The most useful lesson in politics that I learned while at Harvard

I did not learn my best political lesson from a Harvard professor.

I learned it from the father of a girl I was taking out for a date. 

     "The Irish stick with the Irish. The Italians go with Italians. Jews stick together, but they're in the suburbs now. There aren't enough Negroes to elect anyone. Poles and Greeks have to go with the Italians. People stick to their own kind. That's how they vote."
            Mr. Conway, in the parlor of his home near Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Mr. Conway was Marylou's father. He sat me down on a Saturday afternoon to find out who I was and what my intentions were. Marylou Conway was a senior at a Cambridge high school. I was a college freshman. We were both 18. 

In late afternoons she staffed the dry-cleaning place across the street from my dorm. Lewandos. It had a logo of a cat doing laundry. I dropped off one of my three sport jackets. When I entered the shop three days later to pick it up, Marylou was there again. She smiled and addressed me by name. "Hello, Peter."

She remembered me! 

We struck up a conversation, then another, and then a "date," such as I could afford. We took the subway out to Revere Beach to look at the ocean. We could sit on the retaining wall and look at the waves.

I went to the Conway home. Before Mr. Conway called for Marylou to come downstairs, he engaged me in conversation for a half hour or so. Mr. Conway seemed to find satisfactory that my father was an elementary school principal -- not rich, but respectable. He heard about the farm and my melon business. I had short hair, was clean-shaven, and was at Harvard. That was probably enough to suggest I could someday earn a living and support a family. He asked what I was learning. I mentioned a political spectrum, liberals and conservatives, and the politics of the war in Vietnam. Issues of public policy, I said.

He said issues were irrelevant to how people vote. He said people stick with their own kind when they vote. They claim they like to mix, but they don't. People vote for people like themselves. And then he said the words at the top of this page about Irish sticking with Irish.

Democrats have defined Trump as a racist. I believe it is objectively true, but Trump is probably not any more racist than was Mr. Conway or the people of Boston and Cambridge that Mr. Conway described. Trump is simply more frank and direct about it. Trump says he prefers people from Norway, not dark-skinned people from "shit-hole countries." Politicians may feel that way, but it is crude to say it aloud. Trump does anyway. People like that he says what they secretly think. He likes people who are like himself. He is not alone. People sort themselves into circles of like-minded people. It might be ethic similarity, an age cohort, a political cohort, a religious cohort, a group defined around work, or a combination of those things. Everyone does it.

I wrote two posts about neighborhood and the clash of signs: My Harris sign, my neighbor's Trump sign, and a third neighbor's homemade sign calling Trump a liar and felon. It was stolen, but it is back up.

My neighborhood is at a political crossroads, where country club Republicans meet well-educated Democrats. No one is persuaded by signs. It is all tribal signaling. All of Oregon's electoral votes will go to Harris.

Even though I was born in Medford, I suppose I would be more simpatico with my neighbors if I lived in college-town Ashland, an enclave of educated, prosperous liberals, where people vote four-to-one for Democrats and "YES" on bond issues. Democrats say they like diversity, and they do, but they are thinking about race and ethnic diversity, not political diversity. There aren't many Trump signs in Ashland.

We are in a battle between political tribes. Trump has simplified the tribal choices. Those undecided voters in Pennsylvania are deciding right now if they are mostly normal White Christian folks, under pressure from smarty-pants liberal elites who bend over backwards to help victims of prejudice, and not them. If so, they will vote for Trump. Or, are they people who are put off by Trump's rabble-rousing ethno-nationalism and the tone of resentment, and aren't part of the whole MAGA tribe vibe. In that case they will vote for Harris, even if they aren't all that sure about her positions on issues. The undecided voters aren't looking at issues. They are in between tribes and deciding which one fits better.

It is mostly about Trump. You are either in Trump's tribe or you aren't.

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Immigration backlash

Action. Reaction. Secondary reaction. 

Democrats responded to Trump's racist opening campaign statement. 

They should have responded to the need for better immigration enforcement. 

Hindsight is 20-20.

Trump held a rally in Aurora, Colorado. A top policy and strategy aide, Stephen Miller, was a warm-up speaker:

Stephen Miller: "Look at all of these photos around me. Are these the kids you grew up with? Are these the neighbors you were raised with?” 

Aurora Colorado crowd:  "NO!"

Miller: “Are these the neighbors that you want in your city? No, these are the criminal migrants that Kamala Harris brought into your community. And as swiftly as they came, Donald Trump will send -- them -- back."

 

 

This morning, on MSNBC of all places, I saw a Trump ad. It said that Kamala Harris intentionally brought illegal immigrants into the country to spread drugs and to rape and murder Americans. 

How did we come to this? Here is the oscillation of events:

1. Trump came down the escalator and said immigrants from Mexico were "not their best." They were criminals. Rapists. Drug-carriers.

2. Democrats responded to the racism in the statement. Maybe this was bait by a mastermind strategist. Maybe it was just Trump expressing the everyday xenophobia that I heard everywhere in Boston during the busing era of the 1970s. People of Irish ethnicity disliked people of Italian ethnicity, and vice versa. Both groups respected but disliked Jews, who moved to the suburbs to get away. All Whites disrespected and feared Blacks. People had their own neighborhoods. 

By defining Trump's comments on immigration as racism rather than the operational failure of a government-run immigration system, Democrats went into careless oppositional mode. They condemned Trump's efforts to control the border. They scoffed at a wall. They called deportation cruel. They called for abolition of ICE, the border enforcement agency. And when Biden was in office they allowed flagrant gaming of the asylum system. The result was an even more chaotic border. Democrats figured that if Trump said it, it had to be wrong because it was inevitably racist.

3. That created the present backlash against Democrats' blindness to an operational problem. Harris is scrambling to catch up, but the political damage was done. Democrats looked insensitive to a problem Trump now defines as a combination of weakness, wokeness, or a cynical effort to admit people who will vote Democratic in gratitude for all the welfare Democrats will give them.

The oscillation of action and reaction is accelerating, with Miller, JD Vance, Trump, and others talking about foreigners cutting your throat in your kitchens.

Democrats were accurate when they noted and condemned Trump's blunt dog-whistle racism. From the first month of this blog, back in the summer of 2015, 3,860 posts ago, I noted that Trump connected with audiences on fear and dislike of the ethnic and cultural "other." On Sept 18, 2015 I watched from the audience Trump's speech in Rochester, New Hampshire, the one where the questioner asked if Obama was a Muslim.

The only insight I would add is that there is a good reason why Trump may not have perceived the question as one he needed to address McCain-style. It is that the raucous crowd did not give any hints of being surprised or offended by the question. No one shouted “idiot” or “sit down,” and no one booed or hissed. The general crowd noise, audible in the tape, stayed the same. Donald Trump is very attuned to the crowd, engaging it constantly. 

But Democrats were wrong to treat the issue solely as one of deplorable racism. There was, in fact, an operational problem that impacted American security, American labor, and American laws. Democrats are the party that asserts that government can solve problems. When it fails to do it a demagogue can take an issue and run with it, taking it to a higher, cruder level.

Back in 2015 I could see hints of Trump's future success. Trump wasn't just a clownish playboy celebrity with a schtick. He was connecting with people in a way that Hillary Clinton did not. He was appealing to the ethnic tribalism I saw in Boston, and he was making it work to his advantage.

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Denise Krause: How an underdog wins an election

Denise Krause can win her election for county commissioner.

She will be a watchdog. Not an echo.

On the surface it looks bad for her. She is a Democrat in a Republican-majority county. Powerful business interests have endorsed her opponent. 

Her situation is hopeless, right? No. She can win.

Krause: from her campaign website

First, a disclaimer and context. I contributed to Denise Krause's campaign and hope she wins. I get along with Republicans and over half of my financial advisory clients were Republicans. But on matters of politics I hear more from Democrats than Republicans nowadays, especially since Trump changed the GOP. No doubt this colors my judgment. One more thing; I have a history. I won an election for county commissioner notwithstanding the Reagan landslide of 1980. That experience seems to me eerily similar to this one. Nearly every wealthy, powerful civic leader in Jackson County supported my Republican opponent. But I won anyway. In fact, I think that's why I won. That's why Denise Krause can win.

Krause has a Ph.D. in preventive medicine and for 25 years she managed large budgets and a staff. She more than meets the professional qualifications for the job. She led the effort to change the county charter to increase the number of commissioners from three to five, to make the positions nonpartisan, and to reduce their pay if the number of commissioners increased. The initiatives lost, but Krause became known for her effort. Her opponent, Randy Sparacino, is also qualified for the job. He is a retired law enforcement officer, the former Medford police chief, and is now the mayor of Medford, a nonpartisan unpaid position. 

Two years ago Sparacino ran as a Republican for a state Senate seat in a district that includes the Democratic portion of the county. He lost. Upstate GOP PACs spent $1.1 million in this tiny media market. The ads depicted Sparacino as a hard-right Republican foot-soldier of the state GOP -- a losing message in that district. The campaign re-shaped his reputation from nonpartisan mayor to a good, reliable member of the local GOP/ Chamber of Commerce/ people-in-power team. He is Mr. Establishment. 

That is Sparacino's strength. It is why he can massively outspend Krause. Sparacino is the convenient replacement for a departing member on the three-person Board of Commissioners. With major donations from the construction companies, paving companies, and garbage company franchise-holder doing business with the county, the county commissioners' team defeated the county initiatives. Why did these companies care whether there were three commissioners or five? They surely didn't. They donated because commissioners in their mutual support circle asked them to defend the status quo. They did what any businessperson doing business with the county would do. They said yes.  

A Sparacino advertising blitz is underway, with endorsement ads from members of the local business and political establishment. Elect our friend! He's one of us. Like his voters pamphlet, his campaign website is primarily a long list of endorsements. Each of those 35 dots below opens a web page to yet another industry group, business leader, or local politician endorsing Sparacino. 

Sparacino campaign website

That is not Krause's doom. It is her opportunity. Randy Sparacino is indeed, a reliable member of the local establishment team of mutual supporters. She doesn't have to prove that. Sparacino says it himself, repeatedly. If voters want a replacement member of that team, they should vote for Sparacino. 

I suspect that Sparacino and this team misunderstand the moment and the electorate. In fact, I think they have it backwards. People are suspicious of tight teams of public officials, business contractors, campaign donors. They are all good buddies. It is the classic good ol' boy closed loop.

Voters of both major parties are in an ornery mood. The newly MAGA GOP is ready to believe dark conspiracies of corruption by people in power, and the commissioners and their group of campaign contributors are most certainly the people in power here. Democrats have their own worries about democratic process, campaign contributions, and behind-closed-doors power. Everyone fears the swamp. There is lots of suspicion in the air. In the recent May election on initiatives to update the county charter, Jackson County voters did not give the commissioners a vote of confidence. Quite the opposite. The public doesn't seem to want more of whatever commissioners bring to the table. The vote to increase the number of commissioners from three to five failed 55% to 45%. The public voted 63% to 37% to cut the commissioners' salaries in half. Voters don't think they are getting their money's worth.

Voters generally seem grouchy about politics at every level, national, state, and local. I hear complaints that the commissioners are useless and unworthy rubber stamps for the county administrator. The team Sparacino is joining is in a slump. 

Krause is the outsider here. She is positioned as an independent voice. She isn't part of the team. She can question and challenge the county administrator's recommendations in a way the current commissioners appear not to do. In the midst of a jail crisis the county decided to spend over $60 million on a recreation center that can double as a "pandemic crisis" building. I don't know anyone in the general public who thinks that was a great idea. Krause has an opportunity to look like -- and be -- an independent and credible watchdog. 

Krause will be outspent. Maybe the brute force of all the advertising will win it for Sparacino. His problem is that its volume and source of his ads demonstrate what people suspect -- that he is just another member of the closed group that runs things in the county. Krause is not.

That's why Krause can win. 

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The attraction of autocracy

Black and Hispanic voters are turning toward Trump

Maybe they are impatient for change and will accept being insulted as the price for getting it. 

Americans seem willing to try a strong man who doesn't futz around. 

In 2020 Joe Biden won about 90 percent of the votes of Black voters and 63 percent of the votes of Hispanics. Kamala Harris would have a solid lead in the polls if she had that level of support. She doesn't. She has about 76% of the Black vote and 56% of the Hispanic vote. What more could Trump do to turn off Black voters than to call Harris "low IQ" and "mentally retarded," and use Haitians as the example of a disgusting and frightening "other?" What better way to lose the votes of Hispanics than to describe them as rapists and criminals with "bad genes?" 

As Barack Obama said to Black and Hispanic Americans this week: Can't you see that he is insulting you? 

Democrats may be missing the target when they complain about Trump's danger to "democracy." They are defending Constitutional process but maybe frustrated voters want tangible results instead. Democrats promise "hope and change" and say that government would bring it. Medicare-for-all, had it been implemented back in 2009, would have been a dramatic, visible change. But democratic process in the form of Republican opposition and health insurance lobbying stopped it. So we got the complicated, watered-down Obamacare. The Great Financial Crisis was a failure of government regulators to stop crazy risk-taking by banks. Government made a problem, and then democratic process caused an unnecessarily slow exit out of it. Republicans wanted to make sure that the "Obama recovery" was slow and unsatisfactory, so they insisted on underfunding it. 

Trump says he will enact great medical care, that he will make the economy boom, and that he will intimidate Russia, Ukraine, China, Iran, and Hezbollah into being peaceful. He sounds confident. Who knows? It could happen.

The Democratic reputation as the "can do" party took a blow when cities led by Democrats, including Portland, Oregon let George Floyd demonstrations turn violent, then persist night after night. People see TV images of organized shoplifting in California cities. The Biden administration was slow to address the sharp increase in immigrants claiming asylum at the southern border. All this shaped the idea that Democrats are irresolute and incapable. 

Trump openly and proudly says he will be undeterred by democratic process. He says he will be dictator for a day. He says he will direct police to be "very rough" and that they would be immune from any consequences. He says he will invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807. He said he will impose tariffs by executive order. He said he will deport millions of people and use the military to do it. He says he will fill the executive branch with loyal people who will promptly do what he orders.

Trump told Senate Republicans to vote against the very immigration bill they had helped negotiate. They did as he asked. Trump declared Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and much of his former White House staff and cabinet officers to be persona non grata. The GOP now shuns them. Even out of office and under indictment, Trump exercises power. The actions he has taken, and the ones he says he will take if elected, are high-handed, but when you are president nothing he does is illegal, he says. Trump made that improbable claim, and even the U.S. Supreme Court buckled to protect him. That is power.

Trump does not take "no" for an answer, even the "no" of losing an election.

Personally, I am disgusted by this celebration of lawbreaking autocracy. It is an assault on democracy and the rule of law. But I recognize that it has appeal to people, especially people who are impatient for change and are frustrated with government.

The awful reality is that autocracy is a feature for Trump. It helps explain why Trump might win.

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Easy Sunday: A big Irish Catholic family

History may show that the most consequential invention of the 20th Century was the birth control pill and other forms of reliable contraception. 

Large families are rare in America now. It is now commonplace for young women in America to choose not to have children at all. The replacement rate for a stable population is an average of 2.1 children for each woman. The rate in the U.S. is now 1.62 births per woman, and the rate is going down. 

This has all happened in one lifetime.

Gerald Murphy is a retired high school English teacher and a playwright, with dozens of plays and musicals performed by schools, churches, and community theaters in over 40 countries. 

Guest Post by Gerald Murphy

Katty, Jerry, George, and Peggy are still alive.
Suzanne, Molly, Jim, Mom, Dad, and Joe are deceased

My big Irish Catholic family

I read somewhere that research and studies say that single unmarried women without children are happier than married women with children. I’m not a woman, so I won’t presume to know if this is true. It’s confusing to me. I could ask my mother, of course, since she had quite a bit of experience in this area. Unfortunately, my mother died over twenty years ago, so, I’ll never know the answer.

 

My mother had nine children, five boys and four girls. Was it hard to live in such a large family? I can’t think of any of the nine who would have complained. We lived in a tough neighborhood, but with four older brothers, I was untouchable. We did not suffer from want. My father had work from the early Depression until the day he died. My mother fed us well. 

 

We had acceptable sleeping arrangements, The sisters had one bedroom and slept in two double beds, two in each. The boys slept in bunk beds, with me in a ‘junior’ bed, until one of the older brothers left for the service. Then I got my coveted bunk. 

 

My parents followed the teachings of the Church against birth control, although they did try the “rhythm method,” obviously without success. My mother, who could be very blunt at times, thought the method was merely a cruel ruse to get her pregnant again and again. She did not like being forced into repeated pregnancies, but she felt she had little choice. 

 

My mother came from Ireland. She had three sisters, and they all immigrated to America. Two never married (and in those days, being single meant no children.) The other sister married in her early forties and had only one child, a girl. My mother knew that her sisters would never have traded places with her. Raising nine children was an insane burden, both physically and emotionally. Why would she choose this life unless there were no other choice because of her Catholic faith?

 

My mother never preached to us the value of having many kids. She was practical. Kids could be a blessing, but also a curse. When the abortion debates came to our family in the seventies, she often pointed out which one of us she would have chosen for abortion. She had a great sense of humor, so we all laughed this off. But she could also be red-faced with anger and say this with exceptional Irish vitriol.

 

In short, in another time my mother could have had a very different life. She could have waited for marriage and ended up with just one child. Or she could have avoided marriage altogether, ending up happily single, with nine purring kittens on her happy and relaxed lap. 

 

So, should my mother have produced nine children, or one, or none? The answer, I believe, is not for me to choose. If a woman knows what she wants, and is able to choose herself what she wants, then she might be happy with her choice. I don’t think it’s a wise thing to have outsiders, whether the Catholic Church or JD Vance, make the choice for you.

 

Today we live in a different world from my childhood. Catholics are far less likely to blindly follow the rules of the Church. Even in previously devout Ireland, the hold that the Church once held has greatly loosened, brought on by the sexual abuse scandals involving Catholic priests. 

 

Those, like Vance, who would have us return to the good old days have a tendency to hark back to an imagined state of grace, a happy “Leave It To Beaver” existence where Blacks and women and immigrants knew their place, where men went to work in the morning, the woman stayed home and cooked, and the biggest problem kids got into was chewing gum in class.  

But those were not the days I remember. My life was happy, then sad, then filled with success, then failure and everything in between. It was confusing when I was young; it is still confusing. I suspect Vance had just as much confusion in his life. But he’s in a position now to re-invent the past and possibly mold the future. That is a scary notion. If my mother were alive today, she might have something to say about Mr. Vance. “Faith and begorrah, we might all be better off if his mother had only aborted the wee darling.” 

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A brief history of the U.S. and Mexico,

There is a history to our southern border and immigration across it.

American school-children barely learn it. American adults barely acknowledge it.

It started when the U.S invaded a neighboring democratic country and took half its territory.

Erich Almasy read my post last Tuesday, in which I speculated that if Kamala Harris lost the election it would likely be due to votes lost because Biden allowed for too long a surge of undocumented immigrants at the border. The disorder gave Trump an issue that polls show moves voters' opinions. Erich responded on Thursday, arguing that immigration was a net positive to the U.S., so we should stop complaining. Today he added a bit of history and context to that politically troublesome southern border.

In retirement, Erich and his wife Cynthia Blanton, both college classmates, live in the Mexican city of San Miguel de Allende.

Erich Almasy, at a replica Resolute desk at the George Bush Presidential Library in Dallas

Guest Post by Erich Almasy

Unauthorized Immigration – There is a Will and a Way 

In 1821, after 300 years of disease-based genocide and mass servitude, México, along with most of Latin and South America, achieved independence from Spain. By 1828, México was a democratic republic in which President Vincente Guerrero abolished slavery. The border with the United States was the Sabine River, separating Arkansas and the Mexican state of Tejas y Coahuila. The border was essentially unguarded, and as the price of cotton skyrocketed, the lure of prime bottomland was irresistible to many Americans who crossed into México. Ironically, an influx of murderers, rapists, and other criminals evading prosecution in the United States became so great that México closed the border in 1830.

 

By 1836, the Anglo immigrants (Texians) joined many native-born Tejanos in clamoring for independence from México. Their interest was to enter the United States as a slave state. The Alamo is not remembered for noble reasons.* The rebels succeeded, and by 1845, the Republic of Texas was the 28th state (a slave state) of the United States. In 1846, President James K. Polk, calling upon a Manifest Destiny instigated what Ulysses S. Grant (who served in it) later described in his Memoirs: “I do not think that there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on México.”** At the war’s end in 1848, México was forced to yield 55 percent of its land mass - the states of Texas, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah, most of Colorado and Arizona, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming.

Borders are often porous. Through the 1940s and 50s, the border between the United States and Mexico was largely porous since many cities were, in fact, “twinning” (Brownsville/Matamoros, McAllen/Reynosa, Laredo/Nuevo Laredo, Del Rio/Ciudad Acuña, Rio Grande City/Tamaulipas, El Paso/Ciudad Juarez, and Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras), with the border a painted line down the middle of a street. During World War II, wives of officers at the U.S. Army base in Eagle Pass would drive to the Victory Club restaurant in Piedras Negras, where the maître’d Ignacio (‘Nacho’) Anaya would prepare a baked corn chip, cheese, and jalapeño dish to have with their drinks. Ergo, Nachos!

 

The 1,954-mile border between the United States and México spans six Mexican and four American states, covering terrain from dense urban to parched desert. It is the most frequently crossed border globally, with approximately 350 million documented crossings annually. Most of the border follows the Rio Grande River (Rio Bravo del Norte) and includes maritime boundaries in the Pacific Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. There are 35 official border crossings with México, and the total population of adjacent cities and counties is over 12 million. The San Ysidro Port of Entry between San Ysidro, California, and Tijuana, Baja California alone, has roughly 60,000 vehicles and 30,000 pedestrians crossing daily.

 

In addition to managing the flow of documented immigrants, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP) inspects shipped goods and agricultural products and interdicts illegal drugs along over 8,000 miles of border, not just the one between México and the United States. Although it is among the largest law enforcement agencies in the world with over 65,000 employees, CPB’s budget for its Border Patrol grew by only $2.3 billion (to $7.3 billion) from FY2022 to FY2024 during the height of the unauthorized immigrant surge. There were 19,357 border patrol agents in 2022, and that number has not substantially increased due to six to eight percent annual attrition and the time needed to train new agents. About 85 percent are stationed at the southern border.

 

The problem for CPB is immense in terms of distances covered and volumes of people and goods processed. In addition, CPB must house detained immigrants and support the adjudication of legal causes for entry, such as political asylum. The present economic/political-driven surge in unauthorized immigrants came from over 97 countries, in particular, those from the Golden Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala), Venezuela, and Haiti. It is estimated that 6.1 million people, or over one-fifth of Venezuela’s 2022 population of 28.3 million, have dispersed into North and South America. This is the largest population displacement in Latin American history.

 

During the height of the pandemic, Trump’s administration was able to utilize Title 42 of the Public Health Service Act of 1944 to stop or expel all immigrants at the border. By May 2022, it was clear that unauthorized immigrants were not spreading COVID-19 (we were doing just fine by ourselves), and the law was suspended. Unfortunately, the economic and political effects of COVID-19 continued, and the CBP was now unequipped to deal with the surge. In February 2024, after the 249,741 unauthorized immigrant encounters of December 2023, the Senate, under the direction of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, killed a bipartisan bill crafted, in large part, by conservative James Lankford of Oklahoma. Most Republican senators didn’t even read the bill after Trump denounced it for political reasons. Its $19.6 billion cost would:

 

1. Stop all immigration when weekly crossings exceeds 5,000.

2. Alter the "humanitarian parole" definition

3. Provide 50,000 detention beds for detention processing

4. Modify asylum treatment to a “reasonable possibility” standard.

5. Increase Border Patrol recruitment and streamline hiring.

6. Fund mandatory monitoring.

 

Do we have the political will and the financial means to create a manageable border? I believe we do, and both James Lankford and most Democratic senators members agree. 

 

Note one: Books to read:             

*Forget the Alamo - Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stafford

** A Wicked War – Amy S. Greenberg

 

Note two: The parallels between Polk’s invasion of México in 1847 and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 are astonishing: one democratic republic invading another, religious and God-ordained justification, civilian population atrocities, and relative size of the combatants. In México, the war is referred to as The Intervention. In the United States, it remains the only conflict not celebrated with a memorial on the National Mall.

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Consistency is for saps.

Trump is ideologically flexible.

Trump has no principles.

Same thing. 

Trump takes care of Number One. That is the limiting factor on Trump. He wants to be popular.

I take a tiny bit of comfort in that.

Watch Trump on the abortion issue. Most Republican politicians either genuinely oppose abortion or feel trapped by their past statements in opposition to it. Republican legislators in red states are banning abortion. Republican counties and states are banning travel for abortions. Ohio banned an abortion desired by a 10-year-old rape victim. Those laws are wildly unpopular, but politicians with fixed principles persevered. 

Trump, with Melania's help, is abandoning his anti-abortion supporters. Appointing anti-abortion judges was necessary to solidify support among his tribe. But now anti-abortion court decisions are unpopular, and so are strict state laws forbidding most abortions. If Trump gets back into office he will be more careful filling judicial openings, and he now says he would veto national abortion bans. Trump promoted Trump Steaks for only a couple of months. They didn't sell. He dropped the product. No use tying to sell something people don't want.

When the economy was collapsing in the face of Covid shutdowns Trump worked with Democrats -- especially House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden -- to pass the CARES Act. It was the biggest, most expensive piece of re-distributionist legislation in history. It cost a deficit-busting $1.2 trillion and it was a Scandinavian social welfare dream package. Americans like "free money." Trump was flexible.

Trump opposed TikTok. But a large contributor to Trump's campaign had a multibillion-dollar stake in TikTok's owner, ByteDance. Moreover, TikTok was popular. That one-two punch caused Trump to support TikTok. 

Trump is a provocateur. It is popular to communicate outrage over some suspected slight or unfairness against one's team. Yesterday Trump "Truthed" on his Truth Social website that Kamala Harris should concede the election and that CBS-TV should be de-licensed.

A FAKE NEWS SCAM, which is totally illegal. TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE. Election Interference. She is a Moron, and the Fake News Media wants to hide that fact. An UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL!!! The Dems got them to do this and should be forced to concede the Election? WOW!"

In other contexts Trump complains about censorship, he doesn't threaten it. There is no ideological consistency here. The through-line is what his team wants to hear.

Democrats underestimate Trump. Normal politicians feel a need to be consistent and are tethered to fact-checkable reality. He is not a normal politician. He is a showman doing outrage comedy. He happily invented a straw man villain -- poor, Black, cat-eating Haitian murderers. Trump need not be congruent with reality. He is congruent with popularity. A majority of Americans are put off by the notion of cat-barbecuing murderers living next door.

I think it is entirely likely that Trump will win in November. He may govern like a tyrant, with high-handed flouting of the law and cruelty to people disliked by his MAGA supporters. I expect that. But he may well increase the welfare state. It is popular. He may expand health insurance benefits; his working-class rural supporters need it. If Trump supports an expanded ACA (and changes the name to Trump Care), Republicans in Congress will go along. If tariffs raise prices and tank the economy, he will reverse course. If deportations create hardships for farmers, food processors, and small businesses -- and they will -- then deportations will stop. 

The limiting force on Trump won't be the Constitution, expertise, tradition, law, or the simple truth. It will be what is popular. He cannot create a dystopia for his enemies without creating one for his friends.

Trump is no ideologue, committed to a disastrous plan or principle. He isn't Stalin or Hitler. He is a populist demagogue, a Juan Perón. Maybe a Benito Mussolini.

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