Tag: trump

Are the Conspiracy Theorists Still Winning?

Mike Rothschild

I’m an independent journalist with an uncertain road ahead. To support my work telling the story of the Eaton Fire and its aftermath, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

Using the 100 day mark of a presidency as a measuring stick for accomplishments only dates back to the first FDR administration, when Roosevelt mentioned it during a July 1933 radio address. Nonetheless, it’s become the marker to measure how much a president has gotten done in their first 3+ months in office – or, if you’re Donald Trump, how much you’ve broken and gutted.

Trump has been doing a blitz of incoherent and insane interviews to mark his first 100 days in office, which I won’t bother rehashing. But I did think it was a good opportunity to follow up on the first piece I wrote after he won the 2024 election, called “The Conspiracy Theorists Won – For Now.” In it, I wrote about how the right wing cranks and influencers who propelled Trump to a second victory should be prepared for some amount of disappointment as Trump loses interest in their desires to “reveal everything” and bring “the bad guys” to justice.

I made a few broad predictions of what I thought might happen in those spheres in a second Trump term, so I figured 100 days was a good time to check in and see what I got right and wrong. I generally am not the biggest fan of trying to predict what’s to come with Trump, since it’s so often impossible to get any handle on what he’s serious about and what’s just his verbal broke fire hydrant of nonsense. But having lived in these worlds for a while, I feel like I have a decent sense of what matters and what’s just wishful thinking when it comes to conspiracy theorists and Trump.

So how’d I do?

Trump won by exploiting the Appeal to Fear and Appeal to Tradition

This wasn’t a prediction as much as it was a statement on the logical fallacies and psychological triggers Trump exploited to win the election. And given Trump’s relentless fearmongering about Venezuelan gangs, MS-13, immigrant terrorists pouring over the border in carbombs full of fentanyl, and the completely ridiculous idea that if we don’t launch some sort of insane trade war with China then our economy is doomed, I’d say we’re in for a lot more of this.

Public acceptance of conspiracy theories is here to stay

Once again, more of a statement than a prediction. And yeah, we’re all pretty much conspiracy theorists now – both left and right.

Conspiracy content creators might struggle during Trump 2.0

The biggest conspiracy theories come out of either unexpected traumas or personal/national failures. It’s harder to create conspiracy theories when everything is going great, eggs costs pennies, we’re all rich, and our enemies are quaking in fear. When that DOESN’T happen, you get conspiracy theories. Recall that QAnon only emerged in October of 2017, and gained popularity because it offered an explanation for why Trump wasn’t accomplishing what he promised he would – he was, it was just happening secretly.

What we have seen is the “big week ahead” relentless goalpost moving of QAnon applied to many of those lofty campaign promises Trump made. Sure, some of them he kept – but they were slam dunks that he could carry out via executive order, like slashing DEI or “getting boys out of girls sports,” whatever that means.

But many more have been retconned or can-kicked down the road, with lofty achievements meant to happen days or even hours after inauguration now on much longer timelines, with no explanation given for the change. Remember how Trump said he’d end the war in Ukraine before he was even inaugurated? Turns out he was “speaking figuratively” when he said that. Trump’s promise to enact massive, sweeping tariffs on day one? It’s been back and forth for months on who we’re slapping tariffs on, with a constant drumbeat of pauses and trial periods making it nearly impossible to know what’s happening. The promises of near-instant wealth and prosperity have been replaced with warnings of “short-term pain” while the “cheap wealth” of the Biden administration is replaced with…something? And Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has turned himself into a cottage industry of moving the goalposts a few weeks or months or “soon” for the the point when the riches are going to start pouring in.

And all those other promises about ending taxes on tips and overtime, cutting electric bills in half, immediately bring food prices way down, make IVF free, and everything else? Most have either made only incremental progress or have been airbrushed out of existence.

So who needs a new QAnon when you can just use the old QAnon to make everything seem like it’s going great?

Trump might not pardon the January 6th felons

I whiffed on this one, as Trump immediately pardoned all 1,600 January 6th participants. To add insult to national humiliation, he’s considering some sort of reparations fund for the “hostages” who were just peacefully protesting by smashing windows and beating up cops. I thought he’d pardon some, but that it wasn’t politically useful to issue pardons to some of the worst offenders of the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers. Many, naturally, have continued committing crimes, and one’s already been shot dead by police. Very fine people, indeed.

American will not be “made healthy again”

So far, so good. RFK Jr. has gone on a wild spree of undoing NIH recommendations, gutting government health services, touting useless alternatives to vaccination, promising that he’ll uncover the “real cause” of autism by September (which, of course, he’s already kicked down the road for another six months), and, most troublingly, has spoken of creating a national registry for autistic children. Because nothing bad happens when you put “undesirable” people on a list for a leader obsessed with genetics and eugenics.

Trump’s alliance with Elon Musk and RFK Jr. might splinter

Kennedy is still 100% licking the boot, but Musk seems to have overstayed his welcome and might be on the way out, as he looks to be leaving the administration soon to attempt to prop up the flailing husk of his car company. Stories have broken of shouting matches in the Oval between Musk and various Trump officials, and Musk was all set to get a classified briefing on China before Trump stepped in. The days when Musk followed Trump around like a puppy, while wearing his young son as a hat, seem to have ended.

The left wing grift machine will sputter out

Too early to tell, though I’m noticing a distinct lack of “Trump is going to prison” wishful thinking on liberal social media, which is a good sign.

Trump will disappoint his followers by not releasing any information of value about Epstein or JFK

This wasn’t on my initial predictions list, but I did write another piece about Trump keeping his conspiracy theorist followers on the hook with lofty promises to release classified information about some of the most hot-button plots in the conspiracy sphere, as well as unspecified “UFO videos” and 9/11 files.

Trump did release a large tranche of files on the Kennedy assassination, though JFK scholars immediately pointed out that they revealed little of note that was new about the assassination itself, only illuminating some minor mysteries about Oswald and CIA methods.

But UFO videos? Nothing. 9/11 files? Nothing so far. And the purported release of the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein was a total disaster, with a splashy event where MAGA influencers were given binders supposedly full of the darkest secrets the financier kept turning into a meme-generating farce. It took hours for MAGA-world to declare the binders had nothing of value in them, accuse AG Pam Bondi of running a coverup, and mocking the redacted and useless documents they got. Despite Bondi claiming to have thousands of agents working 24/7 redacting and digitizing Epstein docs, nothing has come out since then.

Maybe it’ll all come out in September along with the real cause of autism and halved electric bills.

Conspiracy Contradiction

Mike Rothschild

I’m an independent journalist with an uncertain road ahead. To support my work telling the story of the Eaton Fire and its aftermath, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

It was easy to miss in the normal chaos of weeks under the Trump Administration, and the particularly newsworthy death of Pope Francis, but last week, the White House entirely changed the contents of its COVID response page to a massive conspiracy theory touting the “lab leak” hypothesis as the origin of the pandemic.

The evidence touted by the White House is basically that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Hunan Seafood Market are seven miles apart, along with a bunch of statements backed up with phrases like “most likely” and “nearly all measures of science.” The only real evidence provided is a link to a House Select Committee report, made up of Republicans who are totally under the thumb of Trump.

The “lab leak” scenario has always seemed woefully under-evidenced and based on wishful thinking, so I’m not going to debate it here. But I thought it was worth sharing that the official stance of the US government appears to now be that COVID was a genetically engineered bioweapon that escape from a lab in China only to infect and kill millions – and we’re not doing anything to punish China for its depravity.

Of course, that seems at odds with the other mainstream conservative stance, which is that COVID, while bad, is basically just a cold that can be warded off with vitamins and ivermectin. As such, the massive number of deaths during the pandemic was hugely over-reported to include deaths “with” COVID rather than deaths “from” COVID, based on the deep state wanting to make the pandemic seem worse than it actually was so they could take our freedom away (note that substantial evidence shows COVID deaths were actually undercounted, particularly during the worst of the pandemic).

And both of those things seem at odds with the OTHER mainstream conservative stance, which is that COVID was a planned bioweapon attack on the west, which the deep state conditioned us for and practiced using tests like the 2020 Rockefeller document and the mysterious 2019 drill “Event 201.” In this scenario, the COVID release was planned to cull the population and put the rest of us on permanent lockdown, stealing our freedom and our money to keep us as slaves. And it only didn’t work because…

Sorry, I got a bit lost in my scenarios. How could COVID be planned AND a leak? How could it be just a cold AND a population culling bioweapon? How could the COVID lockdown be a tool of the cabal when it was launched during the administration of the president who dedicated his life to taking down the cabal?

Welcome to the world of conspiracism, where nothing makes sense because nothing has to make sense.

All of these things should, in theory, contradict each other. But somehow, in the conspiratorial mind, they all fit together on a timeline that gets more convoluted and absurd the more you try to make it all work. It doesn’t have to work. It just has to give the appearance of being complicated and long-planned by the most evil people in the world, but also easily discoverable by amateur sleuths doing internet research.

Every major conspiracy theory is riddled with these types of contradictions that are blindly accepted and worked into an incomprehensible world view that actually explains everything if you just don’t think about it at all.

Trump’s assassination attempt? Planned by the deep state to kill Trump, using literally the most incompetent assassin they could find, who utterly failed at his job.

Mass shootings? False flags perpetrated by gun-grabbing presidents in order to take away our firearms, even though they never do it, and numerous mass shootings took place under Trump’s first administration which were actually real mass shootings caused by SSRI’s and carried out by antifa.

Barack Obama? He was incompetent and an idiot, but also all-powerful and pure calculation – while also being both a communist and a Muslim, while secretly gay and married to a man pretending to be a woman whose children just appeared out of nowhere.

9/11? A controlled demolition planned in meticulous detail as a way to take away our freedom, while also being figured out that same day by multiple major figures in the conspiracy world.

The JFK assassination? Oswald was a patsy who never fired a shot, despite the rifle he was known to have owned being found at the exact spot where Oswald worked, and a Dallas police officer also being definitely shot and killed by Oswald, who just happened to kill a cop for no particular reason.

Some conspiracy theories rely on things that might not be contradictions if you use enough wishful thinking and sculpting of the facts to make them fit what you believe – COVID could have leaked from a lab and be planned if you assume that the leak was accidental, AND the deep state was making plans for a fake pandemic that would be activated when a REAL pandemic started. If you squint enough, it makes sense – even if the amount of squinting you’d need would make your face implode.

But some conspiracy theories rely on believing two things that literally can’t be true at the same time. Princess Diana was murdered by British intelligence AND she faked her death to escape public scrutiny. Osama bin Laden was already dead by the time of the US Special Forces raid on his compound AND he’s still alive and in hiding. How is that possible?? It doesn’t matter, don’t ask.

Such cognitive dissonance, the discomfort felt by holding two contradictory positions at the same time, has long been a recognized part of the phenomenon of conspiracism. But this kind of mental plate spinning was always the domain of cranks and fringe authors, not the White House. Of course, that was the before time. Now the President puts out a conspiracy theory that literally depends on contradicting things he’s already said and done, and millions of people simply put all those things together in a way that fits – even if it definitely doesn’t fit and stand up to any kind of scrutiny.

Most people struggle to understand conspiratorial beliefs because ultimately, most of us want to have belief systems that make sense. We disregard the things that don’t fit the evidence, and act on the things that do. A controlled demolition on 9/11 or mass shootings being cooked up by powerful forces don’t fit the evidence, only belief systems that want them to be true. But when things they WANT to be true run into things that ARE true, and only one can be the real thing, then reality warps and we’re faced with confronting our own false beliefs.

That’s a line many conspiracy believers won’t cross. So the rest of us scramble to find ways to understand and react to the things that our conspiratorial friends and family believe, when really, the things they believe can’t be understood. The details of the conspiracy theory don’t matter and are entirely malleable depending on the circumstance. COVID is real and fake, it’s harmless and genocidal – whatever you need in the moment.

If the details of the conspiracy theory don’t matter, why bother debunking it?

For one, many people will come to the conspiracy theory as outsiders, not believers. And it’s important that the first time someone encounters a theory, they should also be given the information required to know it’s false. But more than that, conspiracy belief stems from a real psychological need to make sense out of things that don’t make sense, to find answers to questions that don’t seem to have answers, and to find order in chaos.

We ALL have those needs. We all need reasons why things happened, who did them to us, and what we can do to push back. That’s why we’re all vulnerable to conspiracy theories if they hit us in the right way at the right time. Maybe it’s not COVID or 9/11 or false flags – maybe it’s why did my house burn down, or why did I get hit with this medical bill, or why are things so hard and shitty?

That’s not political or historical, that’s human. So understanding the contradictions of conspiracism helps us understand the appeal of conspiracism. It doesn’t need to make logical sense. It just needs to FEEL like it makes sense. If it’s not THE truth, at least it can be MY truth.

Even if it’s not true.

The Humiliation Ritual Strikes Again

Mike Rothschild

To be in Donald Trump’s inner circle requires a few traits that most people don’t have, some people have one or two of, and only a few people have all of. You have to be able to do something for him, of course. You have to be unstintingly loyal, willing to do anything and everything to advance his aims or simply amuse him. You have to look good on TV. And more than anything, you have to take your dignity and sense of shame, ball them up into the tiniest fraction of their normal size, and hide them away deep in a part of your soul that you will forget exists.

Trump rules the GOP the way autocrats rule nations. He shapes them into his image, and never lets the people forget that they serve him, not the other way around. No matter what baubles and titles Trump deigns to hand out to his bootlickers, they will always be just that. But even a dictator needs acolytes, and if you degrade yourself enough, you can be one too. Nobody should feel sorry for anyone who chooses degradation over dignity, and for the participants in Trump’s ritualized shaming, what they get out of it is far more important than what Trump puts them through.

As much as any other right wing troll, Trump loves to humiliate his enemies. That’s to be expected from someone who has built a brand around being America’s ultimate winner – everyone else is a loser and should be treated as such. But for as much time as Trump spends rubbing it in the faces of defeated electoral opponents, he is more devoted to publicly shaming and degrading those who support him. And the more you support him, the more he will shame and degrade you.

The worst of the humiliation is reserved for those who once opposed him, but then bent the knee to him for various political and financial reasons. The past few years have seen a flood of public embarrassment and shaming so pronounced that it even has earned a nickname – the humiliation ritual.

Ironically, the term “humiliation ritual” has a slightly different context in conspiracy theorist circles, that of an Illuminati rite designed to break down the dignity of celebrities who wish to join the inner ranks of the puppet masters, or who have run afoul of them. This version often involves cross-dressing, men publicly appearing naked, or celebrities suffering a public and embarrassing loss because they dared speak out. The Trump humiliation ritual is different – it’s not about literal embarrassment, but about a spiritual kind of shame. It’s about Trump breaking the GOP to his will, humiliating those who dared to question him, and letting them know that no matter what, he owns them and they are beholden to him. If Trump tells them to jump, their only acceptable response is “off what?”

There was a devil’s bargain that the more moderate, once firmly anti-Trump right made with Trump after he won the nomination in 2016. Yes they complained about him, insulted him, and scored him. But once he’d won the primary no matter how coarse or crude or embarrassing Trump was, he was the only one who could beat Hillary Clinton. And nothing no Access Hollywood tape or bizarre outburst would be more humiliating than allowing that woman to become the president. Then he won the election, and to stay in his good graces, it made more sense to heap praise upon him than to criticize him and face his wrath. Opponents who had once vocally opposed him, including former 2016 primary rivals Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham, all became some of his most vocal bootlickers, bending over backwards to defend him, praise him, and extol his qualities – often at their own expense. Other detractors, like Mitt Romney, were simply humiliated, forced to sit through dinners and slap shit-eating grins on their face to match Trump’s perpetual expression. Such is the price of Trump taking control of the GOP.

Of course, the humiliation of Trump’s early years in office pales in comparison to what we’re likely to get in a second term. Just like 2016, the 2024 election saw Trump save his deepest and starkest humiliations for those who once opposed him, like Nikki Haley, who sat through countless insults from Trump about her heritage and husband, and yet immediately supported Trump once her primary challenge fizzled out; and Tim Scott, a Republican senator who utterly debased himself at Trump rallies, smiling through endless Trump insults to the point where some commentators thought it smacked of self-hatred.

When Trump posted a picture from this weekend of him, his son, Elon Musk, and HHS nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. all eating McDonalds on Trump’s plane back from watching a UFC fight in New York, it wasn’t just a way to engage with fans. It was a direct form of revenge against Kennedy for a comment he’d made about Trump earlier in the week, that flying with Trump meant eating the “poison” that he eats on the road – almost all of which was fast food. That wasn’t very obedient. So Trump broke him, and broke him publicly. It was his way of telling both Kennedy and the world at large that if you want a seat at the table of power, he had to eat what the powerful people were eating – which apparently was the same fast food you can get in every major city in the world. Naturally, Kennedy wants power more than he craves dignity, so he ate the poison with a smile that looked something like the face you make when you’re passing a kidney stone. Kennedy even followed up his shame with a pathetic tweet about how he “couldn’t wait to eat McDonalds again!”

At this point, it’s a fair question to ask whether these people allow Trump to debase them for reasons other than craven lust for power. Does he have financial or sexual blackmail on them? With Lindsey Graham in particular, there’s been a tendency on the left to ascribe the sheer volume of obnoxious praise and bootlicking to “kompromat” – the Stalinist slang term for “compromising material,” and a constant feature of the coverage of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election. Could Trump have such material on his former foes? Is that why they’ve all bowed so deeply and so completely perverted their own values in his service?

It’s certainly possible, though not at all necessary. Trump doesn’t need lurid photos or “pee tapes” of his rivals, because he has the thing they all want and need to stay close to: power. Trump runs the GOP, has broken and rebuilt it in his image, and seeks to do the same to the country. While some Trump opponents have stayed on his bad side, many others have accepted that if they want any kind of role in the new administration or the GOP as it currently stands, they have to eat the poison. After all, it’s a two-way street. Like any abuser, Trump might hit you, but he only does it because he loves you.

So the humiliation rituals go on, because those who endure them have decided that the loss of dignity is worth the gaining of clout. RFK Jr. might have to cram some dreaded seed oils down his gullet, but he’s in line to have one of the most powerful cabinet positions with a vast swath of the American health system under his thumb. Once derided by Trump as “liddle Marco,” Rubio is Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State – a level of power that he never could have achieved in any other administration. Tim Scott might have soft-shoed his way through some humiliation, but was picked to lead the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz get to be on TV all the time, because they spend their appearances praising Trump and extoling his leadership. Even Nikki Haley, who has been totally iced out of the incoming administration, gets to pretend that she’s a kingmaker, whose supporters flocked to Trump and put him over the top, rather than staying on the anti-Trump side and voting Democratic.

And no politician more exemplifies the flip side of the humiliation ritual than vice president-elect JD Vance. The Ohio senator had once been a vocal Trump hater, to the point where after Vance asked Trump to campaign for him in 2022, Trump vociferously insulted him from the stage in his home state. But two years later, Vance is the closest one can get to Trump and the presumptive nominee for the 2028 Republican primary. It’s a mighty reward for a little bit of embarrassment.

There’s no reason to feel the slightest sympathy or cringe for Republicans who have embraced Trump’s humiliation ritual. They’ve chosen to lick the boot. Nobody forced any of these people to line up for embarrassment, they did it because power is more valuable than dignity. As America slides into autocracy, kissing the leader’s ass is just the cost of doing business.

In Trump’s America, the business of bootlicking is good.

Trump and the “Everything Must Go!” Campaign

Mike Rothschild

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I have a theory about Donald Trump and the 2024 election.

In his roughly 700 years of presidential campaigning, Trump has always done things a little differently. He shunned the retail politics and door knocking of past establishment campaigns in favor of a media strategy that revolved around building himself up as a cult of personality figure. That means countless rallies where he offered up his rambling thoughts to adoring crowds, fawning interviews from bootlickers about how great he is, and opening multiple revenue streams to keep his flock sending in the cash to help fund either the campaign or his own legal issues.

It worked in 2016 because nobody had ever seen anything like it, the media had no idea how to cover it, and because he was running against a candidate in Hillary Clinton that the far right hate machine had spent three decades claiming was the spawn of Satan. It didn’t work in 2020, and the Trump inner circle was so shocked that they took their disbelief and used it to fuel a coup attempt.

There are still six weeks until the election, but from most of the evidence we’re seeing, it’s not going to work this time either. Kamala Harris is polling well nationally, and has small but consistent leads in the states she needs to have leads in. She’s crushing Trump in fundraising, Trump’s get out the vote strategy is negligible, numerous high-profile Republicans have either failed to endorse Trump or outright endorsed Harris, he’s getting dragged down by horrible down ballot candidates in states he needs to win, he’s doing far fewer rallies and far more podcast interviews to a walled-off constituency of young men, his lackies are laying the groundwork to contest close elections and convince Nebraska to pull a last second rule change that would net him one electoral vote, and his fundraising efforts are much more centered around filling up his own coffers rather than anything to do with the Republican Party.

These are not the actions and attitudes of a campaign that believes it’s going to win. And my theory is that everyone in the Trump campaign, including Trump himself, have given up on believing they’re going to win. Instead, they’re running the “everything must go” campaign, hoping to wheeze over the finish line by making grandiose promises Trump can’t possibly keep, making as much money for themselves as possible, and sewing the seeds of doubt over Harris winning fairly. A Harris win might not result in another January 6th, but it could definitely be the foundation of a lucrative next stage for the MAGA movement – one not built around Trump as a politician, but as the elder statesman of a Republican Party built in his image, and one that features any number of acolytes fighting it out for his approval to take the mantle in 2028 and pretend that the last two elections were stolen.

Trump himself has more or less given up on campaigning with any kind of rigor or consistency. Whereas in 2016 he was having rallies once a day, sometimes twice, he’s barely having them twice a week now. His campaign has said that they aren’t necessary at this point, and his supporters will point to him nearly having been assassinated at one in July. But the decline started before then, and it’s easy to see why he’s no longer having many – he’s considerably older and less energetic, they aren’t as well attended, aren’t covered with the attention they used to draw, and Trump supporters who do attend tend to leave early. Why wouldn’t they, given that he’s been running for president for a decade and has nothing left to say.

More and more, Trump’s campaign rhetoric depends on making either ridiculous accusations (“Haitian immigrants are eating pets,” etc) or more recently on him promising truly ludicrous things that are never going to happen. Recent Trump rallies and interviews have promised 50% cuts to peoples’ energy bills and car insurance, food prices dropping from massive taxes on imported food, child care costs dropping through tariffs, IVF being free, removal of taxes on tips and overtime, credit card interest rates capped at 10%, restoring the uncapped state and local income tax deduction that Trump himself capped with his 2017 tax cuts, and most recently, a manned mission to Mars by 2028.

While a few of these are decent ideas – the no tax on tips thing has been kicked around Republican circles for a while – most of them are impossible because Trump has no power to enact them. Moreover, these are the sorts of “free goodies” giveaways that Mitt Romney built his 2012 campaign around fighting against, and which Republicans in Congress would fight to their last breath. Trump loses nothing by promising them, because they’re impossible promises to keep.

But they’re a way to get people who don’t understand how anything works interested in Trump, because hey, who doesn’t want their credit card interest rates capped? The credit card industry doesn’t want it, and that’s because it would essentially destroy anyone’s ability to get credit unless they already have sparkling credit scores. But if it’s never going to happen, who cares?

While the bossman is out promising every Trump voter a free TV and a subscription to Sports Illustrated, the rest of his core ticket is out there hitting the bricks and winning hearts and minds, right? No. JD Vance is still embroiled in the Haitian pet eating hoax fiasco while continuing to humiliate himself in TV hits. Melania Trump is focused solely on shilling her memoir, and has made just a few appearances for Trump, at several of which she was personally paid for. And Usha Vance? Never heard of her.

But if Melania is getting paid for the campaign, then it’s peanuts compared to what Donald is taking in personally. And that’s where the other part of the “everything must go” campaign really comes into play. Trump has spent an extraordinary amount of time shilling products with his name and face on them, with the money going not to the campaign, the RNC, or anyone else who might use it to help get Republicans elected. Instead the money just goes to him, presumably to spend on legal fees, or whatever else he feels like buying.

Just in the past few weeks, Trump launched a crypto currency that his two adult sons will run, announced $100 Trump-branded silver coins that are only worth $30, and published a glossy photo book of his time in the White House that includes a disturbingly high number of pictures of Trump with Kim Jong Un. All of this goes on the same groaning merch table that features Trump Bibles, Trump sneakers, and all of the other Trump branded products that the man has sold over the years. Not to mention Melania’s memoir, which is currently in the top 100 of books on Amazon ahead of its publication date in October.

None of the money from any of this shit is going to the campaign. Trump’s revocable trust owns the coins and sneakers, the photo book is being published by Don Jr.’s company, and the crypto is the product of a fly by night company called World Liberty Financial, about which nobody seems to know anything. While Trump has, in the past, claimed his campaign is self-funded, that’s never really been true, and he didn’t even make the same pledge for 2024. And there’s no indication that any of the money from any of these ventures is going to his cash-strapped and increasingly doomed bid for another term.

Beyond the low-effort campaigning and obvious last-second cash grabbing, there’s just the fact that none of these people seem confident at all. Trump allies are already screwing around with vote counting and election administration laws, while Trump has relentlessly whined that undocumented immigrants are going to vote in massive numbers to get Harris over the top and that mail in voting is going to be rigged. In a recent interview with a fawning antivaccine sycophant, he seemed positively morose as he declared that if he lost again in 2024 he wouldn’t run for a 4th time. Where is the fight from Mr. Fight Fight Fight? Where is the confidence from the world’s most insanely overconfident man? Nowhere.

Sure, maybe all of this doesn’t mean anything and Trump will pull the same inside straight he pulled in 2016 and win. The polls are still close in every swing state, and it’s not as if anyone in Trump’s core of cultists is going to walk away from him. Hell, they love the grift and the scamming and the ridiculous promises. Trump could win the most low-effort and scam-laden campaign in history simply because the Electoral College is stupid and overvalues some voters and undervalues others.

But that’s starting to look slightly less likely. And Trump and his people aren’t stupid. They have access to internal polling and proprietary data, and if they really are losing ground in key swing states, they’ll know it. And rather than fight for it, they seem to have resigned themselves to this being their last grab at the wingnut welfare spout. So you can promise people Mars and free stuff if you don’t ever intend to keep it. And you can sell coins and crypto if you have fans who don’t care where the money goes.

Ultimately, an “everything must go” campaign ends with everything having gone. And when it does, when there are no more coins to hawk or crypto to shill, you can always just light a match and burn it all down.

We’re Talking About Joe Biden Completely Wrong

Mike Rothschild

One of the hardest things about being of a certain age is that the people you once depended on start to depend more and more on you. They need more from you – more time, more energy, more help doing things they used to do without help, sometimes even more money.

Sometimes, having an elderly person who depends on you means making decisions. It means painful conversations and losses of things that they never thought they’d lose. Have you ever needed to take driving privileges away from an older person? Have you ever told them they have to move into assisted living, or it’s impossible for them to live independently without help?

Was it easy? Did they just hand over the car keys? Did they just shrug and say “I’ll start packing?”

They probably didn’t. They probably fought you, told you you were wrong, you were crazy, that they’re fine, that maybe they’ve slowed down a little and have a little trouble doing things, but that’s just part of getting old. They’re fine. And they don’t want to hear it again.

But you have to bring it up again, because they’re not fine. And before they drive into a tree or burn the house down or hurt someone, you’re going to have to resolve this. And on and on it goes, you push them to give up something, they push back that they don’t need to, and you argue and put your head in your hands and want to give up. You want to say “fine, let them drive off a cliff.” I tried. I give up.

But you don’t give up, because if you love someone and you see something about themselves that they don’t, you have a duty to keep telling them it’s there until they believe you.

Now take all of that stubbornness and denial and refusal to accept what the people around you have long ago accepted – and make it about the most important job in the world, a job that a lot of other people think only you can do, and that you believe if you don’t do it, we descend into a fascist hellscape.

That’s the problem with Joe Biden running for president again. It’s not that we’re asking him to give up the car keys or the house he lived in for fifty years. We’re asking him to give up being the most powerful human on the planet. And he doesn’t want to.

We’re talking about Joe Biden the wrong way. We’re talking about him like a political candidate, and not like a person. A person who is aging in a very public and ugly way. He is 81 years old, and will be 86 at the end of a second term. And nobody knows what that means for him, for his presidency, and for the country. But it’s hard to see it as anything positive or comforting. Not anymore.

Aging isn’t linear. It’s a slow decline in your faculties and abilities and memory and judgement and temperament. For a while, Biden could walk that line. It appears now that, at a minimum, he’s having trouble walking it. And his halting, quiet, feeble, mush-mouthed, incoherent, extremely painful performance in the June presidential debate against Donald Trump (who, it should be noted, is also mush-mouthed and incoherent, just much louder) proved it.

Biden’s defenders believe that him stepping aside and handing the nomination over to someone else, be it Vice President Harris or another Democrat, will be a disaster. They might be right, of course. They might also not be. They believe that Biden just had a bad night, that he was jet-lagged and feeling sick, that he was over-prepared and restricted by said preparation and let lag and sickness from “letting it rip.”

And again, they might be right.

But if you’ve watched someone you love age, you know that the Biden we saw during the debate is probably closer to the real Biden than anyone wants to believe. Yes, older people can have better days than their worse days. But Biden is only going to get older. Whatever is going on with him might ebb and flow, but it won’t get better. Aging doesn’t go in reverse.

It might happen again. Maybe even worse. And it might happen again when it’s too late to make a change without it seeming like chaos and a total lack of planning.

The conversation about Joe Biden stepping aside is one we should have had years ago. It’s one that should have been had based on reality, on the cruelty of aging, on the idea that one man does not define a political party, and on the knowledge that once you reach a certain age, things start to go wrong in ways that can’t be fixed and so maybe we should act before those things go wrong. It’s not ableist or ageist to see an extremely old man who is clearly breaking down in the way that almost all extremely old people do and point it out. To take the car keys away before he hits someone.

We are being told by Biden loyalists, social media influencers, and die-hards that all of this is just bedwetting and a waste of resources and does nothing but help Trump by ignoring his many flaws and horrors in favor of a media frenzy being goosed by the right wing oligarchs and rat-fuckers that run everything. That Biden is fine, he had a bad night, his appearances since then have gone better, and that we need to suit up, shut up, and get in line.

I reject all of this.

I reject the idea that the movement to push Biden to step aside is just more of the “but her emails” nonsense that sunk the Clinton campaign in 2016. Hillary Clinton’s emails were a minor story that was relentlessly exploited by the right wind media machine who had spent decades trying to destroy her. And the idea that the far right was actually concerned about information security is laughable given their unblinking acceptance of Trump keeping untold classified documents in the bathroom of his golf resort.

I reject the idea that criticism of the Democratic Party and of Joe Biden’s stubbornness is tacit support for Trump. It’s the exact opposite, it’s wanting the Democrats to put forth the candidate who has the best chance to win, and being extremely concerned that this might not be Biden, and even if it is, we should probably talk about it while we can.

I reject that anyone who is having serious doubts about Biden’s ability to win again, his age, and his state of mind are “bedwetters” who are panicking over nothing. The debate we’re having now is the debate that should have been had last year. It’s the sign of a healthy party that puts the good of the country over the ego of one man. We have one party like that already – the Republicans. Just because they will support their man no matter what he does, says, or inflicts on anyone else doesn’t mean we should do the same.

I reject the idea that Democrats wouldn’t support another candidate if Biden were to step aside. Sure, there would be crabbing and bellyaching over Biden leaving the field, but it’s ludicrous to believe that Biden diehards would stay home rather than support another candidate who was already lock-step in beliefs with Biden. Democrats did support a potential Biden replacement already: Kamala Harris, who 81 million people voted to step in for Biden should something happen. Well, something happened.

And I reject the ludicrous conspiracy theories that Biden was sabotaged by a rogue soundman at CNN, the excuses that he was in Italy 12 days before and was too tired to debate, and the self-serving demands to “unite or die.” If Biden thinks that the scrutiny he’s getting from his own party is bad, wait until Trump – who has been uncharacteristically silent the last two weeks – starts on him.

At the moment, the far right has been content to let the two Biden factions battle each other. But that won’t last much longer, and Biden is going to have to defend not only his record and presidency from the right, but his sanity and health and basic ability to make decisions. And it won’t be for the good of the country, it will be for the good of Trump – a man who puts nothing above himself.

Joe Biden is not like that. He is a man who puts country over self. Not many people are like that. But everyone gets older. Everyone loses the ability to do things they used to be able to do.

And everyone has loved ones that at some point will have to step in and make the decisions they might not be able to make anymore.

Because Joe Biden the person has reached the point where while it might not get worse for a while, it won’t get better. It never does.

This is the first post in what will be a relaunched TheMikeRothschild.com. For quite a while I’ve put it to the side while I work on bigger projects, but I’m missing the immediacy of regular writing. I hope to post twice a week, with one post more expressly political and/or fringe, and one a little more of a mix of things I care about and want to share. I hope you’ll share, subscribe, and do all the other things we ask readers to do these days. One post will be Monday or Tuesday, the other Wednesday or Thursday. I’ll develop more of a regular schedule as I go.

As part of relaunching the website and making it a viable way to use my time and resources, I’ve joined Patreon and will be asking readers to kick in $8 a month. Basically, a dollar a piece every month.

I know, everything is expensive and everyone wants your money. I get it. And I’ll keep everything free for now. But I truly hope that if you’ve ever gotten anything of value from something I’ve written, tweeted, or talked about in an interview, that you’ll chip in. And if you can’t, don’t worry about it in the least. Like I said, everything will be free until further notice.

Thanks for reading this far, and for everything!

(photo credit: Elizabeth Frantz/REUTERS)