Kevin Drum

Last night Donald Trump's confused mind burped up the following:

They built eight chargers at a certain location, toward the Midwest. Eight chargers for $9 billion? Think of them as a tank for filling up your gas. Think of it. They spent $9 billion on eight chargers, three of which didn’t work.

Idiot. He couldn't even get the meme right. The meme is that the feds approved $7.5 billion three years ago for EV charging stations and so far only eight have been built.

This whole thing got started by Politico, and it's so tiresome I want to scream. The plan from the start was to have 500,000 charging stations by 2030. Why so long? Because the money was allocated by state and wasn't allocated all at once.

The facts are simple. In November 2021 the Bipartisan Infrastucture Law approved two programs for an EV charging network. NEVI is the main program, and it got $5 billion over five years. CFI is a smaller program meant to fill in gaps in underserved areas, and it got $2.5 billion.

NEVI started up in February 2022. By August states had submitted plans for the first round of funding and in September the plans were approved. Notably, the plan is not to build charging stations willy nilly. The plan is to build a national network along approved corridors, mostly interstate highways. Here's what it will look like:

Once the plans were approved states got to work finding sites in the right areas and putting out construction bids. The first charging station was opened in Ohio in December 2023. As of a few months ago, here's where the states were at. Some are slower and others are faster:

Here's the full timeline for building out the network (future dates are approximate):

As you can see, there's nothing wrong with any of this. Funding has to be allocated to states each year; states have to find suitable sites; and then construction has to go ahead. This takes a while, granted, but it's all on schedule. There was never any intent to have thousands of charging stations ready to go by 2024.

Cat and squirrel. Charlie will never catch a squirrel, but he's become unfortunately skilled at catching birds. Stupid birds.

I'm now halfway through the radiation treatment. Only 14 weekdays to go.

I have to pee constantly and I wake up four or five times a night. Hilbert loves this. There are no other side effects yet.

Holy hell. Half the computers in the world¹ can be bricked by a single automated update from a security service? And for some reason the update can't be automatically rolled back?

MQAGA. Make QA Great Again.

¹OK, not half. But a lot.

I ended up watching most of Donald Trump's endless speech tonight, and it was remarkable. I mean, the guy not only promised immediate peace and prosperity worldwide, he literally said he was going to cure cancer and Alzheimer's if he was elected. I'm not making that up.

I feel sorry for the poor reporters assigned to fact check the speech. What's the point? As near as I could tell, virtually every single thing he said was false. Oh, it's true that Don Jr. is his son and J.D. Vance is his running mate. But on major policy points I only counted two that were actually true:

1. Wages grew under his administration. That's true—though not as fast as they did in the four previous years under Barack Obama. (Note that the chart below ends in January 2020 so I'm not counting COVID against him.)
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2. China took away a lot of American manufacturing jobs. That's also true, though it happened in the noughts and ended about 15 years ago.
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Most of Trump's lies were just the usual stuff that goes back to 2016, though there are a few new ones that I haven't been able to puzzle out. He repeated yet again his claim that Joe Biden wants to raise taxes 4x, which is obviously absurd—but where does it come from? The only thing I can find is that apparently Biden has tossed out the idea of quadrupling the tax on stock buybacks from 1% to 4%. I suppose that must be where it wormed its way into Trump's brain. Maybe?

Aside from that it was just falsehood after falsehood. Quite an impressive performance in its own way. And his themes were pretty much the same as they've been since 2016: illegal immigration, crime, illegal immigration, trade deals, illegal immigration, American energy, and illegal immigration. Plus his odd ongoing assertion that we're on the brink of World War III. All in all, it was more weird than anything else. Joe Biden may be declining mentally, but Trump's brain worms continue to eat away at him too. I wonder if he even knows what consensus reality is like anymore?

Over at Mother Jones, Artis Curiskis writes about old police guns used to commit crimes:

It took seven long years to pry one staggering number from the hands of the federal government: that 52,529 weapons once owned by police were recovered at crime scenes across the country from 2006 to 2021. In that period, an average of nine cop guns were recovered each day. The public didn’t know it.

Hmmm. That's about 3,000 guns per year. Call it 4,000 in recent years. Somewhere between 500,000 and one million guns are collected each year from crime scenes.¹ This means that police guns account for maybe 0.6% of all guns used in crimes.

There's certainly no justification for trying to cover this up, but at the same time it's hardly a big issue. These guns account for a tiny fraction of all crime guns, and criminals have easy access to guns regardless. It's a little hard to see why either side cared very much.

¹ATF gets about half a million requests each year for gun traces. So there are at least that many guns are recovered from crime scenes. If half of all guns need to be traced, it means about a million guns are recovered each year. This seems like a reasonable range. It's unfortunate that actual numbers don't seem to be available.

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?