Annotated Edition

Mark Wilson/Getty Images, via Vox.

Annotated edition of the NBC interview with the president-elect. Nearly all of his response to the first question, "What do you plan to accomplish in your first 100 days?"

Well, we’re going to do something with the border, very strong, very powerful. 

But you won't tell us what?

That’ll be our first signal — first signal to America that we’re not playing games. 

Oh, sending a signal. Something with the border, and it's going to be a signal. To America.

We have people coming in by the millions, as you know, and a lot of people shouldn’t be here. Most of them shouldn’t be here.

It has not been anything like millions at the border since December 2023, and especially since Biden's executive order of last June.

And how do you know who should and shouldn't be here?  

But we have jails being emptied into our country. We have mental institutions from all over the world being emptied into our country. 

Nobody, including your own campaign staff, has ever been able to point to any evidence that there is any truth to this story—

Haute Diplomatie

 

Russia Pyotr Veliky missile cruiser makes port call in Tartus, Syria, 2023, via Countercurrents.

Let me get this straight? Trump dithers on about the situation in Syria and his concern is what's best for Russia?

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— Joyce White Vance (@joycewhitevance.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 8:31 AM

Here's the rest of it. It is ironic, of course, that he criticizes Obama for staying out of Syria and then calls for the same course of action. But his focus is on Russia. Not the US. Not the Syrian people. Russia.

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— Joyce White Vance (@joycewhitevance.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 8:33 AM

Couple of thoughts:

Obviously, Trump did not write this. The thinking is banal, but it's moderately complex and coherently designed toward a single main idea, as Vance notes, the question of how the Syria events will affect Russia. Completely different from Trump's "weave". Also not a subject to which our narcissist-in-chief is likely to devote that much consideration, with participants who aren't his own enemies—and while Russia might be considered one of his friends, he doesn't usually talk about his friends in this tone, as having made a mistake. He's usually "saying nice things" about his friends in return for their saying nice things about him, not speculating about them in this detached way.

The Last Postmortem

 

Screen Capture from Save Daddy Trump on Steam.

A popular postmortem sentiment is the idea that what happened in the US in this month's election is what has happened all over the place in developed democracies, in the wake of the inflation that accompanied the recovery from the Covid pandemic all over the world, when angered voters punished the ruling parties in a frustration with the way democracy is seen to be failing: 

“There’s an overall sense of frustration with political elites, viewing them as out of touch, that cuts across ideological lines,” said Richard Wike, director of global attitudes research at the Pew Research Center.

He noted that a Pew poll of 24 countries found that the appeal of democracy itself was slipping as voters reported increasing economic distress and a sense that no political faction truly represents them.

and even though inflation in the US wasn't nearly as bad as in some of those other countries, our voters just did the same thing.

I wanted to check that hypothesis out for the flood of big elections between 2021 and 2024, and found evidence for a much more nuanced picture: a bad time for a few ruling parties, but not so great either for Trumpies and like-minded individuals on the nationalist, anti-immigrant, authoritarian side of the right (loosely characterized as "fascist" below, sue me if you don't like it):