Caen Spree

Ellipses to close the week of Sept. 26

[Title overexplained here.]

I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump wants to be impeached. But not, as I have heard suggested, for any complex psychological reasons, or even because he’s sick of having to pretend to give a shit about this country: no, he may think it’s his best chance to get reelected. This is what I gather from his ravings on the subject — for example, this red-faced screaming fit that he actually chose to put up on the White House Twitter account:

The White House @WhiteHouse

President Trump made the facts clear. President Zelensky made the facts clear. The transcript made the facts clear. Too bad facts aren't what Democrats want.

He claims that Democrats are preventing him from fixing “gun regulation” by impeaching him, and suggesting that he can stop it “in the courts.” That last delusional bit, along with his declaration that “Nancy Pelosi, as far as I’m concerned unfortunately, she’s no longer the Speaker of the House,” might look to the untrained eye like his usual drug-induced babbling, but it follows his long-time pattern of appealing to the Great Unheard Masses with transgressive fantasies of breaking the system. You may say: Sure, that takes care of his solid 30% electoral base of racists, conspiracy nuts, and general assholes, but he needs, if not a majority, certainly more than that. But you have to figure there’s always election fraud, tampering with voter machines, and so on to close the gap, and assuredly some ringer out there who will, as Jill Stein did in 2016, run third party to thwart the Democrats — you can currently see these future Passive Trump Voters trolling the internet, and they’ll get a big Russian boost when things heat up. It’s not a sure thing but considering everyone knows Trump’s a scumbag, it’s the best shot he has...

You may have seen the hilarious Sabrina Tavernise thing yesterday morning, in which the New York Times’ junior stealth conservative did a story about “swing voters” who are implacably opposed to impeachment only to have some folks notice that her sources were all Trump supporters, some of whom had been interviewed by the Times in that capacity in the past. I observed when this came out that Tavernise had “pulled a Zito” — referring to the wingnut columnist Salena Zito who, in her People Love Trump stories, got caught using Trump fans (and sometimes straight-up Republican operatives) as sources without letting readers know who they were. This got me to look at Zito’s recent, post-controversy columns, and it seems she’s pulled way back on the Surprise Republicans stuff, instead splitting her focus between panegyrics to small towns heavy on Above-the-Fray (“On election night 2016, we stopped watching the national news, and Pablo and I made the decision to focus on our community...”), condemnations of socialist Democrats (enlisting, for example, “John James, the Michigan Republican candidate for Senate and former Army Apache helicopter pilot in the Iraq War” to help her denounce the Dem Presidential candidates), and straight-up Republican blowjobs (“Mike Pompeo says no to Senate run in exclusive, wide-ranging interview”). Her writing remains awful, and I wonder how big the market really is for this kinder-gentler form of Trumpism — his core fans seem to have gone full white nationalist, and would rather have Blood and Soil than apple pie and entrepreneurialism. Well, the Boomers aren’t all dead yet, so maybe she has enough suckers to make it to retirement...

Speaking of Republican embarrassments, get a load:

Among the powerful voices advising Lachlan [Murdoch, Rupert’s heir] that Fox should decisively break with the president is former House speaker Paul Ryan, who joined the Fox board in March. “Paul is embarrassed about Trump and now he has the power to do something about it,” an executive who’s spoken with Ryan told me. (Ryan did not return a call seeking comment.)

It is LOLworthy in the extreme to hear that the former Speaker of the House is perceived to have increased his influence on his party by joining the Fox board. On the simplest level, it speaks to the well-observed phenomenon that Trump tweets, seemingly without thinking, based on what he sees on the network. And it appears a sad commentary on the topsy-turvy nature of our institutions that the gibberish merchants of Fox have more influence on the ruling party than the third ranking federal official in America. But look on the bright side: No one thinks MSNBC, or the Young Turks, or anything like that (certainly not the New York Times!) has a similarly outsized influence in the Democratic party. (Conservatives pretend to think so — Goldurn Liberal Media and all that — but the Age of But Her Emails has dispelled that illusion for the rest of us.) And as fucked up as the Democrats often seem to be, it is encouraging that neither their talking heads nor their media paymasters have the sort of pull with them that their rightwing equivalents do with the Republicans. First of all, because “liberal” talking heads are awful — not as aggressively vulgar as Fox’s (consider their respective demographics!), but nearly as stupid, albeit in a reflexively both-siderist rather than overtly fascist way. And have you noticed: While there are of course centrist dopes aplenty in the current Dem field, two major candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, are openly advocating Medicare For All, and most of the other candidates’ plans are reactions to it — “Medicare for All Who Want It” and all that. That’s not your Grandma’s, nor even Barack Obama’s Democratic Party. And they certainly weren’t pushed into this by Chuck Todd and Fareed Zakaria. So be grateful for this reversal: That our cheap, grubby politicians are actually bolder and more imaginative than our pundits.