Kevin Drum

From Donald Trump during a rally in Florida:

I'm not Christian.

I'm sure he meant to say "I'm a Christian," but his mind's not really all there these days. Alternatively, this is what's known as a Kinsley gaffe, where you accidentally tell the truth.

This was all part of a passage in his speech where Trump told the crowd they would never have to vote again if he won in November. This is being interpreted as a promise to end democracy, but no fair reading supports this. It was just a normal Bizarro world blend of Trump's narcissism and his ego. He's never really cared whether his fans vote for anyone else as long as they vote for him, and that's what's going on here. He's telling them, just vote for me this one time and that's all that matters. In four years America will be so great you won't have to bother voting again.

Or, who knows? Maybe he's promising the rapture will come on his watch and God will do all the voting after that. With Trump these days you really never know for sure.

Here's an intriguing little factoid:

I was prompted to look this up by a Wall Street Journal article claiming that Botox was on the rise among Washington DC politicians. As usual, though, it provided no evidence for this aside from two (2) doctors who said business was good.

But if ISAPS is correct, we're in the middle of a Botox boom that started in 2021 for some reason and has kept going since. Maybe everyone wanted to look good when they finally started socializing again after the pandemic? Or maybe stimulus money was burning a hole in their pockets? Who knows? But whatever the reason, maybe politicians are hopping on the Botox train along with everyone else.

J.D. Vance has been running for vice president less than two weeks and has already racked up an impressive list of recently uncovered greatest hits:

• Suggested that parents should get more votes than people without children.
• Said Kamala Harris is part of the community of "childless cat ladies" who want to make the country as miserable as they are. He later explained himself by saying he didn't actually have anything against cats.
• Went on at length about the prospect of George Soros filling 747s full of (mainly) Black women who want to fly out of Ohio to get abortions. Said he was sympathetic to arguments this should be banned.
• Became the target of a meme that he had fucked a couch in his youth. It is unclear how or why this started.
• Wrote the foreword for a book by the head of the Heritage Foundation's ultra-right-wing Project 2025, which the Trump campaign is desperately trying to distance itself from.
• Praised a book written by a right-wing conspiracy theorist that calls leftist protesters "unhumans" who want to kill anyone who has more than they do.

J.D. Vance is a very strange guy. I'm not sure how well this is going to play in the ol' heartland.

This is Hilbert on the front lawn getting ready to eat some grass. He likes grass because it clears out his digestive system, which then ends up on our floor. I wouldn't mind so much except that he always heads for a carpet instead of just barfing on the hardwood floor where it's easy to clean up. Stupid cats.

The New York Times informs us today that the latest trend is not to buy stuff just because you saw it on TikTok. Brett House, an economics professor at Columbia University, says this is probably thanks to bad economic times:

After years of being told what to buy, TikTok users are trying something new: buying and using only what they need.

....After a major economic downturn, usually about every decade or so, a similar back-to-basics trend follows, Mr. House said.... This recent cycle may have begun in the wake of post-lockdown “revenge spending,” when shoppers bought large amounts of goods to make up for time lost to the Covid-19 pandemic. As that boundless period gave way to the “vibecession,” a term for consumers’ general feelings of anxiety about the economy, many people responded by tightening their budgets.

As I keep saying, we don't actually have to rely on vibes. The federal government tracks how much we spend on stuff and updates it regularly. One thing that's crystal clear is that, in general, consumers haven't been tightening their budgets, something House should know. Beyond that, here's spending on items that I figure are probably fairly common among TikTok influencers:

Jewelry and personal care have been flat or down since 2022. There's nothing new going on. Everything else is up.

What does this mean for the thesis that TikTok influencers are losing their influence? There are two possibilities:

• It's wrong.
• It's right, but TikTok accounts for such tiny sales that it doesn't have any effect on the broad market.

In either case, it's hard to know why anyone should care. It's frankly a little hard to know why we all seem to care so much about social media in general, since it's largely just the latest version of teenagers and their fads. But apparently we do care, so it would be nice to know if these supposed fads are backed up by anything more than a few days on a "trending" list or a single reporter's vibes. Speaking for myself, I am massively skeptical that teenagers in large numbers have decided they're tired of buying stuff. That would be a truly remarkable development, after all.

The Fed's preferred measure of inflation, PCE, remained very low in June:

On a conventional year-over-year basis, headline PCE came in at 2.5% and core PCE was 2.6%.

A few minutes ago I ran across a chart showing that investment in factories had exploded recently and was twice as high as it had ever been in history. It was adjusted for inflation, which is great, but for something that big it struck me that it really ought to be shown as a percent of GDP. So I did:

By a funny coincidence, it turns out that in the second quarter of 2024 we did indeed set an all-time record: 0.854% of GDP compared to the previous peak of 0.847% in 1979.

Putting this into perspective, after falling during Donald Trump's term the rate of factory building has increased 2.5x since Joe Biden took office:

In dollar terms, we're currently spending $244 billion per year on factories compared to $91 billion three years ago. If you believe in restoring America's manufacturing capability, the past three years have been a golden era.

From Oklahoma's state superintendent of schools:

Huh. So declining to teach the Bible means you hate America. That's a fascinating point of view.

Naturally Walters says he wants the Bible taught solely for its "historical, literary and secular value." Nothing to do with proselytizing Christianity, no sirree. It's just a random historically important book.

The only surprising part of this is that Walters hasn't been sued yet, since that's obviously his intention. Maybe because the school year hasn't started yet, and no one can claim any harm until then? If so, we have three weeks to wait.

The New York Times/Siena poll has always been very Trump friendly, but that changed almost overnight after Joe Biden dropped out. Here is today's poll compared to the previous one:

Among likely voters, Kamala Harris made up five points in the national poll instantly. She's still behind, and swing states are still a problem, but that's still pretty spectacular progress.

At this point, I suspect the race hinges mostly on the 12-15% of people who say they're either unsure or planning to vote for RFK Jr—especially among Democrats. If, as I suspect, they mostly come home, Harris will end up with 50-52% of the popular vote.

Is that enough? I don't know.

The current hot topic in politics-land is who Kamala Harris will choose as her VP. And that's fine. It's good, clean fun.

But it's odd that the discourse is all so thoroughly conventional, focused almost entirely on demographic considerations. She needs a white man to balance the fact that she's a Black woman. She needs a moderate to balance the fact that she's a liberal. She needs a Midwesterner to balance the fact that she's from the coast. She needs someone from a swing state who will help capture crucial votes.

But help me out here, political scientists. Is there any evidence that VPs affect the vote even slightly? The last one who comes to mind is LBJ, who probably helped Kennedy win Texas in 1960. That was two-thirds of a century ago. Since then, though? Maybe John McCain's choice of the plainly unqualified Sarah Palin hurt him in an election he was going to lose anyway, but aside from that there's bupkis.

What nobody ever seems to mention is that Harris should pick someone who (a) she already knows and likes, and (b) would make a plausibly good president if she got run over by a bus. That's what I'd do. Since it doesn't really affect the election one way or the other, why not just choose someone whose advice she genuinely values?