Kevin Drum

Hey, Donald Trump is testifying today in his civil fraud trial. How's that going?

Trump is making a long ode to Aberdeen, calling it an “artistic expression,” and the greatest golf course ever built.... Justice Engoron finally loses patience and breaks in as Trump is calling Aberdeen, Scotland, where he has a golf club, the oil capital of Europe. “Irrelevant, irrelevant. Answer the question,” the judge says.

Please go on:

Kise, Trump's lawer, has made sure to praise his client's responses. He called one “brilliant,” and another a “great answer.”

....At this point, Trump is no longer answering questions being posed by Wallace. Instead, Trump is turning his answers into direct attacks on the judge. He continues to point directly at Engoron who is sitting quietly, for now.

“He called me a fraud and he didn’t know anything about me,” Trump says of Engoron, after the judge asks Trump to stop talking about the disclaimers and answer the questions. The judge then suggested that Trump hadn’t read the order where he found him liable for fraud. Trump seems to be losing control.

“You believed this political hack back there and that’s unfortunate,” Trump says to the judge of [Letitia] James. “Done,” asks Kevin Wallace? “Done,” says the former president, and the question continues.

And from the Washington Post:

New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron pointedly urged Donald Trump’s lawyer to control his client, repeatedly asking the former president to stay on topic and avoid making long-winded political statements during his testimony.... “Mr. Kise, can you control your client?” Engoron said. “This is not a political rally. This is a courtroom.”

....Kise took a $3 million retainer to join Trump’s legal team and made sure he was paid upfront. He has clashed with other Trump lawyers. He’s largely been quiet as his client has attacked the judge and court staff. It will be challenging now to rein Trump in.

Whatever else you can say, Trump's sure isn't helping himself with his testimony. He just can't stand being in a situation where he's not allowed to say and do anything he wants.

A study last month done by Swiss Re for Waymo suggests that self-driving Waymo cars are far, far safer than human drivers:

I have long recommended that if you want to evaluate the state of autonomous cars, look at Waymo. Forget about Tesla or Cruise or any of the others. They may do certain things well or poorly, but Waymo is the state of the art.

Note that this chart is based solely on miles driven with no human behind the steering wheel. It is 100% autonomous driving. And as many others have already pointed out, autonomous cars will get better every year. Humans won't.

But this does make me wonder: When are we all going to be able to buy driverless cars using Waymo technology? At this point, Waymo:

• Works on city streets.
• Works on highways.
• Has been tested in San Francisco, Austin, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.
• Is able to drive, park, let you off at the curb, and reliably take instructions about where to go.
• Is extremely safe.

So what's left? I suppose there's still work to be done to make the radar stuff smaller and cheaper, but is that all? It sure seems like Waymo is very, very close to being able to sell this stuff on the consumer market.

I want one.

The New York Times has a piece today about people whose bank accounts are suddenly closed with no warning. The reason is that they've done something that triggers one or more Suspicious Activity Reports from their bank. The nature of the SARs is never revealed, but they often lead to banks deciding not to do business with you anymore. Apparently there is no appeal from this process, which is mostly automated. It reminds me a bit of the no-fly list, which bans people from flying in the US with no explanation and no appeal.

Is this problem getting worse? Oh yes. The Times piece got me curious about how many SARs are submitted by US banks, and eventually I dug up the numbers:

In the past 25 years, the rate of SAR submissions has soared by more than 20x, from 231 per million to 5,479 per million. This means either (a) Americans are conducting way more suspicious activity than they used to, or (b) banks are reporting even tiny infractions as SARs. I suppose you can guess which one I think it is.

POSTSCRIPT: If you happen to be engaged in legitimate activity that might nevertheless look suspicious to a pattern-seeking computer, it turns out your best bet is to keep two bank accounts. That way you always have one handy in case one of your banks suddenly decides to drop you.

The Washington Post says today that a second Trump term would be all about revenge and more revenge:

In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family. The former president has frequently made corruption accusations against them that are not supported by available evidence.

....It is unclear what alleged crimes or evidence Trump would claim to justify investigating his named targets.

Trump seems to have forgotten that he already appointed a prosecutor to go after at least part of Joe Biden's family. That would be David Weiss, now a special counsel prosecuting Hunter Biden. During the election campaign of 2020 Trump tried to broaden this, urging Attorney General Bill Barr to appoint a special counsel to investigate Biden and his entire family. Barr wouldn't do it, which is one reason he's now on Trump's revenge list.

But what about the tradition of separating the Justice Department from political interference? Pffft. That's only been a "tradition" since Nixon—in fact, not even a tradition according to Trump pal Russ Vought:

“You don’t need a statutory change at all, you need a mind-set change,” Vought said in an interview. “You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel’s Office that don’t view themselves as trying to protect the department from the president.”

There you have it. Easy peasy.

Here's the percentage of the workforce employed by the federal government:

It dropped from 3.5% of the total workforce in 1955 to 1.4% of the workforce at the end of 1999. Since January 2000 it's increased from 1.44% to 1.49%. Aside from the decennial census blips, employment generally goes up during and after recessions and declines during good economic times.

NOTE: This is the civilian workforce. It excludes postal workers and the military. It also doesn't account for outsourcing of jobs to contract employees.

Egypt has been a full partner with Israel in the Gaza blockade ever since it began. They have also been resolute about banning immigration from Gaza to Egypt, including refugees in the current war. Why? Over at New York, Benjamin Hart asks Steven Cook:

I think that the Egyptian position on this is a principled position, which is that if they start allowing Palestinians into the Sinai Peninsula, the Israelis will push Palestinians there.... From the Egyptian perspective, allowing large numbers of Palestinians in the Sinai Peninsula would basically be helping to enable ethnic cleansing. So that’s the point that they have been making to various international interlocutors. And they have not been willing to bend on this, except on this question of wounded Palestinians.

There is, of course, an alternate, less principled possibility: Egypt has never liked Palestinians and still doesn't. They treated the Gaza Strip as occupied territory during their accidental 20-year control, and during that time made an open mockery of Gaza's supposed Palestinian government. Palestinians in Gaza were never granted Egyptian citizenship and emigration was always tightly restricted. Egypt made no effort to hold onto Gaza after losing it in the 1967 war and officially gave it up a decade later. Their passion for keeping Gazans in Gaza has always been justified by endless expressions of support for "the Palestinian cause," but real-world actions suggest that the most important part of this cause has been making sure that Palestinians live anywhere other than in Egypt.

Jon Chait remarks on a phrase that's become common on the right recently:

“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” said Russell T. Vought, the former Trump budget director who is orchestrating his planning.... A conservative who knows what time it is recognizes that the left is poised to permanently seize power, and that the old rules of politics (following the traditional norms of liberal democracy) no longer apply in the face of this emergency.

The phrase appears to have been popularized by either David Reaboi or Michael Anton, both fellows at the Claremont Institute....

I wouldn't comment on this except for the fact that I happen to be watching The Sopranos right now.¹ In one of the first-season episodes someone (Paulie?) says, "Hey, I know what time it is" in the same sense that Chait highlights. So the political right has apparently appropriated a phrase that originated either in north Jersey or with the mob. Or both.

¹Yeah, it took me 25 years. So sue me.

Damon Linker today in the New York Times:

A coalition of intellectual catastrophists on the American right is ... giving the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse. Some catastrophists take it a step further and suggest that officials might contemplate overthrowing liberal democracy in favor of revolutionary regime change or even imposing a right-wing dictatorship on the country.

It's good to see someone writing about this in a high-profile place. My only complaint is that Linker doesn't go far enough. He's right that catastrophism has lately infiltrated the Republican intelligentsia, but they're followers, not leaders. The evangelical right, in particular, has been there for years, and was joined by folks like Glenn Beck and Mark Levin a decade ago. Catastrophism has gone mainstream since then, and it's only recently that intellectuals joined the bandwagon.

It's been common for a while on the right to believe that liberals hate America because they think it's the root source of racism, militarism, gun culture, Christian nationalism, greed, and police violence. So things like terrorism, high inflation, and illegal immigration aren't just ordinary problems of the kind that every country has, but problems that liberals have deliberately spawned and secretly bankrolled as a way of weakening and eventually bringing down America as a world power. On the Christian right, the issues are a little different—tending toward abortion, gay rights, divorce, and the rise of atheism—but the belief that liberals are deliberately degrading America out of sheer hatred is much the same.

And now the intellectuals are on board too, providing an elaborate, footnoted superstructure for beliefs that lots of conservatives already have. This is the basis for the militant refusal to compromise among the most extreme precincts of the right. If you thought your opponents weren't merely misguided, but deliberately trying to bring down the country, you'd feel the same way they do.

No special reason for posting this. I just felt like it. It shows primary federal spending (i.e., not including interest) and revenue since 2000:

In the early 2000s spending and revenue were in sync. Then, thanks partly to a mild recession and partly to George Bush's tax cuts, revenue fell. The same thing happened again in 2005, and the opposite happened in 2013 (revenue went up partly due to Obama's tax increase and partly due to economic expansion). Revenue has varied since then based on economic conditions, but has generally fallen as a result of further Republican tax cuts—although CBO is optimistic that revenue will stay flat over the next decade.

Spending, conversely, has gone up, due almost solely to demographically-driven increases in Social Security and Medicare.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that spending and revenue will be out of sync by 3.4% of GDP in 2033. So that leaves us with two choices if we want to close the primary deficit:

• Cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid by a quarter.
• Raise taxes by 18%.

That's it. Either of these would close the primary deficit and automatically take care of rising interest expenses at the same time.

Don't bother talking about welfare or defense spending or any of that. Plausible cuts in those programs would have only a tiny effect. You either raise taxes or you cut Social Security and Medicare. Period.

Over at National Review, Andy McCarthy wanders ever further down the rabbit hole of abject lunacy:

On the latest episode of his podcast The McCarthy Report, National Review Institute fellow Andy McCarthy reacted to the revelation that Joe Biden’s brother, James, wrote him a $40,000 check when a $400,000 payment from a Chinese concern came in.

“It’s 10 percent for the big guy,” he said.

“I can’t see any other way of looking at this,” he continued, “except to say that Joe Biden, as it turns out, is what they accused Donald Trump of being: He is a clandestine agent who’s been well paid by a hostile foreign power.”

In what will come as no surprise to those of you who retain your sanity, there is indeed another way of looking at this: it was repayment of a loan Joe had made to his brother a month earlier. That's it.

McCarthy went off the deep end a long time ago. That happens. But why does NR keep publishing his obviously unhinged rants?