Politics

Question: Eight weeks out, with the forecasters moving races toward the Democrats and the president’s super PAC spending its first general-election dollars of the cycle, is the Senate majority within reach? Answer: The models call it a coin flip. Inside Elections moved four races toward the Democrats this week, Sabato’s Crystal Ball’s best guesses land on a 50-50 Senate, and the money is following the map: Trump’s MAGA Inc. made a $10 million buy in Texas, its first of the cycle. Democrats still need a net gain of four, and a 50-50 Senate belongs to Vance. The path runs through North Carolina, two coin flips in Ohio and Texas, and a bench of races from Maine to Alaska, with Kansas as the margin seat. ...

My name is Philip, and I have TDS. I have had it for years. I have it so badly that I read the news every morning, I check the polls, I have opinions about the federal funds rate, and I once wrote an entire essay about the legal record of the forty-seventh president. The symptoms are severe and, I am told, incurable. I am here to tell you that I do not want a cure. I am proud to have TDS, and I think you should be too. ...

The title of this essay is a statement of record, not of opinion. Donald J. Trump is a convicted felon. A jury of twelve New Yorkers found him guilty on all thirty-four counts of a felony indictment, and no court has reversed that verdict. He is also a man against whom two further federal indictments, one state indictment, and a series of civil judgments were brought, with outcomes ranging from dismissal to final judgment. The purpose of this essay is to set down that record precisely: what was charged, what was proven, what was dismissed, and what stands today. The record is long, and it is public. It deserves to be read whole. ...

Danger and uselessness are usually treated as opposites. A dangerous president is one who is too effective, too capable, too determined; a useless one is merely a disappointment, a man who fails without consequence. The alarming possibility, and the one the record now supports, is that the two are the same fact. The danger of Donald Trump is not that he is powerful. It is that he is powerful and incompetent, and the combination does not cancel out. It compounds. The incompetent exercise of vast power is how wars are started, economies are damaged, and institutions are broken. This essay sets down the evidence for both claims, because they are one claim: a president who cannot govern is not a harmless president. He is the most dangerous kind. ...

The year 2075 is forty-nine years away. That is the same distance as 1977 is from today, and it is worth pausing on what that means. A person born in 1977 has lived through the end of the Cold War, the rise of the internet, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the invention of the smartphone, the first decade of artificial intelligence, and a pandemic. Forty-nine years is a lifetime, and it is also the span in which the world’s population will grow by two billion people, the global temperature will rise past thresholds that have never been crossed in human history, and the political order that emerged after 1945 will either be repaired or replaced. This essay is an attempt to look at that year soberly, without panic and without comfort, and to set down the two paths that are actually available. They are not predictions. They are the two futures that the evidence says are possible, and the difference between them is being decided now. ...

Carl Sagan died in December 1996. He never saw a smartphone. He never saw social media. He never saw a large language model generate a confident lie on demand. He never saw a calendar year pass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above the pre-industrial level, because that year, 2024, was still twenty-eight years away. And yet the question of what he would say about today’s world is not idle curiosity. It is a way of asking what the evidence demands of us, and he spent his life teaching us how to ask exactly that question. He would recognize this moment. He spent thirty years warning that it was coming. The most useful thing we can do is listen to what he said, because he said it all before, and he said it with the evidence in his hand. ...

Ninety Days From Today Count it out on a calendar. Ninety days from this morning is December 2. Between here and there sit a Federal Reserve meeting on September 16, a midterm election on November 3, and another Fed meeting in early December. That is the window this article is about: one quarter of a year in which the world’s largest bond market has to price a war that shows no sign of ending. ...

Public corruption is conventionally discussed in moral terms: integrity, trust, the character of public life. Those concerns are real, and an earlier essay, Corruption at the Summit, addressed them on constitutional grounds. Corruption is, however, also an economic event, with a price, a transmission mechanism, and a payer. The payer is neither the official who accepts the favor nor the magnate who purchases it. The payer is everyone else. The argument of this essay is that public corruption functions as a tax that no legislature ever enacted: it misallocates capital, raises the cost of borrowing, diminishes the revenue the state can collect, and erodes the voluntary trust on which every modern economy depends. None of these effects requires an assumption that anyone has committed a crime. Much of the corruption that matters most is perfectly legal, and that is precisely what makes it expensive. ...

Ninety Days From Today This article is the companion to one I published this morning about the bond market’s next ninety days. Same calendar, same premise, different victim. Ninety days from this morning is December 2. Between here and there sit a Federal Reserve meeting on September 16, a midterm election on November 3, and another Fed meeting in early December. The bond article argued that the window prices a war that shows no sign of ending. This one asks what that window does to the stock market, and the honest answer is: something the index’s current price barely contemplates. ...

Sixty-one days from now, on November 3, Americans will vote in a midterm election: all 435 seats of the House of Representatives, 35 seats of the Senate, and thousands of state and local offices. Most of us will vote without ever asking a question the Constitution answers in surprising and incomplete ways: what does the document actually say about federal elections? The answer is less than most people assume, and more. The original Constitution never mentions a right to vote for president, and barely mentions elections at all. What it does contain is a carefully engineered division of power over election machinery, a method for choosing a president that has been amended four times, and a counting procedure whose ambiguities were tested on January 6, 2021 and rewritten by statute a year later. This article walks through the text, clause by clause, because sixty-one days before a midterm is a good time to know exactly what is written down and what is not. ...