What an appropriate number one single today in 1964:
The number one single today in 1966:
Today in 1971, Rick Nelson was booed at Madison Square Garden in New York when he dared to sing new material at a concert. The reaction to his not singing what the crowd wanted to hear prompted him to write …
If I told you the number one British album today in 1983 was “Genesis,” I would have given you the artist and the title:
The number one song today in 1957 was the Everly Brothers’ first number one:
The number one British single today in 1960 was a song originally written in German sung by an American:
The number one album today in 1967 is about an event that supposedly took place on my birthday:
There’s a school of media thought that President Joe Biden’s frequent falsehoods do not represent a significant problem for the country. But today’s inflation report—and Mr. Biden’s comments in response—demonstrate the stakes when consequential issues are not addressed plainly and honestly.
“Biden, Storyteller in Chief, Spins Yarns That Often Unravel,” reads the headline on a recent New York Times report that attempts to gently place the president’s prevarications in a forgiving context. Timesfolk Michael D. Shear and Linda Qiu put it this way:
For more than four decades, Mr. Biden has embraced storytelling as a way of connecting with his audience, often emphasizing the truth of his account by adding, “Not a joke!” in the middle of a story. But Mr. Biden’s folksiness can veer into folklore, with dates that don’t quite add up and details that are exaggerated or wrong…
“He obviously has this tendency, where he’s a good and decent man who in politics has felt like he could stretch the truth up to a point just like virtually every president has done,” said Eric Alterman, the author of “Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie — and Why Trump Is Worse” and a professor at City University of New York.
“With Biden, people have decided these are not the kind of lies that matter,” Mr. Alterman added. “These are the kinds of lies that people’s grandfathers tell.”
Sounds tolerable and maybe even adorable except for the fact that this particular grandfather holds more power than anyone else on the planet and he’s costing Americans a fortune.
Even the Times today acknowledges the widespread pain, reporting:
The Consumer Price Index report for September, released Thursday, showed that painfully rapid price increases continued to trouble Americans and bedevil the Fed. Here are the takeaways:
Inflation remains relentless. The overall index climbed 8.2 percent in September versus the prior year, a slight moderation from 8.3 percent the previous month — but that was because gasoline prices had fallen, a trend that has since reversed. Practically every other detail of the report was worrying.
By some metrics, inflation is hitting new highs. Stripping out food and fuel to get a sense of underlying price trends, the so-called core index climbed by 6.6 percent, the fastest pace since 1982 and more than economists had expected.
The monthly change in prices is also worrying. It offers a snapshot of the latest trends — and those month-to-month figures looked bad. The price index picked up by 0.4 percent from August, double what economists had expected, and the core measure rose by 0.6 percent on a monthly basis.
The Times adds that rents are still rising and notes:
From pet care to dental visits, prices for a wide range of services are up a lot. That’s worrying, because it suggests that wage increases — a major cost for service providers — may be feeding into higher prices.
What is not folksy or charming at all is this morning’s statement on inflation from the president, in which he doesn’t get through even the first line without attempting to steal a rhetorical base and blame his predecessors. The president begins:
Americans are squeezed by the cost of living: that’s been true for years, and they didn’t need today’s report to tell them that. It’s a key reason I ran for President.
When Joe Biden was elected president in November of 2020 inflation was running at just 1.2% annually—seven full percentage points below the current rate.
Mr. Biden goes on to hail today’s extremely disappointing report from the Labor Department as “progress in the fight against higher prices.” He also claims:
Because of my economic plan, the United States is in a stronger position than any major economy to take on this challenge. And my policies—that Democrats delivered—directly tackles [sic] price pressures we saw in today’s report…
This challenge is largely the result of his policies. Despite warnings from leading economists from the Clinton and Obama administrations, Mr. Biden from the start of his presidency insisted on enacting massive spending increases based on his false claim that the U.S. economy was in a shambles and in need of emergency federal intervention.
It was never true. In the first quarter of 2021 when he took office, the U.S. economy was humming along at a robust 6.3% annual growth rate. This followed an explosive 35.3% surge in the third quarter of 2020 after many shutdowns had ended and then solid economic growth of 3.9% in the quarter before he took office.
The Biden fairy tale of a struggling economy was used to sell his program of juicing demand with heavy spending. Meanwhile his regulatory activism discouraged supply, especially in energy. The result: too many dollars chasing too few goods.
Of course Mr. Biden could not have done all his damage if the Federal Reserve was not also blundering—continuing its money-creation binge long after the rebound from lockdowns had begun. But at least the Fed is trying to learn from its mistakes and is now withdrawing stimulus. Mr. Biden shows no signs of contrition or understanding and now he’s pretending that his failed policy mix will cure the ailment he helped create. It will not.
Some Biden allies are even heralding a huge new cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security as a historic increase in benefits, but of course it’s just an effort to offset the historic monetary debasement authored by Mr. Biden and the Fed. This massive COLA means our government has failed in its bedrock responsibility to maintain the value of the currency.
The falsehoods employed to create the Washington-made inflation disaster are not harmless and ignoring them will only prolong the pain for American workers, savers and consumers.
As ever, America needs a free press to hold politicians to account, not to excuse their deceptions.
Man, you need an electron microscope to spot any silver lining in this morning’s inflation numbers.
At the beginning of the week, I told you this would be the week before the midterm elections that is most dominated by a focus on the economy and inflation, because of the release of the updated Consumer Price Index figures.
This morning, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics dropped the latest round of bad news:
The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers rose 0.4 percent in September on a seasonally adjusted basis after rising 0.1 percent in August, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the last 12 months, the all-items index increased 8.2 percent before seasonal adjustment.
Increases in the shelter, food, and medical care indexes were the largest of many contributors to the monthly seasonally adjusted all items increase. These increases were partly offset by a 4.9-percent decline in the gasoline index. The food index continued to rise, increasing 0.8 percent over the month as the food at home index rose 0.7 percent. The energy index fell 2.1 percent over the month as the gasoline index declined, but the natural gas and electricity indexes increased.
The index for all items less food and energy rose 0.6 percent in September, as it did in August. . . .
Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolfers is a pretty darn straight shooter in his assessments of the economy, and his instant reaction didn’t sugarcoat it, for those who were hoping to get a burst of good economic news about a month before the midterm election:
Inflation is proving to be more resilient — and more troubling — than many had hoped or forecast. Both the headline and core inflation readings are about 0.2 percentage points higher than expected. That might not sound like a lot, but over a month, it’s a pretty big miss. Worse, it comes after a run of disappointing inflation readings. There’s nothing in this report that folks at the Fed are going to cheer. Even as nominal wage growth remains contained, inflation continues to run at troubling rates. Remember, the Fed is focused on core rather than headline inflation, and core is a more dismal story.
One year ago, in September 2021, the U.S. inflation rate was 5.4 percent, continuing a stretch of steadily high, but not quite astronomically high, inflation rates that had begun in April. By November, the rate had jumped to 7.8 percent, the largest year-over-year jump since 1982, and we knew we were entering once-in-a-generation territory. This September’s prices are 8.2 percent higher than those prices, which were already 5.4 percent higher than September 2020’s prices. In other words, we’re now well into our second year of exceptionally high inflation. For 19 straight months, the inflation rate has been higher than it was a year earlier.
CNBC reported that economists had expected the CPI to have risen 0.3 percent, up from 0.1 in August, and offered an ominous quote from Diane Swonk, KPMG’s chief economist:“The core inflation is going to be higher, so it’s still an inflation that hasn’t peaked yet in many ways. There’s still more risks of supply side shocks.”
Yesterday brought the update to the Producer Price Index, a less-discussed figure that measures the prices that suppliers are charging businesses and other customers. That number increased 0.4 percent from this August to this September, and 8.5 percent from last September to this September.
If inflation is cooling, you shouldn’t be seeing big jumps in the PPI number or the CPI number. You know that a lot of people wanted to see some glimmer of hope in those numbers, both for the sake of the country and for the sake of Democrats’ hopes in the midterms. But CNBC’s Jim Cramer couldn’t find a silver lining yesterday:
“It was just plain bad. There’s absolutely nothing to say about it other than it was bad. A lot of people were hoping this number’s going to be good, maybe accepting that tomorrow’s going to be bad,” he said on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “The only thing that’s actually even remotely positive about it is that there’s nothing that’s really shocking to the upside, it’s just kind of as bad as it’s been.”
“There’s no relief here . . . there’s just nothing good here,” he added.
All of this makes for a target-rich environment for Republican challengers to Democratic incumbents. You can picture the ad and debate lines already: The so-called Inflation Reduction Act was signed in August, and so far, it’s not doing a darn bit of good. The economy was already recovering in early 2021, and then Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Democrats decided to throw another $1.9 trillion in cash into the economy — too much money chasing too few goods, driving prices up. Biden said in July 2021 that inflation was going to be temporary, and he declared in December that inflation had peaked, and he said in February that it would “taper off.” He doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. He just keeps telling us to be patient and that things will get better. That’s not optimism; that’s stubborn denial. The Democrats always want to spend their way out of a problem, and when you’re in an inflation crisis, that’s like pumping gasoline onto a raging inferno. Just this month, Gavin Newsom started sending out $1,050 checks to California residents to “help with inflation.” That makes the problem worse! When too much money is chasing too few goods, giving people more money only drives the prices up further!
By the way, this morning in Politico, Victoria Guida begins her piece with, “Officials at the Federal Reserve and in the Biden administration are seeing promising signs that the U.S. might finally be through the worst of inflation.”
Are they?
Yesterday, the Associated Press released a new poll revealing that 46 percent of Americans now call their personal financial situation “poor,” up from 37 percent in March. For perspective, in March 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic was shutting down American society, 38 percent said their personal financial situation was poor — and that number actually improved slightly in the subsequent months. Now, just 23 percent of respondents say they feel the U.S. economy is “good,” and intriguingly, “The drop since September came primarily among Democrats, from 46 percent then to 35 percent now.”
In other words, even the people who are most instinctively sympathetic to the argument that the economy is doing well aren’t buying the happy talk coming from the White House. Not that President Biden is changing his approach.
On Tuesday, Biden was interviewed by CNN’s Jake Tapper, and he scoffed at JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s assessment that the U.S. is either already in a recession or will enter one in the near future.
“Look, they’ve been saying this now how — every six months, they say this,” Biden said. “Every six months, they look down the next six months, and say what’s going to happen. It hadn’t happened yet. It hadn’t been — there has — there is no — there’s no guarantee that there’s going to recession.”
As you probably know, the U.S. has experienced two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, which for a long time was the traditional definition of a recession.
Biden continued, “I don’t think there will be a recession. If it is, it will be a very slight recession. That is we’ll move down slightly. . . . It is possible. Look, it’s possible. I don’t anticipate it.”
The president didn’t anticipate 19 months of high inflation, either.
The number one British album today in 1973 was the Rolling Stones’ “Goats Head Soup,” despite (or perhaps because of) the BBC’s ban of one of its songs, “Star Star”:
Who shares a birthday with my brother (who celebrated his sixth birthday, on a Friday the 13th, by getting chicken pox from me)? Start with Paul Simon:
Robert Lamm plays keyboards — or more accurately, the keytar — for Chicago:
Sammy Hagar:
Craig McGregor of Foghat:
John Ford Coley, formerly a duet with England Dan Seals:
Rob Marche played guitar for the Jo Boxers, who …
One death of note: Ed Sullivan, whose Sunday night CBS-TV show showed off rock and roll (plus Topo Gigio and Senor Wences) to millions, died today in 1974:
The Washington Post hyperventilates:
Imagine it’s Jan. 20, 2025. Inauguration Day. The president-elect raises his right hand and begins to recite the oath: I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear …
It’s an anti-Trumper’s nightmare, but it could happen:47 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents want Trump to be the nominee in 2024, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll. And if Trump and Joe Biden are the contenders, Trump narrowly edges Biden, 48 to 46 percent, among registered voters (albeit within the poll’s margin of error).
The twice-impeached president’s tenure in office was a festival of democratic norm-breaking, culminating in the “big lie” about the 2020 electionand the Jan. 6 insurrection. A second term would likely bring more of the same — only this time Trump would have four years of practice under his belt.
To help game out the consequences of another Trump administration, I turned to 21 experts in the presidency, political science, public administration, the military, intelligence, foreign affairs, economics and civil rights. They sketched chillingly plausible chains of potential actions and reactions thatcould unravel the nation. “I think it would be the end of the republic,” says Princeton University professorSean Wilentz, one of the historians President Biden consulted in August about America’s teetering democracy. “It would be a kind of overthrow from within. … It would be a coup of the way we’ve always understood America.”
Based on what these experts described, here’s a portrait of a democratic crackup in three phases.
Phase 1: Trump seizes control of the government … And installs super loyalists.
“Among the first things he would do, in the initial hours of his presidency, would be to fire [FBI Director] Christopher Wray and purge the FBI,” says Larry Diamond, senior fellow in global democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Diamond’s research has focused on the plight of democracy in other countries, but lately he’s been thinking and writing about its ailments in America. Trump “would then set about trying to politicize the FBI, the intelligence agencies and as much of the government as possible,” Diamond continues. “He has complete authority to appoint the senior ranks of the National Security Council. So you could see [retired Lt. Gen.] Michael Flynn” — who was pardoned by Trump after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI — “as the national security adviser again, or somebody else who would not represent any of the prudence and restraints and efforts to rein in Trump’s more authoritarian and impulsive instincts.”
FBI directors serve 10-year terms across presidential terms to depoliticize the job. Wray, who was appointed by Trump but lost his favor, ascended to the post in 2017 after Trump fired his predecessor, James Comey, partly to undermine the bureau’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Comey’s firing caused an uproar and helped lead to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to oversee the Russia probe. It’s doubtful firing Wray would cause much backlash from Trump’s allies in Congress and his base, given widespread Republican criticism of the search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home, to retrieve classified documents. But even if his allies did balk,Trump might not care; he wouldn’t have to face voters again. Trump made his own view of federal law enforcement clear at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in September: “The FBI and the Justice Department have become vicious monsters controlled by radical-left scoundrels, lawyers and the media who tell them what to do.
“I think certainly in the power ministries — State, CIA, Defense, Justice — he will look to put true loyalists in,” a senior Pentagon official in the Trump administration, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me by email. “When I say loyalist, I mean somebody who places their loyalty to him above their oath of office.”
In his first term, Trump burned through Cabinet members at a high rate because they kept failing the loyalty test: Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper objected to using the military to put down racial justice protests. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly called Trump a “f—ing moron.”
Trump supporters chalk up the churn to a chaotic transition that failed to elevate the right talent to key positions. Now, a number of outside groups formed by supporters and former Trump administration officials are aiming to fix that problem by identifying and vetting a government-in-waiting that will be ready to serve Trump or a Trump-like president right away. “We just have to be more organized and more purposeful and more strategic, and ensure that we have the right team of people from the very top … and then ensuring that we’ve got a structure in place that allows us to move forward our agenda,” says Brooke Rollins, director of the Domestic Policy Council during the Trump administration, now president and CEO of the America First Policy Institute.
If Trump installed loyalists at the FBI and Justice Department — picture as the next attorney general Jeffrey Clark, the Justice official who tried to get the department to help overturn the 2020 election — then any lingering federal investigations of Trump could be dropped. An endless series of investigations of Hunter Biden, Liz Cheney, Merrick Garland, Brad Raffensperger, Letitia James and other perceived enemies could begin. “This is a guy for whom political revenge is pretty front and center,” says Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die.” “He’s going to come in and use the state to go after his enemies. He has a long list of grievances against people. … He’s going to come in like an authoritarian autocrat on steroids.”
Loyalists would lead other departments as well. While in office, Trump futilely tweeted at the Federal Reserve, seeking a monetary policy that would benefit him politically, and compared Chairman Jerome Powell to an “enemy” like China’s Xi Jinping. Powell’s term is up in 2026. If Trump could get a loyalist through the Senate, interest rates could be manipulated to juice the economy ahead of elections, says Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama, author of “The End of History and the Last Man” and, most recently, “Liberalism and Its Discontents.” Meanwhile, a politicized Bureau of Labor Statistics could lead tomonthly jobs reports suddenly becoming suspect. Or how about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention? Says Fukuyama: “Do you want people who believe in hydroxychloroquine making these decisions?”
The BLS’ job numbers are already highly suspect. So are the government’s inflation numbers, which underreport actual inflation for obvious political reasons.
He governs without Senate advice and consent.
Democrats hope to retain control of the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. But even if they do, a Trump victory in 2024 presupposes that he will have strong coattails to sweep in down-ballot candidates — and a Trumpified Senate could reasonably be expected to approve his nominees for top jobs in his administration.
What if, however, a few Republicans balk at nominees who are just too beyond the pale? Or what if the Democrats hold a majority? Not a problem. By the end of his first term, Trump had mastered the art of governing without the advice and consent of the Senate. In part he was forced to do so by Democratic obstruction and by the terrible dysfunction of the appointments process — an already damaged corner of our democracy. But Trump, more than any other president in memory, relied on “acting” Cabinet secretaries and unconfirmed agency chiefs who wielded delegated authority. “I sort of like ‘acting,’ ” Trump told reporters in 2019. “It gives me more flexibility.”
It can also create chaos. In the last year of Trump’s term, the Government Accountability Office found that his acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and the acting DHS deputy were serving unlawfully, calling into question the legitimacy of their policy decisions. But there’s little to stop a president willing to skirt the rules and run out the clock on his term. It would take both houses of Congress to stand up to him, perhaps wielding the power of the purse as a cudgel, says Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group focused on effective government and smooth presidential transitions. And what if a gridlocked Congress failed to check an out-of-control chief executive? Stier told me: “If the president decides they’re going to install a secretary of defense that isn’t actually confirmed, and Congress isn’t going to try to respond with their powers and try to stop that, I think the reality is that there’s not much that you can do.”
He creates a MAGA civil service
Installing loyalists at the top of government won’t be enough. As for populating the rank and file with those who echo the former president’s slogan of Make America Great Again, Trump tipped his hand near the end of his term, when he signed an executive order designed to strip as many as tens of thousands of federal employees of their civil service protections. The order created a new category of employees, dubbed Schedule F, targeting those whose jobs arguably include a degree of policymaking. Top officials would be able to fire them almostat will. President Biden rescinded the order shortly after he was inaugurated. If Trump were reelected, he’d reinstate the policy, Axios reported in July.
“They are using the language of good government to justify this, saying that this is the only way that you can discipline poorly performing workers,” Fukuyama says. “But obviously their real intention is to basically politicize the whole civil service. … Because Trump personalizes everything to such an extent, he’s going to be super looking out for revenge and therefore going after, for example, anybody that denied that he won the 2020 election. And this is going to go down to a really low, granular level of American government.”
The approach would restore a patronage system that hasn’t existed in the United States since reforms were enacted in the late 19th century, says Stier. “It is fundamentally this notion that the president should be able to decide, not on the basis of merit, but on the basis of political or personal interest, a larger segment of the workforce,” he says.
The country already has far more politically appointed civil servants — some 4,000 — than most, or all, liberal democracies, Stier explains. We need fewer consigned to that status, not more,he says. As an example of the potential impact, Stier notes that Trump’s Office of Management and Budget reportedly identified nearly 90 percent of its employees as fitting into the new category. The OMB is the nerve center of the government, making vital decisions on budgets and regulations for all the agencies, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Internal Revenue Service to the Defense Department to the intelligence community. Political actors from OMB could reach into all the scattered engine rooms of democracy; other corners of the government could undergo similar transformations. (A Democratic bill to block initiatives like Schedule F is currently before the Senate. But even if it passes, it could always be repealed.)
Rollins, of the America First Policy Institute, rejects the charge that a measure such as Schedule F would harm government. “It’s not really about us-versus-them, or ‘they’re the bad guys in the federal government and we’re the good guys going to put in some draconian new measures that allow us to come in and clear everybody out,’ ” she says. “But what I do believe we have to put in place is a system where those who agree with the agenda of more freedom and less government have people working in those positions that also align and agree with that. It’s okay if you don’t, but maybe you should not necessarily be part of a policymaking process.”
Fukuyama maintains it would mark the death knell of expertise in the U.S. government. “It’s ridiculous when you can’t run a modern government without expertise,” he says, “and they want to try to undo that system because of these right-wing ideas about the ‘deep state’ and the need to root it out.”
This is different in what fashion from what Democrats do when they take the White House? How many Republicans or conservatives are now working for Biden? How many worked for Barack Obama? How many global warming skeptics or believers in Second Amendment rights get federal paychecks?
Phase 2: Trump deploys the military aggressively at home, while retreating abroad.
Once Trump has centralized power through cadres of vetted loyalists across government, what will he do with it? As The Post has previously chronicled, he’s already told us, in speeches over the past several months, some of his proposals if he decides to run: Execute drug dealers. Move homeless people to tent cities. Eliminate the Education Department. Restrict voting to one day using paper ballots. But there could be much more — including profound shifts in military and foreign policy.
He uses the military to promote his own political power.
After Trump led Secretary of Defense Esper, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley and other officials across Lafayette Square for a photo op in June 2020 amid racial justice protests, Milley apologized to the public for participating in a staged politicized event, enraging Trump. In a second term, such cautionary voices will be fewer, says Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University and a leading expert on civilian-military relations.
“President Trump and his team of loyalists … are going to seek to magnify the president’s already extraordinary power in this area and remove the safeguards … sometimes mockingly called the ‘adults in the room.’ ” Feaver predicts. “Those safeguards don’t prevent the president from doing what he wants to do. They slow the system down from responding to the whim that the president expresses and make sure the president has heard all sides and is willing to own the consequences.”
Some of the ramifications would be small: During a Trump presidency, for instance, expect to see armored troop carriers, soldiers with flashing bayonets and enormous missile launchers stream down Pennsylvania Avenue on Veterans Day as Trump finally gets amilitary parade. He yearned for one during his first term but was talked out of it by advisers and military officials. It’s “the kind of thing that would probably happen,” Feaver told me.
More substantively, Trump — taking up items listed in an aide’s memo near the end of his term on why he should fire Esper — couldrestore Confederate symbols to military bases, reinstitute an effective ban on transgender people serving, and dismantle ongoing diversity and inclusion efforts that his Senate allies already lampoon as “woke.” “These would be a series of dumb, dumb moves done for political stunts and Twitter troll point-scoring rather than because this is a sincere effort to improve national security,” Feaver says.
A dramatic and potentially deadly breach with tradition could come if widespread street protests erupt against Trump and his policies, or if disputes over future elections turn violent. When the murder of George Floyd sparked demonstrations for racial justice in 2020, Trump wanted to call in federal troops. Esper and other national security officials opposed the move and Trump never gave the order. But in a second term with a team of loyalists, who would tell Trump no? “This time Trump’s got a hack Defense Department and moves to repress,” says Levitsky, the Harvard professor. “We know that repression of protest very often triggers the escalation of protests; it could get very ugly, very quickly, under Trump.”
In such a scenario, the response of other elements of the federal government and federal law enforcement could be unpredictable. “What that order does is that it fractures the American federal government, because you give an order like that to fire on American civilians and then maybe some agencies will pick it up and some won’t,” says Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale University who writes about freedom and tyranny. “There’s a very real possibility that giving an order like that leads not to protest being put down, but it leads to some Americans in uniform firing on other Americans in uniform, with the people on both sides being convinced that they are doing the lawful and correct thing.”
Inappropriately using the military? Does the Post mean like …
American global leadership is finished — much to Putin’s delight.
As for theuse of military power abroad, Trump mostly favored withdrawals during his term (though he did authorize a drone strike to kill a key Iranian commander in Iraq in 2020 and, according to the Associated Press, considered an invasion of Venezuela in 2017). Trump wanted to pull U.S. troops out of South Korea, Germany and Somalia, but critics warned that those moves would be devastating to global security and alliances. A second term might see them come to pass, Feaver says: “There’s a higher likelihood that the president would take risky action, but they would be risky actions of retreat, or abandonment of allies … rather than invasions of countries, although downstream they could result in that.”
“One might argue that’s the starting point,” the former senior Pentagon official told me. “Withdraw all U.S. forces and diplomats from Africa, withdraw all U.S. forces from Germany. … And depending on his views of Putin and the conflict in Ukraine, he might just stop the flow of arms, ammunition and material to Kyiv.”
If in 2025 Ukraine still depends on American aid for survival, halting it would hand Vladimir Putin the victory that he was denied in 2022. Recent work to restore America’s leadership and ability to coordinate allies against rogue actors would be undone. “You’ll see a Putin summit,” predicts Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who worked in the State Department for Republican and Democratic secretaries of state. NATO would be undermined if not abandoned. “Trump’s election,” says Wilentz, the Princeton historian, “means the end of the Western alliance.”
American foreign policy would not only be upended vis-a-vis Russia and NATO. “The overriding interest in the Gulf isn’t going to have anything to do with national security,” Miller says. “It’s going to have to do with the security of the Trump Organization.”
Beyond an issue-by-issue restoration of Trump’s isolationist version of an “America First” foreign policy, Miller foresees a ruinous blow to the country’s stature in the eyes of friends and foes. “The Europeans understand that the bloom is off the rose on our capacity to tell and lecture others about what freedom and democracy mean. But never before have they looked into a window where the basic concept of America, the stability of our political system … has been now replaced with one party essentially no longer being willing to respect norms and institutions that are essential to good governance. … Another four years of Donald Trump, and what that could do to faith in government, our institutions, our political stability and our values, would fundamentally open … a more permanent set of questions about America. What does this country stand for now? Is it so deeply divided and polarized that it can’t create a coherent image to the world?”
Intelligence work is harmed.
Up the Potomac River from the Pentagon, at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., a Trump loyalist ensconced in the director’s chair could damage intelligence efforts at the most basic levels, retired Gen. Michael Hayden, who served as CIA director under President George W. Bush, told me over lunch at a diner. “Seasoned people will leave,” he said.
Worse, key allies may be loath to share top secrets. Hayden recalled being able to hop on the phone with spy chiefs around the world to supplement the intelligence-sharing that happens through other channels. But after seeing how Trump handled top secrets at Mar-a-Lago, “Do you want to say something secret to the Americans or not?” Hayden said. “If Trump is in power again, after four years, many of those people won’t ever trust us again.”
In spy work, as in so many professions essential to democracy, respect for facts and the objective search for truth are vital, Hayden added. He said Trump’s reelection would be another sign the country is “spiraling down” into a “post-truth” era.
I wonder what the Post thinks should be done if a majority of Americans don’t want the kind of military adventurism that we’ve had for decades.
Phase 3: Political violence and democratic collapse? It’s possible.
Trump did not cause the fissures slowly pulling the country apart. He’s a symptom — but he’s also an accelerant, one whose return to the White House could provoke the final breakdown. “Trump has been able to add to the narrative that if democracy doesn’t deliver what I want, then it must be a flaw in the democracy,” says Nicole Bibbins Sedaca, executive vice president of Freedom House, a nonpartisan democratic advocacy and research group, which has recorded a decade-long decline in political and civil rights in the United States that accelerated during Trump’s term, putting us on par with Romania and Panama.
Ideological, racial and ethnic tensions ramp up.
America is already gripped by an unprecedented level of what political scientists call “pernicious polarization” — stoked and exploited by Trump — and a second Trump term could make it dangerously worse, says Jennifer McCoy, a political science professor at Georgia State University who co-authored a study of the phenomenon for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. No other established democracy since at least 1950 has been so polarized for so long. In nearly half of the dozens of countries McCoy studied, the next step after pernicious polarization was either “electoral autocracy” — where votes are cast but don’t necessarily confer power — or outright “democratic collapse.” “It’s extremely worrisome; we’re in uncharted territory,” McCoy told me. “If Trump does come back, I think it would severely deepen the crisis that we face.”
Racism, including violent racism, is likely to increase.
“The most immediate concern of Trump returning to the presidency is it would provide the greatest domestic terrorist threat of our time — violent white supremacist organizations — the ability to rebuild and spread and engage in even more violence and terror,” says Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University and author of “How to Be an Antiracist.” At the same time, “I don’t think the people who are opposed to what Trump would try to build would just go lightly into the night. The ideological collision, potentially violent collision, political collision would just be unlike anything we’ve seen since the Reconstruction era.”
Trump would almost certainly return to the issue that first built his following in the GOP and still animates the party: harsh measures to counter illegal immigration. “America will not be known as the place of the Statue of Liberty but rather as the place where there’s a big wall at the border,” says Vanessa Cárdenas, deputy director of America’s Voice, an immigrant advocacy group. She predicts he’ll find another domestic use for the military: deployment to the border with Mexico. Dehumanizing rhetoric and conspiracy theories about White people losing their status will lead to more mass shootings targeting immigrants, like the one in El Paso in 2019, she adds. “He will just continue to create these really hard moments, terrifying moments, for communities.”
The bonds that bind the Union loosen.
How Trump gets reelected matters. Is it a close but legitimate victory where he loses the popular vote but takes the electoral college, as he did in 2016? Or do the insurrectionist schemes that failed in 2020 — getting state officials to block certification and substitute slates of electors — work in 2024? Perhaps by 2024 such shenanigans will have been made legal in certain swing states. Ultimately, does the GOP-appointed Supreme Court majority or the gerrymandered House of Representatives pick the winner?
The intensity and immediacy of the backlash would vary depending on those circumstances, but serious damage to the democracy may be inevitable either way if Trump is on the ballot, says David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “We have a significant percentage of the American electorate right now who have been lied to about the integrity of our elections, who believe that elections … are rigged unless their candidate wins,” he told me. “Yet it’s nowhere close to 50 percent of America overall. But if Trump were to win a narrow victory again, I could see [election denial] ideas … infecting a larger percentage of the electorate. And if a large segment of a democracy’s electorate loses confidence in elections, that democracy probably is unsustainable.”
Differences between states could deepen.
“You’d be looking at states — Democratic states — which would be taking over Republican arguments about states’ rights and applying them in a different way to try to limit the reach of the federal government,” says Snyder, the Yale historian. “And then you’d also be seeing something which I think has already started to happen as a result of the overturning of Roe v. Wade: You’re going to see people moving. It might be a peaceful process at first. But I think you’re going to see populations sorting themselves out according to where people feel safe and at home, which will mean red states becoming more red and blue states becoming more blue. And that makes some kind of secession or breakup scenario in the medium term more likely.”
The message of prophets of democratic doom can sound over-the-top, but to dismiss it, experts say, would be naive.
Becker, who with journalist Major Garrett recently published “The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of the Big Lie,” says he can foresee increasingly nightmarish scenarios of democratic dominoes falling in the wake of a Trump reelection. “It would be very hard for him to keep the Union together as it is now,” Becker says. That doesn’t necessarily mean civil war; short of armed conflict, there are things “that could weaken the bonds between the states.” An example we’re already seeing is the governors of Texas and Florida sending migrants to D.C. and Massachusetts, based on “the idea that states are competitors rather than collaborators and partners,” Becker says. Actions like that to score points against blue states on any number of issues will multiply, and blue states will retaliate.
“If Trump won reelection in 2024, how long until California says, ‘Why are we sending [more in taxes] for every federal dollar we’re getting back?’ ” Becker says. “ ‘Why aren’t we requiring the federal government to pay for its use of the naval bases in San Diego and Camp Pendleton and other places?’ … There are a lot of people who would say, ‘Oh, that would never happen.’ [But] what we’ve seen in the last two years we thought would never happen.”
“What if the ties that bind us have become so weak that even that can’t result in the enforcement of federal court rulings?” Becker continues. “A democracy that must by definition rely upon the rule of law … is built upon an agreement that these paper or parchment documents have meaning and we will abide by them. … If someone like Trump … comes into office with a clear contempt for the rule of law, which I think time and again he has demonstrated, at what point does the rule of law evaporate? At what point does that agreement evaporate? At what point do the people who oppose him say, ‘Okay, are we going to fight him with one arm tied behind our back, even though he won’t do that?’ ”
The chances of civil war increase.
That’s when the potential for violent conflict is real. For those studying the implications of these trends, “there’s no scenario that worries us more than that the wheels just come off completely from the restraints against violence in the United States,” says Diamond, of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute. “My biggest concern is what citizens would do to citizens, and what citizens might do to legitimately constituted government authority.”
Some of the preconditions for civil war — a weakening democracy with hindrances to popular participation and divisions along identity lines — are brewing in the United States, says Barbara Walter, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego and the author of “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.”Those dynamics could intensify with Trump or a similar figure in the White House, she says. It wouldn’t be an 1860s-style civil war of states vs.states; if itdid come to pass, she says,“the type of war we’re going to see is an insurgency. … [Participants] are going to fight a type of guerrilla war, a siege of terror that’s going to be targeted very specifically at certain individuals and certain groups of people, all civilians.”
The election of Trump would not necessarily cause the kinds of people who stormed the Capitol to stand down, just because their goal of elevating their leader has been achieved four years later. “There’s a scenario by which [their aggression] accelerates because they’ve won and they’re emboldened and they have a president who, with a wink and a nod, encourages them not to allow ‘cheating’ and disloyalty at lower levels of authority,” Diamond says. The already commonplace threats and intimidation of public officials, civic volunteers and civil servants — election workers, teachers, health-care workers, librarians — could spread and strengthen, egged on by Trump, driving more from their jobs to be replaced by MAGA loyalists.
Activated rage would not be limited to Trump supporters.
A narrow or dubious Trump victory would inspire massive, potentially violent protests on the left. “Then the MAGA, violent, January 6th-style extremists would take that as the signal to rise up,” Diamond says.
“This is not going to be something that’s just done by one side; that’s why the risk of political violence is so severe,” Becker says. “Oftentimes we talk about the passage of [anti-democratic] laws and the taking of power as if that’s the finish line. It’s just the starting line of a really violent and vicious race.”
Snyder — whose books include “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century” and “The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America” — elaborates on what could ensue: “I think there’s a very important miscalculation going on, on the right, which is that ‘if anyone makes a ruckus, it’s going to be us,’ ” he says. “Folks on the right think that chaos is a button that they push. … Another assumption that the right makes which is erroneous is that they’re the only ones who have guns. … They may be carrying more weapons than the other side, but there are so many weapons in the United States, and there are plenty of people who are not on the right who have weapons, and there could be many more very quickly.”
The spiral of violence, response and counter-response would create the kind of disorder that Trump — no longer constrained by his secretary of defense and attorney general — could use to justify invoking the Insurrection Act. Then federal troops would flood the streets of American cities — and this time, not for a parade.
Could it happen here? Would it be that bad? The message of prophets of democratic doom can sound over-the-top— “crackpot, practically,” acknowledges Wilentz, the Princeton historian. But to dismiss it, they say, would be naive — and they urge vigilance and civic engagement to prevent the nightmare from coming true.
A spokesman for Trump did not return my emails seeking the former president’s reaction to claims that his reelection could wreck democracy. A few days after Biden’s recent democracy speech in Philadelphia — in which the current president said, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic”
Trump responded at arally: “As you know, this week, Joe Biden came to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to give the most vicious, hateful and divisive speech ever delivered by an American president, vilifying 75 million citizens … as threats to democracy and as enemies of the state. … He’s an enemy of the state, you want to know the truth. … We are the ones trying to save our democracy.”
After four more years of nihilistic energy like that, the experience of being American could well have been transformed into something unrecognizable. “If Trump wins, I don’t imagine some kind of normal inauguration in ’29,” Snyder says. “If we want a normal inauguration in ’29, we need one in ’25 which involves somebody else.”
This is all entertaining reading but, again, fiction. The same forces that prevented Trump from being reelected in 2020, legitimately or not, will ensure he doesn’t get (re)elected in 2024. And note that no one quoted here grasps that second-term Trump would be an instant lame duck on Jan. 20, 2025, just like Biden would if Americans stupidly reelect him.
But if Trump represents such a clear and present danger, then everyone quoted in this story, the Post and everyone else in the other liberal mainstream media should make damn sure a Republican not named Trump is elected president in 2024. Biden is the Mount Vesuvius of presidential incompetence who believes the 75 million Americans who voted for Trump are his enemy. That is as much a threat to democracy as Democrats’ and liberals’ fevered dreams of what Trump might do back in the White House.
Jim Geraghty wrote this Tuesday:
There are some little signs that the “red wave” of this election may be picking up speed.
In one of those “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills” moments, I continue to notice that the president and vice president are nowhere near the campaign trail with other Democratic candidates most days as the midterm campaign season approaches the final stretch — and almost all of Washington is acting like this is perfectly normal.
Today, President Biden — whose job-approval rating is around 42 percent — will be “participating in a virtual reception for Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester” this evening. Blunt Rochester represents Delaware’s at-large district in the U.S. House of Representatives. Delaware scores a D+6 on the Cook Partisan Voting Index. Blunt Rochester won with 56 percent of the vote in 2016, 64 percent of the vote in 2018, and 57 percent of the vote in 2020. In her last fundraising update, Blunt Rochester had raised more than $2.1 million; her GOP rival, Lee Murphy, had raised a bit more than $288,000.
In other words, with 27 days until Election Day, the president is appearing at a virtual event for a near-lock Democratic candidate in his home state, where the incumbent already enjoys a 7–1 fundraising advantage.
Here’s the public schedule for Vice President Kamala Harris for today: “At 3:00 p.m. eastern, the Vice President will ceremonially swear-in Travis LeBlanc to be a member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. This ceremony in the Vice President’s Ceremonial Office will be pooled press.” Harris’s current approval rating is 37.6 percent.
Yesterday, Harris attended a DNC fundraiser in Princeton, N.J., and taped an appearance on Seth Meyers’s late-night television program. On Saturday, she traveled to Austin to give the keynote address at the Texas Democratic Party’s Johnson-Jordan Reception fundraiser. (The Texas Tribute noted that, “One topic noticeably absent from her visit was immigration.”) Texas Democratic Party chairman Gilberto Hinojosa boasted that, “[Harris’] trip shows that the nation’s eyes truly are upon Texas as we head into the midterm elections — and, critically, that from Beto’s race, to Mike’s and Rochelle’s races, to races up and down the ballot, Texas is a winnable state.”
Alas, gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke could not rearrange his schedule to meet with the vice president while she was in his state, with the election a month away. He did show up and stay for an entire Dixie Chicks concert at The Woodlands Saturday night.
Tomorrow, President Biden travels to Colorado to designate Camp Hale an official national monument, and Colorado senator Michael Bennet, currently comfortably leading in his reelection bid, is expected to join the president for the event. I guess if you’re an incumbent who’s ahead by about seven points, it is safe to appear with Biden.
You notice that, at least so far, Biden and Harris are not appearing alongside incumbents such as Mark Kelly in Arizona, Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, and Raphael Warnock in Georgia. They’re not doing joint events with Tim Ryan in Ohio, or John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, or Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin. If Democrats thought Biden or Harris would do some good in those races, they would be there. (Meanwhile, Barack Obama is also limiting the number of campaign events he does this fall.)
Speaking of Tim Ryan, NBC News recently noticed that the Ohio Democrat is attempting to win his Senate race more or less “all by his lonesome,” with exceptionally little help from Democratic committees and allied groups:
Through Monday, Republicans had spent or reserved at least $37.9 million worth of advertising on the general election, according to AdImpact, an ad tracking firm. Only $3.7 million of that had come directly from Vance’s campaign, with another $1.6 million split between the campaign and the National Republican Senatorial Committee through coordinated advertising.
On the Democratic side, Ryan’s campaign had accounted for $24 million of the more than $29 million spent or reserved through Election Day and splitting another $835,000 with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Other outside Democratic groups had committed only $4.5 million to the race — about 14% of what the GOP groups are spending.
Polls have been fairly consistent in showing Republican candidate J. D. Vance with a lead, but it’s a small one. American Greatness — a group largely attuned with Vance’s philosophy — commissioned a poll and found the Republican Senate candidate ahead of Ryan by two percentage points. Meanwhile, the same survey found the allegedly boring, milquetoast GOP governor Mike DeWine ahead by 22 points. That is not a typo; the poll found a 20-point split between the performances of the GOP senatorial and gubernatorial nominees.
Democrats can read polls, too, and for whatever reason, they don’t see Ryan as a wise investment of limited resources this late in the campaign. If Democrats don’t think they can spare a couple million for a guy who’s only down by a few points in a key Senate race, they must be really worried about some other races.
Also notice that you don’t hear nearly as much Democratic excitement about Mandela Barnes’s bid in Wisconsin anymore, and don’t sleep on the governor’s race in that state either. Over in Nevada, Senate GOP candidate Adam Laxalt has very quietly built a consistent lead over Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto, and that state’s governor’s race is another one that has slowly shifted away from the Democrats, with Democratic governor Steve Sisolak, who once enjoyed a steady lead, now either tied with or narrowly ahead of Republican Joe Lombardo.
You don’t hear as much Democratic buzz about Cheri Beasley pulling off an upset in North Carolina’s Senate race, either. Republican Ted Budd rarely leads by much, but he hasn’t trailed in an independent poll since June; one poll by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling had Beasley up by one point in late August.
Wisconsin, Nevada, North Carolina — none of these Senate races look like GOP landslides, but none of them look like easy pickup opportunities for Democrats, either. And if Democrats are forced to prioritize to the point where they’re skimping on a once-promising prospect such as Tim Ryan, they probably can’t afford to prioritize these Senate races, either.
Meanwhile, over in the battle for control of the U.S. House of Representatives, there’s a poll showing a Republican leading a race in Rhode Island, which is something you almost never see:
A new poll has found Republican Allan Fung with a lead outside the margin of error for the first time in the race for Rhode Island’s 2nd Congressional District, buoying GOP hopes of picking up a the blue-state seat next month.
The new Boston Globe/Suffolk University survey of 422 likely voters in the 2nd District finds Fung at 45 percent and Democrat Seth Magaziner at 37 percent, with 13 percent undecided and 5 percent backing independent William Gilbert, who will appear on the ballot as “Moderate.”
The 8-point lead for Fung in the new survey confirms the findings of last week’s 12 News/Roger Williams University poll, which showed Fung leading Magaziner by a similar margin of 6 points. The results have increased the alarm among Democrats that they could lose a seat they’ve held for years, due to the retirement of 11-term incumbent Jim Langevin.
Finally, I feel like a lot of Democrat-aligned media voices are sort of sleepwalking into the usual midterm drubbing. Five days ago, CNN asked, “Could Republicans lose a Senate race in deep-red Utah?” Every time I make even the briefest reference to the Mike Lee–Evan McMullin Senate race in Utah, some enthusiastic McMullin supporter on Twitter crashes through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man and insists that McMullin is going to win. Lee’s lead isn’t as big as you might expect, but he’s led every poll. Every poll!
Joe Biden’s job-approval rating in Utah is 27 percent, according to the Civiqs polling firm. You think that’s the kind of environment where a two-term incumbent Republican loses?
Washington Post columnist Lizette Alvarez writes that Val Demings is ‘a law-and-order Democrat [who] could disrupt . . . reelection.’ But the only poll Demings has led this cycle was a poll of registered voters done back in early August. Biden’s approval rating in Florida is 37 percent. Ron DeSantis is on pace to crush Charlie Crist in the state’s governor’s race. None of those are factors that point to a big upset win for Demings.
When the now-traditional midterm wave hits the Democrats, why does it always seem worse than expected? Probably because so many media voices spend October telling Democrats that it won’t be that bad.
We begin with an entry from the It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time Dept.: Today in 1956, Chrysler Corp. launched its 1957 car lineup with a new option: a record player. The record player didn’t play albums or 45s, however; it played only seven-inch discs at 16⅔ rpm. Chrysler sold them until 1961.
Today in 1957, Little Richard was on an Australian tour when he publicly renounced rock and roll and embraced religion and announced he was going to record Gospel music from now on. The conversion was the result of his praying during a flight when one of the plane’s engines caught fire.
Little Richard returned to rock and roll five years later.
The number one song today in 1963:
The number one song today in 1975 (and I remember when it was number one) was credited to Neil Sedaka, with a big assist to Elton John, making it arguably Sedaka’s most rock-like song even with flutes:
The number one album today in 1980 was the Police’s “Zenyattà Mondatta”:
We don’t know everything that the week ahead holds, but on Thursday, the U.S. Department of Labor will release the latest numbers in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), giving us a look at the cost of inflation in the month of September. In August, the CPI was 8.3 percent, after being 8.5 percent in July and 9.1 percent in June. The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland is expecting the inflation rate to be around 8 percent; Kiplinger’s expects it to remain around 8 percent until the end of the year. As usual, we don’t know what the exact figure will be, but we know the number isn’t likely to be particularly good news.
A Monmouth University poll released last week found that 82 percent of respondents consider inflation to be either an “extremely important” or “very important” issue, and just 30 percent approve of how President Biden is handling the issue. The partisan breakdown is about what you would expect:
About 8 in 10 Republicans put inflation, crime, and immigration at the top of their issue list. A similar number of Democrats prioritize climate change, racial inequality, elections and voting, gun control, and abortion, with about 3 in 4 also giving emphasis to jobs and inflation. However, the only issue which more than 3 in 4 independents place high importance on is inflation. Additionally, independents are more concerned about overall economic issues along with crime and immigration than they are by other issues.
In other words, on Thursday morning, we will get new numbers that will spur a news cycle heavily focused upon inflation, probably the last one before Election Day. October’s CPI numbers are released November 10 — two days after Election Day. (Also, it is possible that races in Georgia and Louisiana will go to runoffs.)
When President Biden is pushed on the issue of inflation, he usually crumbles; in his recent 60 Minutes interview, he insisted that, “Inflation hasn’t spiked. It has just barely — it’s been basically even.” Let’s keep in mind though, that inflation remaining “basically even” near the worst rate in 40 years is a terrible place to be.
Even when he’s not speaking off the cuff, Biden doesn’t have much of a better argument. Everyone focused upon his silly opening line from Friday, “Let me start off with two words: Made in America.” But Biden’s meandering remarks — which began with him saying that his father’s regret was that he never went to college — contended that the two reasons inflation is so high is because families must pay so much for insulin and because corporate taxes are too low. U.S. federal corporate tax revenue came in at a record high of $372 billion in fiscal year 2021. As the Tax Foundation dryly observed:
This year’s robust corporate tax collections calls into question efforts by the administration and congressional Democrats to increase the corporate tax rate and raise other corporate taxes based on claims of relatively low tax collections following the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) in 2017. In fact, corporate tax collections this year are about 25 percent higher than the $297 billion collected in 2017, prior to passage of TCJA. Likewise, as a share of GDP, corporate tax collections are higher this year (1.63 percent) than in 2017 (1.52 percent).
Biden’s knee-jerk instinct is to argue that the reason inflation is high is because taxes are too low, which is nonsensical, because taxes were low for years before the inflation rate spiked.
I suspect that people’s perceptions of inflation are driven by two regular purchases: groceries and gasoline. Even when gas prices were declining from their mid June record high, American consumers continued to feel pain at the checkout counter:
Some sobering news for US shoppers: There’s little relief in sight on grocery store bills.
Grocery prices climbed 13.5 percent in August from the year before, the highest annual increase since March 1979, according to government data.
Executives at large food manufacturers and analysts expect inflation to hover around this level for the rest of 2022.
Next year, the rate of food inflation is expected to moderate — but that doesn’t mean prices are going to drop. Once prices hit a certain level, they tend to stay there or go up, but rarely down.
Of all the goods that consumers buy regularly, gas prices are the ones that are likely the easiest to track. Gas prices are advertised on the big signs of gas stations on just about every major road and highway in America, and people generally remember what the price was last week and last month, and how much they usually pay when filling up their tank. The price of eggs has jumped dramatically — as have the prices of white flour, chicken breasts, milk, and potatoes — but people don’t see those prices on big signs as they drive to work every weekday.
The national average price for a gallon of regular unleaded gas is up to $3.91, an increase of 19 cents in the past month. The usual capacity of a U.S. car’s gas tank is 13 to 16 gallons, so this week, lots of Americans will notice that, “Hey, that’s about $2 or $3 dollars higher than I paid last month.” What should really worry the Biden administration is the psychological threshold of $4 a gallon; I’d contend that seeing the $4 on the big sign is what gets people saying, “Wow, gas is really expensive again.” As of this morning, 13 states have statewide averages above $4 a gallon, and Wisconsin ($3.98), Ohio ($3.92) and Pennsylvania ($3.88) are knocking at that door. Say, are any big statewide races currently occurring in those places?
(At a statewide average of $6.33, California is still close to its all-time record of $6.43 per gallon. This is mostly due to the state-specific tax and regulatory and refinery issues I discussed last week.)
The CPI numbers will be released Thursday morning; that evening, Wisconsin Republican senator Ron Johnson and his Democratic challenger Mandela Barnes will meet for their second debate. This coming Friday night is the only scheduled debate between Georgia Democratic senator Raphael Warnock and his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker — the same night as a debate between Wisconsin Democratic governor Tony Evers and Republican challenger Tim Michels. The following Monday, Utah GOP senator Mike Lee and his “unaffiliated” but de facto Democratic challenger Evan McMullin will debate. The inflation rate and gas prices will likely be hot topics in all those debates.
Also, if you’re the kind of suspicious mind who thinks that Democratic campaigns or the White House save up “October surprises” to release into the news cycle when they need to distract from bad news . . . the end of this week would likely be a prime occasion to drop some premium opposition-research dirt.
According to professor Michael McDonald, who collects the early vote statistics from all the states, as of yesterday, more than 662,000 Americans have already voted in the midterm elections.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 