Schrödinger’s Trump

Jonah is in a major positional mood.

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Sarah, Steve, and Jonah discuss Trump’s indictment for the listeners not privy to niche legal podcasts. Can special counsel prove Trump’s intent? Will Trump voters care? Also:

-Addressing stupid arguments

-Jonah’s grudge against lawyers

–NYT Siena Poll on Trump indictment

–Fitch downgrades our credit score

-(Not?) Worth Your Time extended

Show notes:

–The Collision newsletter

-David Brooks: What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?

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Comments (158)
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  1. Avatar photo
    C C Writer

    "Criming," really? Please do not verb nouns.

    (Brought to you by Edith Burton's Desperate Copy Editors' Caucus.)

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  2. Cpittman4

    Sarah, you used the example of the elite working to tear down social norms of having children within wedlock but it is the lower classes that are actually practicing it, to their detriment. A more recent example is the new trend against "fat shaming". While the media is now critical of "fat shaming", it is the more wealthy that are the thinnest in our country and as we go down the income scale it is the poorer who are increasinly more morbidly obese, which is extremely unhealthy.

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  3. Michael J Kole

    Sarah, this is to your comment regarding the 2 merging lanes onto an expressway, and your assumption that those racing along the empty lane to merge at the last minute are rude, or wrongly doing so.

    This form of merging is called the "Zipper Lane". And it's the most effective form of merging. If everyone used it correctly, it is also the most democratic way to merge into one lane. Please review, because you have potentially offended thousands of traffic engineers who use this method to design the traffic flow. If you weren't supposed to be using the 'empty lane', a good engineer would not have wasted the concrete.

    Mike Kole - Belleville, MI

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    1. Avatar photo
      Rajeev

      Traffic works like capitalism we have too many communists on the road. If everyone acts in their self interest to get where they need to get then both lanes fill up at the merge point and no one moves over earlier then traffic flows fastest. Merging early for the common good is Marxist.

      Source: Boston driver ie Masshole

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    2. Ed_Hist

      Yes, thank you for beating me to this. Think of the early mergers as socialist wannabes. They want everyone to be equally miserable and in doing so make the overall situation much worse.

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    3. Austin from Atlanta

      My top rule for traffic is: follow the rules of traffic. Don’t try to comply with the made up rules under which you think the other driver may be operating. If it’s your right of way, don’t “let” the other person go first to be nice - go because that’s how driving works. If, even with the best of intentions, you decide to change who has the right of way, you’re inserting ambiguity into the situation that makes everyone less safe. Same thing for flashing your lights to tell someone to go without knowing exactly what their perception is - you may just be adding pressure that causes an unforeseen error. And on and on.

      Likewise, if 70% of people completely make up that you’re supposed to merge 0.4 miles before the merge point, it’s not your obligation to comply with those made up rules & you would actually be making traffic worse if you did.

      The one caveat to this is once you do reach the merge point, you need to merge. There are some people who continue driving in the shoulder or emergency lane for unsafe lengths of time rather than continuing with the flow of traffic. The good news is that is already illegal.

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  4. Avatar photo
    Rajeev

    David Brooks column is 10% insightful and 90% complete oversimplification that if it were a boat it would sink with the tiniest amount of water added to it.

    It's a conclusion in search of data not the other way around. There are too many major holes to identify but simply: The 11 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. gave Trump more total votes than all of rural America combined. People live in cities. Democrats more than Republicans but a lot of Republicans do too. Cities have always had appeal that have transcended politics. Trump from the beginning of his campaign adopted the Steve Bannon and many other surrogate used term "coastal elites", which I think they mean all the states on the coast that vote Democratic because they spend all day smoking cigars eating kale and writing blogposts while the rest of "flyover" country does all the hard labor. Except of course North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Alaska, and the Gulf of Mexico states don't count as coastal in their definition and Illinois, New Mexico and Colorado randomly don't count as flyover.

    The entire premise is ridiculous. The lower educated voters have been drawn to Trump because the higher educated voters have controlled everything. Yet somehow magically 90+% of Black voters in the country whose median education maximum level obtained is statistically significantly lower than their white counterparts have voted Democrat. And randomly the party of the elites the Democrats have managed to win the popular vote in 7 of the last 8 elections by an average margin of 3.72% which would equate to over 5.5 million more votes on average based on last election.

    The populists get their energy from Donald Trump the New York billionaire who has cheated working class people his whole life. They get their anger and legal advice from JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Ron DeSantis, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, etc. lawyers that went to Ivy League schools (except Rubio) and purposely lie to them over and over to keep them perpetually offended, angry, and feeling victimized.

    Today's society has made it far easier for non-college individuals to thrive. With a proper work ethic, anyone can use the internet to gain more information for free (business, taxes, computer applications, language, etc.) than they could've gotten 20-40 years ago. College in the 1990s was a necessity toward having a stable job. Even if you didn't work in your field having a college degree on your resume was indicative of what a company was looking for in terms of work ethic. Now it's the reverse. The time someone is willing to put into their craft is far more indicative of their prospects for success than the amount of money paid in tuition.

    David Brooks is a fantastic columnist. But this piece is just clickbait like Hillbilly Elegy that plays to a narrative that doesn't match reality in order to achieve some sort of fake reconciliatory harmonic moment bridging political party and socioeconomic status.

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    1. Elijah Sack

      I like your point on the accessibility of education. I would also mention the moment that trade and tech schools are having now. It requires the motivation to retrain for a job and to leave the labor force for a stint but they seem like a great gateway to not just a middle class living, but upper middle class.

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      1. Avatar photo
        Rajeev

        I tutor full time for a living and nowadays non-technical 4 year degrees are far inferior to so many 2 year trade school degrees because those degrees (auto-technicians, hairstylists, hygenists, etc.) all operate like a professional job with 8-5esque hours that prepare people for a real world job.

        Common four year degrees like polisci, communications, psychology, english, etc. can give you a wealth of knowledge but they do not prepare you for the grind of succeeding at an entry level job. Many of those graduates naturally have that drive or grow into it but nowadays for example an art major can probably do just as well bypassing college and working with private instructors for a fraction of the time.

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  5. GoldenRuleLover

    Tim Miller addresses the Brooks piece in the Sunday Bulwark podcast. I hope you all hear it. He nails it. The Brooks piece has a few nuggets that Sarah teased out about elites on the whole marrying other elites but that in no way explains Trumpism.

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  6. Michaelcstreit

    The Welch’s juice ads featuring gulping and slurping sound effects are more offensive on my ears than Pod Save America

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  7. Mkliegman

    E. Digby Baltzell, last name pronounced with accent on the second syllable. Member of Philadelphia "aristocracy," taught at University of Pennsylvania and best known work is "The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America."

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  8. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    Sarah, how on earth are you not every bit as much as Jonah in the category described by that Brooks article?

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    Iandgow

    Jonah described Bernie Sanders as "a quasi-Communist Jew from Queens" … seems very much from Brooklyn.

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  10. BPhillips

    I'm still a bit confused about the need to prove Trump's state of mind on every charge here. I'd thought at least the asking Pence to block the certification part could "stand alone" without proving Trump knew he's lost the election. Doesn't the law pertaining to this one just say it's illegal to "conspire to obstruct official proceedings"? It doesn't say "unless you think it's justified".

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