Sunday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Saturday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Trump Has Empowered Iranian Extremists While Weakening America

Historians and military war colleges will likely teach the Felon's war of choice against Iran as an example of presidential hubris and lack of proper planning can swamp a presidency and lead it to military solutions that only make everything worse.  With an incompetent president and perhaps even more incompetent Secretary of Defense who has purged experienced top levels of generals and admirals, the military disaster was foreseeable and now prices of everything, particularly gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel have soared.  Meanwhile, the Iranian leadership has become more extreme and militant and rather than preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, the Felon's poorly thought out war of choice has made the desire for a nuclear weapon even stronger among the Iranian leadership.  With the final withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, the specter of increased Iranian influence in Iraq may only increase.  Worse yet, the war has depleted American munitions and shown to the world the limits of American military power.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the Felon's debacle:

In early March, nine days after starting his war with Iran, President Trump held a news conference to crow about his “military success, the likes of which people haven’t seen.” “We’re winning very decisively,” he claimed, and “the result will be lower oil prices.”  Peter Navarro, a White House senior counselor, wrote an essay in March explaining why: “Iran War Will Lower Energy Prices.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in April announced “a historic and overwhelming victory” that had rendered Iran “combat-ineffective for years to come.”

Instead, Trump’s Iran war should be taught for decades as a model of how not to conduct either war or foreign policy. It’s an example of how hubris can swamp a presidency and lead it to military solutions for difficult global problems — and, in the process, make everything worse.

Now Trump finds himself stuck in the Sartre play “No Exit.” “The unsettling reality is that the conflict is nowhere near over,” Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group writes in a Foreign Affairs essay titled “The New Forever War.”

Still, the Trumpian myopia persists, with the administration continuing to claim that its pressure on Iran is a smashing success. “The blockade is working; it’s working like nothing we’ve ever seen,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News in September.

Hmm. Diesel prices at a few places in California have hit $9.99 a gallon, the maximum price those pumps can display. The United States has already spent more than $43 billion on the war, by a lowball Pentagon estimate — more than enough to provide free college education for a year to every American family earning less than $125,000 annually. Higher prices caused by the war have cost the typical American family about $1,000, according to the economist Mark Zandi. More broadly, we’ve depleted our arsenal, cost American and Iranian lives, possibly committed war crimes, exposed American vulnerabilities, effectively lost access to some bases and weakened American military credibility as far away as East Asia.

It’s true that the Iranian economy is a catastrophe and that ordinary Iranians — the people we are supposed to be helping — are suffering greatly. The exchange rate is now more than 2.5 million rials to the dollar, one-tenth of the rial’s value in 2021.

Yet Washington doesn’t seem to understand that instead of surrendering, Iran may choose to escalate. “They’ve come to the conclusion that the only way they survive is to shoot their way out,” Vali Nasr, an Iran expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told me. He suggested that Iran could increase attacks on shipping and, especially if it is attacked, strike oil infrastructure around the Gulf.

“Iran did not wage a scorched earth campaign — but it may yet do so if the current situation persists for too long. That is what everyone who actually follows this region and its dynamics is worried about.”

It’s difficult to see a deal being reached, partly because both Trump and Iran have a history of overreaching. It doesn’t help that Trump’s chief negotiators, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, are real estate investors chosen for their closeness to Trump rather than for, er, their diplomatic savvy.

Iranian leaders also seem cocky. Ahmad Vahidi, the commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, boasted in August that Iran had brought the United States “to its knees.” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told “Meet the Press” that Iran was fully prepared for a new round of fighting, “even if it comes to a doomsday war.” . . . Trump’s war may have actually increased the likelihood of Iran’s making a drive toward a nuclear weapon.

Trump’s war began by killing the previous supreme leader, who had issued a fatwa saying that Iran would not develop nuclear weapons. The new supreme leader, his son, does not inherit that fatwa and has not issued his own, so now “there’s a serious conversation in Iran” about pursuing nuclear weapons, Nasr told me.

We should take these warnings seriously. One reason professors will teach Trump’s war as an example of military malpractice is that it fits neatly into a larger pattern of counterproductive American policies toward Iran. I deplore the brutality, corruption and economic incompetence of Iran’s rulers — so it’s infuriating that America has repeatedly empowered Iranian extremists.

First, the United States helped topple a democratically elected prime minister in 1953, energizing nationalists and souring Iranians on the West. Then in the 1960s and 70s, the United States gave Iran a nuclear reactor, backed an increasingly autocratic shah and overstepped in ways that helped allow Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to become a national force by denouncing American imperialism.

President George W. Bush’s 2003 Iraq war toppled Saddam Hussein, an enemy of Iran, and empowered Shiite militias that support Iran. In 2018, President Trump announced his withdrawal from the Obama nuclear pact with Iran. The capstone in this “march of folly,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Barbara Tuchman, was Trump’s war on Iran this year, which has bolstered military hard-liners in Tehran and enabled them to project greater power over the Persian Gulf and global oil markets.

That’s what I find particularly worth studying: How is it that for three-quarters of a century, we Americans have so bungled our foreign policy that we have systematically empowered Iranian extremists? They call us the “Great Satan,” but in truth our ineptitude has made us their benefactors.

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Dinner Parties, Socializing, and American Loneliness

We hear much about the increased loneliness and sense of isolation experienced by everyday Americans and the role it may play in political polarization and the rise of MAGA.  While some on the far right would blame the phenomenon on the decline of organized religion and a loss of "fellowship", as a piece in The Atlantic reviews, the real cause is perhaps due to modern trends that make self-entertainment at home far easier, without the need to included friends and neighbors. One of the starkest declines is in the number of Americans who entertain at home and throw dinner parties. Indeed, the data indicates that the share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026—a 70 percent collapse in a half century.  In addition, many modern homes have eliminated formal dining rooms which were once a standard feature of most homes. The end result is an increased view of others as "strangers" with declines in a sense of community.  Personally, this is an unknown experience. Growing up, my maternal grandmother held family dinners weekly and my parents would likewise host friends.  Currently the husband and I host two or more dinner parties in our home every month (some fancy and others simple comfort food) and frequently we go to dinner parties hosted by friends and neighbors.  And that's when we are not having dinner with friends at restaurants or the yacht club a block down the street.  Besides perhaps setting the stage for political polarization this plunge in socializing does not bode well for aging Americans where studies have found frequent socializing helps ward of mental decline. I'm not sure what the solution is, but the dinner parties and socialization from years past are one aspect of the "good old days" that perhaps need to be restored.  Here are highlight from the Atlantic:

Mid-century Americans knew how to throw a party, for better or worse. In some of the most famous titles of the 1950s and 1960s—Couples, by John Updike; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee; Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates—the drama (and martini-soaked melodrama) took place in middle-class living rooms. The stories were fictional, but the setting was realistic. Until 1975, half of Americans said they entertained guests at their home every month.

Then something changed. Americans stopped throwing parties. Even more fundamental, they stopped visiting one another. From 1975 to 1998, the share of Americans who gave or attended a monthly dinner party declined by half. The share of Americans saying they never entertained people at home tripled. Although cultural critics often bemoan the decline of organized religion, the dip in church attendance was downright modest compared with the collapse in hosting, according to data gathered by the DDB Needham Life Style Surveys.

In his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam wrote that if these trends continued, the ancient practice of visiting with friends “might entirely disappear from American life in less than a generation.” Check your calendars. One generation and change later, Putnam’s prediction needs an update.

So what’s the state of hosting in the 21st century? To get an apples-to-apples answer to that question, the polling group Data for Progress replicated the DDB Needham Life Style Surveys cited by Putnam. Unfortunately, the upshot is about as brutal as you’d imagine.

In the past 30 years, Americans have seen double-digit declines in practically every measure of socializing. They are less likely to play cards; attend a sporting event; go to the bar; volunteer; work on a community project.

When it comes to hosting people at home, the declines are particularly stark. Since 1995, the share of Americans who say they’ve hosted guests or attended a dinner party has declined by about 20 percent, from 88 to 67 percent—and that’s in addition to the declines that Putnam noted a quarter century ago.

Combining the two surveys, we get this astonishing fact: The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026—a 70 percent collapse in a half century.

Perhaps, an optimist might think, Americans are hosting fewer dinner parties because they’ve simply moved all of their hangouts to restaurants and bars. Nice idea, but almost certainly wrong. As Putnam wrote in his book, “the practice of entertaining friends has not simply moved outside the home, but seems to be vanishing entirely.” Overall face-to-face socializing has declined significantly in the past few decades, and the restaurant industry has actually noted a sharp increase in people eating alone.

Another plausible theory is that Americans have replaced dinner parties with other forms of healthy socialization. Americans do engage in some activities much more frequently than in 1975, such as going to concerts, traveling, and exercising. All very good.

But the evidence suggests that, despite the increase in running clubs, the surge in exercise time seems to be mostly solo. A lot of people are going to the gym with a podcast to keep them company or rolling out a yoga mat in the basement. Most important, it is impossible to assert that Americans are getting out of the house to socialize in new ways when time spent at home has certifiably exploded since the 2010s.

In short, the great disinvitation is real, and we can’t wish or explain it away by arguing that Americans are just finding new ways to be with friends. Here are four explanations:

First is that people are more harried, especially those in dual-earner households. In the 1970 book The Harried Leisure Class, the Swedish economist Staffan Burenstam Linder wrote that as a society gets richer, leisure time takes on the frantic quality of work, because each hour of downtime practically shouts, Excuse me! You could be making money right now! We multitask and pack various activities into short periods. . . . Taking several hours to coordinate with other busy people to set up a lengthy dinner party is a tougher sell.

That’s a sociological explanation, but the decline of hosting is also about macroeconomic trends. In Bowling Alone, Putnam acknowledged that women have historically been the keepers of the family social calendar, planning the birthday parties and neighborhood potlucks. For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships and making plans with other families. But in the 1950s and 1960s, tens of millions of women traded their unpaid household-management jobs for salaried jobs, and the family social calendar frayed, as men failed to pick up the slack.

The trouble with going all in on this explanation—beyond the fact that it embraces a version of learned helplessness for men—is that leisure time has increased overall since the 1950s. Theoretically, married couples should have even more time to have people over for food and drink. Other facts must be squeezing out socializing.

Another possibility is that intensive parenting leaves less time for hosting. Americans used to have many kids whom they cared for sparsely; now they have fewer children to whom they devote every minute of their life. . . . Thus evenings that adults once spent hosting adults are now spent holding, bathing, driving, tutoring, playing with, and talking to their children.

A third explanation is that friendship networks are shrinking, especially for poor people who aren’t married. If you’re going to throw a dinner party, you probably need a few things first. Say, a dinner table. Chairs. Food and drink. And also: friends. It is rare to host a dinner party for people you’ve never met. But the average number of close friendships is declining with each generation, and the decline is steepest for Americans without a college degree. So it’s not just that married people have fewer dinner parties; poor people, who are less likely to be married, have fewer friends, period.

[T]he two groups most likely to say they never entertained people in their home in the previous year were political independents (44 percent) and people without a college diploma (39 percent). The latter isn’t surprising, given all of the evidence that socializing is declining most rapidly among poorer Americans with less education. Hosting friends, like so much socializing, is in danger of becoming a luxury good.

The political wrinkle is more intriguing to me. I sometimes hear from people who tie everything back to politics that political polarization might lead to social fragmentation. But I wonder if the opposite is just as plausible. Maybe people who are less embedded in strong social networks are less likely to attach themselves to groups of all kinds, including political parties. In this way, America’s long-term detachment from groups and institutions is leading to a kind of pox-on-all-parties mentality that cashes out in an increase in independents.

The average time that Americans spent at home increased by almost two hours a day from 2003 to 2022. Cocooned within personalized entertainment fortresses, more Americans have shrunk the great buffet of all possible leisure activities to the small plate of screened media.

Everybody might prefer, in the abstract, a world of dinner parties, neighborhood friendships, and spontaneous gatherings. But on any given Wednesday at 7:45 p.m., looking at a screen is easier than hosting a party. This is not so much an individual failure as a coordination failure. Modernity has shifted leisure from activities that require coordination with other people toward activities that can be consumed without the permission or participation of others. . . . . We keep creating opportunities for downtime that eliminate the need for other people to be present. Not all progress is progress.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Friday Male Beauty

 

The Felon Is Repeating a Biden Mistake On The Economy

If one believes the narrative that the Felon was re-elected because voters believed he would improve the economy - rather than because he was greenlighting open racism, hate and bigotry - more than a Democrat president. In reality, through his tariffs, multiple trade wars, the ballooning of the federal debt, and the Felon's war of choice in Iran, the Felon took what was actually a fairly good economy and drove it into the ditch. Inflation is higher, mortgage rates are higher, gas prices have soared, and consumer prices has risen across the board. The Felon's response? He says "affordability" is a hoax, claims that America's economy is in a new "golden age" - perhaps if one is a billionaire or a member of the Felon's family - and he continues policies that will push energy prices, especially electricity, still higher.  Perhaps equally bad, while millions of Americans are struggling financially, the Felon has posted over the top images of the recent state dinner that are so out of touch that they'd embarrass Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.  Indeed, it's little surprise that a recent poll showed the Felon's approval on his handling of the economy is down to 17%.  A column in the New York Times looks at the mistakes being made by the Felon and his regime:

When I served in President Joe Biden’s White House, we had good economic news to report: robust job creation, rising wages, low unemployment and a manufacturing jobs revival. Yes, inflation spiked early in his term, but by the time he left office, it had come down considerably.

Mr. Biden wanted his team to highlight his domestic agenda. His policies were working, and he wanted the country to understand what he was doing and why. But the polling was clear: Our economic message didn’t land.

Senior White House advisers, myself included, would meet for hours, day after day, trying to get a handle on the mismatch between the strength of the data and the flagging public confidence. . . . We pored over the numbers, worked through different messaging options and kept looking for a way to break through.

But Americans weren’t feeling it. Too many people were struggling with the prices of groceries, rent, child care and gas. Their lived experience did not match the encouraging economic news, and that disconnect shaped the entire public conversation.  We believed that if we laid out the evidence clearly enough, people would see what we saw. They didn’t, and we didn’t adjust to meet them where they were.

The truth is, we had a stale message and outdated models for delivering it. It cost Mr. Biden and, eventually, Vice President Kamala Harris dearly. President Trump is now making a mistake even more damaging.

The economic indicator that hurt Mr. Biden the most, inflation, is higher today than it was when Mr. Trump returned to office. The bond market has been roiled. The Federal Reserve just raised interest rates. Mr. Trump’s trade wars and his war with Iran are hurting the overall economic picture. All of which helps explain his sinking poll numbers.

Mr. Trump’s refrain that we’re the “hottest country anywhere in the world” is a no-sale, both because the facts really aren’t on his side and because he’s barely acknowledging Americans’ legitimate economic worries. By and large, people aren’t buying his assertions that “affordability” is a “fake word” or his insistence that higher gas prices are “a very inexpensive price to pay” for his war aims. . . . When leaders neglect lived experience, the message collapses.

Why? To start, facts and figures alone no longer carry the weight they once did. There was a time when people would absorb accurate information presented clearly through official channels, like the White House press briefing. They might disagree on what it meant, they might challenge certain points, but it wasn’t automatically treated as spin.

Today, anyone can be a content creator, producing videos, podcasts and memes with subjective, sometimes bogus interpretations of the news. Many Americans now get their news only from outlets that confirm their political leanings. Social media algorithms clearly favor outrage and certainty, not accuracy.

In that environment, official charts and summaries rarely break through. . . . And once a narrative rooted in daily life takes hold, it is almost impossible to dislodge.

We learned that lesson with the economy and again with the debate around Mr. Biden’s age. Looking back, we misread the public mood, thinking the age conversation would fade. At best, my responses from the podium about Mr. Biden’s age failed to put out the fire; at worst, they fueled it.

The Trump White House should realize that over the next two years, there will be only more, not less, scrutiny when the president appears to drift off during meetings, is cagey about the results of his medical exams or goes on one of his erratic, late-night social media screeds. His communications team should know by now that the prices at the pump and the self-checkout line are undefeated.

When people don’t believe what their government says, institutions lose legitimacy. Conspiracy theories flourish. Urgently needed legislation stalls. Elections are lost.

A decade ago, his bluster, so unlike traditional politicians, grabbed ears and eyeballs. Now even many of his fans can see that he’s frequently just seeking attention. Look at just about any poll and you get the sense that voters increasingly don’t trust him.

That tension, the ability to dominate the conversation while struggling to earn trust, defines this moment. . . . Once people believe their government is not speaking to their reality, it becomes incredibly difficult to earn that trust back. I felt that tension every day in the White House briefing room. I see it happening again now. 

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

The Felon And GOP Are Flailing

The mid-term elections are a month away and both the Felon and Republican candidates are flailing as the Felon's Iran war drags on and high gas prices and consumer prices have caused much of the public to conclude that the Felon - and by extension Republican candidates - could care less about voters' concerns.  Other than horrific imagery of small children alone in immigration courts and continued violence by ICE thugs against both U.S. citizens and anyone with brown skin, the only Felon/GOP accomplishment - if one can call it that - is the passage of the falsely named "big beautiful bill  that gave huge tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy while screwing literally millions of citizens, including children. Throw in the Felon's vanity projects and threats to demolish the Kennedy Center and other landmarks and it ;eaves little to campaign on. Indeed, Republican candidates - like Jen Kiggans - have resorted to bald faced lies and continue to run ads that the local media have demonstrated to be untrue.  The record of the Felon and the GOP offers little to convince voters to give them more time to further plunder and weaken the country. The oligarchs and billionaire class may be thrilled with the tax cuts and deregulation that threatens clean air and clean water, but everyone else there is little to be thrilled about. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the situation:

The White House’s South Lawn was prepared just so: A full honor guard, complete with American and Chinese flags, stood at attention. The new White House helipad, made of four-inch-thick black-and-white California granite, seemed to gleam. President Trump appeared pleased—but something was missing. Where were the TV cameras?

For a president who needs media attention like he needs oxygen, this was an unacceptable development ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s welcome ceremony last week. Trump whirled around to his aides and demanded they fix it, and a staffer raced to the briefing room to ask ABC News whether it would film the arrival, two people familiar with the exchange told me on the condition of anonymity, given the private nature of the conversations. But the answer was no: The networks were boycotting participation in the TV-pool rotation in solidarity with CNN, which Trump had banned from the White House, along with two other media outlets, days before. No major U.S. television network recorded Trump’s over-the-top greeting for Xi, and the news channels refused to display images taken by the White House or any other outlet, American or Chinese. Trump did not get to show off his extravaganza. And he had only himself to blame.

At the risk of understatement, Trump has never been one to think all that many moves ahead. But his impulsive decision to ban media outlets spawned unintended consequences that derailed his own plans. Again. That’s been a real theme for much of this year: Many of Trump’s actions—quite a few impetuous and ill-considered—have only hurt him and his fellow Republicans ahead of November’s midterm elections. He was elected two years ago to drive down prices, but his tariffs have done the opposite, and a recent reignited trade war with Canada has hurt Republican candidates whose state shares a border with our neighbor to the north. His war of choice in Iran continues to sputter along, leaving gas prices elevated as Trump threatens annihilation one day and offers negotiation the next. . . . . And he’s obsessed with vanity projects . . .

The numbers are bad: Trump’s approval rating dropped to 37 percent in a new Wall Street Journal poll this week, marking the lowest rating in that poll since 1990 for an incumbent president heading into a midterm election. He’s even lower in other polls. . . . More and more Republicans are starting to worry about a blue wave, one that seems certain to secure the House for Democrats but could very well, in an outcome unthinkable even a few months ago, yield a Democratic Senate as well. With barely a month until Election Day, and with early voting already under way in a number of states, Trump and his party are flailing.

He’s traveled domestically far less this term, distancing himself from the concerns of his voters. But with October and the stretch run of the midterm campaigns now here, Trump seems set to gas up Air Force One.

Trump will begin with visits to two GOP strongholds (Oklahoma today, Alabama tomorrow) before then journeying on Saturday to Ohio, a state he won three times but where polls show Republican incumbent Senator Jon Husted trailing his Democratic opponent, former Senator Sherrod Brown. Ohio is not the only reliably red state that now seems to have a Senate seat up for grabs: Iowa, Texas, Alaska, Kansas, and maybe even Nebraska . . . .

Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist who worked in the first Trump administration but quit after the January 6 Capitol riot, told me that the president hasn’t given Republicans anything to run on, saying they have “no results to point to, no agenda to promise either.” And he said that many in the party feel that the bottom is dropping out and a wipeout could be coming.

[T]here has been some debate in GOP circles as to whether or not a Trump visit would actually help in some battlegrounds; several Republicans in tight races are weighing whether to request a presidential visit, party strategists have told me. Two candidates, Susan Collins of Maine and John Sununu of New Hampshire, have already said no, and others have refused to commit.

The White House downplayed any internal GOP concerns. . . . Yet there have been signs of Republicans distancing themselves from Trump on more issues, including immigration enforcement and ending the war in Iran. But that unpopular conflict may shadow the party for the foreseeable future: Many diplomats from the Middle East who attended the United Nations General Assembly last week privately feel that the war will, in stops and starts, likely continue well into next year and potentially throughout the rest of Trump’s term, threatening to drag down Republicans’ political fortunes for multiple elections.

Trump has lurched from one distraction to another—Renaming Lake Ontario! Offering $5,000 to every adult citizen if Republicans win in November!—but he has yet to shift the electorate’s dim view of his presidency. He’s still pushing claims of election fraud, even though few Republican candidates have joined in. He even authorized the Department of Homeland Security to use taxpayer money to pay for what is, in essence, a Trump campaign ad despite prohibitions on using federal funds for propaganda.

That moment with China’s leader underscored what is arguably Trump’s biggest problem: He has lost touch with what Americans actually care about. The Xi summit was a cornucopia of warning signs for worried Republicans.

The entire decadent spectacle seemed out of step with a country deep in an affordability crisis. The black-tie guest list was dotted with billionaires and tech titans as Trump feted the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, even though he continues to assail Democrats for allegedly being communists. . . . It all felt like a gift to Democrats, who pounced on the videos to paint those in the president’s orbit as dilettantes looking to enrich only themselves.

Susan Del Percio, a longtime Republican strategist, told me that even Trump supporters who are concerned about the economy feel that the president no longer cares about them. “Voters are angry because they are hurting, and through his actions, Trump is telling them that he doesn’t give a damn,” she said.

This week featured another event that likely will not land well with Americans who are struggling financially. Trump presided over a “Golden Age” event that featured business leaders and billionaires—and no talk of affordability challenges. Once more, Trump defended AI and even boasted that it would power a new government-services website. He then joked about where it stood among his accomplishments, saying, “If it is the biggest thing I’ve ever done, I’ve done a shitty job as president.” You can bet Democrats will grab that one too.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

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.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty