THE MYTHS OF MAY

Oxford Languages, the umbrella organization of the Oxford University Press whose products include the Oxford English Dictionary, defines the word "myth" as "a widely held but false belief". It lists the words "fallacy", "fiction", "delusion" and "lie" as among the word's many synonyms.  

Oxford Languages also defines the word "myth" as "a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events".  For this definition, it lists "story", "legend", "tale" and "allegory" as synonyms.

The definitions are by no means consistent.  

Legends, as the second definition makes clear, are often designed to explain actual, observed phenomena.  An allegory, as Plato's Cave made clear, can disclose a truth. Those shadows on the wall are what you perceive, not what is real.  And as for God, or the gods, though any decent theologian will concede that religion can only begin where science ends, any decent scientist will concede that religious truth is possible where scientific truth is not.  

The Big Bang may have had a Big Banger.

So . . .

When does an allegory become a delusion, a legend a fallacy, a story a fiction, a belief a lie? 

When does a myth become a myth?

Some cases are easy, even in retrospect and even avoiding the tendency to assume the regress of the past must be judged by the progress of the present.  

Hitler's Holocaust, Stalin's Gulag and Mao's Cultural Revolution were based on lies from the beginning. So was slavery in this country. The notion that an entire race could and should be liquidated -- either actually in the case of Hitler, Stalin and large parts  of Maoism or structurally as with American slavery -- was sufficient in itself to constitute evil. And the absence of specific intent on the part of large numbers of the enablers,  the "banal" part of the evil made famous in Hannah Arendt's telling phrase, did not minimize the inherent depravity. 

Other cases, though more ambiguous, can cross the line for different reasons.  

The racism that pervaded America in the wake of the Civil War and still rears its ugly head even today has over time been both accepted and combatted.  Jim Crow and segregation ultimately gave way to Brown v. Board of Education, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the steady emergence of a black middle class (albeit with economic resources below its white counterpart) and Barack Obama. At the same time, while the Klan is gone, black Americans today are still three times more likely than whites to be killed by the police.  And while the Supreme Court pretends conditions today are so different that federal oversight of jurisdictions which historically disenfranchised minorities is no longer needed, the reaction of many of those jurisdictions has been to create new rules (e.g., limiting early voting, closing drop boxes, computerized gerrymandering) to either suppress the minority vote or render it meaningless.  

Though most of us believe racism is wrong, the myth of equal protection and the reality of discrimination are still fighting an ongoing battle.  

Finally, there is the case where lies or lunacy interact with a myth that in itself is not particularly nefarious but becomes so by virtue of the permitted alchemy.

That is the place MAGA Republicans find themselves in today.

The innocuous myths that form the foundation of the MAGA GOP are myths about the American Constitution and the American citizenry. The constitutional myth is that the founders created a limited federal government and that powers not expressly delegated to it were retained by the states and the people. The citizenry myth is that Christian settlers from Europe came here and created Ronald Reagan's shining city on a hill.  

Neither of these myths is inherently dangerous or incoherent, 

Both of them become so, however,  once they are married to Trumpism. 

A pathological liar and narcissist, Trump constantly changes his positions without explanation and oblivious to contradiction. As president he said we should never question the nation's debt or leverage the need to pay it by demanding budgetary concessions; Congress then increased the debt limit three times during his tenure without any conditions.  As an ex-president, however, Trump is now telling the GOP to let the government default unless the Senate passes the House's bill freezing spending at last year's levels for a decade (it won't) and Biden signs that freeze into law (he won't).  

If the House bill actually became law, Congress would have to find $4.8 trillion in spending cuts over that same period, $3.6 trillion of which are not specified in the bill.  The $1.2 trillion that is specified comes from imposing work requirements on food stamp and Medicaid recipients, recouping unspent Covid relief, repealing some of the just enacted energy and climate measures designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions, blocking student loan forgiveness and cutting IRS funding, and is pretty much a laundry list of the usual suspects from whom the GOP typically demands sacrifice -- the poor, the sick, the young and any government agency that goes after tax cheats.  The GOP cannot specify the rest because it refuses to cut defense or raise taxes and does not want to be blamed for cutting Social Security or Medicare, all or part of which would have to happen to get anywhere near $3.6 trillion. 

Default, of course, would be catastrophic.  Both the Congressional Budget Office and Council of Economic Advisers believe it would reverse the employment gains of the last two years and create a recession.  If prolonged, unemployment would rise to 5%, the gross domestic product would decline by 6% and interest rates would skyrocket.  The stock market would tumble, along with the nation's retirement accounts.

Trump does not really care about the full faith and credit of the United States. He does, however, care about staying out of jail and, with  one criminal trial pending and two other criminal investigations coming to a head, he views the presidency as a means to that end.  

For that reason, he is stoking the MAGA base.  

Per usual, part of that stoking involves pissing off his opponents.  

When asked why he had changed positions on the issue of default, he said he was president then but isn't now.  It's hard to understand precisely what that meant (or even if it had any meaning), but if we are looking for answers, Trump's narcissism is as a good a place as any to start.  Thus, when default carried with it the potential to hurt his presidency, he opposed it; now that it has the potential to hurt Biden's, he is for it.

The stoking also involves acts of serial outrage.  

One day he is found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll and ordered to pay her $5 million in damages; the next he is re-libeling her as a "wack job" at a CNN Town Hall, thus creating additional damage; the day after that he threatens to out Brett Kavanaugh if evangelicals refuse to endorse him in 2024; and the day after that he demands America default on its legally assumed bills if the Democrats refuse to sign on to unspecified spending cuts. 

Tearing down is all Trump is good at.

Whether he is tearing down a victim he sexually assaulted.

Or . . .

The country he incompetently ran.

Nor do Trump or his MAGA enablers stop at the water's edge.  

Trump himself is part of a crypto-fascist cabal of western politicians currently reminding the world of what it thought it killed in the 1940s.  With Putin in Russia and Orbán in Hungary, they are fact-free authoritarians who thumb their noses at the rule of law and readily endorse violence as a means to political power.  

Putin himself has tried to remove Ukraine from the map and is counting on western weariness and the support of anti-war Americans like Marjorie Taylor Green and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to ultimately forestall Ukraine's defenses and turn a war of attrition into a Russian victory, however pyrrhic. He has openly endorsed Trump, imposed financial and travel restrictions on Americans who have no connection to Ukraine policy but oppose the former president  (e.g., NY Attorney General Letitia James and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger), and now calls the Trump-led insurrectionists who sought to stop the electoral count on January 6 "dissidents" who the American government is "persecut[ing]" (and who Trump himself is promising to pardon if he returns to the White House).

In his CNN Town Hall, Trump claimed he would bring the war in Ukraine to an end in a day.  

He also refused to say how.  

Claims of omnipotent ability are part of Trump's typical pose but have never been remotely predictive.  As to this one, his former national security adviser, John Bolton, dismissed it out of hand. "No rational person believes you can get the Ukrainians and the Russians to agree on how to resolve it in 24 hours," said Bolton, "It shows [Trump is] utterly out of touch with what the war is all about and what the implications of Russia's aggression . . . are all around the world." Earlier in the interview, Bolton explained that the world leaders with whom he interacted when he led the NSC thought Trump a "laughing fool".

Nonetheless, Trump is a fool who admires dictators -- Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Kim Jung Un in North Korea, all of whom he has variously termed smart, savvy, top of the line. open or honorable.

And he is a fool who still stands a chance of again becoming president.

To date, there are only four Republicans opposing him -- former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), all of whom have announced their candidacies, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who will do so later today.  Of those four, Trump led DeSantis by 31 points in the May 1 CBS poll, by 23 points in the last ABC News/Washington Post poll, and by 27 points in this week's CNN poll. The other three barely register.  

If, however, Trumpist mythology is the GOP's ball and chain, DeSantis is hardly suited to remove it. 

Both of them activate the MAGA base by appealing to the base's sense of grievance.  For the base, the constitutional and citizenry myths are exclusive.  The myth of limited federal government allows the states to ban abortions and books and the myth of Christian and European settlement allows today's citizens to shut the southern border and eliminate gay bars (and gay rights). 

Neither of them, however, can appeal to those outside the base.

Trump is unable to appeal to moderates and independents because they do not want an unhinged psychopath's finger on the nuclear button.  DeSantis is unable to appeal to moderates and independents because they do not want to make abortion illegal at six weeks, ban books, limit fee speech on college campuses or declare war on Disney and Mickey Mouse.  Moderates and independents also do not want Russia annexing Ukraine and do not much care whether that occurs because the American president is in Putin's pocket (as is Trump) or ignorantly treats Russia's seizure as a mere "territorial dispute" (as does DeSantis).  They will vote for neither of them.

At a baseball game last summer, erstwhile Trump supporter Anthony Scaramucci told me that the Republican party had to eliminate Trump and MAGA root and branch to be successful going forward.  

It hasn't. 

Because the other truth about myths is that they . . .

Last long . . .

And die hard.

 A POLL THAT COUNTS

As a general rule, polls have limited value.  

As any expert will tell you, they are mere snapshots in time.  

When used to predict outcomes, their accuracy is off by anywhere from three to five percentage points.  Pollsters call this the margin of error. That error can be the result of a flawed or limited sample size.  In that case, the predicted outcome is likely to be erroneous because the people polled are not the people who later (and actually) decide. This is especially significant when the poll also reports the views of smaller sub-groups.  

There have been two polls much in the news this past week.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post/ABC News poll reported that 36% of its respondents approved of the job being done by President Biden. 56% disapproved and 8% had no opinion.  This was a decline of six points from its last survey conducted two months ago. The poll also showed both former President Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis beating Biden in a head-to-head by seven points.  And it reported that 54% of the respondents thought Trump did a better job handling the economy, an eighteen-point edge over those who favored Biden on this issue.

To say the poll immediately provoked sustained concern among Democrats would be an understatement.  

On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazille said the poll, which was released just after midnight on Sunday, "kept [her] up" and told the administration that it should "wake up".  On Monday, The New York Times reported that "the data has left many Democrats feeling anywhere from queasy to alarmed". And on Tuesday, Robert Hubbell, a Democratic partisan whose blog Today's Edition Newsletter is widely read, reported that he had received "dozens of emails from distraught readers over the last forty-eight hours" in reaction to the poll.  

The poll was not without its critics.  

As a matter of statistics, it is an outlier.  

Other polls give Biden higher marks and the average of all polls in Five Thirty-Eight's daily tracking charts the president's approval rating at 42.5%, which is just about where it has been for the past two months (or the same period surveyed by the Post and ABC).  

At least one pollster, Cornel Belcher, called the Post/ABC poll "trash". 

Belcher, who was Obama's pollster and otherwise claimed to have had "respect for the poll in the past", criticized its methodology as "problematic".  The sample size (1006 adults) was inordinately small, worse (only 900 registered voters) on the Biden/Trump match-up, and more or less useless in evaluating the views of relevant sub-groups (by race and age and of independents, the latter of whom will be critical in 2024). 

In the published poll itself, there was no report of the so-called "demographic" questions or of the numbers of respondents that fell into each demographic group, however defined,  and thus it was impossible to understand the significance of any of the so-called "cross tabs" reporting the approval and match-up results for those specific groups.

Its defenders are noting that the current Post/ABC poll is reporting the same trends the poll reported earlier in its January and September iterations and thus less an outlier than what might otherwise be thought. 

A Nate Cohn wrote in today's Times, "This consistent pattern requires more than just statistical noise and random sampling.  Something else is at play, whether that's something about the ABC/Post methodology, the underlying bias in telephone response patterns these days, or some combination of the above." Cohn then suggested what that "something else" might be, noting that "the ABC/Post poll is nearly the last of the traditional, live-interview, random-digit-dialing telephone surveys that dominated public polling for much of the last half-century".

The bottom line here is that the Post/ABC poll tells us a lot about today but nothing about November 2024.  

As for today, the poll tells us that a roaring economy with 3.4% unemployment and declining (but still annoying) inflation is not making Americans feel better about their particular circumstances (or their particular president).  This is probably because (i) the top-line employment number does not cure the reality that employment is not guaranteed and inequality is still rampant and (ii) unlike unemployment, inflation and high interest rates impose costs on a much wider swath of the public.

As for November 2024, however, the poll tells us nothing.  

Or . . .

Too much of everything . . .

Which gets you to the same place. 

Though the poll makes it clear that Biden is unpopular, it says Trump is too.  It reports that more than 63% believe Trump is a liar, more than half think he should be indicted in connection with the January 6 insurrection and his retention of classified documents, and about half deem Manhattan District Attorney Bragg's indictment appropriate. As for the man who gave us the Court that killed Roe, 78% believe abortion should be between a woman and her doctor.

The second poll conducted this week had none of the uncertainty of the first.

This one was conducted in New York City.

In a federal courthouse.

In it, nine jurors unanimously voted that Donald Trump had sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman in the 1990s and then defamed her after he left the presidency by calling her claim a "hoax and a lie" and a "complete con job" in October 2022.  (A separate defamation case for comments he made about the case while he was president is still pending.)

There are enormous differences these days between legal proceedings and presidential campaigns.  

The first are governed by rules of evidence and procedure and subject to review.  The second are pretty much no holds barred slugfests.  

In the first, facts matter and witnesses testify under oath and on pain of perjury.  In the second, media groups routinely fact check the claims of the candidates, many of which are found wanting or false.  

In the first, jurors deliberate under strict guidelines concerning the applicable law and the degree of certainty they must reach before rendering a verdict.  In the second, 35% (and before 2020 usually more) of those eligible to participate decide for one reason or another (or none at all) not to, and a sub-set (so-called "low information voters") do so with little thought or analysis.  

Following yesterday's verdict, Trump repeated his (now demonstrably false) claim that he did not know Ms. Carroll and did not assault her.  He attacked both the jury that heard the case and the judge who presided over it. He said the latter was biased because he was appointed by Bill Clinton, the former because it was empanelled from "an anti-Trump area."  This last charge was echoed by Senators Graham, Rubio and Tuberville, the last of whom said that with "a New York jury, [Trump] had no chance."

All of this is standard issue Trump talk and standard issue GOP denial.

In 2020 and the months following the November election, Trump and his GOP enablers twisted themselves into knots claiming the presidential election Trump lost was rigged but the House races the GOP won on the same ballots were legitimate.  

And yesterday, Trump and his enablers all sang from the same "no chance with a New York jury" chorus even though that same New York jury had decided Ms. Carroll did not prove Trump raped her.

As Yogi Berra would say, it was déjà vu all over again.

With Trump, only blue state votes . . .

And blue state juries . . .

Are rigged.

Even if they're not. 

When all the dust settles and smoke clears, two facts will be undeniable and featured prominently in any Democratic campaign for the presidency in 2024.

One is that, on January 6, 2021,  Donald Trump sponsored an insurrection to overturn a legitimate election.

The other is that, on May 9, 2023, a jury declared him to be a sexual predator.

And that is . . .

A poll that counts.