Daily Bafflements

• ICYMI: “Let us now address the greatest American mystery at the moment: what motivates the supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump?” So begins founding editor Thomas Frank’s latest for The Guardian. Though white, working class voters are showing up for the candidate in droves, writes Frank, “their views, by and large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers.” And why not read about Frank’s leisurely (and scathing) tour of Martha’s Vineyard in our latest issue?

• In the midst of major changes in economic policy by Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to mitigate the country’s ongoing economic turmoil, a much deeper national crisis is going largely unnoticed by international observers. “Close to 70 percent of public hospitals can no longer provide diagnostic services and surgery, and the medical staff in these facilities has reportedly dropped by 50 percent,” reports Pacific Standard. With the country facing a dire shortage of birth control and contraception, experts predict that the country’s public health crisis is not going away any time soon.

• CNN’s “Reality Check Team” has fact-checked last night’s Republican debate, although if you ask Baffler contributor Alex Pareene, their own facts often leave something to be desired, particularly in their coverage of key debate topics like violence in the Middle East and political protest in America. In issue 28, Pareene wrote that “CNN has attempted in recent years to boost its ratings with stunts, game shows, personality-driven edutainment, and the firing of Piers Morgan, but nothing succeeds like violence. When something bad is happening, Americans still instinctively tune in to CNN to watch it happen live. This creates a strong incentive on the part of CNN producers to make bad things appear as bad as possible.”

Daily Bafflements

• Baffler contributing editor Astra Taylor reports on “the troubling intersection between higher education and high finance” over at The Nation. And it’s not just Harvard she’s talking about: in the wake of state funding cuts, more and more public universities are investing endowment money in hedge funds.

• Without comment, and drowning in our own skepticism, we present “How Robots Will Kill the Gig Economy.”

• David Graeber once lamented to Baffler readers about the unrealized “technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now.” David would probably find it little consolation that at least our kitchen appliances have finally caught up to Jetsons-era predictions.

Straight Out of Centrist Casting

Say what you will about this demented presidential election cycle—it has, at a minimum, forced the myths of Beltway centrism out into gloriously open view. The meme that has lately captured the responsible commentariat is not that the rise of Donald Trump represents the unmanageable blowback from a decades-long conservative-movement assault on the theory and practice of government. No, gentle readers: the centrist insight du jour is that the hideous Trumpian cancer on the body politic stems from the hyperpartisan track record of Democrats in power. Back in their post-2008 heyday, the story goes, Obama and his congressional politburo threw their weight around in such obtuse, high-handed, and confrontational fashion that the avenging Trump moment we are now living through followed just as inevitably as a Spider-Man reboot or a Vox correction. Thanks, Obama!

Just behold the latest such brief, from National Journal hot-take maestro Josh Kraushaar, who confidently argues that “the notion that Obama was fated to face an intransigent Republican opposition has always been off-base,” in a work of speculative fiction bearing the suitably hallucinogenic headline, “How Al Franken Paved the Way for Donald Trump.” 

No, it isn’t only because both men are accomplished insult comics; rather, Kraushaar argues, Franken’s narrow victory over incumbent Republican Minnesota senator Norm Coleman in 2008 delivered Obama a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate. Just add the new Democratic president’s power-mad executive hubris, and you have the mother of all nightmare scenarios:

Daily Bafflements

• Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders threw pollsters and pundits for a loop last night in Michigan by winning the state’s Democratic primary when everyone and their mother (literally, this author’s mother) thought it was impossible—or at the very least, damn well close to it. FiveThirtyEight, among others, gave Hillary Clinton a 99 percent chance of winning, which means that Nate Silver and friends ended up choking down “a stack of humble pie on Tuesday night.”

• Today in “whoops”: one Wired writer’s use of a word-replacer browser plugin may have caught up to them. To an article on the Internet’s obsession with Chris Christie’s facial expressions while standing behind Trump, the magazine appended the following correction: “Due to an oversight involving a haphazardly-installed Chrome extension during the editing process, the name Donald Trump was erroneously replaced with the phrase ‘Someone With Tiny Hands’ when this story originally published.” It’s entirely possible we’ll end up with an even funnier correction this election cycle, but this one is definitely up there.

• Okay, just hear us out, but is the fact that Donald Trump is actually the trickster god Loki the reason he’s winning so many primaries? And why isn’t this question being seriously considered by pundits and analysts? Truly frustrating. 

Bring On the Unisex Onesies

Dear Your Sorry Ass,

I don’t know quite how to put this, but I’ve never considered myself somebody who was really interested in smashing children’s gender roles. I’ve read all the op-eds that come out every year about gendered toys and games and the modeled behavior it produces and all that, and it’s not that I disagree . . . I guess I’ve just never felt really felt invested in the whole post-gender project. Just let the kids play with what they want to play with, I always thought, and don’t try to impute too much political value to toy-purchasing.

Daily Bafflements

• Say “hullo” to our thirtieth issue, a breezy look at the collective panic afflicting the nation in election year! As John Summers writes, “Sober pundits intone, how do we balance liberty and security, freedom and security? We? Balance?  The bywords of America in 2016 are more like plutocrats and jittery.” Today we roll out Kade Crockford’s salvo “Keep Fear Alive,” on the trillion-dollar business that is the national security state, and Corey Pein’s “Everybody Freeze,” which examines the craze for heads-on-ice that is sweeping Silicon Valley. Look out for salvos by David Graeber, Astra Taylor, Tom Frank, and Evgeny Morozov, among others, as well as liberating stories by Ottessa Moshfegh and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, poetry by Dulce María Loynaz, Edwin Muir, and Natalia Ginsburg, and more. And, after all that, why not subscribe?

• “For all the articles about Trump I had read in recent months,” writes Tom Frank in The Guardian, “I didn’t recall trade coming up very often. Trump is supposed to be on a one-note crusade for whiteness.”

• Who’d have thunk it? Dystopic people-rating tools are still in business.

Daily Bafflements

 • Today in ostriches, their heads buried in the sand: “The future is clearly coming much faster than science had expected,” writes Bill McKibben in the Boston Globe.

There is legislation pending in the House and Senate that would end new fossil fuel extraction on America’s public lands. Senator Sanders has backed the law unequivocally; Secretary Clinton seemed to endorse it, and then last week seemed to waffle. Donald Trump has concentrated on the length of his fingers. 

Well, that’s a bit uncharitable, Bill. He’s concentrated on his short fingers and on cultivating fascist salutes. 

Donald Trump, Trickster God

The witch-doctors of the electoral season have utterly failed in their essential task; that is, to explain the alarming spectacle that has befallen the land like a sudden eclipse. Political reporters, consultants and pundits are flailing in astonishment as “the unthinkable becomes inevitable.” You know what I’m talking about. 

The old conventional wisdom held that Donald Trump’s campaign was a joke soon to be forgotten, that the bratty-rich-kid-turned-reality-show-star was unelectable—even in a Republican Party primary where a large share of the electorate believes the sitting president is a Manchurian candidate engineered by the all-powerful Islamic Illuminati.

The revised conventional wisdom says party leaders and other institutional elites failed to consider Trump with the seriousness he deserved, thus enabling his rise in a crowded field of flawed candidates. Which is yet another bogus argument. Not only does it deny agency to voters, it presumes that with a little time in the rhetorical gym, a chinless wonder like Trump’s bygone punching bag, Jeb!, might have gained preternatural charisma and convinced the public that he was a superior substitute to the patented original Trump brand.