Over the weekend, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal complained that liberals are always stereotyping Republican presidents as dimwitted. Maybe so. But I’d argue that this is nothing compared to the relentless stereotyping of Democrats as fake and poll-driven. This started with Jimmy Carter, and just as there’s a tweet for everything, there’s also a Doonesbury for everything. Those of you of a certain age will remember Duane Delacourt:

This has since become an almost automatic assessment of Democrats running for president. Dukakis was fake, Clinton was fake, Gore was fake, Kerry was fake, and Hillary Clinton was fake. The only recent Democratic candidate who’s mostly escaped this is Barack Obama. Republicans ran their usual playbook (“empty suit,” can’t give a speech without a teleprompter, etc.) but it never stuck.

But Republicans are never stereotyped this way. Ronald Reagan was probably the first real master of political symbolism, but he was never viewed as anything but entirely authentic. George Bush bought a ranch one year before he ran for president and promptly moved into a house in Dallas when he left office, but clearing brush at Crawford somehow became evidence of his regular guyness. And Donald Trump is routinely viewed as representing genuine working-class grievance despite the fact that he’s the fakest president in history. He’s changed his mind—sometimes more than once—on practically every issue anyone cares about. He plainly cares nothing about actual policy. His tweets are almost 100 percent about projecting a fake persona. He adopts absurd positions (Mexico will pay for the wall, it’s OK to say “Merry Christmas” again) that are such obvious pandering they almost make your teeth hurt.

Trump, like most Republican presidents, speaks in a tough-guy style. Even if he’s changed his mind since yesterday’s breakfast, he talks loudly and insists that he’s “strong” on whatever issue he’s asked about. And that seems to be enough for most people, the press included. Conversely, Bill Clinton was all about Sister Souljah and feeling your pain and “triangulation.” Al Gore changed his position on abortion a decade before running for president in 2000, but that was nevertheless Exhibit 1 (out of dozens) in the case that he was just a big phony. John Kerry was “for it before he was against it” and spawned innumerable “Top Ten Flip-Flop” lists from campaign reporters. And Hillary Clinton, despite a progressive record extending back for decades, was always portrayed as too cautious and poll-driven to ever give a straight answer to anything.

Apparently Kirsten Gillibrand is about to get the same treatment because she softened her position on gun control after Sandy Hook. Will the press go along? Is she the next fake, flip-flopping Democrat to run for president? We’ll see.

Kevin Dietsch/CNP via ZUMA

LOL:

The White House is struggling to contain the national discussion about President Trump’s mental acuity and fitness for the job, which has overshadowed the administration’s agenda for the past week….Trump privately resents the now-regular chatter on cable television news shows about his mental health and views the issue as “an invented fact” and “a joke.”

….Some Trump allies voiced frustration that the White House does not appear to have implemented a full-scale crisis communications plan. “When you raise an issue like the mental acuity of the president, there is no organized effort to push back,” said one ally, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly. “How do you disprove a fallacy?”

Actually, fallacies are disproven all the time. That’s why they’re called fallacies in the first place. In this case, it would be easy to disprove that Trump is a moron, and in a spirit of bipartisan magnanimity I’m going to reveal how to do it free of charge. Are you ready? Here it is:

Have Trump give a live TV interview in which he addresses policy issues in depth and shows that he has actual, demonstrable knowledge of a variety of topics. Points will be deducted for every meandering mention of (a) Hillary Clinton, (b) fake news, (c) his record-breaking election victory, (d) the FBI, (e) the unfairness of the Russia investigation, (f) his IQ, (g) collusion between Democrats and Russia, (h) how he personally turned around the economy, or anything else that’s so off-topic it’s not even in left field.

A bright high school senior could do this, so the bar is set pretty low. You don’t need a full-scale crisis communications plan. This is all it would take.

I don’t want to turn into a total Cassandra about the economy, but the Wall Street Journal isn’t providing me any comfort:

December 13: Everyone is giddy. “Forecasters are increasingly optimistic the U.S. economic expansion could continue beyond the 2020 presidential election….Most of the private-sector economic forecasters surveyed in recent days by The Wall Street Journal said the odds of a new recession by late 2020 were below 50%. The average probability of a recession in the next year was 14%.”

January 4: Even the bears are giving up. “Jeremy Grantham, a skeptic of the U.S. stock rally, said this week that investors ought to brace for explosive short-term stock gains….He is the latest high-profile investor and market strategist to change their stance in recent days, as some of Wall Street’s most closely-followed seers have tried to come to grips with the continued rise in stock prices.”

January 8: Hedging is for wimps. “After a long stretch of stock market tranquility, more investors are concluding that paying for hedges to protect against any sudden downturn is a waste of money….‘I haven’t seen hedging activity this light since the end of the financial crisis,’ said Peter Cecchini, the New York-based chief market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald.”

January 8: Borrowing is all the rage again. “U.S. consumer borrowing posted the largest monthly gain in 16 years, buoyed by increased consumer confidence in the economy. Outstanding consumer credit rose by $27.95 billion in November from the prior month, the biggest increase since November 2001, according to new data from the Federal Reserve.”

These are the kinds of behaviors that become common just when things are about to turn around. The key problem, of course, is defining “about to.” When GDP starts bumping up against potential GDP—which is happening now—that’s an obvious danger sign. But that can mean a recession is anywhere from a few months to three years away:

You pay your money and you take your chances. I’m less giddy than most, but I don’t know anything more about this stuff than you do.

Atrios today:

I’m not sure of the precise timing, but I figure sometime soon..either before the 2018 midterms or soon after… the regular drumbeat for a “populist” party whose appeal is limited to Tom Friedman and Matthew Dowd and maybe Chuck Lane will begin. A reasonable amount of money will be spent on laughing consultants, a disproportionate amount of media attention will be paid, and then little things like “ballot access” and “nobody likes us” will become apparent and the whole thing will collapse. Just like it does every election.

The really weird thing about this is that the pundit dream team is almost always a party with liberal social attitudes but conservative economic policies:

But this party already exists: it’s libertarians, more or less. The problem is that I’m pretty sure communists are more popular than libertarians, and a bit of tweaking around the edges to make them warmer and fuzzier won’t come anywhere near to changing that.

The people who are truly unrepresented are in the top right. They’re not comfortable with gay marriage and abortion and secularism and gun control, but they like Social Security and Medicare and raising taxes on rich people. Donald Trump sort of campaigned in this quadrant, but not really that much.

The ideal party to appeal to these folks would be center-right on social values; social democratic on entitlements and taxes and garden-variety government programs; and in favor of cutting back any program that smells like welfare. That would probably get some votes. But it sends shivers down the spines of elites everywhere, so no one will ever put up the money to get it started.

It’s raining today in Southern California, so it’s not just you East Coasters with your bomb cyclone and subzero temps who are having weather difficulties. We’re suffering too. Of course, this is actually good news in our case, since this has been one of the driest years on record up to now. To celebrate, here’s a picture of a lovely yellow rose following a rain shower. I took it at the Garden of the Senses in Sneem, the nearest big city (population approximately 557) to our house in Ireland. I’m not sure why it’s called that. It’s nice, but it’s a pretty ordinary garden, appealing to the usual senses that every garden appeals to. I guess it’s marketing hype, Ireland style.

In the LA Times today, Christine Stenglein and John Hudak warn that enlarging the border patrol won’t be easy:

Customs and Border Protection last year awarded a $297 million contract for assistance in recruiting and hiring the 5,000 border patrol agents President Trump believes we need to combat “the recent surge of illegal immigration at the southern border with Mexico.”

Those bold numbers may please the Make America Great Again crowd, but it will be exceedingly difficult to find qualified agents, or to deploy them effectively since the border is actually quieter than ever. Under the Clinton administration, it took 27 applicants to yield one Border Patrol officer. And the hiring ratio has gotten worse. This spring, when Customs and Border Protection requested bids for private contractors to help fulfill Trump’s order, it wrote that it now takes 133 applicants to hire one full-time employee.

Not only is it harder than ever to find qualified agents, it’s not clear why we need them in the first place. Here’s what border apprehensions look like over the past decade:

Apprehensions went down substantially during President Obama’s first three years in office. Was this due to the Great Recession or to tougher enforcement? Some of both, I think, but the recession must not have been a huge factor since the 2008-11 decline merely continued a trend that started under the Bush administration—and apprehension numbers have stayed low ever since, even as the economy has expanded. In President Trump’s first year, apprehensions went down even further.

Here’s what this means in terms of Border Patrol staffing:

A decade ago, it took less than one-quarter of an agent to make an apprehension each month. Today it takes four times as many. And if Trump has his way, it will take five times as many.

This doesn’t make much sense. Illegal immigration is down, and it seems to be down permanently. Why do we need five times more agents per apprehension than we did in 2008? Not only is it dangerous to hire this many new agents at once, possibly at the cost of lowering standards, but it seems like a waste of money too.

Here’s a little more about my relative optimism over how America is doing in the Trump era. This chart, which doesn’t get nearly enough attention, shows the change in first-year presidential approval ratings from copartisans. That is, it shows Democratic approval of Democrats and Republican approval of Republicans:

After an admittedly wild first year in which he disappointed liberals with his budget, gays in the military, and a missile attack on Iraq, Bill Clinton ended 1993 exactly where he started. George Bush got a huge bump across the board after 9/11, but even if you look at his approval rating through 9/10, he only lost about one percent of his support. In 2009, during a brutal recession, Obama lost three percent of his support by the end of the year.

Donald Trump has lost eight percent of his support among Republicans. During a strong economy.

I know these seem like small numbers, but they’re meaningful. It’s natural that presidents lose support among independents and members of the opposing party. Many of them want to “give the new president a chance,” and then slip away as politics takes its natural course. But polarization being what it is, recent presidents just don’t lose much support among their own party. Only in Trump’s case has there been any significant erosion.

Losing the support of people who probably didn’t vote for you in the first place doesn’t mean too much. But losing the support of people who did vote for you means electoral disaster. It’s also good news: Americans aren’t reacting to the norm-busting buffoonery of the Trump presidency with indifference. Not only is the opposition movement enormously energized, but even Republicans are losing faith in him.

The 9/11 attacks rescued George Bush. Something similar could still happen with Trump, so this is hardly a call to breathe a sigh of relief. The fight is everything. But keep in mind that the fight is working. This is why I think, in the end, Trump will end up being a weird outlier in American history, not a harbinger of things to come.

So this happened last night:

Dogecoin?

— Kevin Drum (@kdrum) January 8, 2018

It turns out that this is the cryptocurrency version of asking about the latest teenage slang. I may think I’m hip to the ways of bitcoin and ethereum and tether and whatnot, but in fact I’m just an old fogey.

“Get ready to have your mind blown,” replied Jordan Weissmann. Consider me ready. The name, it turns out, comes from a viral internet meme from several years ago, and the cryptocurrency itself is…um, interesting:

Dogecoin, the alternative cryptocurrency inspired by a popular meme, has surged over the weekend and now has a market capitalization over $2 billion….Founder Jackson Palmer, who created the digital currency as a joke, said new found interest in Dogecoin is a concerning indicator of wide-spread frothiness in the cryptocurrency market.

“I have a lot of faith in the Dogecoin Core development team to keep the software stable and secure, but I think it says a lot about the state of the cryptocurrency space in general that a currency with a dog on it which hasn’t released a software update in over 2 years has a $1B+ market cap,” Palmer told cryptocurrency watcher CoinDesk.

….As for Dogecoin, Palmer, a group product manager at Adobe, and Billy Markus, a software engineer at IBM, created it “without much real thought,” according to reporting by Motherboard.  As Palmer told Motherboard’s Patrick McGuire, “one night after work, I sat down with a beer, I had too much time on my hands, and I bought Dogecoin.com.”

I am once again prompted to wonder just what these market cap figures are based on. Are they based on actual trades for real money like dollars or euros? Or on trades for other cryptocurrencies that are then extrapolated into values in dollars? Or what? If I had my way, the market cap for all cryptocurrencies would be expressed in bitcoin just to remind everyone that this is probably just a giant circular game that everyone is playing. For example, Dogecoin has a market cap of B136,000. That’s a lot less insane sounding, isn’t it?

Allen Eyestone/The Palm Beach Post via ZUMA

Aside from the fact that he’s a political genius, what have we learned about Donald Trump this weekend? Jonathan Swan reveals that Trump’s official schedule has been pared back a bit:

President Trump is starting his official day much later than he did in the early days of his presidency, often around 11am, and holding far fewer meetings, according to copies of his private schedule shown to Axios. This is largely to meet Trump’s demands for more “Executive Time,” which almost always means TV and Twitter time alone in the residence, officials tell us.

Trump’s days in the Oval Office are relatively short – from around 11am to 6pm….Then he’s back to the residence for more phone calls and more TV….On Thursday, the president has an especially light schedule: “Policy Time” at 11am, then “Executive Time” at 12pm, then lunch for an hour, then more “Executive Time” from 1:30pm.

Along with millions of others, I will henceforth be demanding more “Executive Time” in my daily blogging schedule. And if you’re wondering what kind of TV Trump watches during Executive Time, wonder no more. Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, has been monitoring Trump’s tweets in order to figure this out:

Everyone has a theory about Trump’s hyperaggressive early morning tweetstorms. Some think they are a deliberate ploy the president uses to distract the press from his administration’s potential weaknesses, or to frame the public debate to his liking….But my many hours following the president’s tweets for Media Matters for America, the progressive media watchdog organization, have convinced me the truth is often much simpler: The president is just live-tweeting Fox, particularly the network’s Trump-loving morning show, Fox & Friends.

….After comparing the president’s tweets with Fox’s coverage every day since October, I can tell you that the Fox-Trump feedback loop is happening far more often than you think. There is no strategy to Trump’s Twitter feed; he is not trying to distract the media. He is being distracted. He darts with quark-like speed¹ from topic to topic in his tweets because that’s how cable news works.

So how does all this play out in the real world? Evan Osnos, a longtime observer of China’s leadership, describes their conclusions after their meetings with Trump last year:

During the Mar-a-Lago meetings, Chinese officials noticed that, on some of China’s most sensitive issues, Trump did not know enough to push back….[Daniel] Russel spoke to Chinese officials after the Mar-a-Lago visit. “The Chinese felt like they had Trump’s number….Fundamentally, what they said was ‘He’s a paper tiger.’ Because he hasn’t delivered on any of his threats. There’s no wall on Mexico. There’s no repeal of health care. He can’t get the Congress to back him up. He’s under investigation.”

….After the summit, the Pangoal Institution, a Beijing think tank, published an analysis of the Trump Administration, describing it as a den of warring “cliques,” the most influential of which was the “Trump family clan.” The Trump clan appears to “directly influence final decisions” on business and diplomacy in a way that “has rarely been seen in the political history of the United States,” the analyst wrote. He summed it up using an obscure phrase from feudal China: jiatianxia—“to treat the state as your possession.”

In other words, the Chinese use the same kind of language to describe the Trump administration that we might use to describe a third-world thugocracy. Ultimately, though, the Chinese figure that’s fine, since it means they can do pretty much anything they like without having to worry about pushback from the former most powerful country in the world. China apparently views the Trump presidency as a huge opportunity for them to spread their influence around the globe unimpeded.

¹Quark-like speed? Wut?

From Stephen Miller, on Jake Tapper’s State of the Union, describing President Trump:

I saw a man who was a political genius…a self-made billionaire who revolutionized reality TV…hasn’t gotten the due he deserves…

Miller was his usual obnoxious, hyperactive self, refusing to answer questions and instead filibustering about how great Trump is and how horrible CNN is. Eventually Tapper got tired of it and just shut him down: “Stephen, I get it, there’s one viewer that you care about right now, and you’re being obsequious, you’re being a factotum in order to please him, and I think I’ve wasted enough of my viewers’ time.”

The only part I don’t get about this is why Tapper invited Miller in the first place. I’ve seen him before, and I’m sure Tapper knew what he was in for. It’s a pointless exercise, like interviewing Kellyanne Conway. Why even bother?

UPDATE: It turns out that Miller’s performance had a perfect coda:

Scoop from @lopezlinette: Stephen Miller refused requests to leave the set at CNN today and had to be escorted out. https://t.co/uLusqxd7W4

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) January 8, 2018