The "Rabid Duck" Edition

Since 2020, the premise of More Stable Union has been that Trump won’t leave office peacefully, and that he can’t accept lame duck status because of his pathological need to be the center of attention. Obviously I was proven right in 2021, but there’s no question Trump has lost a step in the past month. Whether it’s his health or disappointing elections or Epstein Epstein Epstein, he’s showing signs of recognizing his political and/or biological mortality. So is it time for a duck-sized crutch?

I’m going to stand by my assessment. He’s a little down. It’ll pass, both because of who he is and because of who’s around him.

As Trump’s niece (and clinical psychologist) Mary Trump observes, Trump isn’t just a narcissist, he’s a nihilist. As Mary puts it, Trump’s father/Mary’s grandfather, Fred Trump, was a narcissist too, but he thought in terms of his role in building a Trump Legacy—he groomed Donald to carry that legacy forward, and it was a disastrous mistake. As a nihilist, Donald isn’t able to imagine or care about legacies, or anything after him. Trump doesn’t know anything more about Louis XIV than a gaudy furniture style, but he’d totally agree with the idea of “apres moi, le deluge.” Faced with political and biological mortality, Trump will become more and more self-destructive, and that’s bad for all of us. He won’t be a Lame Duck; he’ll be a Rabid Duck.

This will be orders of magnitude worsened by the people Trump has around him, whose sole shared talent is an uncanny ability to combine criminality of both the most conscience-shocking sort with that of the most comically venal. Count on Steve Bannon always to say the quiet part out loud: these people know if they lose power, they’re going to prison. Eyeing each other around the cabinet table like capos at a mafia summit, they judge that no one among them (except, perhaps, themselves) has what it takes to prevail in a free and fair election barring an unspeakable (and entirely possible) Democratic screwup.

Led by a nihilist who’ll drag them all down if they betray him (as just happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene), their best bet for survival literally is to “ride or die” with Trump, and hope they can create enough confusion in 2028 that the security organs of the state will continue to obey them into 2029, when Trump or whichever of them is left standing swears in before a parade of brown-shirted ICE agents, with drones hovering overhead and concertina wire around the National Mall. Hopefully the wind will blow the smoke and tear gas into the event.

The Shutdown

Watching Ken Burns’s outstanding documentary, “The American Revolution,” I couldn’t help but be struck by the Trenton/Princeton campaign of the winter of 1776-77. It’s widely considered a brilliant military feat, but it’s pretty clear that for George Washington it was more an expression of desperation—and a determination to go down fighting—than a considered work of genius.

From the late start crossing the Delaware, to landing well after midnight, to marching through a snowstorm over nine miles and not arriving at Trenton until after daybreak, to two of the three Rebel columns failing to even manage the crossing at all, Washington made an insane gamble, and it paid off handsomely. Even more remarkably, Washington was able to make almost the same successful move against the British at Princeton, just a week later, inflicting more damage to the British Army, effectively liberating New Jersey of British occupation, and getting his army away cleanly to safe winter quarters when he realized he’d pushed his luck far enough.

I wouldn’t dream of putting Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries in the same category as George Washington and Henry Knox—we should wish!—but I would put the shutdown in the same category as the Trenton/Princeton campaign: it was ill-considered, rash, uncertain what it could accomplish, born more of desperation than strategy—and paid off better than its instigators expected or deserved. For all the frustration some people have had about whether or not the Democrats should have ended it, I find myself asking more whether they should have started it. After all, that’s really going to be the most relevant question if and when we have to think about doing it again.

My analysis is that it was a bad idea, and likely not worth repeating, unless the goal is to stretch it out until Senate Republicans kill off the detestable filibuster to pass the budget. Setting conditionality around Obamacare subsidies was a foolish choice; fifteen years in, it should be pretty obvious Republicans have no problem immiserating their own constituents as long as it sticks it to the Libs and their hated Kenyan Muslim. To be fair, a lot of their constituents also seem to enjoy misery for that cause. So Dems launched a shutdown for a hopeless goal they’d have to climb down over eventually, as they did. That’s not smart.

Moreover, the real problem with this idea is that the budget hardly looks better if you put the Obamacare subsidies back in! You’re still funding ICE attacks, war crimes in the Caribbean, massive tax cuts, impoverishing cuts to social services, betrayal of Ukraine, and the rest. Rather than standing against this monstrosity of a bill at all costs, Dems now own a piece of it.

And of course I’m hardly the first person to point out that the federal budget is an uneven battleground for Democrats, because we want government to work and do things for people, and the Republicans don’t care. It’s not just like taking someone hostage to try to escape an armed robbery, it’s like taking your own loved one hostage to escape a bunch of armed robbers. Even if they believe you’re not bluffing that you’d hurt them (and you’re bluffing!), they don’t care.

And yet… I think we won? Just a battle, not a war, but a battle nevertheless. How was this a victory?

It Was a Fight: the Base, the Grassroots, the Rank-and-File—whatever you call them, they were (and still are) scared, angry, and poorer than they were a year ago. At a time when Trump and his goons are kidnapping people off streets and bulldozing The People’s House, they desperately needed to see their leadership fight for something, anything. Their leadership might also have noticed their positions in serious jeopardy, and as the old saying goes, a key trait of a successful politician is knowing where people already are going and getting there ahead of them. I still think we need generational leadership change, and Schumer and Jeffries in particular aren’t right for where we are right now, but I won’t criticize them for taking the same gamble Washington did on the Delaware.

The Economic Terrain Was Favorable: all the shutdowns of recent memory took place in moments of relative economic prosperity, and most of the worst economic impacts happened to federal workers who inevitably were made whole when the shutdowns ended. This shutdown took place in what’s almost certainly a recession/stagflation, as all Americans perceive themselves as poorer, and as any American receiving federal dollars is certain to receive a lot fewer of them for the foreseeable future.

The Timing Was Great: I don’t know whether or not Schumer begged his wavering members to hold out until after the elections, but it worked! You have to think at least some of the Dems’ striking over-performance came from frustration at the shutdown.

Our Opponents Are Bumbling Nincompoops: Trump and Republicans just screwed this up at every turn. From boasting that his economy was booming to continuing with ICE roundups and the ballroom construction, Trump was completely tone-deaf through the whole episode. The Great Dealmaker wouldn’t even try dealing. The Great Dictator couldn’t even get his own party to blow up the filibuster. With the same smug overconfidence Lord Cornwallis had in New Jersey, Trump let himself get played.

Kudos to Saturday Night Live for really nailing the whole thing with this sketch:

So what’s the lesson? I think I’d tell Democratic leadership that they got very lucky once, but shouldn’t try it again unless very special circumstances prevail—which likely isn’t in January, when this continuing resolution runs out. Why?

You’ll Need a New Fight: coming into the 2026 campaign season, it’s time for the fight to move to what Dems can do as opposition in control of one or both houses of Congress, and on the electoral challenges the Republicans will create.

The Economy Might Not Be a Good Fight: it’s unlikely to improve anytime soon. As it gets worse and as Trump shows signs of talking about “affordability,” there’s a risk Dems get the blame for another shutdown that causes more pain.

The Timing is Questionable: the election is still almost a year away. A fight now won’t give much help to either Dem incumbents or challengers.

The Republicans… Well, They’ll Still Be Nincompoops: that’s not enough.

The exception I’d make to this strategic calculus would be if the Dems forced a shutdown simply to force Republicans to blow up the filibuster. I’d back this because a) I don’t think Dems should get behind any part of what the Trump Regime is doing, and b) the filibuster is so odious that I’ll take any means to see it die.

Crooked Con

The fine folk at Crooked Media (you might know them better as the Pod Save America multiverse of liberal podcasts) organized a convention just after the election here in Washington, DC, and I figured I’d show up and see what was going on, as an embassy political officer might do for such an event in another country. I made some contacts, got some cards, heard some interesting things, but let me give you my topline thoughts based on my strongest impressions.

Sadness (Just Me): though the crowd was pretty upbeat just a few days after the elections (to their own pleasant surprise), the event was in the Ronald Reagan Building, and that made it really hard for me for my first few hours there. The Reagan Building used to house USAID—there’s a garbage bag draped over the glass entrance to that part of the building to hide the USAID logo etched in the glass, and whoa, buddy, I cannot give you a better symbol of Trump’s America than a garbage bag half-assedly draped over a symbol of American decency in a clumsy manner that you can still see through. I have a lot of memories of meetings and coffees and lunches with colleagues and friends there, all of them better patriots than a Trumpist even can comprehend, all of whom now are unemployed, and it hit me harder than I expected when I first walked in.

Andy Beshear: wow, the Governor of Kentucky is impressive. I’ve got a strong bias against presidents who don’t have any form of national security experience—it’s the most important part of the job, even though we evaluate them on the economy, which they have the least control over—but he really came off well. I’ve gotta say, though, that while I was drawn to his manner and his ebullience, he didn’t give off an indication that he really viscerally grasped the stakes: that the 2028 election is as likely to end with martial law and candidates dead or imprisoned as it is to end in a free and fair election and a peaceful handover of power. Like Michael Corleone evaluating Tom Hagen in The Godfather, I’m not sure Beshear is a Wartime Leader. I don’t mean that in the sense of the presidential commander-in-chief role (though see my bias above), but in the sense of the leader of an opposition party in an authoritarian state. He’s got time to persuade me otherwise.

Ruben Gallego: Now, this guy gets it! I didn’t find Gallego nearly as traditional-sunny-optimist-Clinton/Obama/Biden as Beshear, but while I’m as attracted to those politicians and “running on joy” and “the audacity of hope” as the next Democrat, I felt Gallego had a much stronger grasp of where we are and what’s going to have to happen. Gallego demonstrated a determination to fight through. I swear, he reminded me of what an aide once said about Ulysses S. Grant: “He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it.”

A Little Too Sunny: of course everyone was cheerful after this election, and I’m sure the event would have been a lot darker had Dems not done so well, but the convention was months in the making, and so I feel the tone, and topics discussed, needed more realism. I found one panel discussion on authoritarianism/election security, and was disappointed to find it to be only lawyers discussing election litigation—to be fair, brilliant lawyers discussing brilliant litigating!

Look, that’s really important, as is winning elections in the first place, but I’ll say until I’m blue in the face, it’s not going to be enough. Making sure elections and rulings are followed in the face of Trump’s private army of Homeland Security, Proud Boys, and Groypers—but I repeat myself—is going to require an unprecedented level of civil mobilization and resistance, and I was disappointed nothing at the event even nodded to this fact. These folks should know better. Since you read MSU, I know you know better!

Don’t let up on the fascists, but don’t let them ruin your Thanksgiving either. Feel free to comment or DM me on Substack, and follow me there for additional periodic comments as well.