Walz started this meme and Republicans are steaming about it. Their response has mostly been, "No, you're weird."

The best way to settle this is to go to the tape. Here's a list—by no means exhaustive—of things that various Republicans have proposed recently. You be the judge.

1. The FBI was secretly behind the January 6 insurrection.
2. Facebook is constantly censoring conservatives.
3. America needs a strategic bitcoin reserve.
4. You shouldn't drink Bud Light because it's too woke.
5. COVID vaccines can kill you.
6. Childless people should get fewer votes.
7. New York state should be defunded for allowing a court to convict Donald Trump.
8. Trans people are scheming to turn your child trans behind your back.
9. We should return to the gold standard.
10. Climate change is fake.
11. We should allow more oil drilling in national parks.
12. Barack Obama is secretly in charge of the White House.
13. Joe Biden stole the 2020 election.
14. You should not be allowed to buy cultivated meat.
15. Americans stop working too early. The retirement age should be raised.
16. We should get rid of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because it produces too much evidence of climate change.
17. Energy efficiency standards for home appliances should be repealed.
18. The world's most notorious online drug trafficker deserves a pardon.
19. Christians in America are a persecuted minority.
20. The 2024 Olympics were ruined by a brief tableau that looked vaguely like The Last Supper.

This is a Union Pacific freight train passing through Banning. It's a meh kind of picture that normally wouldn't make the cut for the blog.

Except for one thing. When I shot this I framed it poorly and the left edge of the photo stopped right at the signal. That was too tight, so I expanded the canvas and gave Photoshop's AI fill tool a try. The first attempt went poorly: it was mostly just a mirror image of the train. Then I told it to ignore the train and it produced the image you see. Half of the signal plus everything to its left is a pure AI invention.

Now that you know this, you can see some telltale signs if you look closely. I probably could have improved things with further refinements to the prompt, but I wasn't that committed. I was just curious to see if it worked. It did.

Hiring fell by more than 5% in June:

That's a pretty considerable drop, equal to 50% if it kept up for a full year (which it won't). Hiring has declined 17% in the past two years and nearly 10% over the past year. Over the past two years, hiring has dropped about 200,000 more than total separations (quits, firings, retirements, etc.).

The silver lining to this bad news is that a softer job market will prompt the Fed to ease interest rates. So there's that.

Alex Thompson informs me today that Kamala Harris no longer supports Medicare for All; says she won’t ban fracking; wants to increase funding for the border; and doesn’t want to require people to sell their assault weapons back to the government. Obviously this means that Harris has wisely decided to shift a bit toward the center now that she's in a general election contest for the presidency. That's pretty standard triangulating.

But it probably doesn't matter all that much. This is policy stuff, and most voters care about policy only in the broadest terms: for or against abortion, pro or anti gay marriage, and so forth. What they care about a lot more are social values, and even that's mostly on the level of vibes.

This is what J.D. Vance was getting at with his oddball comment about "childless cat ladies." He was using that as a metaphor for lefty women who like to spoil everyone's fun by harrumphing about racism and mass transit and single-use plastic bags. Obviously Vance chose his metaphor badly, but the point he was making is very, very common on the right. They believe that liberals aren't just wrong, but really annoying.

And often we are! This is where Harris would also be wise to shift slightly to the center. Not a lot. Lefty values are more popular than conservatives like to admit. But it wouldn't hurt to make some noises about the evidence on gender affirming care being unsettled. Or that, yes, DEI training can sometimes be a bit on the ridiculous side. Or that the Bible is the word of God (which she presumably believes, being a Baptist and all).

These are the kinds of things that can make centrist voters more comfortable without really ceding anything that's of concrete value to the liberal project. It's basically just a way of putting across the idea that she's a normie, not a nutball extremist. And it draws a contrast with Trump and Vance, who are nutball extremists.

Mock Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah moment all you want, but it worked—and since the liberal coalition isn't in favor of killing white people it didn't concede anything of value. A little bit of this goes a long way, especially if it comes as a bit of surprise and gets some press.

Google is running an ad during the Olympics. Perhaps you've seen it. A little girl wants to write a fan letter to her hero, 400-meter-hurdle world-record holder Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. So Dad suggests she have Google's AI write one for her. He even makes up the prompt for her.

The first time I saw this ad, I turned to Marian and said, "If I were Sydney that's just what I'd want. Fan mail from an AI."

So naturally I was pleased to see a piece in New York today titled "Everyone Hates That Google AI Olympics Commercial." Hooray! Unfortunately, author Matt Stieb didn't really have the receipts for that claim. He demonstrates that a few people didn't like the ad, but "everyone"? I'm not so sure of that.

In any case, I'm sure that Dad and girl will get what's coming to them: an automated AI reply. And I guess everyone will be happy. They get a perfect simulacrum of human warmth and bonding without anyone having to bother making any effort. What's not to like?