by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC – I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I’m furious that so many Donald Trump voters are suddenly now realizing what we knew all along, after it’s nearly two years too late. On the other hand, it’s fun to watch all these MAGA fanboys hustling toward the exits, dropping their red hats in the dumpster along the way.

We all tried desperately to warn voters prior to the 2024 election that Donald’s incompetence, corruption, and half-baked policies would not only drag down the economy, but he’d also hand over piles of cash to billionaire oligarchs, including himself, while also precipitating horrendous crimes against humanity.

We tried to warn everyone that returning him to the presidency would manifest daily episodes of chaos that’d make his first term seem relatively sane.

We brought receipts, we cited math, we scrambled to retrieve blindingly shocking examples from the great American memory hole – the death toll from COVID, the nightmare of mass graves, the economic meltdown, the horror show of January 6. All of it.

Instead, 82 million Americans stupidly decided that the world’s most obvious liar con-man was worthy of another term – that decency, expertise, and competence were irrelevant and mixing things up again would work out differently this time. Other than leaving slavery intact in 1789 and, subsequently, Southern secession in 1861, the 2024 election was one of the most catastrophic political events in American history by far, with deadly long-term ramifications for the climate, pluralism, and democracy itself.

And now that Donald is doing all the horrible things we forecasted, his voters are turning against him – not because they’ve finally accepted that the anti-Trump coalition was right about him from the beginning, but instead because the leopard is finally – and deservingly eating their faces.

According to the Washington Post, Trump voters in Texas “adopted a slogan ‘Break Rank,’ an indication that they are not content simply to sit out the election but want to punish their party with a vote for the opposition.”

“My party has failed,” said Weeks, 66, who retired from the paper supply business to the North Texas suburb of Granbury where he’s been fighting both data centers and a bitcoin mine that arrived a few years ago, bringing round-the-clock noise.

“Nothing has been done by our party to help,” Weeks said. “Any Republican who has been in office since we started this fight, I’m not going to vote for them.”

Good. The movement isn’t just about Texas, either. But how many decades did it take to arrive at the conclusion that Republicans don’t give a flying fuck into a rolling donut about regular people, instead keeping their voters in line by scaring the bejeezus out of them by demonizing Black people, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community? Four? Six? It’s been a long, long time. Too long. Worse, this too-late epiphany required an agent of chaos who’s actively redistributing America’s wealth to the top one percent, while severely raising taxes on the rest of us through unnecessary tariffs.

Even clout-seeking weirdos like Milo Yiannopoulos are only now seeing reality. “I didn’t really understand the physical reality of how institutionalised the brutality is in America,” he told Piers Morgan this week after ICE arrested and deported him back to the UK.

Some people only learn when their bullshit finally boomerangs around and clubs them in the skull.

Tucker Carlson is one of those people. After the 2020 election, and two days before January 6, Tucker texted, “I hate him passionately. ... I can’t handle much more of this.”

Three years later, Tucker both endorsed and campaigned for Donald, like an idiot.

Two years later, Tucker called for Donald to be removed from office.

“The second any president actively considers first-use of nuclear weapons. that person should be removed from office immediately. Immediately, because that’s gotta be the red line, destroying all of humanity with a nuclear strike,” Carlson said, adding, “So why isn’t there an attempt to remove him from office, like, immediately?”

There was an attempt to keep him out of office in the first place, but Tucker decided not to help. We wouldn’t have had to remove him from office if grifters and suck-ups hadn’t endorsed him.

Now, nearly two years into this shithole administration, people who blindly voted for flock cameras, oligarchy, data centers, inflation, tariffs, unnecessary vanity projects, a poisoned food supply, measles, medical bankruptcy, and another endless war are totally pissed off about flock cameras, oligarchy, data centers, inflation, tariffs, unnecessary vanity projects, a poisoned food supply, measles, medical bankruptcy, and another endless war.

Here’s my suggestion for atonement. For the next several elections, stay home. Take a knee. Maybe sit out a few elections to allow the grownups to handle things for a while, right the ship, and let pluralism, competence, and sanity re-establish itself here. It won’t always be flawless, but it won’t eat our faces. Deal?

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by Ben Cohen

Unless you grew up in London during the ’80s and ’90s, it is impossible to truly understand the Ali G phenomenon. You might find the character funny, and you might even understand what Sacha Baron Cohen was trying to satirize.

But the character was born out of a very particular subculture from a very particular time in a very particular place. And if you lived in that subculture at that very particular time and place, you truly got Ali G. And if you truly got Ali G, you would also understand that he is one of the most brilliant comedic creations in television history.

Which is why the current campaign against Cohen’s new Ali G movie is so revealing — and, to original fans like me, so infuriating.

According to Metro, Picturehouse Cinemas said it had no current plans to screen the film after an online campaign by media watchdog NewsCord, which called on cinemas around the world to boycott it. The group accused Baron Cohen of having “enforced harmful stereotypes across marginal…

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Even MAGA hates ‘Lake America’

It seems as if even the most ardent Trump excusers have come to the crushing realization (again?) that their man is not the brilliant strategist they believed him to be. Here was Matt Walsh on Trump’s comically stupid decision to rename (sorry, “re-brand”) Lake Ontario because Canada walked away from his trade deal:

Walsh’s withering put down is illustrative of what is happening offline, where Trump’s support has basically collapsed (via Nate Silver):

The reasons for this are obvious: Trump’s trade wars with America’s allies haven’t made life better for the average American family. Instead, they have made life more expensive — because as every halfway decent economist warned, tariffs are taxes on imports that are largely paid by American businesses and consumers. There has been no “dividend” check, and contrary to Trump’s claim that tariffs would unleash a manufacturing boom, the evidence suggests they have actually been a drag on America’s emerging manufacturing renaissance. They have raised input costs, disrupted supply chains and discouraged investment in many of the industries they were supposed to help.

Trump was elected in 2024 primarily because there was a cost of living crisis. He has made that materially worse, and has now kicked off yet another trade war that even his supporters now seem to understand will hurt them.

Trolling Canada was fun when Trump’s supporters believed he could bully America’s neighbor into submission and make Canada help subsidize their lifestyle. Now that reality has set in, Trump has become the punchline instead.

Russia’s empty threats

Russia has threatened to bomb UK military bases in response to Britain’s deepening military support for Ukraine.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned that London risked pushing the conflict into a new phase and accused Britain (and France) of “playing with fire” by providing Ukraine with sensitive missile technology.

The military targets aren’t inside Britain, but many are in NATO countries and would constitute a very serious escalation of tensions.

Britain is taking the threats seriously, but more astute observers of the Kremlin understand this really reveals how weak Russia’s position has become. There virtually no chance that Russia will attack a NATO country, because it understands that it would lose an outright military conflict badly. NATO's vastly larger combined economy, population and industrial capacity means a war with Russia wouldn’t be much of a fight.

The Kremlin understands this of course, but it is lashing out in the hopes that its aggressive rhetoric will deter Europe from continuing to intervene it its ill-fated war with Ukraine. The reality is that Russia cannot defeat Ukraine militarily, but it cannot withdraw either. If Putin cuts and runs, the wartime economy propping Russia up would come apart, exposing the underlying weakness of the country’s economic model. If he keeps pouring money and troops into what has become a quagmire, Russia will continue hemorrhaging resources — and lives — on a longer timetable.

That is why escalation is the only option for Putin from a political point of view. It keeps the war going, preserves the economic system built around it, and postpones the inevitable reckoning.

Europe’s growing involvement also serves Putin domestically. The more Britain, France and other NATO countries deepen their support for Ukraine, the easier it is for the Kremlin to portray the war as a defensive struggle against a hostile West — not a badly botched invasion and occupation.

When Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, he knew he’d face serious opposition from the West, but he banked on being able to outlast it. Now it increasingly looks like the inverse is true — and judging by his increasingly aggressive rhetoric, Putin appears to know it.

How to lose friends and alienate everyone

If you thought Benjamin Netanyahu was an insufferable, lying sociopath, wait to you meet his son, Yair Netanyahu.

The younger Netanyahu appears to be doing his utmost to make Israel even more despised around the world by picking gratuitous fights with allies and parroting the ugliest instincts of his father’s extremist government.

At a time when Israel desperately needs friends, Yair seems determined to make sure it has as few as possible. Here’s what he tweeted over the weekend:

Yair’s post is a mash-up of exaggeration, distortion and outright falsehood. First of all, Britain did not impose an arms embargo on Israel. It suspended only a small fraction of export licences over concerns about possible violations of international humanitarian law. The UK’s recognition of Palestine was not a “reward” for October 7, but part of its stated effort to preserve a two-state solution (while condemning Hamas and demanding the release of the hostages). Britain’s funding of UNRWA also does not mean it funded an organization “involved” in the massacre. The allegations concerned a small number of individual employees, not UNRWA as an institution. And while the UK has sanctioned Israeli ministers, settlers and organizations, they were targeted at individuals accused of inciting or participating in extremist violence.

The Falklands comparison is especially dishonest. Britain’s claim to the islands is not, and has never been based on how close they are to the UK, but on nearly two centuries of British administration and, crucially, the explicit wishes of the people who actually live there.

The fact is, Israel is run by an extreme right-wing government that has done incalculable damage to Israel, Jews and Palestinians. Britain has, compared with much of the world, been remarkably restrained in its dealings with Netanyahu. His son appears to be too dim to understand that while some of Israel’s growing isolation is undoubtedly driven by antisemitism, much of it is also the predictable consequence of his father’s disgraceful policies.

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In response to my Banter Members piece on Jason Arday, one reader made an interesting point about the nature of university professorships themselves. Arday’s appointment, he argued, was part of a much wider trend of universities hiring high-profile, marketable figures who can attract students and publicity — and that if those appointments are now subjected to greater scrutiny, black academics may well receive a disproportionate share of it.

I responded:

It’s almost impossible to know how much race played in this horrible episode, but it’s clear it was a factor. The problem is that the progressive-left wants us to believe we’re in 1960’s Alabama, while the right claims racism no longer exists.

Another point: a lot of my closest friend…

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Donald Trump’s second term was supposed to be the triumphant culmination of the MAGA revolution. Instead, it is beginning to look like the disastrous ending of George W. Bush’s presidency.

The war with Iran is a disaster. Trump’s economic policies are failing. Republicans are heading toward a brutal midterm election, and the sense of invincibility that surrounded Trump at the beginning of his second term is gone.

So has Donald Trump become the new George W. Bush, or is he even worse?

I sat down with Banter contributor Bob Cesca for a fascinating conversation about Trump’s increasingly lame-duck presidency, the extraordinary similarities with Bush’s disastrous second term, the mess in Iran, the coming midterms, and the terrifying possibility that a weakened Trump may actually be a more dangerous Trump.

Check it out below:

Donald Trump is already laying the groundwork to subvert the midterms. From pushing aggressive new congressional maps to expanding federal involvement in voter rolls, mail ballots, and election administration, the pattern is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

In this video, I walk through what Trump is doing now, what he tried to do after losing in 2020, and why the machinery being built around the 2026 election should make everyone deeply uneasy about what could happen in 2028:

After a short summer break, the F**king Monday column is back! In the roundup today:

“Dynamic pricing” is basically enshittification

I had the odd experience the other day looking at a pair of sneakers on Amazon and deciding they were just out of my price range. I searched for some more shoes and after a few minutes decided I’d bite the bullet and fork out a few extra dollars for the original pair. Much to my delight, the price had dropped to within my budget.

This was no doubt because Amazon tracks my every move, and its algorithm cleverly figured out what I would be prepared to pay for the shoes. While in this instance it benefited my wallet, the dynamic pricing model has far more insidious implications.

Stephanie T. Nguyen, the former chief technologist at the FTC, wrote in the New York Times this weekend about what she calls “surveillance pricing” where companies use your location, browsing history, purchase habits etc to estimate the inverse, or the absolute maximum an individual is willing to pay.

This is essentially enshittification applied to pricing. The internet economy began by using technology to make shopping cheaper, easier and more transparent. Now that the infrastructure is entrenched and companies possess enormous amounts of data about us, that same technology is increasingly being used to extract as much money from each individual customer as possible.

A coupon is public and available to anyone. Surveillance pricing means you may have no idea that someone else is being charged less for exactly the same thing.

Nguyen cites travel sites varying prices by location and a former Washington Post reporter who discovered that the more frequently he visited Starbucks, the fewer discounts he received. The Post itself is facing a lawsuit alleging that it used reader data to charge loyal subscribers more.

Her solution is simple: companies should be required to publish a genuine base price. Discounts would still be allowed, but businesses couldn’t secretly charge you more because an algorithm has decided you’ll tolerate it.

A Republican controlled Congress is unlikely to pass a federal law, so in the mean time, you might want to try playing the companies at their own game. If you want to purchase something and think it’s mis-priced, search for other similar products that are cheaper. Then come back and you might be pleasantly surprised. No guarantees of course, but my shiny new shoes look pretty great.

Bravo, Mark Carney

The rest of the world should study Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney for lessons in realpolitik — and courage.

Trade talks between Canada and the U.S. dramatically collapsed over the weekend, with Carney walking away from a deal that Trump had claimed was basically “done” just days earlier. The economic implications of the fallout are serious given how deeply interconnected the two countries economies are, but the geopolitical implications are even more profound.

Carney’s decision to walk away is a message, not only to Trump, but the rest of the world. America might be the world’s most powerful country, but that power is not absolute. More than that, it can be successfully challenged.

Because Trump is, by instinct, a bully, he has a very limited understanding of power. Just as a smaller, weaker military power has refused to submit to Trump’s demands over the Strait of Hormuz, a smaller, weaker economy has now refused to submit to Trump’s economic demands. This does not compute in Trump’s mind, because in his view, strong always defeats weak. Carney knows this, and has called Trump’s bluff.

Carney’s gambit is the same as Iran’s — while the U.S. can do far greater damage, if Canada is willing to endure more, it can win. Because the U.S. is viewed as the aggressor in this conflict, Carney’s popularity will soar in Canada, while Trump’s will plummet at home. This is yet another idiotic trade war no one wanted, further damaging already struggling families in America.

That is the lesson other countries should take from Carney. Trump’s power depends on the assumption that everyone else will panic when he threatens them, and then submit. If enough governments decide that short-term pain is preferable to permanent submission, the coercive power of the United States begins to diminish very quickly.

The lesson, then, is simple — and one every child learns at school. You might not be able to beat up the bully, but if you make bullying costly enough, eventually they’ll leave you alone.

Trump’s plan to steal the midterms is gaining steam

George Chidi has written a very ominous piece in the Guardian warning that Trump’s not-so veiled attempts to steal the midterms are rapidly taking shape.

Chidi argues that election-law specialists, democracy advocates, and a former Trump White House lawyer are deeply concerned about a pattern of moves they believe show Trump want to subvert the midterm elections in November.

Here’s the outline of what has happened in recent weeks: Trump used a July primetime address to repeat false claims about the 2020 election and warn of foreign manipulation, Steve Bannon then openly predicted Trump would declare a national security emergency around the midterms, and Trump himself declined to rule the idea out when asked directly.

The most troubling part:

After Trump’s TV address, a White House “Government Transparency Task Force” – composed of members of the office of the director of national intelligence, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – began releasing declassified “election integrity” documents on the White House website.

The first tranche included declassified intelligence memos which described electronic voting machine vulnerabilities, foreign access to state voter registration data and foreign digital manipulation strategies. Much of the material was already known to the public and amounted to a US intelligence assessment that found no evidence Beijing altered the 2020 vote, which Trump lost.

This is pretty substantial evidence that Trump is using the power of the state to manufacture a crisis. Having tried to steal the 2020 election, Trump knows the best way to hide his efforts is to claim the other side is doing it. He almost got away with it the first time around, so he is using the same tactic again — only this time with the machinery of the federal government behind it.

I’ve been writing for years that Trump will attempt to stay in power beyond 2028. This looks to me like a dry run.

If you’re interested, here’s a video I made earlier this year on exactly how he might do it:

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by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC – It might not seem like it, but there’s actual good news happening all around us. I know, crazy, right? To be clear: the crisis we face, with democracy as a cliffhanger, is very real. But it’s also important to keep in mind that regular people are striving to make life better for all of us every day.

Here are some good news stories happening right now.

A personalized mRNA cancer vaccine just succeeded in a large Phase 3 trial. This is legitimately big. Moderna and Merck announced Wednesday that their individualized mRNA vaccine, combined with Keytruda, significantly reduced the odds that high-risk melanoma would recur or spread after surgery in a trial involving more than 1,000 patients. Each vaccine is essentially custom-built around mutations in that patient’s tumor. Since it’s the same class of vaccines as the COVID inoculation, I wonder whether anti-vaxers will accept treatment.

The Supreme Court rejected Trump on E. Jean Carroll — again. The Supreme Court refused to reconsider its June decision declining Trump’s appeal of the $5 million judgment for certified bad ass E. Jean Carroll. A jury found Donald liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll; his lawyers asked the Supremes for the unusual step of reconsideration, and the justices simply denied it without explanation. This appears to exhaust Donald’s Supreme Court route on that verdict.

North Carolina’s Democratic governor just vetoed sweeping new voting restrictions. Josh Stein vetoed a Republican elections bill recently that would have cut early voting from 17 days to 10, lengthened the period for challenging votes and expanded voter-roll purges. Stein called it an “anti-voter law,” and he’s correct. Republicans have overridden several of his vetoes this year, so this fight isn’t necessarily finished, but this action stopped the restrictions from becoming law for now.

Britons have now earned about $135 million selling rooftop solar electricity back to the grid. Octopus Energy says its UK customers have collectively earned roughly £100 million by exporting excess solar electricity. The company is also reporting record demand for solar panels, with home batteries allowing households to store cheap daytime electricity and either use or sell it when power is more valuable.

Democratic candidate flips a Donald +18 district in Pennsylvania. Democrat Brandon Dukes won a special election for Pennsylvania’s 12th state House district in Butler County by just 88 votes. Donald carried the district by about 18 points in 2024, Republicans have roughly a 53 percent to 30 percent registration advantage, and the seat hasn’t been held by a Democrat in more than three decades. Dukes’ victory also increases Democrats’ narrow majority in the Pennsylvania House. Even allowing for special-election turnout, that’s an enormous Democratic overperformance heading toward November.

Democrats also got encouraging Senate news out of Alaska. Alaska Democrat Mary Peltola advanced from Tuesday’s open primary for U.S. Senate, keeping alive one of Democrats’ more interesting opportunities to expand the map this fall. Reuters specifically described the result as bolstering Democratic hopes of winning Senate control. Donald’s endorsed candidates, meanwhile, had mixed results across Tuesday’s primaries.

Medical organizations are mounting an immediate revolt against Donald’s vaccine order. Trump’s new executive order calls for major changes to the childhood vaccination schedule, including breaking up MMR and dropping some federal recommendations. The encouraging part is the reaction: physicians, public-health experts and lawmakers immediately pushed back, stressing that the changes contradict established evidence and warning families not to abandon proven vaccines. The institutional scientific resistance is loud and immediate.

Don’t get happy – and I suspect you probably won’t. But in an era when outrage is a commodity, and bad news is profitable, it’s important to find the helpers, as Fred Rogers once said. They exist and they’re doing great work.

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by Ben Cohen

I published a piece last week denouncing the terrible shaming Arday was experiencing because it was obvious what could happen. No human being could endure that level of public humiliation without severe consequence, and unfortunately in this instance, the worst possible outcome transpired.

When I heard the news of Arday’s death on Friday of last week, I was on Clapham Common in the London neighborhood that both he and I grew up in. We did not know each other, but he was a Clapham boy, like me. We would have taken the same buses, gone to the same afterschool programs, and probably known some of the same people.

As the news sank in, I could not push an image of him out of my mind. It was Arday as a little boy kicking a football around on the common, as I had done. Because that was what the world seemed to have forgotten; that Jason Arday wasn’t the sum of his professional transgressions, or an object onto w…

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by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC – This is the most underreported story of the month so far. Many of us are unaware that Donald Trump is continuing to build his border wall, and no, Mexico still isn’t paying for it. You might recall that only 52 to 80 miles of new wall was built during his first term.

But while he’s wasting taxpayer money on his vanity fiascos: his ballroom, the Reflecting Pool, the new helipad, the triumphal arch, a golf course, and a bunch of what he calls “water falls” (fountains), he’s also building new sections of border wall.

Firstly, bulldozers have been spotted at Big Bend National Park in West Texas, decimating the pristine landscape that’s supposed to be set aside for the enjoyment of the people.

USA Today:

Congress last summer supercharged Trump’s efforts with $46.5 billion in funding, and federal officials in June waived dozens of environmental regulations to speed up wall construction in or near the national park.

Construction is expected to include blasting new roads through the area so Border Patrol personnel can better reach remote areas of the park…

The blasting will irreparably destroy the rock formations and canyon walls, some of the most gorgeous scenery of any national park. And migrants don’t often cross there anyway – frivolous decimation without any real benefit when it comes to border security.

Donald’s new Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin waived 35 laws in order to launch the project, while conservation groups have filed lawsuits. But bulldozers have already created considerable damage.

Since the creation of the National Parks, history has recorded far too many villains like Mullin and Trump threatening the condition and existence of the parks. Far better people who respect the parks and cherish democracy have had to fight to preserve this land against greedy and nearsighted interests.

Donald doesn’t give a flying rip about the parks and why the exist in the first place. He thinks he’s synonymous with the country and believes it’s his to do with whatever he pleases.

Which is also why he’s using eminent domain to build his wall across private land owned by Texans – well on the American side of the border cutting off those land owners from 280,000 acres.

Some have reported that Donald is effectively giving American land to Mexico. This isn’t the case, though the wall will still cut off landowners from significant sections of their properties, while also blocking access to water resources from the Rio Grande.

Remember the rancher protests against the Bureau of Land Management during Obama’s second term? This is far, far worse than anything the Bundys and their gun-toting allies were freaking out about.

The Republican Party’s declining, fascistic leader is stealing private land. Worse he’s stealing public land from you and me – land we and our posterity are entitled to enjoy. More damage we’ll need to repair when he’s gone.

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Democratic strategist Rachel Bitecofer posted an image to Substack Notes earlier this week reminding liberals of a “very important reality of the American electorate”:

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Today’s republished piece is the essay I wrote in the hours after Trump defeated Kamala Harris in 2024. I’ve reread it several times since, and I stand by every word. It was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to write because I understood what his return to power was likely to mean—not only for America, but for the rest of the world. Millions of immigrants would be deported. Ukraine would be hung out to dry. Palestinians would be left with even less hope of a political settlement. And America would be governed by chaos, corruption and revenge. Again.

What strikes me most is how little of it feels dated.

I’d be curious to hear what readers think. Did I exaggerate—or did I underestimate just how bad it would be?

The Bad Guy Won

by Ben Cohen

You could blame the Democrats for not being strong enough on immigration, or Joe Biden for not stepping down soon enough, or Kamala Harris not connecting with white rural voters and Hispanic men. You could blame the “woke”, or you could blame their use of gender pronouns and their obsession with identity politics. Or you could blame Democrats for not holding a primary, for rushing Kamala Harris through without the public getting a say.

There are a million things the Democrats could have done differently, or better, and in time these things must be examined.

But right now I want to focus on the real culprits for this heartbreaking election that has returned Donald Trump to the White House. And those culprits are the malevolent billionaires who funded Donald Trump’s campaign, the media outlets that sane-washed his candidacy, Elon Musk’s brutally effective disinformation platform, and finally the people who voted for him.

A planned disaster

Last week I wrote an article outlining what I called the biggest psyop in modern history. I argued that a coordinated effort between America’s oligarchs, far right provocateurs, Fox News, and opportunistic Alt “journalists” had created a frightening alternative reality. In this reality, Trump was a genius, a brilliant negotiator, a free speech martyr, and democracy’s only hope. Jan. 6th was not really an insurrection, and the Deep State was out to get Trump from the get go. The Democrats were a cabal of sinister, Bill Gates funded Marxists who wanted to trans America’s kids and inject them full of microchipped vaccines.

I believed Americans would reject that reality at the ballot yesterday. The smartest analysts I know thought the same, that the polls showing a tight race were wrong, and that Harris and American women would prevail. I believed Americans wanted to turn the chapter on Trumpism and elect someone who was competent, smart, and actually cared about their wellbeing. I was wrong.

Enough Americans have been taken in by this extraordinary cult of personality and have voted in a madman to be their president. The mainstream press failed spectacularly, again, to focus on the danger Trump posed to America. They turned the presidential contest it into yet another horse race where the reds were fighting the blues in battle to the finish. Trump was sanitized, repackaged, and finally thrust back into the White House with barely a scratch on him.

The polls were right

The polls, having been basically wrong about everything since 2016, were far more accurate than I and almost everyone in the media anticipated. They did not overestimate the Democrats, and they appear to have correctly gaged Trump’s almost mythical ability to activate his base and bring low propensity voters out to the polls. And that really is the story of the race. Despite having run one of the most racist, deranged, insane campaigns in modern history, Trump pulled out the victory again.

He massively over performed with Hispanic men, and shockingly made the huge gender gap irrelevant. It is the comeback of all comebacks, only it isn’t the good guy who has won, but the convicted felon and sexual abuser who tried to overthrow the US government only four years ago.

Sane, well adjusted people know that Donald Trump should not be allowed anywhere near the White House. He should be in jail for the multiple crimes he committed while in office, including his attempted coup. Now he will grant himself immunity and no doubt commit more crimes during his second term in office.

We are headed to a very, very dark place right now, and those who enabled, funded and voted for this despicable charlatan will have to own what is about to happen.

What to expect

A story broken by Tim Alberta in The Atlantic this week cataloged the final weeks of the Trump campaign. It is a brutal read that outlines the breathtaking corruption and dysfunction in his inner circle. As Alberta describes it, Trump is so loathed by his staff that the majority of them ended up not caring whether he won the election or not. Alberta describes a Trump who is less tethered to reality than ever before. He is unable to control his darker impulses, incapable of behaving rationally, and more malevolent than ever. This new version of Donald Trump will be leading the country for the next four years, and it will take all of our might to preserve America’s democratic institutions and civil society.

I am not looking forward to this task. After nine years of covering Donald Trump, I am, like many of you reading this, utterly exhausted.

But this is a war that cannot be ceded. We cannot allow Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Fox News to destroy reality and decimate truth. He does not get a grace period, and he must not be respected. Donald Trump is a fascist, and fascists must be defeated. His lies will be countered with truths, and his disinformation will be fought with facts. This is war, again. And we here at The Banter will be fighting it with you.

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by Ben Cohen

When Jonah Lehrer was caught inventing Bob Dylan quotes in his 2012 book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, I sent him an email telling him to keep his chin up. I did it because I knew a little of what he must have been feeling.

I made a mistake very early on in my journalism career and wanted to crawl under a rock when my error was made public. I had misquoted a fighter at a press conference, and someone who had recorded the event compared my transcript to the actual audio.

I was genuinely shocked to hear the difference.

I had been scribbling notes down on a pad during the conference, but had stopped when I got verbally attacked by one of the fighters after asking him a question. He was being extremely aggressive, and I was genuinely worried he might want to pick a fight with me (he had just won a fight and I had told him at the press conference I thought he had lost). I reconstructed what I thought the back-and-forth had been because I was too shaky at the time to take any …

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Anthony Fauci has become the right’s favorite COVID villain: a supposedly all-powerful bureaucrat who engineered lockdowns, silenced dissent, forced vaccines on the public and then lied about all of it. Last week’s congressional spectacle orchestrated by Rand Paul pushed that narrative even further — and for one very good reason.

The truth about Fauci is complicated. He made real mistakes that deserves scrutiny, but none of that justifies the years of smears, conspiracy theories and historical revisionism coming from the right.

In this video, I look at Fauci’s actual record, what his testimony did and did not reveal, and why the right’s obsession with him serves one overriding political purpose: distracting from Donald Trump’s catastrophic handling of COVID.

Watch below:

by Ben Cohen

According to Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan knew how to handle the Covid pandemic. He knew that lockdowns were a bad idea, that masks didn’t work, and that the government had no clue what they were doing.

Not only that, Joe Rogan knew how to treat Covid-19. Forget the medical professionals, doctors, virologists, epidemiologists, public health officials, and ongoing clinical trials.

Rogan had an intuition that ivermectin worked because, well, he spoke to some guys on his podcast about it.

There is a chance in some alternate universe that Rogan’s prescriptions for a global pandemic were correct. But we’ll never know, because Rogan didn’t have to run the government while a novel virus was killing millions of people. He didn’t have to treat Covid patients in overrun hospitals, or provide public health advice that he could be held accountable for. He was not responsible for synthesizing complex, often contradictory scientific studies and presenting them to the public.

The truth is, Joe …

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Donald Trump’s wealth increased by an astonishing 273 percent in a single year.

That would be remarkable for any businessman. For a sitting president with a long history of bankruptcies, failed ventures and dubious financial schemes, it ought to be one of the biggest political scandals in America.

Instead, the story appeared briefly and then vanished beneath the next avalanche of Trumpian insanity.

That is the defining feature of Trump’s presidency: the corruption is so constant, so brazen and so overwhelming that almost nothing has time to register. Trump can enrich himself, launch vanity projects, pardon political allies, use the government against his enemies and drag the country into a disastrous war—and before the public has processed one outrage, another has already replaced it.

I spoke with longtime Banter contributor Bob Cesca about the sheer insanity of living through a presidency in which every previous standard of political behavior has basically collapsed.

We discuss Trump’s extraordinary accumulation of wealth, his family’s crypto operation, the possibility that his grand construction projects conceal something even more corrupt, and the most uncomfortable question hanging over 2028.

Watch our full conversation below:

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by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC – The name Anthony Fauci should become a neologism for the word “scapegoat.” Fauci was questioned by Congress this week as part of the ongoing Republican plot to blame the existence of COVID on him and him alone. Well, maybe China, too, but mainly Fauci.

Naturally, this plot is all about deflecting blame away from Donald Trump by flagrantly revising history. But it was the president, not Fauci, who possessed the immense power and endless resources to prevent the virus from entering and spreading throughout the United States, but he refused to do all the things. At the very least, he could’ve mitigated the mass death we witnessed with great shock and horror.

Instead, according to audio recordings by Bob Woodward, Donald privately knew how deadly the virus was but refused to act early when he had a chance. More than a month before lockdowns began, Donald told Woodward when there were only around 11 confirmed U.S. cases: “It’s also more deadly than your -- you know, your – even your strenuous flus.”

And we know why didn’t act at that point. He was terrified that safety protocols would disrupt the economy during an election year, like the Great Recession had in 2008. So he clearly sat on his tiny stumpy hands, recklessly hoping the virus would run its course without too many cases. At the end of February, he said to Woodward: “It’s going to disappear one day. It’s like a miracle. It will disappear.”

When the “wish it away” plan became untenable, he did the minimum he could do without doing nothing. In addition to waiting too long to act, he chose to end protocols prematurely, insisting that states with lockdowns should be “liberated”. In one of the most remarkable statements from any president, he insisted that testing be slowed down or stopped so there would appear to be fewer cases than actually existed.

Eventually, the death toll was so catastrophic, victims were buried in mass graves while countless others were held in morgues and refrigerated trucks.

By the end of his presidency, exactly 400,000 Americans had suffocated to death. Remember the outrage and investigations after the terrorist attack at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi…where four Americans were killed? Donald’s gross and incomprehensible negligence led to the deaths of 100,000 times that numer during his final 11 months in office.

How he wasn’t forced to flee the country to a non-extradition nation under an assumed name is something that will baffle me for the rest of my life.

Adding to the trauma and tragedy is the unforgivable fact that he continues to claim his record on handling COVID was perfect. This week, in fact, he insisted that more Americans died of COVID during Joe Biden’s presidency than his own.

This would be hilarious if it weren’t such horseshit.

There are two reasons why the death toll appears higher under Biden. 1) COVID only existed during Donald’s final 11 months in office, give or take, while it existed throughout Biden’s four year presidency (and continues to exist today). And 2) by the Summer of 2020, Donald, the Republican Party, and the MAGA fanboys had begun shirking protocols – ignoring mask rules; insisting lockdowns and school closures were somehow worse than mass death; refusing to be vaccinated once the first shots were available; and spreading conspiracy theories about the virus, leading to many millions of Americans outright refusing to protect their friends, family, and neighbors, allowing the virus spread virtually uncontrolled through the remainder of 2020 and beyond.

By the time Biden was sworn in, this idiocratic movement, following Donald’s lead by ignoring the virus, was well underway and so the deaths continued. No matter what you might think of Biden as a president, there’s no way he could’ve stopped the awful war against safety, courtesy, and common sense started by his predecessor.

All that said, there were technically fewer deaths during Biden’s first 11 months (353,000) than Donald’s final 11 months in office.

So many of Donald Trump’s atrocities have been flushed down the Great American Memory Hole, but we can’t allow history to exonerate him for any of it – especially his COVID negligence and the mass death he inflicted because he was too worried about getting re-elected.

And by the way, after such a colossal sacrifice of American lives in order to keep himself in office – Donald Trump lost the election anyway.

Never forget what he did. Never.

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by Rich Herschlag

If ten years of social media in the MAGA era have taught me anything it’s that a large percentage of Trump supporters have given little if any serious thought to American domestic and foreign policy. Rather, as they state over and over again, directly or indirectly, explicitly or by example, they want to “own the libs.” This is the single most important and unwavering feature of their cult.

It was a pretty easy, foolproof mission in the beginning. Who was a “lib?” Anyone who advocated numerous progressive policies. Anyone who advocated a few progressive policies. Anyone who advocated a single progressive policy. Anyone who looked like they might. Most women. Almost all college educated women. Any woman who disagreed with them. Any male who disagreed with them. People who used a lot of four and four-plus syllable words. People of color who did not clarify from the outset that they are, counterintuitively, MAGA, full stop. LGBTQ+ people, even if they leaned conservative. Basically anyone, for whatever reason, they did not like. And the number one reason, drum roll please—anyone who did not support Donald J. Trump.

I qualified handily as a “lib.” No need to dissect my well-earned distrust of government at all levels. No need to go over my history of objecting professionally to all sorts of arcane, draconian building codes and zoning laws. No cause to discuss my personal brand of theism, which is more about universal consciousness than about a little old white-haired man sitting on a throne meting out punishment to young men exploring their own erogenous zones. No reason to review the strict code of ethics under which my wife of almost 40 years and I raised our two daughters. No reason to chat about my family’s long history of American military service in some of its most deadly wars or the way intense patriotism was drilled into me the first two decades of my life.

No, all that is just a bunch of bullshit, because someone found something online where I advocated gay marriage or a woman’s right to choose, or keeping church and state reasonably separated. Any sliver of anything was easily enough to qualify me not only as a lib but as a libtard, a faggot, a traitor, a POS, a communist or any other poorly thought out slur that served as a substitute for thinking.

With virtually all of Trump’s second term “policies” not just failing but driving the United States steadily to Third World status, whatever remains of diehard MAGA now has to fall back harder than ever on owning the libs. A while back there, OTL was a bonus—a significant something extra from the Führer for his peeps in return for buying in whole sans cerebral cortex. The thick ICE-ing on the bigly cake. Now that there is no cake, OTL has become not just a consolation but the final, withering battle cry of a gang going down the tubes.

Was it worth it? Let’s look at it unscientifically for a moment. I will admit freely that in some ways they owned this lib, if to “own” means disturb, annoy, vex, frustrate, disrupt sleep, render less efficient at employment, and undermine certain longstanding relationships. The early going, back in 2017, was particularly rough for me. I had done personal battle with the Trump Organization in the 90s and took his 2016 electoral victory both seriously and personally. In that first full year alone I probably lost a few hundred hours of otherwise productive time arguing with folks both online and off, subjecting my better half to all sorts of paranoid theories, calling my dad frequently to monopolize his longstanding calming influence, and most of all, shouting nasty epithets at cable news talking heads and elected officials who could neither see me, hear me, nor smell my angst.

But here’s the thing. I’m a crafty motherfucker who lost his mom when he was nine; fought back against routine bullying for years in Trump’s birthplace of Queens; suffered through my wife’s miscarriages, all sorts of stolen equipment, suicide of a close friend, near-bankruptcy, and a nearly fatal car accident. By the middle of 2017 I had a grip on my TDS or whatever the hell you’d like to call it and started to adapt positively. I began writing for this newsletter. I developed guidelines for not getting negatively engaged on social media (didn’t stick to this perfectly). I developed protocols for speaking apolitically with most friends, family members, and especially clients.

I abstained from most news sources on alternating days (taking the full plunge in between). My wife and I took a deeper dive into renovating local distressed housing and raising money for area charities. Much later on I took my misgivings to the PA-7 campaign for the U.S. House on behalf of Democrat Ryan Crosswell, to a political spoof performed off-Broadway, and finally to a few major streaming platforms with the same production. The relationships that survived—and most of them did—are stronger than ever.

Perhaps more important than all the above, I completed my life’s primary familial mission. Money was never fundamentally important to me, and that hurt my family in subtle but real ways. As of 2016 I was looking down the road at completion of college and graduate school for my kids and at the most loyal life partner a young man from New York ever had who was herself starting to burn out and might want to retire in a few years, or at least have the option. The raw math told me we would have to double our modest portfolio twice in the coming years to make all this possible. I wish I had been able to accomplish all of it through smoke, mirrors, and clubby connections, but it was nearly all unromantic nose-to-the grindstone stuff.

I did it. We did it. I nearly imploded. But on a personal level it’s over. Trump messed with the economy and general well-being (remember this thing called COVID?), but not enough to squash the fortunes of a fairly middle-of-the-road guy who happens not to like the dumping of chemical toxins into open waterways. I guess, as Michael Corleone said, there just wasn’t enough time.

So, my lib-owning fellow Americans, other than blurry, flashing glimpses of some middle-aged bloke struggling through the decade—as he largely would have anyway regardless of who occupied the White House—what did you get out of all this? Show me your thriving children. Show me your unfailing marital union. Show me your portfolio. Show me your dozens of intact friendships. Show me your record of community service. Show me your professional accomplishments. Show me your vital signs—BP, resting heart rate, blood oxygen level, and a few others I’ll let you select. Can you run a mile? Do you rescue cats and dogs? Do you sleep fairly well most nights in spite of it all? Can you give a good accounting of how you spent your life?

Whether or not you believe it, I hope you can. But from what I see and hear and read I’m not getting good vibes. I’m seeing you struggle with basic bills, car payments, health care, mortgages, education costs and a core anxiety closely related to a pointless war. You don’t seem very happy, and you don’t seem very happy with how happy I am. And that is an intrinsic difference between me and you. You never heard me and my peers chant “own the righties,” “own the MAGAs,” “own the fascists,” “own the conservatards,” or however you fancy yourself these days. I’ve never owned you, I never could, and frankly I can’t imagine why I would ever want to.

You made me into an enemy I am not. You made me into a caricature I am not. You accepted the benefits of my bipartisan public professional services when it suited you. You blamed me and my friends for things that had nothing to do with us and everything to do with the creeping oligarchy the United States has foisted upon us for decades peaking with this last one. I believed in the kind of freedom you claimed to believe in, and you shoved it back in my face whenever Dear Leader told you to. I’m a little rattled and worn but as the clock winds down, fine. You, not so much. So what did you get? What?!!!

I compare you, albeit very loosely, to suicide bombers. These self-annihilators were around at the end of World War II and later in the century when they took to international terrorist groups, reaching a climax of public outrage upon 9/11. That public outage was coupled with reluctant wonderment, because while everybody seems to hate somebody, few hate anybody so intensely that they are willing to vaporize themselves in the process of making a tiny dent in the armor. It took brainwashing and promises of 72 virgins, but you know—promises, promises.

Your more recent claim to fame is that you hated me, my wife, and the Clintons (I voted against Bill in 1996) so much you were willing to throw your life to the wind. But you weren’t, were you? This was more like mindless entertainment for you—an amusement park where you thought you could shoot a few two-dimensional bad guys and take home a prize. But there were no bad guys, just Americans a shade different from you. And there was no prize. You know that today, to the bone, with or without my snarky diatribe.

What you nearly destroyed in the process was democracy. Because you couldn’t see the connection between it and your well being in 2016, 2020, 2024, the stakes appeared low or maybe even non-existent. I know—it’s a very abstract notion to preserve a concept that in the past seemed to leave you with unenviable status, security, or purchasing power. What made the assault on democracy worth it for a while was the fiction that “vermin” were keeping you down and that your fearless entitled leader would ultimately bring you into his privileged fold. That took talent on his part and gullibility on yours.

And now it’s ending and you’re nowhere. One can thrive on the misery of others for only so long. Unless you’re Lindsey Graham or Mitch McConnell, the democracy suicide bomber label doesn’t hold water, because democracy is going to survive and so are you. The question is— what are you going to do with the rest of your life?

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by Ben Cohen

Zohran Mamdani is an incredibly talented politician. He has captured the imagination of progressives around the country and proven left-wing candidates can win tough elections against big monied opposition.

Mamdani’s natural charisma is infectious, and he has ideas. Big ones. From government run grocery stores to free childcare and rent freezes, the New York City Mayor has put his money where his mouth has begun pursuing some of the boldest reforms seen in recent American politics.

I’m probably to the right of Mamdani’s economically speaking, but I’m all for giving him a chance. Life in America’s major cities is becoming increasingly untenable for ordinary families, who are being crushed by soaring energy bills, unaffordable housing and outrageous childcare costs. If the choice is between democratic socialism and oligopolistic capitalism, I’ll take the democratic socialism, please.

But this essay isn’t about Mamdani’s economic agenda. It is about the cultural and social val…

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Welcome to another edition of F**king Mondays! In the roundup today:

The DNC is in trouble

A devastating story in The New York Times broke over the weekend detailing the DNC’s severe financial and leadership crisis. Despite a political climate that favors Democrats, the DNC is $2 million in debt, is reportedly asking vendors to delay submitting bills, and cannot provide its usual support to House and Senate campaigns. The RNC on the other hand, has about $128.5 million in cash, while Donald Trump controls a $400 million super PAC.

The Times reports particular anger over Martin’s disastrous handling of the party’s long-awaited autopsy into the 2024 defeat, which found that Democrats had lost touch with rural voters, men and Latinos, failed to define Trump aggressively enough, and were hamstrung by Biden’s deeply unpopular decision to remain in the race for so long. Martin first tried to bury the report, then released an incomplete draft riddled with defensive DNC annotations disputing its own findings—turning what was supposed to be an honest reckoning into yet another display of denial and dysfunction.

The takeaway is brutal: while Democrats should perform well in the midterms, major donors no longer trust the DNC’s ability to manage money or lead the party effectively. That leaves the party facing a serious institutional reckoning and creates precisely the kind of leadership vacuum in which factional warfare thrives.

The Democratic Socialists of America remain a minority force, but they are disciplined, increasingly influential and winning primaries against establishment Democrats. Unless the party’s mainstream develops a coherent identity and credible leadership, the DSA and its allies will be in a far stronger position to pull Democrats toward their agenda—or eventually capture significant parts of the party machinery.

That would be disastrous over the long term. A party increasingly identified with the DSA would risk driving major donors away in droves, leaving Democrats even less capable of competing with the RNC’s vastly superior financial machine.

It will be hard for Martin to survive this kind of implosion, and maybe that’s a good thing

Putin is in serious trouble

I recently recorded a video essay about Vladimir Putin’s increasingly desperate predicament in Ukraine. Things are not going well for the Russian dictator, and a confluence of events is threatening to dramatically alter the course of the war—not in Russia’s favor. Ukraine, it appears, is on the verge of achieving the impossible:

The worst comedian ever?

Trump attended the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Friday and delivered an hour-long address that—if I’m being charitable—landed extremely badly. He recycled old grievances, hurled personal insults at journalists and political opponents, and singled out CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for apparently not smiling enough after receiving an award.

“I want to personally congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on receiving her award,” Trump said. “It was all about me. It was a fake. She shouldn’t get the award—it was a fake. But I didn’t mind. I said, ‘Kaitlan, congratulations.’ But it was fake, there’s no question about it.”

“She never smiles,” he continued. “I said, ‘Kaitlan, do you ever smile?’ Smile. You have a nice position. You’re at CNN fake news. You should be a happy person. So smile, Kaitlan. Just smile.”

Hilarious.

The president also put on a “Trump 2028” hat and joked about seeking a third—or even fourth—term. The room responded mostly with long stretches of stunned silence rather than laughter.

Because, of course, no one really believes he is joking.

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