Downsizing: Moving to Mexico

Today's post isn't about politics. Or maybe it is.

This is my sixth post about downsizing.

Earlier posts were written in the shadow of Joe Biden's plan to hold on to his office past the time when opponents called him senile and jeered while his supporters suspected something was a little wrong, but kept quiet about. Downsizing from a large "family home" into something smaller is a metaphor for that larger issue of when to accept that one has entered a new phase of life marked by the frailties of age. Biden, many of us thought, needed to "downsize." 

But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Downsizing is a practical thing in itself, involving boxes, moving trucks, and dumpsters. No need to overthink it into a metaphor of politics or aging or death or anything. But letting go is hard because where we live and all that "stuff" we have kept represents more than choices we made. They represent who we are. And as Neil Sedaka put it so well back in 1962, when I and my classmates were age 12:

Comma, comma, down dooby doo down down
Breaking up is hard to do

Downsizing is a breakup. 

College classmates Erich Almasy and Cynthia Blanton dealt with retirement and downsizing simultaneously. They moved to Mexico. Erich tells their story.

Erich Almasy and Cynthia Blanton, faces painted

Guest Post by Erich Almasy 

Downsizing and Our Last Move

In line with Peter’s series on downsizing, here is the tale of two Boomers who used the excuse of leaving the United States to reduce their “stuff.” It began in 1997 when the company I worked for in New York City asked me to run their Canadian division on an “interim” basis. Never trust a CEO who uses the word “interim” because it means, “We hope you’ll give in and take the job.” After two years of commuting between Toronto and New York, we packed up and began our twenty-five years as expatriates. Unfortunately, when a corporation moves you, they pay all the expenses, so we didn’t leave much stuff behind unless it was broken or we couldn’t remember ever owning it.

Our actual downsizing didn’t begin until we retired. Like most of our contemporaries, we thought big about places to retire - Umbria or Tuscany in Italy, Paris, and the English countryside (nixed because Cynthia cannot stand the British sexism and class consciousness). Places like Costa Rica and Ecuador appeared on our radar when we became more fiscally responsible. At this point, the words of Cynthia’s Toronto-based hairdresser came to mind. Every year, he and his wife would book the month of February in a 500-year-old Mexican Colonial city called San Miguel de Allende. Located in the geographic center of México, San Miguel was as far away from the Mexican beach resorts as one could imagine. This seemed possible since we didn’t care much for those beach resorts.

We booked a week in February 2019, and after some research, we kept finding reviews like the one in Conde Nast Traveler magazine that said this was the best place in the world to retire. We spent our week in the “Centro” main downtown area and were amazed by the culture and beauty. We even attended an opera put on by the local music organization. We got sunburned in 75 to 80-degree weather and decided we should make another visit in June, during the hot and rainy season. That week was even more encouraging, and we found a home just finishing construction. Now, we had to race back to Canada and pack up.

When you’ve lived together for nearly 50 years, you accumulate lots of “stuff.” For two people, our homes had always been five bedrooms with a basement so we could each have offices and places to store our “stuff.” To save money, we planned to transport our goods to Laredo, Texas, where we had an appointment to get our permanent visas to live in México. A Mexican moving company in Laredo would handle the paperwork and transship our goods to our new home. We rented a 24-foot truck from Penske (always use Penske for your move - more about that later) and a trailer from U-Haul. Along with our Yukon XL, we figured we could move nearly everything we needed for our unfurnished home. In addition, Cynthia made it her job to measure every cubic inch of our goods and boxes to ensure they fit in the vehicles.

We have always been book people and reckoned that we had over 4,000 books together. We knew most would not make the trip, especially since many were still boxed in the basement from our first move. Furniture, yes, but our home offices mostly no. We were retiring. We made a grave mistake with our packing crew. Despite positive reviews and a dozen workers, the Bulgarian team was a disaster. I have nothing against Bulgarians, but these guys knew little about how to pack a truck. When they were done, 20 percent of the stuff we intended to take didn’t fit, despite what I knew to be my wife’s accurate calculations. Sad trips to the dump ensued.

We began the trip with me driving the truck, Cynthia the Yukon and trailer, and our 10-year-old miniature schnauzer, Molly. There was a minor kerfuffle at the U.S.-Canada border, solved by our American passports, and smooth sailing until just south of Indianapolis. In my defense, I have a fair amount of experience driving trucks, and this one had an automatic transmission and was nearly new. However, on a narrow bridge, I was almost sideswiped by a speeding semi-truck whose back blast knocked me into the bridge abutment. The truck’s right side, rear wheel, and drivetrain were all demolished. I was stunned but managed to roll onto the shoulder.

This is where Penske and the liability insurance I had taken out proved their worth. We called, and they asked where to send a tow truck on site. They then told us to meet them at a nearby struck stop at 9 a.m. he following day. We found a motel and, with my head still buzzing, went to the truck stop the following day. Our broken truck was backed up near a new truck, and two movers were ready to trans-load our “stuff.” I was a bit taken aback by the movers. One appeared to have no teeth (“Talk Like a Pirate Day” wasn’t until September 19th), and the other mover had only one leg. Despite these impediments, or perhaps because of them, the move took less than three hours, and lo and behold, there was 20 % more space in the back of the new truck.

I was still in no shape to drive, so we asked if either of the gentlemen knew someone who could drive the truck with us to Laredo. We would pay a fee plus airfare home. Allen, the man with one leg and a metal prosthesis, said he would call his wife. She agreed, and he volunteered. After a quick conference, Cynthia and I asked him if he had experience driving trucks. I will never forget his reply, “When I was in the army and before an IED blew off my leg, I qualified on Humvees, HEMTTs (Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Trucks), and M1 Abrams Tanks." He was hired.

In an anticlimactic fashion, the rest of the trip went without a hitch (except on the trailer, haha). We arrived at Laredo in 100° heat, drove our new best friend to the airport, delivered our items to the Mexican movers, and returned our rentals. The visa process mainly went smoothly, followed by a customs inspection of now just our car at the border and a ten-hour drive to San Miguel de Allende. The movers had passed us along the way and were ready to drop off the rest of our “stuff.”  

What lessons can I impart to you who may seek to downsize? First, make sure you know why you are keeping “stuff.” For years, we owned French chinaware and crystal glasses that we never used because we either didn’t entertain or were afraid of breakage. We had already made friends in San Miguel and were determined to engage with them, so we brought those items along. Good move, and breakage be damned. Second, you probably want to plan an eventual place for your “stuff” afterward (i.e., post-mortem). We moved to the East Coast from the Mid- and Southwest for school to the West Coast for lifestyle and back to the East Coast for culture and work. This was our last move. We haven’t quite figured out who will eventually get our "stuff" since we never had children and, thus, have no one to leave things to. On the other hand, if Trump wins, I expect we will be inundated with requests from Americans on the whys and wherefores of moving to México. Some of you may need furniture!

 

Some comments to think about:

 

Downsizing is a relative term.  We went from a five-bedroom house with a den and basement to a three-bedroom house with a den but no cellar or storage.  We arrived with enough household goods to fully furnish and outfit the house. We still kept a fair amount of “stuff,” including vinyl records, travel souvenirs, art, etc.  Others have made much more dramatic reductions in their possessions.

 

My most painful choice was finding ways to dispose of our thousands of cherished books, which we discovered almost no one wanted (NOTE: I now have thousands of ebooks on my Kindle).  For Cynthia, giving up her Ferragamo high-heeled shoes, which would be dangerous on our cobblestone streets, was torture.

 

Erich Almasy and Cynthia J. Blanton

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Three corners of an intersection

Today I describe an intersection.

The photographs show the confluence of two neighborhood streets in Medford: Harvard Place and Princeton Way. The neighborhood was platted and built out in the late 1960s. There is also a Stanford Avenue, an Oxford Place, and a Yale Drive. The lots are a half-acre to an acre.

I have seen Trump signs in Medford and the rural areas surrounding it continually since 2019. Sometimes "Trump won!" Sometimes "F--- You for voting for Biden." Most often just "Trump." Some signs were never taken down from the 2020 election and its aftermath. I have not seen a Biden sign in this election cycle. Nor had I seen a Harris sign on a Medford street until this week, beginning with my sign four days ago.

The house in the first photo is where my wife and I live. Three days ago I put up this three-by-five-foot sign in my front yard. I wanted to show that there were Harris-supporters, too. The sign faces west and into the middle of the intersection.

The neighbors across the street put up extensive Christmas decorations, including a large illuminated cross high over their house. The day after my sign went up they put up their sign. It faces east and into the middle of the intersection.

The day after that, a third neighbor, in the home catty-corner from mine and across the street from the Trump sign, put up their sign. It faces northeast and into the center of the intersection. 

Here is a close-up of their hand-painted sign:

So far, the fourth house at the intersection has no sign.

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Coup d'etat: We reap what we sow.

Why are so many people fleeing the "Northern Triangle" countries to come here?

America wrecked the place. 

People are fleeing a mess America helped make.

In 2023, the U.S. Border Patrol encountered more than 447,000 foreign nationals from the Northern Triangle crossing the U.S. Southwest border between ports of entry, including 213,000 Guatemalans; 181,000 Hondurans; and 53,000 Salvadorans. That is an increase from the 50,000 to 100,000 people who entered during the years Donald Trump was president. 

That created a political problem for Kamala Harris -- asylum seekers in numbers that overwhelm our ability to process them. It created the opportunity for Trump to progress from denouncing criminal, drug-carrying, rapist Mexicans to inventing stories of cat-eating Haitians. 

In 2024, the Biden administration increased penalties for asylum-seekers who arrive illegally, and following the failure of the bipartisan immigration legislation, the president used executive orders to set a cap on the number of asylum petitions the U.S. will consider. Diplomatic negotiations with Mexico sharply curtailed passage at the Mexican border. This has sharply reduced immigration, although not the underlying problems in Northern Triangle countries.

The U.S. Government's Congressional Research Service summarized the reasons for economic and governmental dysfunction in the Northern Triangle:

"El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have long histories of autocratic rule, and their transitions to democracy have been uneven. . . . Land ownership and economic power in the Northern Triangle historically have been concentrated in the hands of a small group of elites, leaving a legacy of extreme inequality and widespread poverty."
          Central American Migration: Root Causes and U.S. Policy

Why is democracy so fragile there?  Jack Mullen shares a bit of history and context. 

Jack Mullen entered the Peace Corps after college and served in Guatemala, where he grew agricultural test plots. Jack thinned pears alongside me in local orchards in our high school years, and later worked with me as field staff for U.S. Representative Jim Weaver. Jack is retired and lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Jennifer Angelo. He wrote me about the blowback to America's meddling in foreign affairs to achieve our economic goals.

Guest Post by Jack Mullen

The latest anti-immigration targets are Haitians. It’s not like there hasn’t been a grim tradition of demonizing Haitians.

Back at the turn of the 19th century, Haitians overthrew their White colonial European rulers, becoming the world’s first Black republic. The American Revolution may have inspired the Haitian Revolution, but our nation’s new wealth depended on slavery, so our country considered intolerable the example of a Black slave revolution. The legacy of the 19th Century U.S. campaign of manipulation and demeaning Haiti and its people -- and supporting France in its century of sucking wealth out of Haiti through its demand for reparation payments --  found its way into the latest presidential debate. 

Haiti was an early democratically-elected government to cause disfavor with the U.S. government. It wasn't the last.

IRAN

When officials from British Petroleum, fearful of Iran’s nationalizing its oil production, met with President Harry Truman in 1952, they suggested we overthrow the elected government of President Mohammad Mosaddegh. Truman, a man who knew how to “give them hell”, tossed the BP guys out of the Oval Office. The little guy from Missouri instinctively knew we best not dip our big toe into the Middle East any farther than we had.

But early in 1953, these same BP executives returned to Washington. BP found the new Eisenhower administration receptive to tossing out Mosaddegh. The CIA paid a million dollars to Mohammed Reza to gather a combination of mobsters and students to run ramshackle through the streets of Tehran and foment the overthrow of the government. Four days of street disruptions ended up with Mohammed Reza becoming the Shah of Iran and a strong American ally.

Iranian resentment of America’s meddling ended up in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

GUATEMALA

Petroleum is the reason we stuck our noses in the Mid-East. Bananas is why we felt the need, one year after overthrowing the democratic government of Iran, to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Guatemala.

We Americans love bananas, and in the 1890’s the United Fruit Company started purchasing land in Guatemala to grow and ship bananas. By the 1930s, the United Fruit Company owned 42 percent of the land in Guatemala, land on which United Fruit was exempted from paying taxes.

Guatemala progressed towards democracy with the 1945 election of Juan Arévalo. In 1952, their government began expropriating unused United Fruit land to distribute to landless peasants. Later there was a peaceful transfer of democratic power to another president, Jacobo Árbenz.

United Fruit was well represented in the Eisenhower administration. CIA Director Allen K. Dulles was on United Fruit’s Board of Directors. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was a former member of the New York law firm, Cromwell and Sullivan, which represented United Fruit.

Using the successful model of the CIA-financed coup in Iran, the CIA organized a coup financing covert "freedom fighters," radio propaganda, leaflet drops, and bombing raids using unmarked aircraft. President Árbenz concluded that resistance to the "Giant of the North" was impossible. Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, a member of the right-wing National Liberation Movement party, marched into the capital and took power as president of Guatemala in April, 1954. He established an authoritarian government closely allied with the United States

No more land reform in Guatemala, as U.S.-financed military-backed corrupt Guatemalan governments ruled by various oligarchs and generals.

A Guatemalan anti-insurgency civil war broke out and lasted from 1960 to 1996 when over 200,000 Guatemalans were killed and another 200,000 were forcibly "disappeared." Many became refugees in Mexico and the United States. Of these over 400,000 Guatemalans, 83 percent were indigenous Maya, according to a U.N. sponsored commission.

The most egregious era of Guatemala’s killing fields occurred under the 1982-83 reign of an evangelical Christian president, General Effrain Rios Montt. Rios Montt was convicted in 2013 for the war crimes of his “beans and guns” campaign, in which the Guatemalan Army exterminated the entire Ixil Mayan ethnic group.

President Ronald Reagan visited Guatemala for six hours, met with Rios Montt, and told the American press that he felt Rios Montt “had gotten a bad rap.” 

A new, but rather untold story, is the effort of the Biden-Harris administration's successful efforts to uphold the legitimate election and January inauguration of an anti-corruption Guatemalan lawyer, Bernardo Arévalo as his country’s president.

Guatemala continues to have among Latin America's highest poverty and inequality rates, and a child malnutrition rate of 47 percent. In its poorest cities, some 90 percent of households have children under age five showing stunted growth. Americans who think Guatemalans should stay home and fix their own place if there are problems there, and in any case should leave the U.S. alone, need to look at the history and ask the same things of ourselves.

 We reap what we sow. 

 

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Another White male gun enthusiast. Whew.

I admit I breathed a sigh of relief. In fact, two sighs.

I am happy the apparent assassination attempt failed. Murder is wrong per se, and an assassination is doubly so. An assassination would be chaotic and divisive. Trump's assassination would become a point of grievance for a generation or more. It would make our fractured democracy even weaker. 

I was happy, too, about who the assassin was not. Not a Democrat. Not employed by or associated with Democrats. Not a liberal. Not a progressive. Not a socialist. Not associated with Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, or AOC. Not "woke." Not a member of any liberal-adjacent groups. Not a college graduate. Not Black. Not Hispanic. Not dark-skinned. Not an immigrant or the child of immigrants. Not a gun-hater. Not angry about the death of George Floyd. Not a cop-hater. Not a woman. Not a feminist. Not angry about racial injustice. Not angry about abortion.

Instead, the two alleged assassins are people deep inside the Trump orbit of "real" Americans. Both are White, American-born, unmarried, working-class, male gun enthusiasts. That is the sweet spot for Trump support. 

Thomas Crooks

Ryan Routh

Both alleged assassins had incoherent political beliefs. Thomas Crooks, 20, who shot the former president, was a registered Republican, but had once given a few dollars to a presumed Democratic cause. Crooks' home in Butler Pennsylvania, is Trump country but Crooks' parents may or may not have displayed Trump signs. Witnesses differ. The Florida gunman, 58-year old Ryan Routh had voted for Trump in 2016, then preferred Tulsi Gabbard, then Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy in the spring of 2024, but now disagreed with Trump on the Ukraine issue, and was registered as a Democrat at the time he was arrested.

If I saw this man at a political event, a Walmart parking lot, or anywhere near a pickup truck, I would profile him as a likely Trump enthusiast:

 Routh

People beside me in line for a Trump rally in New Hampshire

People beside me at a Trump rally in Medford, Oregon

My sense of relief is not that Democrats won't get blamed for the assassination attempts. Too late for that. Trump and JD Vance immediately blamed Democrats. JD Vance said:

The big difference between conservatives and liberals is that no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months. I'd say that's pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric. It needs to cut this crap out. Somebody's going to get hurt by it."

Trump looked inside the mind of Routh and said that Routh "believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it." 

Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out. . . .It is called the enemy from within. They are the real threat. 

My relief is from thinking that the Democrats-are-to-blame case is not credible in the minds of whatever undecided persuadable voters still exist. Trump's extravagant smash-mouth talk is a reason not to vote for him. He's gotten too wacky, and he is at it again with these assertions.

And there is the simple matter of instant, gut-feeling typecasting. Neither Crooks nor Routh read at first glance like Democrats  acting on encouragement from the likes of Biden, Harris, or Walz. They look like what their biography suggests they are: single White guys who like guns. They aren't archetype Democrats. They are Proud Boy types. Trump types, if anything. They are the lonely guys who make the news when they shoot up schools, churches, and supermarkets. Kooks. 

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Flood the Zone

     "The Democrats don't matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit."
          Steve Bannon, provocateur and strategic advisor to Donald Trump

     "We'll take the hit."
          JD Vance, GOP vice presidential nominee

On Friday I posited something so unintuitive as to seem ridiculous. I wrote that Trump's claim that Haitian immigrants were killing and eating pet dogs and cats, a claim that appeared to be blowing up in his face, would in fact help his campaign. 

Oh, the story would confirm that Trump was undisciplined, unreliable, divisive, cruel, and happy to spread racist dog whistles, but that was already well-understood by voters. The important thing -- and the benefit to Trump -- was that it pictured immigrants as profoundly foreign and dangerous, and that the mental image of dark-skinned people eating cats or dogs would be mentally "sticky."

The Haitian immigrant BBQ story crowded out discussion of Trump's poor debate performance and Harris' credible one. It took off center stage news about inflation dropping below 3%, news of a pending interest rate cut, news of polls showing Harris now ahead of Trump. The Haitian claim moved immigration back to the center of attention.

Vice presidential nominee JD Vance went on the CNN's "State of the Union" yesterday to say that this was exactly what they were doing, and he didn't mind making stuff up nor smearing Haitians to do it. CNN reporter Dana Bash asked why both he and Trump were spreading debunked rumors. 

JD Vance: "American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do."

Dana Bash: “You just said that this is a story that you created.”

JD Vance: "It comes from firsthand accounts from my constituents. I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it. I didn’t create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris’ policies. Her policies did that. But yes, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story and the suffering caused by Kamala Harris’ policies.”

The Haitian story is dishonest, but useful.

Biden and Democrats made a giant policy and political error on immigration. They were baited by the "If Trump says it, we must be against it" reflex. Across a wide political spectrum,  Americans -- like Europeans -- are feeling unsettled about immigration from poorer countries. Trump opposed immigration on bluntly xenophobic grounds, and did so from the first day of his campaign. He didn't like Mexicans, to whom he soon added Muslims, and then the rest of the non-European world. There was ample political space for Democrats to have re-framed the issue as one of immigration control and accountability, not one of Trump-style prejudice. Democrats could have been conspicuous for border bureaucracies. Instead they are conspicuous for allowing mass scofflaw immigrants to arrive and stay by gaming a failed asylum system.

Democrats accepted Trump's frame of good people vs. bad people, a frame of well-controlled vs. uncontrolled immigration. Democrats left the border in a chaotic state for too long, lest they be thought cruel and racist. Public opinion has jelled. Democrats are living with that history now, and that failure may result in Americans electing a felon who instigated a plot to overthrow an election to stay in power. At least he will do something about the border. Democrats had their chance and didn't.

Harris has a job to do: show herself to the American people and explain what she might do regarding food, housing, and fuel prices, and what she will do about the southern border. The debate showed her to be personally competent -- adept, articulate, and far more mentally and emotionally credible than Trump. However, she did not make the sale that her policy positions will solve America's problems. Trump keeps stealing the spotlight. The Haitian cat and dog story was intentional. So was Trump writing that he hates Taylor Swift. The second assassination attempt on Sunday was not part of the campaign plan, but it will serve the same purpose. 

The spotlight is on Trump, always Trump. 

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Easy Sunday: Quick Satire

Sometimes you have to laugh.

One way to keep your mental health in this Era of Trump is to laugh at the absurdities.

A Medford neighbor, Gerald Murphy, has a lighthearted approach to Trump. He writes little satirical pieces that are misunderstood as real, which gets him kicked off of social media platforms. Murphy laughs it off. He is a retired high school English teacher. He has written dozens of plays and musicals with productions in over 40 countries, mostly in schools, churches, and community theaters.

Murphy, at his granddaughter's high school graduation

The presidential debate and its aftermath produced some humor, if one has the right mindset. Murphy sent me these, hoping I would get the jokes:

My wife is mad at me -- again.

"You promised to make a plan to stop drinking so much ten years ago, but you still drink like a fish," she said.

"Give me a break," I told her.

"Well, what's the plan?" she said.

She was pretty pissed so I had to come up with something.

"All right," I said, "I don't have a plan yet, but I got this great concept."

 

And this one:

Friday night football turned out dismally for the Medford High School Black Tornadoes. A sports reporter was on hand to interview the coach.

Reporter: "Tough game, coach. The final score was 36 to 0! How do you explain the loss?"

Coach: "I wouldn’t count this as a loss. Our boys can hold their heads up high. They did remarkably well, considering the officiating."

Reporter: "Bad refs?"

Coach: "Cheating refs. Definitely. Before the game started, we saw their coach hand the refs a bundle of money. Then the ref gave him a copy of our playbook." 

Reporter: "So, you had no chance?"

Coach: "I believe we still could have crushed them except for the way they drugged our quarterback’s Gatorade."

Reporter: "I guess that explains the four fumbles and three interceptions."

Coach: "Right. But we still would have won if they didn’t have that bozo changing the scoreboard. We scored seven touchdowns, but not one showed up."

Reporter: "But I was there--"

Coach: "You were up in the stands. It was a different game here on the sidelines." 

Reporter: "And you won’t accept that you guys lost?"

Coach: "No, no, no! Only losers accept a loss. I say we won. And when the truth comes out about all their shenanigans, we’ll be on our way to a perfect season! Our tenth perfect season in a row!"

Reporter: "But you were two and six last year!"

Coach: "Where’s the reporter for another paper? We can’t trust your fake news reporting. This is the last time you’ll ever interview me!"

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I won! I won! I already won!:

It's a negotiating technique: Claim the initial position. 

Assert that the matter is settled. Claim you've already won.

On election night, 2020, before most of the ballots were counted, but when the early indications looked like a Biden win, Trump spoke:

   "This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election, we did win." [Audience cheers.]

We saw a fresh iteration of the technique after the debate on Tuesday. In the post-debate spin room, at subsequent speaking events, and in writing, it is the same message: Trump won in a landslide and the opponent cheated. 

Trump on Truth Social:
     "Polls clearly show that I won the Debate against Comrade Kamala Harris, the Democrats' Radical Left Candidate, on Tuesday night."

Also on Truth Social:

     "People are saying that Comrade Kamala Harris had the questions from Fake News ABC. I would say it's very likely. . . . Despite having to debate three people, Polls firmly state that I won, and EASILY."

In a speech in Las Vegas yesterday:
     "I hear she got the questions, and I also heard she had something in the ear." 

In Trump's world, there is no set of facts that would allow a Kamala Harris victory to stand on its face. Even Trump political allies and Fox News acknowledged that it was a bad night for Trump and a good one for Harris. No matter. Someone acting in bad faith was quick to present evidence to the contrary. After all, it is the internet and we have free speech:

Elon Musk comes along shortly after, admitting his data is worthless, but presents it anyway. It fits Trump's narrative, and Musk's:

What is true? Anything could be true. Trump uses a ready-made source that will meet any need: "People are saying" and "I hear that."

I know of no effective way to inoculate the American political system against a November reiteration of Trump election denial, except, of course, a Trump win. Trump has trained his supporters to accept what he claims. It is either true or could-be-true. Could-be-true is close enough.

Mainstream media warned of the "red mirage" problem four years ago: Early votes would skew to Trump and Democratic votes would come later. Before the 2020 election Steve Bannon was caught on tape laughing about Trump's plan to announce and claim victory on election night when Trump was ahead in the vote count. Americans knew what to expect, but it did not inoculate the system against what Trump doing exactly what was predicted.

After the fact, the political system took action to protect itself. The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 clarified the role of the vice president as ministerial in counting votes. Indictments of 2020 fake electors are a caution to potential new ones in 2024. Security at the Capitol has been beefed up for this coming January 6. The biggest vulnerability remains, though. Approximately half the American public tolerates and endorses a leader who flagrantly and proudly creates his own reality. This is a democracy, so a self-governing people are free to be governed by someone who makes things up. And that is what we have. Trump makes things up, proudly and shamelessly. 

Trump can sell. Democrats underestimate how believable he sounds to people who want to believe what he makes up. He says he won elections and debates in a landslide, and that is welcome news, and it could be true. He seems utterly confident and convinced of what he says, and that makes him believable, at least to some of the people some of the time, and very possibly half the people this time.

Whatever the vote this November, he will claim a landslide victory, and a lot of people will believe him.

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The “Haitians eat your dogs” gambit.

Trump:
      "In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats . . . The people on television say, my dog was taken and used for food.”

Trump's attack is vile, dishonest, racist, defamatory, and bad for America. 

It may well win him votes.

Trump: hero and savior of cats

At first glance Donald Trump appears to have sabotaged his debate performance by making crazy accusations. The most memorable of them was that Haitian immigrants are killing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. 

There was early blowback.

Debate moderators did a real-time fact-check, and said it was not true. Democrats scoffed at it. Even conservative media said that Trump embarrassed himself. Karl Rove called it "probably Team Trump’s lowest moment.” The Wall Street Journal ran a headline about the "False Claim That Immigrants Are Eating Pets."

Conservative pundit Erick Erickson used blunt language:

But wait. 

Maybe this serves Trump's purpose.

Underlying Trump’s popularity is his overarching idea that American identity -- its culture, its economy, its blood, and the safety of its native-born citizens -- is under economic and physical attack from foreigners, especially dark-skinned ones, many from "s-hole countries." He is playing to a perennial theme in American culture, the fear and distrust of immigrants from new places. In prior generations it was the Irish in the 1840s, the Italians, Greeks and Chinese in the 1880s, and Germans during World War I. Always, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background, there is fear of Jews. Always, less now but still present, is racial prejudice against Blacks. Trump turned the focus to Muslims and people from Latin America. Both Bush presidents said we were not at war with Islam. Trump said yes we are. And Trump's campaign in 2015 started by saying that Mexico isn't sending its best. "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists."

Trump is playing the race card more bluntly than did Richard Nixon, with his "southern strategy," or Ronald Reagan, who kicked off his presidential campaign in, of all places, tiny Philadelphia, Mississippi. That's a place distinguished in American history as the town whose leaders conspired to cover up the investigation of the murder of three civil rights workers. There is always reason to be afraid of strangers, crime, and disorder. Trump is unusually direct in appealing to that fear and putting a dark face on it.  

Trump says that Haitian immigrants eat dogs and cats. Yuck. It's vivid and mentally sticky. Trump's Republican allies are looking to see if somebody, somewhere in America -- maybe an immigrant, ideally a dark-skinned one -- killed and ate a dog or cat. See! It might be true! The very search for it keeps the idea bubbling at the top of the public mind. Focus:

Immigrant. Kill and eat cats and dogs. Haitians. S-hole countries. 

Trump is not recoiling in the face of the blowback. He is doing the opposite. His Truth Social posts perpetuate the story. Laugh about it. Scoff. But keep in mind the idea, here again:

Immigrant. Kill and eat cats and dogs. Haitians. S-hole countries.

One of many posted on Truth Social by Trump

Trump openly shows his contempt and disgust; Haitians are dangerous, dark-skinned, and profoundly foreign. Weird foreign. Disgustingly foreign. And they want to move next door. The more Trump is criticized for saying it, the more the idea registers with voters that Trump is rough and crude and just the person we need to protect America from foreign defilement by dog and cat eaters.

Don't underestimate Trump. He isn't appealing to our sense of reason. He is appealing to something more instinctual and primitive: our gag reflex. 

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Housing in Boston

Boston is booming. 

It is a success story of urban redevelopment and transition to the 21st Century. It has become a great American city again.

Jobs in Boston are being created faster than housing is being built. 

I lived and worked in Boston during a rough time there, the early 1970s. Ethnic groups -- Irish, Italian, Polish, Black, Jewish -- divided into neighborhoods that were being roiled by court-ordered busing to attempt to integrate the public schools. People and jobs were leaving.

I worked for Boston's mayor and the Bicentennial program to celebrate Boston's role in the American Revolution. (The revolution started early in Massachusetts. The Boston Massacre was in 1770; the Boston Tea Party was in 1773; and the shots heard round the world were fired in Lexington and Concord were in 1775.) One element of life there was not a problem. I paid $160/month for a nice one-bedroom apartment, about 20 percent of my income. I could walk to a subway stop and commute to work downtown. I was a fish out of water there, and I wanted to escape the politics of ethnic rivalries I didn't understand. I moved back to my hometown: Medford, Oregon.

In that same period, college classmate Larry DiCara -- Boston-born-and-raised, a graduate of Boston Latin School -- had been  elected to a seat on the Boston City Council. Just 22, he was the youngest person ever to serve on that body. He did not leave Boston. He dug in, continued on the City Council for a decade, became a lawyer and civil leader, and for the next five decades and into the present has been a key player in the physical and economic development of Boston.

Prosperity brings problems of its own. Boston is expensive. 

Larry DiCara

Guest Post by Larry DiCara

I grew up in a poor neighborhood in a poor city. My grandfather paid $18,500 for a two-family home in 1956 because nobody wanted to pay any more. I rented cheap apartments when I was young, as did all young people in Boston in the 1970s.

Boston was on its knees. Our population was reduced by over 250,000 in the course of 25 years; a loss of 30 percent. As a result, there was no significant demand for housing. When the Desegregation Order was implemented in the mid-70s, families disappeared. There were arson rings. Some of them included members of the fire department and the police department. This followed a series of economic sucker punches, including the closing of major employers such as Plant Shoe and Walter Baker Chocolate and then the Charlestown Navy Yard and the Army Base in South Boston. Furthermore, as a result of high interest rates, construction slowed down significantly. My contemporaries would relocate to Texas to get work and come back to visit once a month to pay the rent.

All of this has changed now that we are a city dominated by educational and medical facilities where people toil with their brains rather than their brawn. There are fewer poor people, many of whom live in some type of affordable housing.

The other aspect of no longer being a poor city is that we are city full of young people, many of whom are single and who have great jobs and who want to live near a transit line, even if the MBTA may not work on a regular basis.

As a result, younger, mostly single people without children have replaced, and arguably displaced, families, often single-parent families with children. Those without children pay less for food, sneakers and jeans, and therefore can pay more for rent. Let’s not even try to calculate the cost of childcare! Two, three or four wage earners can pay more for rent than one or two. Not surprisingly, the school-aged population continues to decline, despite an influx of immigrants, even as the population has returned to the levels of the 1960s, when the Boston schools had over 100, 000 students

These are the normal rules of economics. I think it was Chapter four in Professor Paul Samuelson’s book which so many students read in the 1960s and 1970s. When there is a great demand, the price goes up. When there is less demand the price goes down. The only way to solve the problem is to build more housing -- lots of it -- which means we must override discriminatory local zoning laws across the Commonwealth.

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Trump blustered.

"Never let them see you sweat."
        Advertising slogan, Gillette's Dry Idea anti- perspirant 

Trump returned to form. He went into an extended rant. He sweated.

At 27 minutes after the hour, Kamala Harris said Trump's rallies were poorly attended and that people left early "out of boredom and exhaustion." 

Trump was hooked. 

He looked desperate. He was a salesman who had to meet a sales quota and he would say anything -- anything! -- to close the sale before the customer left the sales floor.

Lindsey Graham called Trump's performance "a disaster." Fox News hosts admitted it, too. Trump advisor Stephen Miller and Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida look glum going into the spin room to defend Trump.  

Meanwhile, Democrats are giddy.

Huffington Post

The Wall Street Journal's editorial pages are universally understood to be Republican-oriented, but even Kyle Peterson, a member of their editorial board could not ignore the obvious:

“We have the biggest rallies,” Mr. Trump said. “That’s because people want to take their country back.” The U.S., he continued, is a failing nation. “You’re going to end up in World War III, just to go into another subject.” In Ohio, immigrants are eating people’s dogs and cats, “they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” (Moderator: “The Springfield city manager says there’s no evidence of that.”)

Mr. Trump went on to say that the FBI’s crime statistics are “a fraud,” and the Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs numbers are “a fraud,” and the 2020 election was, yes, still a fraud, and “they should have sent it back to the legislatures.” About the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, he regrets nothing. Then World War III again. What of this is supposed to reassure suburbanites who worry that Mr. Trump is too erratic to put back in the Oval Office?

The followup news and commentary about the debate will be that Trump melted down and Harris did well. It may not be enough to secure victory for Harris. Trump's incompetence meant that Harris never got pressed hard on the issues that trouble swing state marginal voters. Harris did not face a back-and-forth on fracking sufficient to make voters in Pennsylvania know, for sure, that she won't end it by regulating it into impracticability. Trump did not challenge her directly enough on immigration to assure voters that she will do something about it and not cave -- as Biden did for two and a half years -- to forces within the Democratic coalition that consider border enforcement cruel and unjust. She never had to persuade people she has an economic plan she could defend against an opponent's criticism.

Trump's incompetence has that silver lining for him. 

I expect Trump's campaign will stop calling Harris low-IQ. She looked smarter and more mentally sound than did Trump. If mental fitness is the issue, Harris wins big. Trump's campaign will redirect the attack to saying she is a San Francisco Marxist, trying to hide it with a smile and gauzy generalities.

Trump may be a whack job, but Harris hasn't yet assured voters she isn't dangerous in a different way. She still has work to do. But this was a very good night for her.

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