In the Unlikely Event

5/27: Updated version at the Substack

I hate the hypercorrect "whom" in that headline: a headline is a truncated sentence, and surely the truncated question it's answering is "Who is the presidential candidate voters say they'll support?", not "Whom do voters say they'll support as a presidential candidate?"

It's something from the Other Nate (Cohn, at The Times) that I'm taking a personal interest in, because I've been asking somebody with the resources to do it for a long time: going in search of the unlikely voter. Except he doesn't know that's what he's doing.

That is, when he was looking into the factors that might be associated with voter preference for Biden, he found that people who were otherwise likely to vote for Biden—self-identified Democrats, people who voted for Biden in 2020, minority members, the relatively young—it was those who didn't vote at all in the 2022 midterms, who were more likely to express a preference for Trump or no preference at all:

For the Record: Critical Press Theory

Press room of the Chicago Criminal Courts Building as depicted in the original Broadway staging (by George S. Kaufman) of Ben Hecht's and Charles MacArthur's The Front Page, 1928, via Wikipedia.

Studies show that about 35% of people really do prefer, even long for, authoritarian style rule. How do we grapple with that?

— Rebecca Fachner (@rebecca_fachner) September 26, 2022

"pastors", maybe, or "vicars", something like that. And they wouldn't cost the community anything, members of the "congregation" could pay for it out of their own pockets. As long as they left the other 65% alone, this couldn't do any harm.

— Überwoke Sweepstakes (@Yastreblyansky) September 27, 2022

Meanwhile, the stupid argument about Ms. Haberman (now being roasted for failing to report in The Times that Trump had told her he had some presidential documents at Mar-a-Lago and saving it for her book instead) finally ended up going someplace interesting:

Encore Presentation: Embedding

Now we're beginning to see, thanks to Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon, that the awful decline in President Biden's approval numbers was caused neither by public indignation over inflation nor Fox News bogus preoccupation with the president's age, but mostly by our "liberal" media's insane rage over the withdrawal from Afghanistan, I felt like re-upping this post from when it was going on, trying to puzzle out what the journos were so outraged over:

2. There's a large foreign policy community -- especially journalists at places like NYT or WP who worship "objectivity" 99% of the time -- for whom Afghanistan is personal. They have human ties there, with no greater priority -- human nature, understandable -- than...

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) August 16, 2021

4. It's on the rest of us without personal ties to point out the obvious bigger picture: That a government that collapses in days without America propping them up wasn't worth $2.2 trillion and thousands of U.S. lives. Biden was right to leave but...

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) August 16, 2021

... but even Bunch has the same objection to "how" Biden left as all the embeds have: why did Biden bet that the Afghan government would be able to hold out for four weeks, giving us enough time to get all the journalists' friends to safety, along with the American business community and the Afghan employees of the military? Why didn't he realize it would collapse in a week and start moving everybody out earlier?

To which there's one obvious answer, if you give it a little thought: the moving-out process was going to be a trigger for the collapse, as the White House was warned—if we'd started three weeks earlier, it would have happened three weeks earlier, with the same results. Or 12 years earlier, no doubt.

What's Happening

Via @Accountabilabud.

Say, what's Mr. Bret Stephens up to these days? Just joining Donald Trump and Glenn Greenwald in a take about how smart President Putin is and how everything is going according to plan ("What If Putin Didn't Miscalculate?"):

Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).

Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.

Putin's just adopting the geopolitics of the Trump Doctrine: Wars are OK if you get to keep the oil. Thus proving that he's "smarter", as Trump would say, than Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Cheney. 

Of course Mr. Bret has already been proven fundamentally wrong, since as it turns out Russia is not withdrawing its forces from north and west at all, just lying, as usual.

So I've spent much of the day assembling what I was thinking of as more interesting arguments for why Stephens is wrong in his interpretation of what Putin is doing, and it immediately turns out he's wrong because Putin isn't doing that. The illustration above was meant to show how leaving the assaults in Kiev and Chernohiv in favor of a focus on the southeast wouldn't have gotten the Russians dominance over the energy reserves,  because that's not where the energy reserves are—if Russia is refocusing its efforts away from the northern part of the country between Kyiv and Sumy where they've been steadily losing ground, and to the east of the imaginary line from Kharkiv to Mariupol where they've been steadily gaining it, they're hardly adding anything to the oil and gas field they already control, in Crimea and the the two mini-republics; what remains of that enormous shale-gas field is in the Dniepr basin which Russians have scarcely approached (with a very big portion of it clear over the border in Belarus), and there's another huge oil and gas basin in the the very far west, in the foothills of the Carpathians, which Russians clearly won't go near. But then that's not what Putin is doing anyway, so what's the point?

Which is how things have been going for the blog in recent weeks, in case you're wondering why I haven't been posting much. Nearly everything I start turns boring as I'm writing it. Not only with respect to Ukraine but the various Trump investigations, and the criminality of Clarence Thomas, and so forth. Everything, really. My fascinating take turns into somebody's premature cliché. Anyway, sorry.

You Come Here, You Drink Trump

"Forty-Five" cocktail (Wyoming whiskey, Demerara, orange bitters, Diet Coke, garnished with "two American beef sliders"), $45, at 45 Wine and Whiskey, burgers not shown.

Shane Goldmacher and Eric Lipton at The New York Times seemingly giddy with pleasure at how enthusiastically The Former Guy is taking care of business:

For Mr. Trump, the monetization of his post-presidency represents a return to his roots. He expertly leveraged his celebrity as the host of “The Apprentice” and his image as a decisive businessman to build credibility when he first entered politics. Now, he is executing the same playbook, only in reverse: converting a political following that provided hundreds of millions of dollars in small campaign contributions into a base of consumers for all things branded Trump.

Right. Years ago he turned his imaginary skills as the manager of a long string of real estate and tchotchke-selling businesses, based not on success (all the businesses actually failed) but rather his performance as that character on a TV drama, into a successful campaign for the presidency of the United States. Now he's turning his imaginary skills as president (in fact he is by common consent of historians, political scientists, and most normal people the worst president we've ever had) into actual success selling tchotchkes and profiting from real estate.

Ain't Gonna Work on Maggie's Form No More

A Twitter friend sent me the following by DM yesterday evening, and I didn't notice it until later:

Does @maggieNYT’s latest change your opinion any?

My opinion of what? I assume she must have posted another obnoxious, defensive tweet, and it's so bad I'll really stop coming to her defense myself, like she's my girlfriend and the scales will fall from my eyes and I'll ask for my ring back.

Look, she's not my girlfriend. I've never met her and it's unlikely I ever will. If I saw her at the smoked fish counter at Barney Greengrass I would pretend, as I always do with celebrities, that I didn't recognize her. I don't want to know her. More important, I really need for people to start distinguishing between the profoundly stupid question, "Is X a Good Person or a Bad Person?" and the important question, "Is a thing that X is doing having a good or useful or pleasing impact or a bad or unhelpful or ugly impact? and what do we need to do about it?

For the Record: Good News for Joe Biden—Why That's Bad News for Joe Biden

Remember that Dana Milbank piece about how unfairly the press treats Biden as opposed to Trump at the beginning of December?

Even the extraordinary news that jobless claims had dropped to the lowest level in 52 years came with a qualifier: “BUT, BUT, BUT … don’t expect [the numbers] to immediately change Americans’ negative perceptions of the economy.”

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman taking it, as she seems to take most things, as a personal attack on her, had a pretty snippy subtweet response, to which I happened to respond myself:

Here’s a perfect example, Maggie pic.twitter.com/GYMTpW9TuW

— Rob Wagner 😷😷🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@wagner_rob) December 4, 2021

You haven't read it very well then. Sorry, I really value your work, but you should have found out that the job numbers were drastically and unprecedentedly underestimated through the summer and had to be hugely revised, and that's why we should be skeptical about November.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) December 5, 2021

Because all year, if you were reading, the "mainstream media" had been highlighting monthly job numbers coming in under expectations as DISASTERS FOR BIDEN and, in the very same stories, just whispering the fact that the previous month's numbers were much better than originally reported.

Boring Democrats, Always Solving Problems and Shit

 

Image via Nikkei Asia.

Thought I was somewhere back in the 80s yesterday as the stock indexes crashed and soared out of "uncertainty" over inflation, ostensibly, though in fact over the cure for inflation, which includes the Federal Reserve Bank ticking up interest rates. Of course in the mid-80s the federal funds rate was running around 7 or 8%, occasionally higher, and had recently gone as high as 19%, during the Volcker shocks, while now it's effectively zero, with plans to get it up to 0.75% or even 1.0% in the course of the year (those plans could be changing at this very moment, as I type, as the governors are in the first day of their two-day meeting, but it's not considered likely). 

One percent isn't exactly a nightmare, is it?

I found myself wondering about the actual issues that are causing price hikes, the Covid-caused international supply chain breakage and labor shortage, and what the Biden administration is doing about them. Leading up to Christmas, there was a profusion of news coverage of how, basically, Santa's sleigh was stuck on the freeway and everybody's holiday was going to be wrecked by the failure, and how badly the government was handling it, and how the public wasn't impressed (and horserace gossip: when Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg informed the nation in late November that $17 billion had been allocated to keeping the ports working around the clock and other measures, the media coverage was all about the stupid question of whether "Mayor Pete" might challenge Kamala Harris for the vice presidency). And then, after Biden announced on 22 December that, in fact, the toys had all arrived on time, the discussion kind of went quiet.

It took me three or four pages of Google results to get to some circumstantiated coverage, in a pretty unexpected source, Iowa Starting Line (Your Home for Iowa Politics)

The Biden administration on Wednesday [19 January] announced a major effort to address supply chain backlogs caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The federal government released $14 billion to the US Army Corps of Engineers to fund 500 projects, which will make it easier to transport goods, allow the passage of larger ships, and expand capacity at key ports, according to a White House fact sheet.

Also in the same report legislation in the House to do various reforms in the shipping industry to free up movement of goods, introduced by Rep. Cindy Axne (D-IA), which is probably how the story ended up on an Iowa site. Good for her! Show her some love, if you can, and give her some publicity!

But the story of the big Biden initiative, now almost a week old, still hasn't really shown up in the mainstream news sources (a quick Google search finds it's been on ABC and CBS but not in New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, MSNBC, Politico or Axios, or, like, anywhere people go), and lots of people think the interest rate thing is the only thing the administration is doing about inflation. I guess the political reporters think it's boring. That's why Democrats don't get a break.

Why I Hate The New York Times: Centripetality

Josh Gottheimer gets a commitment from the Speaker, 24 August. Via.

 

Josh Marshall does an excellent job of skewering the dreadful New York Times reporting on what happened yesterday on Capitol Hill, according to which the House's failure to vote on the "BIF" (Bipartisan InFrastructure bill, though it's getting less bipartisan every day as its few Republican supporters dwindle in number and commitment) is a "significant setback" for Biden's agenda produced by a "liberal revolt" and a "humiliating blow to Biden and Democrats" ("Something's Very Wrong With the Times"):

The president’s goal throughout has been both bills. They both have to pass. The last week has appeared to be on a steady course toward decoupling the two bills, passing the BIF bill and then facing negotiations over a reconciliation bill with no leverage at all over the two Senate holdouts who seem increasingly happy to let the reconciliation bill die on the vine. This is far from over. But what really happened is that the threat to kill the BIF bill got the two holdouts or at least Joe Manchin to actually start negotiating. What the Times calls a “significant setback” and a “humiliating blow” is actually the two bills being recoupled which has been the White House’s aim literally for the entire time.... But the outcome of yesterday is th[e] first good news supporters of the President’s agenda have gotten in days. Not seeing that means having a profoundly distorted understanding of the most basic dynamics at play here.

But he's not so clear on what exactly is wrong with the paper—what exactly is the profound distortion, and where does it come from? 

Embedding

 

2. There's a large foreign policy community -- especially journalists at places like NYT or WP who worship "objectivity" 99% of the time -- for whom Afghanistan is personal. They have human ties there, with no greater priority -- human nature, understandable -- than...

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) August 16, 2021

4. It's on the rest of us without personal ties to point out the obvious bigger picture: That a government that collapses in days without America propping them up wasn't worth $2.2 trillion and thousands of U.S. lives. Biden was right to leave but...

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) August 16, 2021

... but even Bunch has the same objection to "how" Biden left as all the embeds have: why did Biden bet that the Afghan government would be able to hold out for four weeks, giving us enough time to get all the journalists' friends to safety, along with the American business community and the Afghan employees of the military? Why didn't he realize it would collapse in a week and start moving everybody out earlier?

To which there's one obvious answer, if you give it a little thought: the moving-out process was going to be a trigger for the collapse, as the White House was warned—if we'd started three weeks earlier, it would have happened three weeks earlier, with the same results. Or 12 years earlier, no doubt.

New York Note: Excelsior

 

Brouwerij Corsendonk, Turnhout, Belgium.

Just a note for the pleasure of having a scoop:

Following a lengthy statement of what sounded like his defense against a criminal case and followed by a less lengthy statement of what a great governor he's been (tbf there have been real accomplishments). And apology for "mistakes".

— CHANNEL YOUR PARANOIA (@Yastreblyansky) August 10, 2021

Excelsior!

— CHANNEL YOUR PARANOIA (@Yastreblyansky) August 10, 2021

"Excelsior!" (Higher! or Upwards!) is the official New York state motto, which he used in his peroration of thanks to New York for its heroic response to the Covid pandemic. It was weird, and it would indeed have been easy to miss the resignation bit, which had to do with how competent the lieutenant governor is (I thought he was talking about a temporary pull-back during the coming impeachment, which I think would be mandated under the state constitution) and the inevitable not wanting to be a "distraction" during this time of crisis with the Delta and all.

I'm certainly very glad, for all of us (including him!) and for the state's Democrats, who really shouldn't have to be thinking about him as we prepare for next year's election of—I hope—somebody else (on my radio, they're starting to wonder if he's planning to go on an apology tour and then run again—no! no! no!). 

And just for the fun of it, this peak New York Times fact check (caught by Matthew Yglesias):

One employee said she was concerned because she thought a vaccine had caused the characters in the film “I Am Legend” to turn into zombies. People opposed to vaccines have circulated that claim about the movie’s plot widely on social media. But the plague that turned people into zombies in the movie was caused by a genetically reprogrammed virus, not by a vaccine.

Also, some Twitter participant points out,  they turned into vampires, not zombies. BUT THAT'S NOT WHY THE EMPLOYEE SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN CONCERNED. WHAT THE EMPLOYEE NEEDED TO KNOW WAS NOT THE DETAILS OF THE I AM LEGEND SCRIPT. THE EMPLOYEE NEEDED TO KNOW THAT NOBODY EVER TURNS INTO A ZOMBIE BECAUSE ZOMBIES DON'T EXIST! FFS.

It's so crazy how these people—Politifact is a frequent offender—seem to have no concept of what a fact check is meant to accomplish.

For the Record: Why It's Complicated With The New York Times

 

Drawing by Jack Ohman, April 2020.

Got into a Twitter dustup with Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, not exactly a dustup from the technical standpoint, and I still yield to no one in my perverse fondness for Maggie, but this concern for whether Biden is holding press conferences or not is bogus. Baker and Haberman don't even perform for press conferences—no camera around when they're doing their questioning...

At this point in office, Trump had sold you guys about 500 idiotic bald lies and stream-of-consciousness revelations of his personality disorder which you dutifully printed as if they were normal. What he said should have gotten him instantly impeached but instead got you clicks.

— Screechy Ill-Speak (@Yastreblyansky) March 14, 2021

Why I Hate The New York Times Redux

Via Mrs. Kilburn's Kiddos.

That said, this drivel from the Times Editorial Board

Ease Up on the Executive Actions, Joe

President Biden is right to not let his agenda be held hostage, but legislating through Congress is a better path.

is hard to take, you know. As if Biden's flurry of executive actions were in opposition to some legislative work that he and the congressional Democrats are unaccountably refusing to do.

That's just not the case. Congressional Democrats are working on a lot of important stuff, including the Covid relief bill which it is hoped will be passed through reconciliation, possibly within the next couple of weeks, to spectacular effect (again, permanent things the public is eager to see like the minimum wage hike and the paid leave), and the huge pieces of democracy reform, the For the People Act (HR1) and John Lewis Voting Rights Act (it's hard to see these getting the needed 60 votes in the Senate but at least the provisions of the first are hugely popular, including among Republican voters, so it's worth forcing them to vote on it). The executive actions are, rather, making up for things that Congress can't do for one reason and another, which is why Biden's been promising to do them for months:

For the Record: Why I Hate The New York Times

Photo by Money Sharma/Getty Images via Wired.

But first, Pompeo's farewell. Only a few short years ago I thought it would be safe to say there would never be a worse secretary of state than Rex Tillerson, and I was wrong. But in his departure, he really transcended himself:

It's kind of an alternate to "saying the quiet parts out loud": the silence of where they belong is even louder. Indeed it's monoculturalism, the suppression of difference. Everybody's supposed to be Mike Pompeo. Or in the original German, "Ein Land, ein Volk, ein Führer."

— Coup Coup Barabajagal (@Yastreblyansky) January 20, 2021

Vignette From the Age of Covid

Ooh Mark, Jared saw you crying and told Maggie about it and now ALL the girls know Donald said he might ask for his ring back https://t.co/RL7KKbXufu

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) April 16, 2020

Maggie Haberman, 16 April, on the first three weeks of the president's new chief of staff:

In the case of Mr. Meadows, it has not helped him with his White House colleagues that the former North Carolina congressman, who has a reputation for showing his emotions, cried while meeting with members of the White House staff on at least two occasions. One instance was in the presence of a young West Wing aide; another time was with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

On both occasions, Mr. Meadows was discussing staffing changes, according to the people briefed on the events. A White House spokesman declined to comment on either meeting. A person close to Mr. Kushner said he denied that any such episode involving him ever took place.

I'm not going to try writing it up as a scene, but I can't stop picturing it as a lockdown moment that should be part of the history, a Skype call between Haberman in her Washington apartment and Jared and Ivanka on a couch somewhere, maybe still in Jersey—they flew to the Bedminster golf course for the first Passover seder, with their Secret Service friends and presumably hundreds of freshly rented golf carts, and it must have been a pretty idyllic moment of respite, unspoiled by any golf or First Golfer raging through the clubhouse. Jared's regaling Maggie with tales of weeping Mark, and they're laughing their little hearts out, and then Ivanka raises a warning finger: "Of course Jared denies that any such episode involving him ever took place." And then they're laughing harder than ever.

Why I Hate the New York Times: The Endorsement That Wasn't

Bad cork. Via Wine For Real People.

As Steve says,The New York Times's weird "endorsement" of two candidates for the price of one, Warren and Klobuchar, isn't really an endorsement at all. In fact it's a kind of protest against the irritating choice they feel they've been given, between Biden and Sanders: "Waiter, I'm afraid this bottle is corked, could you get us another one?"

With which I'm actually kind of sympathetic, because I've been feeling that way myself from the beginning, that these two superannuated white male cartoon representations of their different ideological stances are just not the best candidates we could end up having to choose between, and I hate the thought that I might have to vote for one of them in the primary just to stop the other one from getting the nomination. I too would like it if Warren and Klobuchar were the front runners, or Warren and Harris for that matter, or Castro and Klobuchar, or Castro and O'Rourke, or Booker and Buttigieg, or whatever, but very much the couple the Times chose as the bottle they'd meant to order in the first place.

Don't Care

Drawing by Peter Brookes.

Roger Cohen, a columnist from whom I sometimes learn sort of useful and nonpartisan things, in The Times, on the kinds of voters he thinks Democrats should be aiming at for 2020:

Chuck Hardwick, lifelong Republican, former Pfizer executive, now retired in Florida, voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but not without misgivings. He’d met him in the 1980s and noted a “consuming ego.” Still, elections are about choices, and he disliked the “scheming” Clintons. He was mad at the media for first mocking Trump during the primaries and then turning on him as nominee.

Three years later, Hardwick, 78, whose political career included a stint as speaker of the New Jersey General Assembly, is unsure how he will vote in November 2020. Trump confounds him. He admires the president’s energy, his courage in taking on difficult issues like China “stealing its way to prosperity,” his corporate tax cuts, and what he sees as a revitalizing impact on American ambition.

“But if I was on a board that had hired Trump as C.E.O.,” Hardwick tells me, “I’d have to say to him: ‘You’ve got good traits but you can’t manage people. You’re fired.’”

Steve M is pretty savage about the piece, which more or less pulls a Salena Zito on us in suggesting there is any possibility that this man, a mainstay of the New Jersey GOP though the 1980s who worked hard for National Right to Life and NRA endorsements, is a necessary element of a Democratic victory:

Brooks on Contemporary Art

Torey Thornton, “There’s Solid Militia Fashion, but Come On, Domestic Like Focus Always”, via Buffalo News, whose critic didn't like the artist's 2016 debut show much, but I like this one a lot.

So two Manhattan contemporary art curators (Jewish Museum and Whitney), two New York–based conceptual artists, and a Brooklyn-based painter, Torey Thornton, walk into a bar. No, really, they walk into the New York Times newsroom, equipped with their lists of ten "works of art that define the contemporary age", toward the project of compiling a master list of 25 in a couple of hours for the Times's style magazine, T, and

Unsurprisingly, the system fell apart. It was impossible, some argued, to rank art. It was also impossible to select just 10. (Rosler, in fact, objected to the whole premise, though she brought her own list to the discussion in the end.)... this list of works is merely what has been culled from the conversation, each chosen because it appeared on a panelist’s original submission of 10 (in two instances, two different works by the same artist were nominated, which were considered jointly). The below is not definitive, nor is it comprehensive. Had this meeting happened on a different day, with a different group, the results would have been different.

Also there were hardly any paintings, sculptures, or works on paper, and hardly any of the artists were very famous (or famous in peculiar and tendentious ways, including Jenny Holzer and Jeff Koons but rejecting Gerhard Richter), leading world-famous art critic David Brooks ("Who Will Teach Us How to Feel?") to lament

Most of the artists have adopted a similar pose: political provocateur. The works are less beautiful creations to be experienced and more often political statements to be decoded.... Artists have always taken political stands, but in some eras there’s more of a conviction that beauty yields larger truths about the human condition that are not accessible through politics alone — and these are the truths that keep us sane. Now one gets the sense that not only is the personal political, but that the political has eclipsed the personal. What’s missing from most of these pieces is human contact and emotional range.

Which might have some point to it, notwithstanding the clichés in which it's expressed, were it not for the fact that this is T magazine ffs, from the Times style department, and represents the actual art world no more than that recipe for guacamole with peas represented contemporary gastronomy.

Data Nerds

Via Sierra Madre Tattler.

From his R&R location, Steve is wondering:

Am I the only one who thinks the data nerds are overcompensating for 2016 by portraying Trump as nearly unbeatable in 2020?

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) July 21, 2019

And I figured that's something he might be writing about if he were here.

He's talking among other things about the New York Times Upshot department and Nate Cohn, who reported over the weekend that

President Trump’s approval ratings are under water in national polls. His position for re-election, on the other hand, might not be quite so bleak.

His advantage in the Electoral College, relative to the national popular vote, may be even larger than it was in 2016, according to an Upshot analysis of election results and polling data.

Based on that, I'd say yes, it's overcompensating. The basic hypothesis seems to be about those key states that Trump unexpectedly won in 2016, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and significance of the broad Democratic swings they saw in the 2018 midterms; Cohn calls attention to Trump's approval numbers in November 2018 and suggests that he was a lot less unpopular than the election results might make you think—and less unpopular than he was in 2016, when he won the states, and especially certain population centers, and especially in Milwaukee, and if Democrats lose Milwaukee in 2020 they'll lose Wisconsin. And they may not be able to replace Wisconsin with some other state they narrowly lost in 2016, like Arizona, North Carolina, Iowa, or Florida, because he's less unpopular in those states than you might think, and especially in certain population centers, and especially Miami-Dade County.

Then there's the trope of maddening indirection

Drawing via Corner Poetry.

The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Sunday weighed in on the friction between a group of four freshman Democratic congresswomen and Speaker Nancy Pelosi: He suggested that the congresswomen — none of whom are white — should “go back and help fix” the countries they came from. His message was immediately seized upon by Democrats, who called it a racist trope.

Trope? Reader, Democrats did not call it a trope of any kind. Speaker Pelosi said it was "xenophobic"

I reject @realDonaldTrump’s xenophobic comments meant to divide our nation. Rather than attack Members of Congress, he should work with us for humane immigration policy that reflects American values. Stop the raids - #FamiliesBelongTogether!

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) July 14, 2019

and Ben Ray Luján said it was "racist":

“That is a racist tweet,” Mr. Luján said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Telling people to go back where they came from — these are American citizens elected by voters in the United States of America to serve in one of the distinguished bodies in the U.S. House of Representatives. I think that’s wrong.”

And Ted Lieu has called him "a racist ass". What I say is

"trope". In addition to the rhetorical figures of metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, litotes, etc., there's this new trope called "saying exactly what you mean". Hope it catches on. https://t.co/Q8UEuErpLJ

— O'er the Airports We Watched (@Yastreblyansky) July 14, 2019