Pre-DNC Pep Talk

No, Donald is not better looking than his Democratic rival

Trump "Freedom Cities" affordable housing proposal, via The Land Desk (sorry about the AI art, but this one really hit the right note).

By the way, I still think Biden would have won the election, when it came down to it. I still think there was a majority who would be happy to vote for him but told the polls they didn't want to because they'd heard he was unelectable, and were afraid if Biden was the candidate Trump would win. Fear of Trump won out.  But it certainly wouldn't have been as much fun as this looks likely to be. As Josh Marshall (gift link) is saying, it was going to be a slog, weary work, not happy. And now we're talking joy!

I also still think Biden made that happen, defeating the timid centrist plan to run Some White Dude chosen by some improvised set of reality-TV rules, with his endorsement of Kamala Harris as his successor minutes after he left the race (the centrist plan was specifically meant to exclude her, as too "controversial"). And it was clearly a great decision, as was his naming Harris in the first place, back in 2020. If anybody engineered a "coup" it was Biden himself, ensuring his post-neoliberal "legacy" by naming the candidate most representative of the Biden coalition and most likely to continue along his policy lines. As Harris has confirmed in her own naming of the most Biden-like of VP candidates, Tim Walz, the lovable non-rich white guy, mainline Christian, tell-it-like-it-is orator (Biden could easily have invented the "these guys are weird" line himself), simple but extremely sharp, with a genuine fund of out-of-country experience (in China, where he taught English for a while and used to bring his American high school students on trips every year) and an unshakable commitment to kindness and understanding. 

(I also should add, contra Peter Beinart's "Joe Biden Is Not a Hero", that I still think Biden has been doing everything he believes is possible to stop the killing in Gaza, and continues to work tirelessly at that at this late date. I think he's literally hoping to have the permanent ceasefire announced at the Democratic convention. Biden may well be wrong on the hopefulness of this approach, but I'm certain an arms embargo wouldn't have succeeded any better at stopping the killing, given the mood in Israel and the criminal intransigence of the prime minister and his party, intent on saving his own bacon; it would have left Netanyahu feeling even freer to ignore US entreaties. Meanwhile, as I type, FWIW, Blinken has just announced that Netanyahu and Gallant have accepted his "bridging proposal" for getting from here to there, though the details remain thin.) 

Oh, and also, for the record, Wall Street Journal reporter Annie Linskey acknowledged to NPR that her reporting didn't find any indication that Biden was incapable of serving as president or suffering from dementia:

FOLKENFLIK: I wanted to focus this conversation almost exclusively on President Biden because, of course, he's the sitting president of the United States. You cover the White House, Annie Linskey. What has your reporting told us about his ability to do this for another 4.5 years, but his ability to be the sitting president right now?

LINSKEY: Well, I mean, this is a story that we're continuing to report, and you know, you're right. He continues to be the president. You know, I will say that the reporting that we did, there was not a suggestion that the president is senile. There was a sense that his age was impacting his quickness, his memory.

Anyway, water under the bridge. I'm really very pleased at the way this is developing, as the "joy" spreads. Harris is just great. I note polls saying voters trust her better than Trump on economic issues, something Biden could never achieve, though it's obvious to me that Trump is a catastrophic idiot on economic issues and Biden—with assistance from a Democratic Congress—saved the country from terrible financial disaster.

And then, on the other side, three or four minutes into the speech in Wilkes-Barre in which he was supposed to be laying out his economic program, Trump started talking about Kamala Harris instead, "EVERYTHING. WHEN SHE SITS AND COMPLAINS -- HEY LOOK, LOOK. JOE BIDEN HATES HER, OK? HATES HER. YOU DON'T MIND IF I GO OFF TELEPROMPTER FOR A SECOND, DO YOU?" in a way that can only be described as unhinged, about the way she is portrayed on a Time magazine cover and in a Wall Street column by "so-called Republican" Peggy Noonan:

---

I'm Better Looking Than She Is

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

I read a so-called Republican,
who Ronald Reagan did not like,
and she did not like him,
but she got credit for being
this Reagan speechwriter—highly
overrated—I don't know anything about her.
I don't know her. Treat me badly, but
that's OK. She called me wrong. She's called
it wrong for about eight years. She said
one thing that got me, "Kamala has one
big advantage. She is a very beautiful
woman. She's a beautiful woman."
So I decided to go back and reread—
I say that I'm much better looking
than her. I'm a better looking
person than Kamala. No, I couldn't
believe it. I had never heard that one.
They said her biggest advantage is
she's a beautiful woman. I'm going no—
I never thought of that. I'm better
looking than she is.

I love how he "doesn't know anything about" Noonan but claims to have this unexpected scoop about her unhappy relationship with old Ronnie. Then he went back to Miller’s prepared text on the teleprompter calling Harris a communist, for proposing price controls, like Richard Nixon in 1971. Was he a communist too?

And that's not the plan, in any case, except possibly as a last resort; the weapons are chiefly rhetorical, as Robert Reich writes:

“Put blame for high prices squarely where it belongs: on big corporations with monopoly power to keep prices high,” he wrote. “And take those corporations on: Condemn them for price gouging. Threaten them with antitrust lawsuits, price-gouging lawsuits, even price controls. Criticize them for making huge profits and giving their top executives record pay while shafting consumers.”

(My bold.)

It's the least interesting or controversial aspect of Harris's economic program, especially since, as everybody knows by now, the inflation of 2-3 years ago has been effectively conquered by the usual tools of the Federal Reserve, without much if any input from Biden, who has always respected the Fed's independence from the White House, and we're in more danger of shrinking into recession than exploding into hyperinflation, through the crisis in affordable housing, which Harris's program announced this week addresses in a Bidenesque list of mostly really good ideas aimed at the relatively young:

• Up to $25,000 in down-payment support for first-time homebuyers.

• To provide a $10,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers.

• Tax incentives for builders that build starter homes sold to first-time buyers.

• An expansion of a tax incentive for building affordable rental housing.

• A new $40 billion innovation fund to spur innovative housing construction.

• To repurpose some federal land for affordable housing.

• A ban on algorithm-driven price-setting tools for landlords to set rents.

• To remove tax benefits for investors who buy large numbers of single-family rental homes.

You obviously wouldn't bother to ask Trump what he proposes, because there's not a chance he knows, but the 2024 Republican platform gives it a sentence

To help new home buyers, Republicans will reduce mortgage rates by slashing Inflation, open limited portions of Federal Lands to allow for new home construction, promote homeownership through Tax Incentives and support for first-time buyers, and cut unnecessary Regulations that raise housing costs.

with one point of agreement with the Democrats, the bit about the federal lands, which I believe are mainly around Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, not necessarily the places the youngs are eagerly flocking to, perhaps as expanded by Stephen Miller into the entrancing science fiction project of "freedom cities" with flying cars and no crime, in the script of a Trump video last year:

"Past generations of Americans pursued big dreams and daring projects that once seemed impossible. They pushed across an unsettled continent and built new cities in the wild frontier," Trump said in a Friday campaign video.

The former president and current presidential candidate wants to bring this pioneering magic back by holding design contests for 10 new cities to be constructed on a small portion of the federal government's vast landholdings. The feds would vet submitted designs and then grant charters to the winners.

"These freedom cities will reopen the frontier, reignite the American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a shot at home ownership and the American dream..."

Other than that there's not enough detail to comment on, except that the burdensome regulations that need to be eased are probably the NIMBY zoning rules that most Republicans and too many affluent Democrats cling to, and the plan of lowering mortgage rates by "slashing inflation" is pretty much like Trump's plan of slashing inflation by imposing 10% tariffs on all imports, kind of the opposite of what it purportedly aims at (how inflation has been slashed over the past two years, by the Fed, is exactly how mortgage rates got so high). End gun violence by giving every family its own AR-15, while you're at it. LOL.