More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

With Luck, The Trump Brand Has Tanked

I and others have long been baffled by the willingness of many Americans to cast their votes for the Felon, a malignant narcissist who cares nothing for anyone but himself and who increasingly flaunts his unrestrained corruption. Seemingly, the Felon giving his cult followers permission to hate and discriminate against blacks, Hispanics, gays and non-right wing "Christians" was more appealing to these voters than their own financial security and access to health care. Now that the Felon's war of choice against Iran has caused fuel prices - including gas at the pump - to soar and his trade wars and tariffs have driven consumer prices even higher, some within his Kool-Aid drinking base are belatedly realizing that the Felon has always only cared about himself and that their struggles mean nothing to him.  Indeed, the Felon seems most fixated on taking revenge on perceived foes, enriching himself, and building monuments to himself.   The state of the economy is merely an after thought and the Felon has admitted that he thinks little about Americans' financial struggles. A column in the New York Times looks at the hopeful cratering of the Felon's brand:

In 1992, James Carville’s famous refrain — “It’s the economy, stupid” — compressed into four words what it might have taken a political scientist 400 words to explain: When family budgets feel tight, voters often go shopping for a new party to run things.

So as we approach the 2026 midterm elections, it’s hardly a unique insight for a pollster like me to say the election will hinge on the issues of our fragile economy and the high cost of living. Arguably, pocketbook issues led Donald Trump back to the White House for a second term: Poll after poll in 2024 showed the economy as the top issue and tended to show him with a significant advantage on who was more trusted to handle it.

Today, [the Felon] President Trump and Republicans haven’t merely lost that advantage; they’re underwater on the cost-of-living issue by an eight-point margin. And this year a second issue has been rising in my polling, ranking below the cost of living but ahead of other concerns. It’s not just the economy: “It’s the corruption,” too.

Voters don’t think the economy is working for them, and they think it’s being rigged more and more in favor of a precious few who are cozied up to our nation’s leaders. The combination of these two worries is putting Mr. Trump and Republicans in a terrible position on the eve of an election.

When Gallup asked Republicans back in 2016 what made Mr. Trump appealing, one in six alluded to his experience as a businessman. This was a product of his years in the public eye as a real estate mogul and as the star of “The Apprentice.” The top response? Mr. Trump was an “outsider.”

Some of his voters are wondering if that’s still true. Robert, one of the Trump-voting Texas swing voters in a recent Times Opinion focus group for which I was a moderator, put it this way: “You used to think that you could count on the Republicans to be able to help out with the economy.” Now, he said, it feels as if “it’s going to be the top class or the certain friends that are getting the benefit of the economy, not the general folks.”

For years, Mr. Trump got a lot of mileage out of his supporters thinking of him as a singular figure — a tycoon who put his glitzy life on hold in order to fix a broken Washington. Today, they see headlines about memecoin scams, inexplicable pardons and the enormous wealth that the president’s family and close associates are accumulating, and some of them are beginning to draw a different conclusion.

It would be one thing if Americans thought Mr. Trump were focused on fixing the economy and just hadn’t had enough time to deliver results.

In January 2025, I asked voters what they hoped Mr. Trump would focus on in his second term, and they were clear that they wanted to see efforts to lower the cost of living and secure the border. By November 2025, more than seven in 10 said he had given a lot of attention to the latter, but only 43 percent said he had made reducing the cost of living one of his highest priorities. Today, that figure is down to four in 10, fewer than the number who think he has prioritized projects such as building a White House ballroom or renovating the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Even among Republican voters, only six in 10 think he has made the cost of living a top priority.

Many of Mr. Trump’s supporters grumble that he’s out chasing pet projects and feeding his ego, busy renaming buildings and bodies of water. As Pam, another of my focus-group participants, put it: “Those things to me are a waste, instead of spending time on what’s going on here in the U.S. and the fact that people are struggling.”

On its own, an economy that feels like it is leaving people behind would be a political problem for any incumbent. But add to it the gold leaf and vanity projects, and you wind up with a politically perilous one-two punch.

Some of the people who’ve believed in Mr. Trump over the past decade seem to be coming to the conclusion that the outsider businessman they voted for is just another typical politician. And while there are surely plenty of disillusioned Trump voters who wouldn’t dare cast a ballot for a Democrat, there’s no guarantee that they’ll bother to turn out on Election Day if they feel their own side is behaving poorly. Come November, that’s a slice of their coalition that Republicans can’t afford to lose.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

Is the Felon's Luck Is Finally Running Out?

Predictions of the Felon's political death have proven false and wishful thinking in the past and despite his unfitness for office - and I mean any office - he has resurrected himself. Not even two full years into his second regime, the chaos he generates is exhausting and his focus remains primarily on his own self-enrichment and benefiting the billionaire class and the fossil fuel industry.  The wants and needs of average Americans is nowhere on the Felon's radar screen and the Felon's tariffs and war of choice have driven fuel costs through the roof, dragging other consumer prices higher - the opposite of what the Felon promised in his disingenuous 2024 campaign. With the mid-term elections a little more than a month away, as a column in the New York Times lays out, the Felon may be at the end of his lucky streak even as he pushes his vanity projects in Washington, D.C., and moves to despoil public lands. More and more voices on the political right are critical of the Felon's misrule even as Republican candidates seek to run from the Felon (see this piece at Salon).  Here are highlights from the Times column:

Trump has been president, on and off, for five years and eight months. We have been waiting a long time, and there have been premature declarations in the past, but this time his string [of luck] is finally running out. The evidence is decisive.

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken Sept. 17 to 20, the share of voters who disapprove of Trump (66 percent) is twice as large as the share of those who approve (32 percent).

Trump’s support among Latino voters — a crucial ingredient of his victory in 2024 — is falling rapidly. Pew Research found that Trump’s approval rating among Hispanics who voted for him two years ago fell to 66 percent from 93 percent between February 2025 and April 2026.

The way independents break in the end is often determinative in general elections, and they have turned their backs on Trump. In 2024, independents split among the two candidates, favoring Trump by 3 percentage points. Asked now whether they intend to vote for a Democrat or a Republican for Congress — the generic vote question — independents choose the Democrat over the Republican 57 percent to 32 percent, a 25-point difference.

Trump has lost “ownership” of the issues that put him in the White House. In 2024, voters said Republicans would do a better job dealing with immigration than Democrats, 42 percent to 30 percent. Two weeks ago, the NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll national survey found that voters had shifted to favor Democrats by a modest three points, 41 to 38 percent, but that modest three-point advantage actually represents a 15-point swing.

Voters, in other words, are showing a growing determination to repudiate the Trump presidency. Their most direct opportunity to express this determination is electing Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate. At the moment, poll data gives Democrats a strong chance of taking the House and modest but strengthening odds of taking the Senate.

Trump, as we have learned to our detriment, cannot tolerate defeat. Jan. 6 was only the most obvious manifestation of that.  He has already taken or announced actions that amount to expressions of desperation: an offer to pay every adult $5,000 if Republicans retain control of both branches of Congress, for example. He also told us, point blank, after he was asked whether he would send National Guard troops or Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to polling locations during the midterm elections, that he would “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections; we have to have honest elections.” The only elections Trump recognizes as “honest,” of course, are the ones Republicans win.

That Trump is going to extremes to avoid responsibility for defeat is unsurprising. He has spent much of his political career blaming others for his mistakes, and few things could be more repellent than the Republican losses on the political battlefield when voting ends on Nov. 3, leaving an indelible stain on Trump’s hands.

Trump remains blissfully ignorant of his political toxicity. On Sept. 9, at the Republican midterm convention that he convened, Trump told loyalists worried about the midterms, “Pretend that I am on the ballot.”

In fact, the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that a strategy to persuade voters that Trump was on the ballot would backfire disastrously

Steve Deace, a right-wing talk show host in Iowa, gave a warning last Wednesday on X about the dangers facing the Republican Party on Election Day: Yesterday, Iowa House Republicans were informed by their own pollsters that if you are in a +15 district you’re within the margin for error, if you’re in a +10 district you’re underwater, and that this might end being an even worse midterm environment than 2006. …

Deace placed the blame for his party’s endangered position on the way “This whatever/kinda/sorta/but not really war has become an existential misuse of political capital. Many of us never thought it was worth it, and more and more it appears voters agree.”  “Out here in the cheap seats,” Deace added, “it feels like another Middle East War quagmire regular folks are paying for on both ends all over again.”

The erosion of support for Trump has been a slow and steady process. Polling by the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that over the 13 months from July 2025 to August 2026, the percentage of voters who “strongly disapprove” of Trump rose to 54 percent from 49 percent, while the percentage saying they “strongly approve” fell to 14 percent from 21 percent.

Predicting election outcomes is a fool’s game, but as one of the fools, I think Taylor is too cautious. My own experience is that trends are highly predictive of outcomes — and the trend line now is moving decisively in favor of the Democrats.

Amy Walter, the publisher and editor in chief of The Cook Report, wrote last Tuesday under the headline “Political Gravity Finally Caught Up With Trump. Now the G.O.P. Has to Try to Spend Their Way Out of It”: . . . the economic consequences of his sweeping tariffs and the war in Iran have done the one thing all the controversies of his first term were never able to do: splinter his coalition and sink his approval ratings to all-time lows. . . . Perhaps more damaging, Trump’s inability to pull his candidates across the victory line has become conventional wisdom.

Smarter.Vote, a voter analysis website, currently assesses a 73 percent chance of a Democratic takeover of the House, with a post-election makeup of 228 Democrats to 207 Republicans. Smarter.Vote foresees a much closer and more contested Senate outcome, with Democrats now having a 57 percent chance of taking control, with a 51-to-49 majority.

Most damaging of all for a wannabe autocrat like Trump, who depends on being the center of attention to maintain his power, there are clear signs that the president is losing relevance.

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported on its A.I.-based analysis of nearly 70,000 hours of podcasts with a headline that should make even Trump cringe: “MAGA Podcasters Are Tuning Out Trump.”

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Sunday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

Thanks to Trump/the GOP Lenders Don’t Trust the USA Anymore

The Felon ran a number of his businesses into the ground and multiple bankruptcies ensued.  Now, the Felon and those who have shredded the myth of GOP fiscal responsibility are driving the USA in a similar direction as the federal debt explodes - 30% has been incurred in just the years the Felon has held the White House. Other factors besides the exploding debt are the Felon's attacks on the Federal Reserve, Republican threats to allow America to default on its debt, and the overall corruption of the Felon's regime.  The result is  that America's borrowing costs are soaring and America finds itself paying more to sell it governmental bonds than even nations like Greece and Estonia.  Rather than making "America great again," the Felon has made America weaker as it has suffered a de facto defeat by Iran, munitions supplies have been depleted, allies have been spurred and alienated, and much of the world views the Feloon as a dangerous buffoon.  A piece in The Atlantic by a former Republican and true conservative in the traditional sense looks at the damage being done:

This has been a week of pain for anyone who borrows money.  All over the world, lenders are demanding higher interest rates. The global bond market is extracting higher yields from every borrower, starting with the biggest borrowers of all: national governments. But not every government is paying equally.

Trustworthy borrowers with solid finances and honest leadership pay less. Distrusted borrowers with disordered finances and corrupt leaders pay more. In times past, the United States would have headed that first list. Under President Trump, the United States has tumbled onto the second one.

In trading yesterday, the yield on a U.S. 10-year Treasury bond hovered near 5.2 percent. Germany pays less than the United States. France pays less than the United States. Canada pays less than the United States. Even Greece pays less than the United States. Estonia—a country under constant threat of a Russian invasion and the annihilation of its sovereignty—pays much less than the United States: only 3.6 percent.

Most reporting on the bond market emphasizes the Iran war, global inflation, and the surge in government debt during the global pandemic. These are the conditions faced by every major borrower. But they don’t explain why American debt is more expensive than the debt of Greece or Estonia.

In April 2011, then-Representative Paul Ryan delivered a speech at the American Enterprise Institute to warn of an imminent debt crisis in the United States. The country’s debt stood at $14.3 trillion . . . In 2017, when Ryan was speaker of the House, Congress enacted and Trump signed a big 10-year tax cut without comparable spending offsets. The national debt climbed to $23.2 trillion by early 2020, then spiked further as the U.S. government—like governments everywhere—spent massively during the pandemic and its aftermath.

By the time Trump returned to office in 2025, the national debt had reached $34 trillion. Trump and the Republican-led House and Senate he helped usher in could have restored fiscal discipline. Instead, they made the 2017 tax cut permanent, again without comparable spending offsets. . . . . Trump’s new “love me, love me” taxpayer-funded campaign ad touts what he calls the “largest tax cuts in history,” but ignores both the gaping deficits and his abortive tariffs.)

The U.S. national debt surpassed $40 trillion in August 2026. On the current trajectory, it will exceed $50 trillion by 2030, the year after Trump is constitutionally required to leave office. The United States now pays more to service its debt than it spends on national defense. By the end of the Trump presidency, interest costs will exceed Medicare funding too.

Other countries also have big debts. Why, then, do Americans pay higher interest rates than most other large democracies? This is partly a data problem. America’s debt-to-GDP ratio is about double that of Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavian countries, and it continues to rise fast while the debt burdens of other seriously indebted countries, such as Italy and Greece, are steady or declining.

But much of the problem can be blamed on Trump and the GOP, the so-called party of fiscal discipline. The European Union has a truly independent central bank. Countries that use the euro, including Greece and Estonia, cannot simply inflate their way out of debt. In the United States under Trump, however, the White House has steadily attacked and subverted the Federal Reserve’s independence.

In an unprecedented act that could threaten the global economy and destroy trust in the dollar, Trump has speculated about refusing to pay some or all of the country’s public debt. In a CNN town hall in 2023, Trump urged congressional Republicans to “do a default” to force “massive” spending cuts on the Biden administration. In 2024, Trump’s chief economist, Stephen Miran, wrote up and circulated a plan to reduce the country’s borrowing costs by forcing U.S. creditors to swap existing debt for longer-term bonds at lower interest rates.

The Trump presidency will end. Yet a readiness to default has become a signature theme of Republican politics. U.S. debt is subject to a strange artifact called the debt ceiling, which imposes a maximum limit on federal borrowing. In the past, the majority party would raise the ceiling as required, while the minority party intoned scolding speeches about fiscal irresponsibility. After 2010, however, Republicans in Congress began to use the debt ceiling as a political weapon.

In 2011, the Republican House majority refused to raise the ceiling until the country was within days of a debt default, prompting the rating agency Standard & Poor’s to strip the U.S. of its long-term triple-A credit rating. Republicans again pushed the country to within hours or days of hitting the debt ceiling in 2013 and 2015—and then again, at Trump’s urging, in 2023. Another agency, Fitch, dropped its triple-A rating of U.S. debt that year, citing “erosion of governance” as a principal cause. After Trump’s threats to fire Powell raised questions about the central bank’s independence last year, the last major rating agency, Moody’s, downgraded the U.S., citing expanding fiscal deficits and rising interest costs.

The corruption of the Trump administration, enabled by Republicans in the House and Senate, also bears blame for the country’s rising borrowing costs.

A 2006 study found that the more corrupt a country was rated by the nonprofit Transparency International, the more it paid for its debt. Within the United States, more corrupt states pay higher interest rates than more honest states. In August 2024, a Trump-campaign social-media account posted an anti-immigration warning: “Import the third world … Become the third world.” Yet Trump’s multibillion-dollar self-enrichment schemes, perversion of presidential pardons, attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve, and costly vanity projects throughout Washington all make the United States look more like Pakistan, Nigeria, or the Philippines than a consolidated democracy.

Americans are now paying for these crooked extravagances on their mortgages, car loans, student debt, and credit-card interest statements. When it comes to borrowing rates, the United States now sits between Estonia and countries in deep financial trouble. This is not all because of Trump, but it wouldn’t have happened without him and those who enabled him.