DL Open Thread Monday, Sept. 23, 2024

It was hard enough running for governor as a Black conservative, but a Black conservative sex creep? Mark Robinson’s task is well nigh impossible, especially now that all his senior staffers quit. Maybe he can ask Bethany Hall-Long for advice on how to run a campaign after your staff bails over your sketchy behavior.

Congress averted a budget shutdown with a three-month funding bill. Of course, that sets up the possibility of Republican fuckery during the transition period from Biden to Harris, so expect more motivated intransigence then.

Liberals are upset that Israeli forces raided and shut down Al Jazeera’s bureau in the occupied West Bank. If they had just carried some of those exploding pagers that wouldn’t have been necessary.

In serious news getting less attention, it appears America’s students aren’t making up their COVID learning losses. The problem, as usual, is worse for the poor and disadvantaged, and it helps explain the growing trend toward cell phone bans.

Ezra Klein examines the tension between Trump and a MAGA movement that has grown beyond him, exemplified by Project 2025. As he explains, the plan is for a full takeover of federal bureaucracy – essentially the blueprint for a coup.

The MAGA coalition — particularly its elected officials and Washington staffer class — has grown beyond Trump. It has more views on more issues than he does. It has absorbed more specific and unusual ideologies than he has. It is more hostile to abortion than he is, or than he wants to appear to be. It is more committed to deregulating health insurance than he is, or than he wants to appear to be. There is a great gap between the MAGA leader who slept with a porn star and the factions in the MAGA movement that want to outlaw pornography, as [Heritage Foundation head Kevin] Roberts proposed on Project 2025’s first page.

Trumpism is whatever Trump says it is, but MAGA is whatever his movement becomes. This is why JD Vance has been a political liability to Trump’s campaign: Vance represents MAGA as it has evolved — esoterically ideological, deeply resentful, terminally online — unleavened by Trump’s instincts for showmanship and the winds of public sentiment. It is telling that it is Vance, not Trump, who wrote a glowing forward to Roberts’s forthcoming book. Trump is where MAGA started, but Vance and Roberts is where it is going.

Despite Trump’s blustery denials, these are the people who would staff his second administration.

The floor’s yours.