Good morning folks. Here’s what’s coming.
David, Jay and I occasionally get together to record a podcast, something we should do more of (readers, should we do more of them?). We are planning to get together tomorrow morning. The topic, of course, is the New Hampshire primary. Our Racketeer on the ground in NH, Jay, will provide some color commentary. I think, if I can arrange it, we’ll review some of the best and worst political ads in the tsunami of media drowning Granite Staters right now—and this is the first David or Jay are hearing about it.
As DJT tweeted a little over four years ago, it “will be wild!”
Speaking of wild, eight years ago, Jay and I participated in Decision Desk HQ’s first exit poll in its coverage of the NH primary. Volunteers were flying in from all over to help Brandon Finnegan pull this off, and a blizzard was bearing down on New England. I remember the conference call we had in the airport as flights began to get cancelled. This is when Jay assumed the mantle of leadership.
“If you’re not on a plane to Manchester in the next couple of hours, you’re not going to get here.” Most of the crew was flying into Boston’s Logan airport, and those flights were showing “delayed” which would decay into “cancelled” very soon. Everyone immediately hung up and changed their flights to Manchester, and most made it in. Good call, Jay!
I wish I could be up there again to see how the exit polls look. The only thing we know for sure is that we will all know soon. As expectations for Nikki Haley begin to ramp up (read the Boston Globe turning the screws), I hope she can pull it off. If she can’t, I fear Trump is going to dance and urinate on her grave.
Speaking of Donald J. Trump; the media’s evil fascination with him is just awful. The more he does anti-social, terrible things, the more earned media (i.e. “free”) he gets. Like this one, “Muttered Insults, Stern Warnings: Inside Trump’s Second Defamation Trial” from the New York Times. They cannot learn that Trump cannot be rewarded for being terrible, because if they don’t cover it, they fear someone else will and get those valuable advertiser eyeballs. I don’t know a single person who would cancel their NYT subscription because there wasn’t enough Trump. The media is just addicted, and all this does is help him.
Then there’s the blamers who analyze why Trump commands 50% of the Republican Party, and effectively has become the establishment, while remaining able to position himself as an outsider working against the thing he in fact, is.
For instance, David French, who I respect immensely, posted on Threads, “I refuse to blame prosecutors for Trump's popularity with the GOP. Enforcing the rule of law is their job. I blame GOP voters for supporting a profoundly corrupt man.”
Oh, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
I will start with prosecutors. Yes, I blame them, because there are certain prosecutors who have been fixated on convicting Donald Trump since before the guy was elected. Yes, it’s their job to secure convictions, but there’s other criminals in America who need to be jailed. It’s no defense to say “it’s my job” when they can’t deny their own politics, ambition, and bias has driven them into some box canyons with Trump.
When you’re the Chief of Hammers, you get to pick the nails.
This applies to any professional or powerful group who “have jobs” to do a particular thing. The Department of Health and Human Services is a leviathan with immense power, rivaling Disney in its footprint. The agency where Anthony Fauci ruled for 40 years, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, isn’t even on the top line of the HHS org chart, but it’s one of those tip-of-the-spear agencies like the Centers for Disease Control. These people have trained for decades for a global pandemic like the ones seen in movies. When COVID-19 came along, they went into “it’s my turn!” mode and Donald J. Trump handed them the keys to the hammer arsenal. We were the nails.
All of those professional relationships with researchers around the world, with their little clubby mailing lists and Slack chats, university coffee klatches, and dinners with “science writers” at magazines and journals make a perfect stew for groupthink on what the public will “buy” to get those nails hammered in. If you take the bank security guard who’s been waiting for an armed robbery all his life, and put him in a movie-set version of a heist, the dude’s gonna go all John McClane. (“Now I have a machine gun. Ho ho ho.”)
If anyone let the State Department into the hammer closet, there wouldn’t be a Jew problem in Israel, because a good number of them are “from the River to the Sea” people. But hey, it’s their job to do diplomacy. They’re the experts. Career Foreign Service people. But someone’s got to keep them on a dog chain.
When you unchain the prosecutors to go after one man, whether he’s a guy who wants it, deserves it, and fully lives to welcome the hammers, like DJT, you get what the military calls a Charlie Foxtrot. You get overzealous prosecutors like Fani Willis, who all she needed to do was go after one man for the crime of election interference, yet she hired her lover and paid him nearly a million dollars from the DA budget to try for a RICO case on a dozen Trump sycophants.
Don’t they see that in the climb to the top of the “let’s get Trump!” hill, it’s Trump who is being elevated while they all duke it out? No, they’re blind hammers.
And what the electorate, the 50% who would die for Trump, sees is their guy exposing these hammers for what they are: faulty, ambitious, biased, political ass-kissers who have been unchained to go after everyone who is a nail (and everyone they decide to be a nail is a nail). The issue becomes not what Trump has done, but what the folks who are after him, or ordering us to wear masks after telling us not to buy masks, or keeping our kids out of school then pretending it’s not harming them—what those people are doing.
Moving on…in the stupid department, without much comment: Iran attacked its nuclear-armed neighbor, Pakistan, which then responded in kind. I thought it was kind of a rule to not attack your nuclear-armed neighbor when you, yourself, have no nuclear weapons. I’m not sure this is part of what Semafor is calling a “widening conflict” regarding Israel, because Israel has no part in it. But I guess war is like fire—it spreads.
I am not going to apologize for the rant because I needed to vent my spleen this morning. Blaming the voters for discovering what they know to be true—the expert class builds their thrones on the skulls of the proles—just because Trump is the one telling them this truth (him being a prime example of one who does it), is misplacing the blame. Yes, the voters are blame-worthy, but so are the experts.
Anyway, please watch for our podcast coming out probably tomorrow evening after I get done editing it. It’s worth a nice Friday night listen over a glass of fine wine (not from a box) or a Saturday morning listen over coffee.
And in case I don’t tell you enough, I have nothing but love and appreciation for you,, the best readers on Substack. And I mean that, every word.
I hope you saved some of that fire from your rant for the podcast. :-)