Hey, Look! News!

(thumbnail photo credit: Jeremy Cohen @jermcohen)

So much news is happening! Did someone leave the news faucet on? Seems like someone opened up the News Nozzle full blast, those jokers! Hey, guys, the News is getting up to my shoulders and I can’t swim, can we shut down that News pipe?

* glurgle gurgle glurgle *

Quickly! Because there’s too much to cover and because there’s a heat wave in NYC and I only have one air conditioner and it went to my selfish children and not my laundry room / office!

ZOHRAN? MORE LIKE NO-RAN!

So, like, everyone with a hand on a traditional power structure in NYC hates Democratic Mayoral Nominee Zohran Mamdani. It is the wildest example of “the guy got the most votes but democracy must have short-circuited” in America since Trump… except Trump in 2016 didn’t actually win a majority of Republicans, he won 45% against a divided field. [Somewhere out there is a long, pictureless article on how ranked-choice voting would have changed the 2016 election.]

So you’ve got racist / “smart for the internet” guy Chris Rufo digging into Zohran’s past and coming up with absolute fireballs like “his SAT scores weren’t great.” You have the NYT continuing their essentially open campaign against him as they pat themselves on the back for great journalism. And you have all the other possible candidates in the race telling each other to be brave and step down so it’s a 1v1 race in the fall.

Obviously, I don’t think Mamdani is Trump [NOT AS FUNNY!]… but this is a reverse Trump. All those moves, flipped, are 2016. Cruz and Rubio couldn’t convince each other to leave, votes stayed split, Kasich stayed in even though he didn’t have a chance…. change those names with Adams / Cuomo / Sliwa and you’re in 2025.

But the larger thing that’s the same is that the populists of a party (and I’m using populists loosely, incredibly loosely, like ‘poor people who get other poor people aren’t why they’re poor’) were able to get their candidate through a primary by voting. More than half a million NYers voted for this guy (It took just over 700k votes for Adams to win the general in 2021.) And the response to all those people voting is “No. Redo.”

But you look at the GOP 10 years later and it’s fundamentally reshaped. So if I made my money off the old shape, I might be worried too. (Luckily I make my money off coming up with creative ways to describe farts.)

TARIFFS?! TARIFFS?! DON’T TALK ABOUT TARIFFS.

(Shout out to Jim Mora who I refuse to Google because I’m sure I’ll learn something horrible and sad.)

Trump has a bunch of new tariff threats, and it’s really just kind of a big shrug. These always get big announcements and turn into nothing / delays / rollbacks, so it’s getting very Boy Who Cried… Tariff? [Ok that’s bad but it’s not TACO, an anagram that has drilled into the brains of MSNBC Boomers and their AI-generated Facebook posts like digital syphilis.]

Trump is a huckster from Queens! We can skip all the deep analysis! He doesn’t have a plan, but he wants you to think he has a plan because that buys time to… come up with a plan. August 1st is the new deadline… unless he rolls it back. The 90 deals in 90 days did happen… if you consider 3 deals and a lot of letters to be 90 deals. The letters are final offers… unless they want to call up and negotiate. We have a Nelly trade policy.

BIG DUMB GUYS

Well. Elon Musk left the White House. He ended his friendship with Trump. They yelled at each other. Musk tried to tank the Trump Budget. It did not work at all, which seems to be creating a pattern after he spent a zillion dollars in Wisconsin on a state Supreme Court election and got crushed. And out of this now growing string of ineffectual political moves, Musk announced he is focused on making Teslas not crash and SpaceX not explode starting a new political party. So Tesla stock went down, and Trump did his mad quotes, and… I guess we’ll wait to see what else.

Many American third parties have been focused around one charismatic leader who can’t find a slate of candidates who are as charismatic and have all the same ideas policy-wise. Also, the country has done an incredible job in the past 20 years of staking out essentially opposing positions on all sorts of issues from “Should the rich be taxed more?” to “Is showing someone the movie ‘Black Panther’ a form of anti-white racism?” So not a ton of room for a third option on the questions of the day.

But hey, I was the guy who thought Trump was never gonna file the actual paperwork to run for President in 2015 and that it was all a publicity stunt. So what do I know! Here comes Senator Musk after a successful primary of Ted Cruz! Oh. Wait. Elon has an approval rating that’s so negative it’s hit the Phantom Zone? Ah. Well.

Ok! See you later this week!