It's interesting, isn't it? I mean obviously it sucks balls. Lives are being destroyed. Livelihoods are in the shitter. Global geopolitics is being rocked to its core and wealth is being destroyed at a rate not seen since 2008. But once you get over the "front seat at the apocalypse" nature of it all, it remains... interesting.

I think the Democrats had a duty to warn about all the heinous bullshit the Trump administration would try to pull. it didn't work? But "no, you don't understand, all this stuff is holy-shit bad" was an electoral strategy that should have worked. They could have taken the tack of "do you realize how incompetent they were last time" as well as "and all the clever people who signed on last time are farts in the wind" but not after getting caught pretending Biden was more competent than he was.

I also think the Democrats are leaning too heavily into Napoleon's maxim "Never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake." But I can see the thinking - if "these guys would burn the Reichstag" doesn't work, and you have a good guess they will fucking suck at everything they do, standing back and letting the populism dissolve in the face of pure criminal incompetence is a strategy. It's certainly the lowest effort. I'm halfway convinced the Dems are hammering everyone's emails and phones so they can see just how small their base truly is; I know I'm in no mood to give them any money and i broached some "oh you're a REAL sucker" giving level last year. They're historically unpopular and that's saying something, considering the environment.

One of my favorite morning rituals is opening up Yahoo! Finance and comparing the articles written three hours before the market opens with the tickers after the market opens. They rarely align anymore. Futures kinda went "lol tariffs" and then retail went "oh noes tariffs" and every talking head and substack analyst shows their ass about the fact that all their models and prognostications date to a world that makes sense. Broadly? The markets have stopped taking Trump seriously.

And has been pointed out about that whole Signal shitshow, the only evidence that Trump had any involvement whatsoever was Stephen Miller going "daddy Trump told me" at which point it isn't even the populists in charge. '87-'88 were rough for Reagan, even after this:

Because Iran-Contra made it really clear that homeboy was not in charge. Bush won in '88 anyway? But a lot of that was Dukakis had the charisma of a wet paper towel and a lot of that was ample evidence that Bush was a competent bureaucrat (new taxes notwithstanding).

I think it ends in ignominy. I think it's gonna suck to get there but I think the fever dies back. I mean, the Trump administration hasn't even been able to do shit about egg prices, despite this:

What have they done recently for the people who voted for them? Because what minuscule fraction of the electorate gives a shit about stuff like this?