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Big Republicans Donors Prepare a Draft Youngkin Campaign

Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia gubernatorial contest two years ago through a highly deceptive campaign where he pretended to be a moderate and maximizing a gaff made by his Democrat opponent.  In truth, Youngkin - who admittedly a smooth, if disingenuous talker - is no moderate as the fact that he was/is the darling of The Family Foundation, one of Virginia's leading Christofascist/hate group, should have told thinking Virginians.  But for Democrat control of the Virginia Senate to date, Youngkin and the GOP extremists in the House of Delegates would have turned Virginia into a warmed over version of DeSantis' Florida.  Now, desperate Republican mega donors who fear a failed Trump rematch against Joe Biden and are dismayed with what they have seen on the GOP debate stage are beginning a draft Youngkin campaign to find someone other than Trump as the 2024 party standard bearer.   To think Youngkin would restore  sanity to the GOP if the campaign were successful is a pipedream given Youngkin's embrace of Christofascists/white supremacists.  A lengthy column in the Washington Post looks at the GOP donor effort.  Here are excerpts:

Some of the biggest Republican donors in the country will converge next month at the historic Cavalier Hotel in Virginia Beach for a two-day meeting to rally behind Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The closed gathering, named the “Red Vest Retreat” after the fleece Youngkin wore during his 2021 campaign, will begin Oct. 17 and be focused, officially, on the Republican effort to win full control of the General Assembly in Virginia’s upcoming elections. But unofficially, several donors tell me, it will be an opportunity for them to try to push, if not shove, Youngkin into the Republican presidential race.

Others say they will be busy prodding Youngkin and his allies in phone calls from afar. “He appears to be leaving the door open,” Thomas Peterffy, a billionaire who has already given millions of dollars to Youngkin’s PAC, told me this week. “And if Republicans win in Virginia, maybe we can talk him into it. He obviously wants to see what emerges, what the state of play is.

“The money would be there,” Peterffy assured me.

Drafting Youngkin as a last-minute addition to the sclerotic Republican presidential field is something that has lingered for months as a donor fantasy — a whispered, can-you-imagine gambit rarely meriting much discussion because there has been widespread hope that somebody, anybody, would gain traction against former president Donald Trump. But now, fantasy talk of an audacious, break-the-glass moment for the anti-Trump faction has morphed into not-so-quiet consideration.

Wednesday’s debate in California likely did little to calm the restlessness felt by plugged-in Republicans desperate for an alternative to Trump. Even as some contenders understandably boast about a bounce, dissatisfaction with the field has become a refrain that will not abate.

The thirsting for Youngkin is not a well-orchestrated power play. It is the latest slapdash scheme in a long search for a standard-bearer and a portrait of the powerlessness so many Republicans feel as Trump plows ahead, shrugging off criminal indictments and outrage over rhetoric they fear is growing dark and dangerous.

After months of hearing mostly about Democratic concern about President Biden’s poll numbers or his age, it’s evident that a Republican panic is emerging from hibernation.

Donors and anti-Trump Republicans have been fixated on Youngkin for two years, since his 2021 election impressed them for how he was able to win support from Trump voters while keeping Trump himself at a distance. They also know a direct challenge to Trump would be politically brutal — and that late entries are logistically near-impossible.

“I’m for whoever can beat Trump in the primary and, while I still think some of the current candidates can do this, I’d welcome Youngkin putting his oar in,” William P. Barr, Trump’s former attorney general, told me. “If the governor indicated he’d to it, I believe he would draw serious support and be a strong candidate,” Barr said.

Rupert Murdoch, the new chairman emeritus of Fox Corporation and News Corp., has encouraged Youngkin in at least two face-to-face meetings, as The Post reported last month. And Murdoch has continued to speak highly of a possible Youngkin campaign to colleagues, according to a person familiar with his comments.

“The search for other people is very real,” Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton told me, recounting how he went to Atlanta in August to try to recruit Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who resisted Trump’s pressure campaign in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Bolton left unconvinced that Kemp would do it. “A lot of people put Youngkin in the category of a kind of fresh face who could make a difference,” he said. (Bolton hasn’t ruled out his own late run if others decide against it.)

Of course, many other donors and anti-Trump Republicans hope that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) or former vice president Mike Pence, among others, could eventually pull even with Trump. But the experience of DeSantis has dampened spirits.

“DeSantis has faltered and failed to meet expectations and donors know it,” Ed Rollins, Ronald Reagan’s former campaign manager, told me. “No one has a real opening right now, but people are trying to figure out what to do.”

The various Youngkin 2024 theories go something like this: If Virginia’s state legislature goes Republican on Nov. 7, Youngkin could claim he flipped a state that Joe Biden won in 2020. If the governor then signaled interest in exploring a run, supporters could rush to collect signatures for him to get on the ballot in delegate-rich states, many of which have December deadlines. If he got in, he’d make a play for Iowa and build a campaign with an eye on staying in until the convention.

There are some around Youngkin who say the prospect of relentless attacks from the GOP front-runner could be what keeps him on the sidelines, with one person close to him saying, “Glenn cringes when he thinks about what Trump would do.”

Youngkin, while listening to overtures, does not seem particularly keen to take such a risk. These days, he is “super careful to say little” but also “does little to stop you from talking about it,” according to one person who has pitched him on 2024.

On Tuesday, appearing at the Washington Economic Club, Youngkin was asked about what the host called the “elephant in the room.” He said he was “humbled” by the encouragement for him to run and notably declined to endorse a candidate. “I think voters should choose this,” he said.

That breezy Beltway chat is far different than the campaign grind that would test the smiling, often-red-vested governor. Youngkin’s push to restrict abortion in Virginia after 15 weeks of pregnancy would be under the microscope from rivals who think he doesn’t want to go far enough and from supporters of abortion rights who think he might as well be Trump. Opposition researchers would dig into his record, and Democrats would happily revive the playbook they used against Mitt Romney in 2012, painting him as out of touch, uber-rich former chief executive.

“If somebody wants to come in, great,” Romney told me, but he said any addition to the race would risk being meaningless if the Republican field remains crowded and the non-Trump vote is split a dozen or so ways.

History has frequently been unkind to those who run late. . . . Dust off old campaign memoirs and look up chapters on the bids of candidates like Wesley Clark, Fred Thompson and Rick Perry and you’ll see that few of them have happy endings.

The ballot deadlines would present huge hurdles for Youngkin. He would likely miss some key contests in Nevada and South Carolina, which have October filing deadlines . . . Youngkin — or anyone running late — also can’t count on the party convention as a place where the race could be upended, even if Trump were to be convicted in one of his several trials scheduled for next year.

Behind the scenes, Youngkin’s political talent is widely debated by senior Republicans. Some of them find him likable and able to handle the populist headwinds in the party without seeming uneasy. They point to the governor’s support for election denier Kari Lake as evidence of his willingness to dance with Trump’s coalition without much hand-wringing.

“That, more than anything, tells me he wants to run for president,” one longtime Republican presidential campaign adviser told me. “He’s willing to get into the mud with people who lie about the election because he knows he has to.”

“Trump will elect a fair number of delegates and they will not be people subject to switching,” Bolton said. “The famous battles in the past where conventions did make a difference is where people were prepared to switch or freed and Trump’s not going to do that. He would fight to the bitter end.”

Others worry that he’s not doing enough to put himself in a position to come across as commanding and viable, organizationally and in terms of his message. Several Republicans told me he has a window of maybe days, if that, after Virginia’s elections to decide or else supporters would struggle to secure enough signatures.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who challenged Trump in 2016 and has not yet endorsed in 2024, smiled tightly when I asked him how Youngkin would fare if he jumped in. Trump, Rubio said, is “basically the de facto Republican incumbent running for reelection.” He added, “If you’re going to run for president, you can’t just put that thing together in a couple months.”

It’s unclear who would run a Youngkin campaign, but his inner circle, on both the official and political sides, includes players such as Richard Cullen, a well-connected former Virginia attorney general, and David Rexrode, a former executive director of the Republican Governors Association who has helmed Youngkin’s PAC, which has published dramatic, polished videos of Youngkin, including one in which he praises Reagan. Youngkin’s 2021 campaign guru, Jeff Roe, is gone and working as chief strategist for DeSantis’s super PAC.

But a decision — a final and definitive one, not another “I’m humbled” by the suggestion — will be necessary if the clamor gets louder after the polls close in Virginia in November and Youngkin finds himself facing cameras in Richmond.

In the meantime, Youngkin’s supporters on Wall Street and in Washington will keep trying.

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The Futility of Trump's GOP Challengers

Donald Trump skipped another Republican Party presidential primary debate and seemingly will pay no price for it.  Why?  Two reasons: (1) the base of the GOP has become so ugly and dangerous that  they truly seem to want an overthrow of democracy and the murder of anyone opposing Der Trumpenfuhrer, and (2) none of Trump's would be challengers dare to call out the man's growing insanity out of fear of upsetting the most hideous elements of the GOP base.  Thus, the "debate" became a meaningless vanity project for the attendees who attacked each other but never brought the fight against Trump.   It was so pathetic that one can see why the advertising rates for the debacle were reduced. A column in the New York Times looks at the debate which in some ways was akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as the danger Trump poses to the nation went utterly unchallenged by the spineless participants.  The take away is that the GOP has truly become a cult and no one within the party has the courage to do what must be done.   Here are column highlights"

Donald Trump won’t be defeated with sound bites. He won’t be bested with wordplay. Ron DeSantis carped repeatedly that Trump was “missing in action” at the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night, while Chris Christie called Trump a coward and christened him “Donald duck.” How very clever.

And how totally futile. They were throwing darts at the absent front-runner when missiles are in order.

Trump has a mammoth lead over all of them, and there’s no sign that it’s shrinking. He’s skating to the party’s presidential nomination. Along the way, he’s doing quadruple axels of madness, triple toe loops of provocation. He’s fantasizing about executing a respected general and he’s fetishizing firearms, his words coming close to incitements of violence. He’s not sorry for the Jan. 6 riots. To my ears, he’d like more where that came from.

But did any of the seven candidates onstage at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., talk about that? Nope.

Christie, the bravest of a timid bunch, gave eloquent voice to how profoundly Trump had divided the country, pitting friend against friend and relative against relative, and while that’s sadly true, that’s also beside the point.

The point is that Trump has zero respect for democracy and aspirations for autocracy. The point is that he keeps scaling new pinnacles of unhinged. The point is that he needs to win the presidency so that he doesn’t have to worry about living out his days where he belongs — behind bars.

And perhaps the only shot that any of those seven candidates has to stop him and prevent the irreversible damage he’d do to the United States with four more years is to call a tyrant a tyrant, a liar a liar, an arsonist an arsonist. None of them did.

They’re too frightened of his and his followers’ wrath. So forgive me if I chortled every time they talked about leadership, which they talked about often on Wednesday night. They’re not leaders. They’re opportunists who are letting an opportunity slip away from them.

The hopelessness of their quest for the presidency and their deepening awareness of that were reflected in all the shouting and cross talk. Dear Lord, what a din . . . . My ears will be ringing until the next Republican debate, scheduled for early November in Miami. Those poor Floridians. With DeSantis as their governor, haven’t they suffered enough?

Instead of taking Trump sufficiently to task, instead of explaining in full why just about any one of them would be preferable to the madman of Mar-a-Loco, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott quarreled about drapes. Yes, drapes.

Instead of savaging him, the seven candidates tore into one another, seemingly vying not to catch up to Trump but to be declared the No. 1 alternative, like a beauty pageant runner-up poised to fulfill the winner’s duties and wear the winner’s tiara should the need arise.

DeSantis was more aggressive than ever, a contender of faded promise making a last stand. . . . Haley tussled with him, with Scott and especially with Vivek Ramaswamy, who was yet again the political equivalent of a jack-in-the-box, popping up every time you hoped that he’d finally been squished down. Haley called nonsense on his nonsense, telling him: “Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber.” It wasn’t very kind, but it was wholly relatable.

There have now been two Republican presidential debates. Trump has proudly skipped and obnoxiously counterprogrammed both of them. And his punishment from his supposed rivals has been a dainty slap on the wrist.

The moderators on Wednesday night were just as gentle on him, never posing a question as pointed as one during the first debate, when the candidates were asked whether they’d support Trump as the party’s nominee even if he became a convicted felon.

It’s a matter of our country’s survival. But from the way seven candidates danced around the danger of Trump, you’d never know it.

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New York Court: Trump Engaged in Fraud, Receivership Ordered for Trump Companies

As if Donald Trump did not already have enough legal problems given his 91 criminal indictments in four pending cases, a New York court has entered a ruling that threatens Trump's false persona as a successful business man and could destroy his real estate holdings in New York.  The ruling held that Trump, his sons and others in the Trump Organization had committed business fraud for a decade and falsified property values when securing loans or stating Trump's net worth (some believe his real net worth is vastly lower than what Trump claims).  In essence, the ruling confirms that Trump has been a con man for years and not the savvy businessman he claims to be.  Even more threatening, the court terminated the legal existence of a number of Trump limited liability companies and has called for a receiver to be appointed to liquidate their assets. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post look at the ruling and its potential impact on Trump. While not mentioned in the articles, the termination of the legal existence of Trump's companies could well trigger defaults under his loans made to the companies.  Trump's attorneys - a number of whom were sanctioned by the court - say Trump will appeal.  First these highlights from the Times piece:

Nearly every aspect of Donald J. Trump’s life and career has been under scrutiny from the justice system over the past several years, leaving him under criminal indictment in four jurisdictions and being held to account in a civil case for what a jury found to be sexual abuse that he committed decades ago.

But a ruling on Tuesday by a New York State judge that Mr. Trump had committed fraud by inflating the value of his real estate holdings went to the heart of the identity that made him a national figure and launched his political career.

By effectively branding him a cheat, the decision in the civil proceeding by Justice Arthur F. Engoron undermined Mr. Trump’s relentlessly promoted narrative of himself as a master of the business world, the persona that he used to enmesh himself in the fabric of popular culture and that eventually give him the stature and resources to reach the White House. . . . his finding imperils both Mr. Trump’s public image and his business empire. The former president now faces not only the prospect of having to pay $250 million in damages, but he could also lose properties like Trump Tower that are inextricably linked to his brand.

Mr. Trump’s lawyer in the case, Christopher M. Kise, called the ruling “outrageous” and said the decision would be appealed.

In all of Mr. Trump’s recent legal travails, his typical tactics for self-preservation have largely failed him. When cornered, Mr. Trump has traditionally sought to bluster his way out of trouble, falling back on exaggerations or outright lies to escape.

These methods have served him well in the business and political arenas, where there is often little price to pay for bending the truth and where voters tend not to distinguish between gradations of prevarications. Those methods, though, have been much less effective so far in the courts, which operate according to strict standards of veracity and staid and sober rules.

In straightforward terms, Justice Engoron punctured Mr. Trump’s bubble of protective falsehoods about the way he conducted his business.

Mr. Trump’s other weapon of choice — bullying his adversaries — has not fared much better in the courts. This month, federal prosecutors asked the judge overseeing his federal election interference case to impose a gag order on him, citing his “near daily” social media attacks on people involved in the proceeding and the threats they were generating.

Mr. Trump blew past an early warning from the judge in that case, Tanya S. Chutkan, to be mindful about what he said concerning the witnesses, prosecutors and potential jurors in the case. But if he thought he could simply muscle through the judge’s admonition, prosecutors called his bluff. Now Mr. Trump has placed himself on what could be a collision course with the judge that could result in his public statements being curbed in the middle of his presidential campaign.

Justice Engoron’s decision hinted at a trait that has longed defined Mr. Trump’s personality and approach to doing business. He has always sought to create his own reality, often getting away with it — up to a point.

The truly fun stuff that threatens Trump assets is covered by the piece in the Post.  Here are the most delicious highlights:

The judge’s ruling represents a significant setback for Trump by revoking his company’s authority to do business in New York, where the Trump Organization is headquartered and where Trump has major real estate interests. It also represents a victory for Attorney General Letitia James (D), who had asked that Engoron simplify the upcoming trial by deciding in advance that fraud was broadly committed so the state would need to prove only specific illegal acts.

The decision orders the parties to suggest candidates for receivers who will oversee the dissolution of the various entities that make up the Trump Organization’s corporate structure — a ruling that appears to mean the collapse of its operations in New York.

James filed a lawsuit against Trump and his company last year alleging that the Trump Organization and its executives defrauded lenders and insurance companies from 2011 to 2021 by inflating Trump’s net worth in business transactions.

By manipulating the value of Trump’s property and other real estate assets by up to $2.2 billion annually, the real estate, hospitality and golf resort company obtained better interest and policy rates than it otherwise would have, according to the lawsuit.

Trump is expected to stand trial along with his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who served as executives, longtime finance chief Allen Weisselberg and long-serving comptroller Jeffrey McConney.

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Today's GOP: Soft Corruption and False Populism

One of the most amazing and disturbing things about today's Republican Party and its base is how willing much of the MAGA base - especially working class whites - continues to support the GOP's agenda which favors the very wealthy and large corporations.  Time and time again, that agenda boils down (i) to tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations and (ii) slashing safety and labor regulations while seeking to inflict drastic cuts on programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid which support working and middle class Americans.   All the while, Republicans rail against "elites" - even though many hold Ivy League degrees themselves - all things "woke," and socialism even as they seek to knife working Americans in the back financially.  Sadly, much of the MAGA base is so consumed by hatred of others (think blacks, Hispanics, gays, and non-Christians) and often low intelligence/information that they routinely support a party that is in reality a threat to their financial wellbeing.  The false populism of the GOP is so glaring that one needs to be blind or consumed with hate not to see it. Throw in the love of high level Republicans for graft and perk from billionaires and the deceptive picture is complete.  A column in the New York Times looks at the sad phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

There are currently two clown shows — sorry, but let’s be honest — going on in the Republican Party. One is the intraparty fighting that seems extremely likely to cause a government shutdown a few days from now. The other is the fight over who will come a distant second to Donald Trump in the presidential primaries.

There are many strange aspects to both shows. But here’s the one that has long puzzled me: Everyone says that with the rise of MAGA, the G.O.P. has been taken over by populists. So why is the Republican Party’s economic ideology so elitist and antipopulist?

Listen to the rhetoric of the people making Kevin McCarthy look like a fool or of the presidential candidates, and it’s full of attacks on elites — but also of promises to cut taxes for the rich and slash government spending that benefits the working class. For example, Nikki Haley — who is making a credible bid to be Trump’s also-ran, given Ron DeSantis’s implosion — is calling for big cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

As I write this, McCarthy is reportedly trying to appease MAGA dissidents with a temporary funding bill that would cut nonmilitary discretionary spending outside of Veterans Affairs by 27 percent — meaning savage cuts to things like the administration of Social Security (as opposed to the benefits themselves).

The thing is, such proposals are deeply unpopular. It’s true that Americans tell pollsters that the government spends too much, but if you ask them about specific types of spending, the only area on which they say we spend too much is foreign aid, which is a trivial part of the budget. Oh, and most Americans still support aid to Ukraine.

So there would seem to be an opening for politicians who are right wing on social issues like immigration and wokeness but are also genuinely populist in their spending priorities. Such politicians exist in other countries.

So why aren’t there such figures in the G.O.P.? To be fair, during the 2016 campaign Trump sometimes sounded as if he might turn his back on Republican economic orthodoxy, but once in office he pursued the usual agenda of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy combined with benefit cuts for the rest.

Part of the answer may lie in the American right’s general mind-set, which valorizes harshness, not empathy. People who are drawn to MAGA tend to imagine that solving society’s problems should involve punishing people, not helping them.

Also, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of ignorance: MAGA politicians, who generally disdain any kind of expertise, may not have any clear idea of what the federal government does and where tax dollars go.

Finally, there’s the Clarence Thomas factor.

What I mean is that part of the explanation for the absence of genuine Republican populists may involve the gravitational pull of big money, which is both broader and subtler than the way it’s often portrayed.

If the accusations against Senator Robert Menendez are true — and it’s not looking good — old-fashioned bribery, payments to politicians in exchange for favors, hasn’t gone away. But it’s probably not shaping party ideology.

Campaign contributions, on the other hand, definitely do shape ideology; DeSantis was touted as a rival to Trump because he got a lot of support from big donors who believed he would serve their interests and had real political skills. (Being rich doesn’t necessarily come with good judgment.)

[T]he fact is that public figures whom the very rich see as being on their side can reap considerable personal rewards from their positions.

Recent revelations about Justice Thomas show how this works. ProPublica reports that he has received many favors from ultrawealthy conservatives, notably lavish free vacations. These reports are shocking because we don’t expect such behavior from a Supreme Court justice, and Thomas may have violated the law by failing to disclose these gifts. But does anyone doubt that many politicians who favor tax cuts for the rich and reduced benefits for the working class, even as they rail against elites, receive similar favors?

And the hermetic information space of the American right surely facilitates this soft corruption. Suggestions of improper influence on right-wing officials and politicians won’t get much coverage on Fox News, except possibly for claims that they’re the victims of a liberal smear campaign.

Now, I don’t know how important these different factors are to the fact that America’s “populists” are anything but populist in practice. But we do need to ask why people who denounce elites somehow always manage to avoid targeting corporations not named Disney and billionaires not named George Soros.

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Climate Change is Coming for America’s Real Estate Market

Many Americans continue to go about the business in denial that climate change, including rising sea levels and increased hot weather with more violent storms and hurricanes, is real and that it is just a matter of time before the bill comes due for properties in disaster prone areas become uninsurable or may need to be abandoned.  Living in Tidewater Virginia and working in real estate I am well aware of the number of local homes and commercial properties that carry flood insurance which is getting increasingly expensive despite government efforts to suppress increases in premiums.  One factor in the husband and I moving was the ever present worry of flooding at our former home.  The new place - its actually 104 years old - is on higher ground and is much farther back from the water.  While we have flood insurance, it is due to the house having a basement and the cost is a fraction of the cost at the former home (we now insure through a private carrier).   A piece in The Economist looks at the coming bill for too many Americans living in flood, hurricane and wild fire prone areas and the trend by insurers to increase premiums to reflect the true risk  that goes with living in beautiful though dangerous locations.  Here are article highlights:

FOR DECADES Americans have been moving to beautiful places that are vulnerable to extreme weather. Florida, once a swampy frontier, is now America’s third-most populous state. It is also the state most often hit by hurricanes. By 2015, the Atlantic and Gulf coasts boasted more than $13trn of real estate. Look West and the story is similar. Homes are proliferating in the wildland-urban interface, where nature and development anxiously coexist and wildfire season seems never to end.

It is climate change that makes extreme weather more common. But the financial cost of storms and fires depends, more than anything else, on how many homes people choose to build in risky places. After adjusting for inflation, there have been more billion-dollar disasters so far in 2023 than any year since America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began keeping records. Losses as a proportion of GDP have kept stable over the past four decades. But there are big local exceptions: last year hurricane damage cost Florida between 7.5% and 10% of the state’s GDP.

Those who enjoy the benefits of living in high-risk areas (such as a majestic ocean view) should shoulder the costs. However, both federal and state governments ensure that they do not, by subsidising or suppressing property insurance rates in such places. This has encouraged reckless building. A new report from the First Street Foundation, a non-profit research group, finds that if proper account is taken of climate risk, nearly a quarter of all properties in the continental United States are overvalued. These 39m properties represent a climate-insurance bubble inflated by government.

Private insurers burned by huge payouts after disasters are abandoning risky markets such as Florida and California. Homeowners are turning to state-backed insurers of last resort, which offer less coverage for a higher price. When these plans cannot cover claims, taxpayers are often left with the bill. As climate change continues, the uninsurable parts of America will only grow.

At the federal level the National Flood Insurance Programme, which offers subsidised flood insurance to homeowners in hazardous places, is drowning in debt. America’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which runs the programme, is in the process of raising rates to keep it solvent. But property-owners are rebelling by cancelling their policies, and the politicians who represent them are threatening to intervene.

Such intransigence is bipartisan. State and national politicians, Democrats and Republicans, prefer to keep rates artificially low, constituents happy and their tax bases intact. This is short-sighted. So long as disaster risk is underpriced, people will take too much of it. And it is unclear how long taxpayers who live in comparatively safe places will be happy to subsidise insurance for those who don’t, especially when the subsidy-guzzlers are rich. . . . . Taxpayers should not be helping the Real Housewives of Miami build seaside castles.

Instead, policymakers should allow private insurers to set actuarially sound rates, so they can keep writing coverage. Realistic premiums would deter reckless new construction. They would also hurt existing homeowners, so politicians would probably have to keep offering government flood insurance, at least temporarily, to those who cannot afford anything else.

Eventually, though, some Americans will need to move to keep safe from rising seas, roaring floods and fast-encroaching flames. The government should ease the transition: for example, FEMA could offer buyouts to homeowners who cannot afford their insurance. But make no mistake: the longer politicians subsidise building in dangerous places, the worse the pain will be, and the bigger the final bill.

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Trump's GOP Rivals Are Letting Him Win

The Republican presidential primary is a train wreck with Donald Trump skipping debates - an editorial in the Wall Street Journal last week asked what Trump is afraid of - and the remainder of the would be nominees are so milquetoast (save Chris Christie) that none of them will engage Trump head on given their terror of the MAGA base.  Former GOP congressman Joe Scarborough  has offered a number of reasons for Trump's boycott of the debates ranging from an inability to speak without a teleprompter to having to answer questions posed by moderators to a fear of facing someone like Christie, a former federal prosecutor.  Sadly, congressional Republicans similarly refuse to challenge Trump and the danger he poses for the GOP and the country.  As a column in the Washington Post lays out this cowardice and failure to directly challenge Trump is allowing Trump to surge ahead in pools and is setting the nation up for the nightmare of a potential second Trump term which would likely mean the end of American democracy before it was over short of a military coup to remove Trump.  Here are column highlights that notes the failures of Trump's challengers:

To understand why Donald Trump is once again skipping a Republican presidential debate, realize that the conventional way of looking at the GOP’s nomination contest has things largely backward. Trump’s standing in the polls is less about his strength than about the weakness of the rest of the field — and the traditional Republican Party.

Trump wants his foes to stay weak. By not showing up, he reduces them to squabbling bit players trying to bring each other down while the major contenders offer pale imitations of his own message and values.

Republican voters once open to someone other than the former president are concluding that if they’re going to get Trumpism, they might as well go with the guy who invented it. And they’re getting little useful advice from party leaders who — as Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told his biographer McKay Coppins — see Trump as a disaster but are too timid to say so publicly.

It didn’t have to be like this, because the strength of Trump’s lock on the party is vastly exaggerated.

Sure, Trump has an unshakable base, those who would stick with him if he were indicted a dozen more times. But that hard core accounts for no more than about 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate. There really is (or was) room for someone else to break through.

But not one of them has inspired real excitement, and the politician who once seemed best placed to take Trump on, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has had a miserable year.

As a result, Trump has been able to combine his base with a fair share of the largest group of Republicans: those with a more or less positive view of the former president but willing to support someone else.

Not so long ago, such Republicans were flocking to others, particularly DeSantis. Trump seemed anything but inevitable at the beginning of 2023. Many in the party blamed him (and the candidates he backed) for its disappointing showing in the 2022 midterms.

A mid-January poll for the Bulwark by North Star Opinion Research and GOP pollster Whit Ayres found that when Republicans were offered a choice among DeSantis, Trump and “another candidate,” 44 percent picked DeSantis to 28 percent for Trump and 10 percent for the unnamed alternative. When the other potential GOP candidates were listed by name, DeSantis led Trump by 39 percent to 28 percent.

Other polling early in the year generally showed Trump ahead, but mostly not by his currently prohibitive margin.

The sad news for the country is that Republicans let a real chance to end Trump’s career slip away. The opportunity may not come around again. Critics of the GOP enjoy observing that the more Trump is indicted, the more Republican voters flock to him. The timelines of his growing lead and his expanding list of felony counts do overlap, but there are better explanations for his comeback.

The most obvious is that his primary foes have plainly failed to impress voters. At least as important, they and Trump’s (often secret) party critics were unwilling to risk enraging him and his supporters. So they held back from throwing knockout punches when Trump was on the ropes. That’s no way to beat a brawler who’ll do anything to win.

Congressional leaders also seem to have calculated that their hopes of keeping their narrow House majority and winning back the Senate depend on voters whom Trump can draw to the polls — and traditional conservatives cannot. Trump is rubbing that in by forgoing the Wednesday debate in favor of a trip to Michigan, where he’ll pretend to be a friend of the state’s autoworkers. He was, in fact, a very antilabor president, but he sure knows how to play roles on TV.

The party’s paralyzing Trump dependency has only grown with its ongoing loss of middle-of-the-road suburban voters, small-c conservatives temperamentally who are skeptical of a contemporary Big-C Conservatism increasingly shaped by the Far Right.

The journey of suburban Montgomery County outside of Philadelphia is a microcosm of the GOP’s troubles. In 1988, George H.W. Bush, the paragon of old-style moderate conservatism, won 60 percent of the county’s vote, carrying Pennsylvania and the presidential election. In 2020, Trump got just over 36 percent, losing the state and the presidency.

In the short term, Republican strategists see no path to rebuilding a more moderate coalition. The party’s primary electorate is concluding that in a closely divided country, Trump is about as electable as any of his less-than-stellar rivals. The candidates who gather on Wednesday at the Reagan Library need to grasp that they’re on the verge of allowing the most dangerous man in American politics one more shot at power.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty