Cave Newton

[Cave Newton @CaveNewton]

@AntiTrumpCanada It is strange how he wakes up when she pats her stomach. Wasn't there another video like this with a curiously placed staffer making a gesture coinciding with him jolting awake?

[Pedro L. Gonzalez @emeriticus]

All that noise about Graham Platner from self-righteous Trump supporters, all that riding around on moral high horses—only for them to go silent when Trump personally intervenes to protect an alleged wife beater, an alleged child abuser. His team did this with Andrew Tate, too. To say the MAGA GOP cares about anything resembling virtue or family values is just so laughable, but that won’t stop them from doing it.

These people will look you in the eye and tell you about how they’re fighting to save our “civilization” from “barbarism” while ignoring or downplaying the barbaric behavior of people like Max Miller. I spent enough time in these spaces to know that they really believe it too. They don’t see a disconnect between being part of the party that defends abusers and predators and conceiving of themselves as standing athwart “decline,” “degeneracy,” terms they can’t properly define because doing so would indict them more than anyone else.

[Cave Newton @CaveNewton]

Think about how unbelievably messed up the media environment is that Trump is historically unpopular overall but the second most popular President within his own party. Maybe that improves post-Trump given all the tribalism baked in to his support.

[InteractivePolls @IAPolls2022]

PEW RESEARCH: Presidential approval in the summer before the midterms

🔴 Reagan: 42% (1982)
🔴 Reagan: 63% (1986)
🔵 Clinton: 45% (1994)
🔵 Clinton: 63% (1998)
🔴 G.W. Bush: 65% (2002)
🔴 G.W. Bush: 36% (2006)
🔵 Obama: 47% (2010)
🔵 Obama: 44% (2014)
🔴 Trump: 40% (2018)
🔵 Biden: 37% (2022)
🔴 Trump: 34% (2026)

https://t.co/KQOP8ObBTz

[Cave Newton @CaveNewton]

@Ohiocovid1 Potentially $100B a year in perpetuity for "administering" the Strait that was already open.

[Cave Newton @CaveNewton]

@CrossingUNStyle This term is about exposing the enemies (anyone criticizing Trump's corruption or megalomaniacal legacy projects) or something. Next term we'll finally get the good stuff.

[Cave Newton @CaveNewton]

@IAPolls2022 Now do a comparison of in-party approval against independent approval and rank by largest gaps to find the most out of touch parties.

[Cave Newton @CaveNewton]

@TheoThomo2005 @IAPolls2022 Choose Your Own Adventure Media.

[GBX @GBX_Global]

🚨 BREAKING:

Trump’s sons became partners in a Kazakh mining company.

The company received a $1.6 billion U.S. government contract shortly afterward!

Are we having fun, America?

[Cave Newton @CaveNewton]

@DarrenGill91487 @TheMaineWonk MAGA is a cult of delusion, ignorance, and loserdom.

[Cave Newton @CaveNewton]

@goinggodward I despise corruption, lies, incompetence, and megalomania.

[Justin Amash @justinamash]

One of the worst things about Trump is that he’s ushering in more corporate welfare, cronyism, and socialism while parading it under the banner of capitalism, so we end up with all the failings of those ideologies but with a generation of young people blaming the market economy.

[i/o @avidseries]

Bill Barr on Donald Trump: "If you believe in [Trump's] policies, he's the last person who could actually execute them and achieve them. He does not have the discipline, he does not have the ability for strategic thinking and linear thinking... It is a horror show when he's left to his own devices. And, and so, you may want his policies, but Trump will not deliver Trump policies. He will deliver chaos and, if anything, lead to a backlash that will set his policies much further back than they otherwise would be."

[Richard Hanania @RichardHanania]

Douthat, in his goodbye column, says that Trump has behaved in a corrupt and authoritarian manner, but you can rest assured because his second administration "has no great popularity, no legislative capacity, no policy legacy that a Democratic successor can’t easily roll back."

I think this misunderstands how norms fall apart. Compared to Trump, administrations used to face corruption scandals over relatively tiny amounts of money and accusations of a politicized justice system over trivial offenses.

You have Trump now openly selling pardons, doing crypto rug pulls, pulling in billions from all this, and directly telling his subordinates who to prosecute. None of this was thinkable before. Compare Hunter Biden to Don Jr and what Trump himself are doing, we can't even measure these things on the same scale.

Do future administrations go back to the previous levels of corruption? Or has Trump set new norms and redefined what we see as scandalous behavior in politicians?

We better hope Trump is unique in how much he can get away with. He certainly is to some extent, but I would bet it's going to be more difficult to punish all kinds of bad behavior among presidents in the future.

One populist administration threatens norms built up over generations.

This is why populism so often destroys democracy.

[Cave Newton @CaveNewton]

@mattforney Everything you said was retarded and begins with misunderstanding that this is one poll of South Carolinians.

[Cave Newton @CaveNewton]

@AmygatorRedux I think he used to be friends with Hunter back in the day.

[Cave Newton @CaveNewton]

@Golden_Phoenix But he has to both sides it. So, if Democrats have a crazy person running for governor of Wisconsin that matters as much as the sitting President who is totally worshipped by his party. Forget the crazy GOP nominees all over.

[Grace Cathedral Park @gracecthdralprk]

For everything bad you could say about American culture (and it could fill libraries), we used to have a very Protestant aversion to ostentatious displays of wealth and a very republican aversion to veneration of living leaders. The Trump era has virtually destroyed both of those

[Cave Newton @CaveNewton]

@andrewwdz @nytimes Iran is clearly very worried about more of the same bombings.

[The New York Times @nytimes]

Breaking News: Iran’s top security official said the Strait of Hormuz would not reopen until the U.S. met a sweeping list of demands, including withdraw the U.S. military from around Iran, pay war reparations and release frozen Iranian assets. https://t.co/D731AnzqFr

[Cave Newton @CaveNewton]

@gtconway3d They don't want to be kicked out of the club.