JAMES CARVILLE IS A CREEP -- AND IS AS ELITIST AS THE DEMOCRATS HE CRITICIZES

Maureen Dowd appears to be charmed by a squirm-inducing story James Carville told her about a celebration in one of the classes he used to teach:

A few years ago, when James Carville was teaching at Louisiana State University, he heard that one of his students had gotten into the school of her dreams to work on an advanced degree. He wanted to toast her.

“I get a $25 champagne and four plastic flutes,” he recalled, “and I said to the students: ‘All right. You are not going to get out of James Carville’s class unless you know how to properly open a bottle of champagne.’

“I said: ‘Here’s what you’re going to do. You don’t pop it like you see in the movies or you’re going to poke somebody’s eye out. You take the foil off. Now you’re going to take a dishcloth, and you’re going to execute the classic counterclockwise movement. The bottle is going to go one way; the cork is going to go the other way. You just ease it out, and the sound that you are looking for is the sigh of a satisfied woman.’

“The next Tuesday, the dean comes into my office and he said: ‘I’m closing the door. We need to have a talk.’”

A female student had complained about the sighing line.

He wanted to mutter to the dean, “Her boyfriend has never heard that sound,” but he simply said, “OK, I’ll endeavor to do better.”

Carville is 79. It's creepy for an old man to say this to a class full of people young enough to be his grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren.

Also -- and yes, I know I'm compounding the cringe -- what Carville said is wrong.

I use this method to open champagne bottles, and the corks always (quietly) pop, which is ... um, probably not a sound you want to hear in the boudoir. This sommelier knows how to avoid the pop altogether, but this isn't the sound of ecstasy either:



"A nice gentle sigh of happiness," the sommelier says. For a bottle of champagne, maybe. Not for a person.

Later in Dowd's column, she reminds us of Carville's anti-"elitist" posturing. You know how this goes:

Carville has been sounding an alarm about progressives getting too censorious since he advised Hillary Clinton in 2016. He disparaged liberals’ snooty, elitist “faculty lounge” attitudes long before he blew off the faculty lounge himself. He complained that “woke stuff is killing us,” that the left was talking in a language that ordinary Americans did not understand, using terms like “Latinx” and “communities of color,” and with a tone many Americans found sneering, as in Hillary’s infamous phrase “basket of deplorables.”

In Dowd's column, Carville compounds this by gendering it. Even if you don't think the champagne story is misogynist, this is:

Lately, he has been obsessed with Biden bleeding Black male voters.

“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females” dominating the culture of his party. “‘Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you.’ The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’ ..."

But none of this ever shows up in the polls. Last month, Gallup asked voters to name "the most important problem facing this country today." Here's a list of every problem mentioned:

I don't see "woke stuff" on that list.

A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released earlier this month asked respondents to name "the most important issues facing the country today." Respondents could name more than one issue. "Political correctness/cancel culture" was tied for 16th place, well behind immigration (36%), price increases/inflation (33%), the economy and jobs (24%), crime and drugs (17%), guns (17%), and a host of other issues.

Also, Carville's obsession with terms like "Latinx" proves that he's just as much of an elitist as the people he criticizes. For most Americans, this term is a non-issue -- polling in 2020 suggested that only about a quarter of Hispanics were aware the term existed. No one seems to have polled the rest of us, but I'd bet that the percentages of white and Black voters who recognize the term are minuscule. Yet we've had story aftetr story after story about the Democrats' alleged Latinx problem, always in the elite media. Being concerned about this is "faculty lounge" thinking.

I won't deny that Donald Trump's macho bluster appeals to some voters, of all ethnic groups, precisely because he's perceived as more masculine than Joe Biden (and, obviously, Hillary Clinton in 2016). But Democrats won the "Who is more manly?" war in 1992 and 1996, and again in 2008 and 2012 -- and Democrats also won the popular vote with a female candidate in 2016 and a candidate Maureen Dowd (and others) incessantly tried to feminize in 2000. And Democrats are winning a lot of races in which Trump isn't on the ballot.

Trump's chest-thumping has its appeal, but he's just one Republican, and I can't see anyone else like him on the horizon for the GOP. (His son and namesake, who could easily be the party's 2028 nominee, can't pull it off.) So while I think the Democratic Party has some long-term problems, I don't think this is one of them.

TRUMP ISN'T THE ONLY REASON EVANGELICALS ARE "RAUNCHY"

Last week, The New York Times published a piece by Ruth Graham headlined "Piety and Profanity: The Raunchy Christians Are Here." Graham wrote about a recently published right-wing calendar:

The “Conservative Dad’s Real Women of America” 2024 pinup calendar features old-school images of sexiness — bikinis, a red sports car, a bubble bath....

In [one] image, a crucifix hangs prominently on the kitchen wall behind a woman in a tiny skirt, apron and platform heels. On the platform X, the model — Josie Glabach, who goes by “The Redheaded Libertarian” — said she was working to provide for her family, and defended her conservative bona fides in part by referring to her family’s Catholic faith. Using vividly vulgar language, she wrote that she doesn’t care “if the fact that I look hot doing any of it offends your senses.”

This calendar is controversial in Evangelical circles:

Allie Beth Stuckey, an evangelical commentator and podcaster, condemned the calendar as “soft porn” marketed to married men, and saw it as proof of growing polarization between Christian and secular conservatism. Other prominent Christian conservatives joined her in expressing their disgust.

But the calendar itself suggested that Christian and secular conservatism are not exactly as distinct as Ms. Stuckey and others might wish. The calendar’s cover model, Riley Gaines, a former college swimmer and activist against transgender women’s participation in women’s sports, frequently speaks at church events and evangelical conferences, and frames her cause as a “spiritual battle.”

Graham, of course, blames the increased raunchification of Evangelicals on Donald Trump:

... a raunchy, outsider, boobs-and-booze ethos has elbowed its way into the conservative power class, accelerated by the rise of Donald J. Trump, the declining influence of traditional religious institutions and a shifting media landscape increasingly dominated by the looser standards of online culture.

At Threads, David French recommends a despairing essay on the same subject by Russell Moore, a prominent Southern Baptist theologian and critic of the edgiest right-wingers. In the essay, titled "Why Character Doesn’t Matter Anymore," Moore spreads the blame around:

Yes, part of the vulgarization of the Right is due to the Barstool Sports / Joe Rogan secularization of the base, in which Kid Rock is an avatar more than Lee Greenwood or Michael W. Smith. But much more alarmingly, the coarsening and character-debasing is happening among politicized professing Christians. The member of Congress joking at a prayer breakfast about turning her fiancé down for sex to get there was there to talk about her faith and the importance of religious faith and values for America. The member of Congress telling a reporter to “f— off” is a self-described “Christian nationalist.” We’ve seen “Let’s Go Brandon”—a euphemism for a profanity that once would have resulted in church discipline—chanted in churches.

Pastor and aspiring theocrat Douglas Wilson publicly used a slur against women that not only will I not repeat here but that almost no secular media outlet would quote—and that’s without even referencing Wilson’s creepily coarse novel about a sex robot.

(The congresswoman who joked about postponing sex with her fiancé in a National Prayer Breakfast speech was Nancy Mace. The "fuck off" member of Congress was Marjorie Taylor Greene. And Pastor Wilson described women whose interpretation of Scripture differed from his as "a couple of cunts." Glad I could clear all that up.)

This seems like a relatively new development, but some Evangelicals have wanted to be like this for quite a while. Back in 2006, I wrote about this Newsweek story:

Last Saturday morning, 200 Christian men gathered in a downtown warehouse in Nashville for a daylong spiritual extravaganza. Inside, strobe lights flashed, and tracks by the Killers thumped from speakers stacked on either side of a stage. Four large video screens showed clips of karate fights, car chases and "Jackass"-style stunts. Then the music lowered and Christian comedian Brad Stine appeared. With his rat-a-tat delivery and aggressive style, Stine quickly whipped the crowd into a chorus of “Amens!” “A lot of guys out there wouldn’t have the balls to be here,” he shouted. “Are you ready to be a man? Are you ready to kick ass? Are you ready to grab your sword and say, ‘OK family, I’m going to lead you?’ Buckle up. This is GodMen!”

The event was the first of what Stine and other organizers hope will be a series of testosterone-fueled Christian men’s gatherings across the country. Their purpose: to reassert masculinity within a church structure that they say has been weakened by feminization.

The tunes at this event weren't exactly "Amazing Grace."

The GodMen also reject typical Christian music. It “doesn’t usher me into the presence of God,” says Smith, Stine’s manager. “It just ushered me into boredom.” Not so with the GodMen band that played on Saturday. On stage, as a series of words flashed on screens—BOSS, BOLD, BRASH, BULLY, BLUNT—the band ripped into their first tune, “Testosterone High”: “Forget the ying and the yang/ I’ll take the boom and the bang/ Give me another dose of testosterone.” ...

When the GodMen band seized the stage again, they tore into an anthem called “Grow A Pair!”: “We’ve been beaten down/ Feminized by the culture crowd,” they sang. “No more nice guy, timid and ashamed/ We’ve had enough, cowboy up/ In the power of Jesus name/ Welcome to the battle/ A million men have got your back/ Jump up in the saddle/ Grab a sword, don’t be scared/ Be a man, grow a pair!”

This was around the same time that many right-wingers were claiming to be "South Park Republicans." In 2005, an essayist for the Manhattan Institute gleefully described one South Park episode:

Consider season nine's hilarious - and disturbing - opening episode. The boys' gay teacher, Mr. Garrison, decides to get a sex change. The procedure is shown, graphically, to be a horrific self-mutilation, which is already a brave bit of truth-telling in an era of "transgender rights." But you've never seen anything on television like what follows.

Mr. Garrison, now a "woman," mistakenly thinks he's pregnant - and that makes him very happy because he can rush off to get an abortion, and so prove that he's a real woman. Here's the key exchange, at a Planned Parenthood center:

Garrison: Hello, doctor. Looks like I need an abortion.

Doctor: An abortion?

Garrison: Yeah, I've got one growing inside of me. Now are you gonna scramble its brains or just vacuum it out?

The doctor then tells Mr. Garrison that he can't have an abortion because he can't get pregnant: His sex change is ultimately cosmetic. Mr. Garrison is crestfallen: "You mean I'll never know what it feels like to have a baby growing inside me and then scramble its brains and vacuum it out?" The doctor responds: "Nnn ... that's right."

[Matt] Stone and his fellow thirtysomething colleague, Trey Parker, portray both abortion and sex-change operations in ways Robert Bork would endorse wholeheartedly - but do so in one of the most offensively vulgar half-hours in television history. Now that's subversive.

All of this -- twenty years ago and today -- conforms to Cleek's Law: Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily. In the 1960s and immediately afterward, the left was identified with sexual liberation, and the right with its opposite. But in periods when feminism, respect for LGBTQ rights, and a focus on consent and mutual respect seemed to dominate on the left, the right decided to emphasize the opposite -- which was a good fit, as it turned out, because right-wingers hate LGBTQ people, hate feminism, and want heterosexual sex, but exclusively on straight men's terms.

Right-wingers talked less about all this in the Obama years, when liberals elected a straight male sex symbol as president. But since then, Democrats have run a feminist woman and an old codger as president, so Trump pretended to be the stud he may have been a few decades ago, and the right followed. But the tendencies were there all along.

And it's not just Trump. In seemingly non-political online spaces, "manosphere" influencers are encouraging young men to dominate women and be "pimps" while also expressing contempt for women who have active sex lives. Other influencers encourage women to be "tradwives" who marry young, stop working outside the home, cede decision-making to their husbands, and bear lots of children. This is the right hoping to remake the sexual zeitgeist, or at least persuade a significant number of young people that present-day sex and romance are a liberal plot against them. And that's the context for Elon Musk's recent online pronouncements that hormonal birth control is dangerous, a message that's also being spread to the young by junk-science influencers.

All this is consistent with the raunchy Evangelical movement, which I fear will outlive Trump.

THE RIGHT'S BLAME-AMERICA-FIRST RESPONSE TO THE MOSCOW TERROR ATTACK

More than 100 people are dead in a terrorist attack on a concert hall at the outskirts of Moscow. ISIS claims responsibility, and U.S. officials agree with that assessment. Russia, not letting a crisis go to waste, says the attackers were trying to flee to Ukraine when they were captured.

And on the American right, the real culprit has been found: the CIA.

The CIA cut out ISIS takes responsibility for terrorist attack in Moscow weeks after Ukraine threatened terror strikes on Russia. https://t.co/uRykPpKwEP

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) March 22, 2024

Four days ago, Obama was in the UK for a private meeting.

Today, ISIS took credit for the terror attack in Moscow.
Obama’s CIA created ISIS.

Obama is the shadow POTUS.

The CIA/MI6 already committed terrorism in the European theater by sabotaging Nordstream.

Get the picture? pic.twitter.com/da3p1bhGGB

— Enlighted1 (@maatopdogg) March 23, 2024

Remember: Wikileaks has never had to retract a story.

Julian Assange reported ISIS was created by the CIA. pic.twitter.com/TJyWV8b5Zf

— Derenic Byrd (@DerenicByrd) March 23, 2024

Biden has been flooding what’s left of America for over 3 years with mindless scum of this exact type. The CIA and Israel recruited hundreds of thousand of these maggots to attack Syria. It’s all hiding in plain sight and it’s coming to the USA… https://t.co/uRYnd5x0Zq

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) March 23, 2024

The ISIS has not attacked a single country that supports Israel since the War in Gaza

Reason? The ISIS is created by Obama, Hillary Clinton, The CIA and The Mossad

Anyone that continues to support Palestine will suffer the same faith as #Russia, Moscowpic.twitter.com/eCYhgTtnrI

— ripped_mask (@ripped_mask) March 23, 2024

Some people think I'm 'cray cray' when I say the CIA/Mossad created AQ & ISIS and used them to foment terror in the Middle East that the Western powers then were 'forced' to respond to with military actions.

TRUMP TOLD YOU YEARS AGO.

You just weren't fucking paying attention. https://t.co/YXtvWvIK8W

— Brian Cates - Political Columnist & Pundit (@drawandstrike) March 23, 2024

I don't think U.S. government contractor Elon Musk has blamed the CIA yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

I should note that there's no real distinction between blaming Ukraine for this attack and blaming the CIA -- to the modern right, it's all part of one big "globalist" "deep state" octopus, which includes NATO:

NATO strikes! https://t.co/eXugiCDcHS

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) March 22, 2024

BONUS: This is from patriots.win, the message board that used to be r/TheDonald on Reddit:

They hate America when they don't control it.

GOP VOTERS IN 2021 SAID, "WE STILL LOVE TRUMP!" MERRICK GARLAND SHRUGGED IT OFF.

In a very good New York Times story about Merrick Garland's lack of urgency in bringing Donald Trump to justice -- the result of which will be, in all likelihood, that neither of Trump's federal trials will start before Election Day -- we're told that one reason Garland and his colleagues weren't aware of the time pressure on them is that they found it unimaginable that Trump might be the GOP presidential nominee again:

In trying to avoid even the smallest mistakes, Mr. Garland might have made one big one: not recognizing that he could end up racing the clock. Like much of the political world and official Washington, he and his team did not count on Mr. Trump’s political resurrection after Jan. 6, and his fast victory in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, which has complicated the prosecution and given the former president leverage in court.

In 2021 it was “simply inconceivable,” said one former Justice Department official, that Mr. Trump, rebuked by many in his own party and exiled at his Florida estate Mar-a-Lago, would regain the power to impose his timetable on the investigation.

I've always assumed that an excess of fastidiousness delayed these indictments. Some of you told me that I'm not a lawyer and therefore can't understand that the sauce has to simmer for the precise amount of time described in the recipe -- even a tiny compromise makes it inedible. Apparently, despite being an ignoramus, I had a point.

But I want to talk about the idea that in 2021 Nobody Could Have Foreseen a third presidential nomination for Trump. That's nonsense. Here's CNN's Harry Enten on January 30, 2021, ten days after Trump left office:

... make no mistake: This is still Trump’s Republican Party.

You see it in the actions of Republican state and local parties trying to punish those who went against Trump. You see this in a majority of congressional Republicans voting to uphold an objection to Pennsylvania’s electoral votes for President Joe Biden.

And more than that, you see it in the polling, which indicates that Trump’s in a historically strong primary position for an ex-president. Indeed, he’s polling tremendously well among Republicans in the context for any future presidential nominee....

After the US Capitol insurrection on January 6, Trump’s still cruising in a potential 2024 primary. A majority of Republicans (57%) said in an Ipsos KnowledgePanel poll that he should be the 2024 nominee.

Against named opponents, Trump easily leads the field. Among those who either voted for Trump in 2020 or are Republicans, Trump’s averaging about half the primary vote. No one else is even close.

At CPAC at the end of February 2021 -- a few days after Mitt Romney said that if Trump decided to run in 2024, he was "pretty sure he would win the nomination" -- Trump teased a third presidential run, then won the convention's 2024 presidential straw poll with a majority of the vote. At the next CPAC, in June 2021, the same thing happened:

Former President Donald Trump bathed in the adulation of an adoring crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference Sunday as he easily won the informal straw poll of attendees when they were asked who they’d like to see run for the White House in 2024....

Trump once again teased a 2024 run on Sunday: “I could have a nice, beautiful life and here I am on a Sunday in Texas.” The crowd began to chant “Four more years! Four more years!”

(Between the two CPACs, Sean Hannity asked Trump about a third run and Trump said, "I am looking at it very seriously, beyond seriously.")

Trump's plans for 2024 were so obvious in the first year of his post-presidency that Politico could run a story in July 2021 with the headline "Trumpworld Is Already Weighing Veeps for 2024. Hint: It Ain’t Pence." In September, Chris Cillizza published a piece with the headline "Donald Trump Is ‘99, 100 percent’ Likely to Run for President in 2024."

An October 2021 Quinnipiac poll found that 79% of Republicans wanted Trump to run in 2024.

How could Garland and his associates not realize that Trump wanted to run, and would be the front-runner for the nomination if he did run?

At the time, I was aware of Trump's enduring popularity among the GOP electorate. In April 2021, in response to a Ross Douthat column about Ron DeSantis's presidential prospects, I wrote:

Douthat is suggesting that DeSantis could beat Trump in the 2024 Republican primaries. That's insane. No one will beat Trump if he runs. That will be true even if he's under indictment. (Being under indictment would make him even more popular among Republican voters -- he'll say "witch hunt" every day and the rubes will go wild.)

But Merrick Garland, a very smart man, had no idea.

ELON MUSK IS STUPID AND SO IS HIS FAVORITE NEW CONSPIRACY THEORY

Greg Sargent reports:

For much of the last week, Elon Musk’s mighty Twitter feed—sorry, his X feed—featured as its pinned tweet a video that purports to lay bare a vast conspiracy among Democrats to “flood” the country with “illegals” to lock in a “permanent voting majority.” Many people have picked apart the video’s numerous lies. It is a strikingly crafted piece of “great replacement theory” propaganda....

Is it really "strikingly crafted" propaganda? The video looks slick, in all the most obvious, clichéd ways, but if you believe what it's saying, you're as dumb as a rock.

This is actually happening!
pic.twitter.com/qeNBu3S1mF

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 19, 2024

The video purports to describe a "Democrat" plan to achieve "single-party rule":

... flood the country with untold millions of illegals by land, sea, and air from all over the world — enough to eclipse the populations of 36 individual U.S. states, so far.

... keep them in the country at all costs, even when they commit violent crime like murder and rape. Attack the language used to describe the criminals, as opposed to the criminals themselves. Slander critics as racist.

... count the non-citizens in the census that will determine congressional apportionment in the House of Representatives — as of now, that would equal thirteen extra congressional districts; a tremendous amount of electoral power.

... wage a massive, heavily funded lawfare campaign to change state voting laws that legalize mass mail-in ballots, no signature verification, and no proof of citizenship requirements — making it nearly impossible to prove voter fraud.

... lock in the permanent voting majority with campaign promises of lavish benefits and permanent privileges, enshrining generational fealty to the Democrat party.

Okay, let's discuss this.

You know how Republican conspiratorialists say, after every mass shooting, that it's a false flag designed to allow Democrats to go door to door and take everyone's guns? Notice how they've been saying that for years and years, and yet no Democratic president has taken everyone's guns? Not Bill Clinton, who had eight years to do it, or Barack Obama, who also had eight years, or Joe Biden, who's had three years and counting? And yet the nefarious scheme is always presented as something that's about to happen -- and the idiots who believe it never ask, Why hasn't it happened already?

The conspiracy theory Musk is promoting works pretty much the same way. Counting non-citizens in the census? That's been done in literally every census since the first one in 1790.

In the nation’s early history, a substantial share of the population had migrated from other countries, and for many decades thereafter, some states actively recruited foreigners to provide labor and boost political representation. The framers of the Constitution elected to exclude some people from being counted — specifying “Indians not taxed” and, most notoriously, deciding to count someone who was enslaved as three-fifths of a person — but left noncitizens intact. The drafters of the 14th Amendment debated whether to count all immigrants for apportionment purposes, and elected in the end to do so.

Sanctuary cities? They've been around since the 1980s. Mail and early voting? That's also been on the rise since the late twentieth century, though there was a decline in 2022 after a peak in 2020.

In other words, for quite a while the elements have been in place for the evil Democrat Party to achieve single-party rule -- and yet Republicans have won half the presidential elections in this century; Republicans have controlled the House for 16 of the 24 years in this century, and the Senate for the same amount of time; Republicans control 28 of 50 state legislatures; and there are 27 Republican governors. And, of course, the Supreme Court has a 6-3 Republican supermajority.

You'll say, But this is a new evil Democrat plan. Except that it's not so new, if we believe Donald Trump. In 2017 -- after he won the presidency the previous November -- Trump claimed that he'd actually won California (a state he lost by nearly 4 million votes) because non-citizens illegally threw the election to Hillary Clinton.

And even if you think the elements of the plot weren't fully in place until 2020, why did Democrats lose the House in 2022? Specifically, why did they lose two seats in California and four seats in New York (including one to George Santos!), despite the fact that California and New York are full of immigrants? Winning those seats would have given Democrats a House majority, but the scheme to ensure permanent single-party Democratic rule diddn't even work in these two liberal states.

But Republican propagandsists will use this conspiracy theory to explain every loss they have in a competitive election (and ignore it every time they win a close one). They'll always say that the ultimate deployment of the Democrats' immigrant voter army is in the future. They'll just pretend it doesn't matter that single-party Democratic rule never arrives, just the way they ignore the fact that mass gun confiscation never arrives. And Elon Musk and millions of others who've contracted brain worms from the right-wing media won't even notice that their day of doom never arrives.

TRUMP MIGHT WANT THE SEIZURE OF TRUMP TOWER TO BE A CAMPAIGN EVENT

Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama press aide, thinks Donald Trump was demonstrating some campaign discipline a while back -- but not anymore. Pfeiffer writes:

There was a sense that Trump had become a better, more disciplined candidate than in his two prior campaigns. Trump did show up to big moments like that CNN town hall better prepared and with a semblance of a strategy. On the campaign trail, he followed the script a little more and didn’t step on his message of the day. In other words, he behaved more like a typical candidate and less like a raving lunatic driven by an underlying urge to sabotage himself....

However, since the General Election kicked off almost two weeks ago, Trump has returned to his old, chaotic, self-destructive ways. After securing the delegates as the presumptive nominee, Trump has made critical errors daily. He can’t seem to stop saying insane, deeply politically damaging stuff. In the last two weeks, Trump has said:

* He was open to cutting Social Security if elected;

* There would be a “bloodbath” if he lost the election;

* He would pardon the January 6th rioters on his first day in office;

* He doesn’t think immigrants are “people;” and

* “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion. They hate everything about Israel and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.”

(I would have also mentioned Trump's threat to deport Prince Harry because Harry has acknowledged using recreational drugs. This isn't a major issue, but if I were a public figure trying to get President Biden reelected, I'd be talking about this a lot. Trump wants to do what? Is this really the kind of thing he intends to focus on if he's elected again? And if so, isn't that ... deranged?)

Some of the items on Pfeiffer's list aren't new -- Trump has been promising to pardon January 6 prisoners since last spring, and he said similar things about Jews who vote Democratic during his presidency, in 2019. But Pfeiffer thinks it's a sign that "Trump is cracking under the intense scrutiny of the General Election."

Is he? Or does he just have a different theory about how to win in 2024 -- a theory we hope is utterly wrong?

David Frum thinks Trump is approaching the general election with a bad strategy. Frum writes:

Almost 30 years ago, I cited in The Atlantic some advice I’d heard dispensed by an old hand to a political novice in a congressional race. “There are only two issues when running against an incumbent,” the stager said. “[The incumbent’s] record, and I’m not a kook.” Beyond that, he went on, “if a subject can’t elect you to Congress, don’t talk about it.”

The same advice applies even more to presidential campaigns.

Trump defies such advice. His two issues are his record and Yes, I am a kook. The subjects that won’t get him elected to anything are the subjects that he is most determined to talk about.

I hope Pfeiffer and Frum are right. It's clear that Trump thinks they're wrong. I'm reading this story in the New York Post, and I suspect that if it's true, it's part of Trump's strategy to be the most-discussed person in American life every day from now until November because he thinks it will lead to victory:

As Donald Trump faces a Monday deadline to post a $454 million bond in the civil fraud case against him in New York, insiders said he may be weighing a little-discussed option: Doing nothing....

A ... possibility ... is to let the deadline pass, leaving it to New York Attorney General Letitia James to seize Trump’s bank accounts or buildings — including Trump Tower....

Why would Trump want this to happen? The story says it's "partly because he believes the chances are good that he could recover the assets on appeal, even if he is forced to take his case to the US Supreme Court, according to friends." But if he takes this approach, I think it would mostly be because he thinks he benefits electorally from appearing to be persecuted -- even though that seems to work for him mostly among Republican voters, and not the larger electorate. He may also hope for another January 6 when and if the marshals come to seize Trump Tower.

I hope Trump is misreading the electorate -- like most old white people who binge-watch Fox News, he probably believes that all of America thinks the way consumers of right-wing media think. If that's a bad plan for the general election, I hope Trump pursues it from now until November.

*****

ALSO: The Biden campaign's message seems to be Yes, he is a kook.

Stable genius pic.twitter.com/gPKafVbnWf

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) March 20, 2024

"BLOODBATH": TRUMP WASN'T REALLY TALKING ABOUT THE AUTO INDUSTRY OR PROMISING MAGA VIOLENCE

Donald Trump and his Republican friends, along with some people who aren't Republicans, insist that Trump's reference to a "bloodbath" in an Ohio speech over the weekend was merely a reference to the future of the U.S. auto industry if President Biden wins again and foreign-built electric vehicles make inroads in the U.S. car market. Here's Trump on Truth Social:

Here are some Trump surrogates:

Donald Trump said that a bloodbath would happen to the American auto industry if Biden kept on promoting Chinese made EVs.

He of course is 100 percent correct.

All other reporting about his "bloodbath" comment is complete propaganda. The media should be ashamed.

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) March 17, 2024

President Trump said the AUTO INDUSTRY faces a bloodbath if Biden wins and he’s right!

Democrat mandated switch to EV’s and all the regulatory changes that come with the Green New Deal climate agenda is already hurting car dealerships and auto manufacturers.

It will get worse! https://t.co/zkt9rv0liA

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) March 17, 2024

Mediaite founder Dan Abrams said this on NewsNation:

He’s talking about it in the context of cars, right? Is it a great idea to be using phrases like “bloodbath” considering what happened on January 6th? No. But do I think he’s calling for another January 6th-type event there, as many in the media have been claiming? No. The context matters. Right out of the gate, the word “bloodbath” blew up in the media. The Trump campaign put out a statement repeating it was talking about the automobile industry in China, but the left-leaning media dug in.

Here's what Trump said while talking about electric vehicles built in Mexico by Chinese firms:

Now, we’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars, if I get elected.

Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole. That’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it.

Timothy Snyder says this isn't just about cars, and he's right about that:

Yes, Trump spoke for a moment about cars. He was saying that we should elect him so that he can put tariffs on Chinese cars. At this point he is presumably still on script. And then he starts to say that it will be bad for the auto industry if he is not elected. He never quite gets to that, since in the middle of the sentence he has another idea.

The auto industry, he says, is "the least of it." If he is not elected, "it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole" and "it's going to be a bloodbath for the country." He repeats that the auto industry is "the least of it." So, yes, the words about cars are part of the context, in the sense that if you pay attention to them you know that he does not mean an automotive bloodbath.

The auto industry is "the least of it." Trump is promising, as he says, a "bloodbath for the country."

But is Trump promising a bloodbath? Is he, as Snyder believes, promising to unleash more January 6-style violence?

I don't think so, even though, starting at the very beginning of the speech, he lavished praise on the January 6 rioters (whom he now invokes using the conservatively correct term "hostages"). I think Trump was predicting that a second Biden term will turn America into an unlivable hellscape, because sinister foreigners will make it one.

Here's some of what Trump said in the speech:

This is the worst border in the history of the world. There’s never been anything, millions and millions of people are pouring into our country, probably 15 or 16 million people. That’s almost larger than any state we have in the union.

... among my very first actions upon taking office will be to stop the invasion of our country and send Joe Biden’s illegal aliens back home. These are the roughest people you’ve ever seen. Now we have a new form of crime. I call it Biden migrant crime, but it’s too long. So let’s just call it migrant crime. We have a new category. You have vicious crimes, you have violent crimes, you have all these, now we have migrant crimes and they’re rough. They’re rough and it’s going to double up....

They’re sending from all over the world, not just South America, Latin America. They’re sending them from Asia. They’re sending them from Africa. The Congo, last night, 22 people arrived from the Congo. Now, the Congo is a very nice place I would imagine, but they arrived from the Congo and they came from prison. Where are you from in the Congo? What’s your address? Prison. Now these are rough people....

And these are tougher than anybody we’ve got in the country. These are hardened criminals and we’ve got hundreds of thousands of them and we’re not going to take it. We’re just not going to take it. They are destroying our country.

One week ago I met with a family of 22-year-old nursing student, incredible person, Laken Riley, who was brutally murdered in Georgia last month while out on a morning run. She was so badly beaten up, unrecognizable, can you believe it? Laken’s killer was set loose into the United States through Joe Biden’s program of releasing military-aged males into our communities after they’ve illegally crossed our southern border.

And that’s what happened, that this animal came in. Laken Riley would be alive today if Biden had not unleashed his savage attack on America, and that’s what he’s done....

I think they hate our country. So now they have a new term for people like this. They call them neighbors. Neighbors. They want to call them neighbors so that people coming into our country illegally, “Hi, neighbor. How you doing, neighbor? How’s everything?” Then they punch you in the face and whack you. What a group of idiots we have. This country has never seen anything like what’s happening to it now. And it’s true. We have never seen what’s happening to our country right now. They’re destroying our country. They’re ruining our country.

In the Republican party, we believe that Laken’s killer is an illegal alien criminal. He is an illegal monster. He should never have been in our country and he would’ve never been in our country, never ever would he have been in our country if the election weren’t rigged because we didn’t allow people like that into our country. We didn’t welcome them and they knew it....

Not one more American life should be lost to migrant crime. When I’m President of the United States, we will demand justice for Laken. On day one my administration will terminate every open border policy of the Biden administration.

If there's a throughline in this speech, it's this: Evil foreigners want to kill you, and Joe Biden is letting them do it. And these evildoers aren't just evil because they commit acts of physical violence. It's economic, too, according to Trump:

No one has been hurt by Joe Biden’s migrant invasion more than our great African American and Hispanic American communities. You know that, right? Because they’re taking your jobs and they’re creating lots of problems.

And you know who else it hurt? People on social security, because your social security will be destroyed by the people coming in. There’s too many of them, it’s not sustainable. Joe Biden is costing you Medicare and he’s costing you your social security as sure as you are sitting or standing....

With his open border policy Joe Biden has repeatedly stabbed African American voters in the back, including by granting millions and millions of work permits, taking their jobs. The African American community, the Hispanic community, are going to be the ones that suffer the most. And you know who else? Unions. Because unions are getting good, solid high pay. And guess what’s going to happen? Those unions are going to go out of business because people are owning trucking companies and carpenters and people that employ electricians. And a lot of trades, they’re not going to be able to do this. They’re not going to be able to do it. The unions are going to go out....

Mexico has taken over a period of 30 years 34% of the automobile manufacturing business in our country. Think of it, it went to Mexico. China now is building a couple of massive plants where they’re going to build the cars in Mexico and think, they think that they’re going to sell those cars into the United States with no tax at the border. Let me tell you something to China, if you’re listening, President Xi, and you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal, those big monster car manufacturing plants that you’re building in Mexico right now, and you think you’re going to get that, you’re going to not hire Americans and you’re going to sell the cars to us. Now, we’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars, if I get elected. Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole... That’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars.

So that's the context for the word "bloodbath." Never mind the fact that migrants who live in this country are consumers as well as workers, and thus they help create jobs. Never mind the fact that it's good if migrant workers are paying into the Social Security trust fund. Trump thinks migrants are killing Americans literally, and foreign workers, here and in other countries, are killing Americans economically.

That's what he means by "bloodbath." He doesn't want America to find a way to thrive in a global marketplace. He doesn't want to build a rational immigration system. He just wants to wall us off from foreigners. Otherwise, he says, there will be blood.