The political term for physically-challenged waterfowl has been appearing with increasing regularity in the media this week, to describe the president. But is Donald Trump really a "lame duck" yet? Or is he more of a duck that happened to sprain an ankle or perhaps stub a toe (do ducks technically have ankles... or toes? I must admit, I have no idea...)?

Etymological/metaphorical/biological amusements aside, though, the question is a bigger one than pinning down the exact nature of this particular waterfowl's infirmity. Because the articles using the term are really asking whether Trump's iron-fisted grip on the Republican Party (and/or his MAGA supporters) is slipping -- and if so, by how much. Here's just one example of the question being discussed:

Continue Reading »

Larry Summers has now become the first prominent American to be publicly disgraced for his association with Jeffrey Epstein, but he certainly won't be the last. Since the release of emails between Summers and Epstein, Summers has swiftly been disappearing from public life. He has either resigned or been kicked off many lucrative positions he held with various companies and other institutions, and he has now had to step back from his teaching position at Harvard University (after an attempt to cling to the job by admitting his shame to his students didn't go over very well). My guess is he won't be appearing on many news programs as an expert economist anymore either. But again, the fall of Summers is just the first in what will likely be a series of people who will be ostracized and shunned in public life. Because he certainly wasn't the only friend of Epstein who is in a prominent public position (and therefore has a lot to lose). [I should add, for the record, that former-Prince Andrew has also paid a steep price for what was recently revealed, but the woes of British royalty don't really interest me that much, so I consider him more of a footnote to the story here in America.]

Continue Reading »

Who is ultimately going to win the game of "mid-decade redistricting" that Republicans launched earlier this year? At this point, nobody knows. Several things are still very much up in the air, and we won't be able to tell the ultimate score until all the state maps are locked in and people are actually running and campaigning in the resulting districts (filing deadlines are already approaching in several states, it is worth mentioning).

The Republicans were heavily favored to win this political game, of course. They had more opportunities to rejigger the district lines than Democrats, since they held more state governments (with a trifecta of both chambers of the legislature and the governor's office) than Democrats did. But with a dramatic court decision, this advantage seems to have all but evaporated -- to the extent that the final score might actually show Democrats gaining an advantage.

Continue Reading »

[No full column today, as once again I was too busy with outside life. Instead, here is the outline of the column I would have written, after a rather extraordinary day in Washington.]

Wow, that was fast!

Congress can indeed move quickly, when they want to. The House speaker could have delayed the vote until just before or after Thanksgiving, but instead he scheduled it for today. After this weekend's about-face from Donald Trump, almost the entire Republican Party (with only one vote against in either chamber) passed the bill through both houses in one day.

Continue Reading »

Donald Trump has done an about-face on two big (but completely unrelated) issues, which took place within a few days of each other. While it's impossible to know what he was thinking, the reasons behind these two major reversals can probably be summed up as: (1) he was about to lose, and: (2) he was already losing. Trump has a pathological fear of being on the losing side of anything, so both of these U-turns was pretty obviously intended to put him on the side of winning, at the last possible minute.

Continue Reading »

So the longest federal government shutdown in American history ended last weekend, not with a bang but a whimper. Seven Democrat senators and one Independent voted with the Republicans to reopen the government without securing the goal that Democrats had been fighting for. This has outraged many other Democrats, since it was seen as "pulling defeat out of the jaws of victory," once again.

Continue Reading »

Are Republicans actually shooting themselves in the foot with their newfound love of gerrymandering? That question is beginning to pop up more and more frequently, although at this point nobody knows the answer to it. But the possibility does exist that what the Republicans are now engaged in might turn out to be "dummymandering" rather than gerrymandering. I have to admit, this was a new political term for me to learn, so allow me to explain it.

Dummymandering is when gerrymandering backfires on you. Instead of carving new district lines to give your own party an advantage, you unintentionally wind up handing districts over to the opposition party -- which is the exact opposite of what you were trying to do.

There are two main reasons why people are even beginning to wonder about whether Republicans are falling into this trap. The first is how stunningly well Democrats did in the 2025 elections. The second is that the Republicans might be making demographic assumptions based on 2024 voting patterns that don't hold up in the 2026 midterms (or possibly even beyond).

Continue Reading »

The federal government is about to reopen once again. But as everyone gets back to work again, I have to wonder how much data has been lost and how much will be reconstructed. Specifically, how big a gap will there be in the official data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics? One month? Two months? Three months? Hopefully the gap will be as small as possible, but it seems like we're going to miss at least one month of data on the jobs market and unemployment, with the possibility of a gap in the official inflation numbers as well.

The monthly jobs numbers regularly appear on the Friday following the end of a calendar month. The last such Friday when everyone at the B.L.S. was still at work was at the start of September. The last jobs report covered the month of August, to put this another way. So we are now missing data for September and October, and we're almost halfway through November.

Continue Reading »

Donald Trump has apparently woken up and realized he is getting beaten badly on a big political issue -- and one that he leaned on heavily during his last presidential campaign. So he's been complaining about Democrats hitting him on affordability since last week's election (where Republicans got spanked in pretty much every race they ran in). Trump insists that all prices are way, way down and Democrats are just lying about affordability being a big issue.

He is, of course, delusional about this. Affordability is a huge political issue right now, and it is one of the main reasons Democrats did so well at the ballot box last week. In the two big governors' races and the New York City mayoral race, Democratic candidates from across the political spectrum campaigned heavily on exactly the same issue -- and won.

Continue Reading »

Eight Senate Democrats are leading America on a spelunking tour. They desperately point out all the wonderful natural features of the cavern to everyone, as they lead us all lower and lower beneath the ground. However, to the rest of their Democratic colleagues (and millions of Democratic voters), no natural formation or mineral oddity can distract from seeing the truth of the situation as just a handful of weak "moderates" completely caving.

That's about as politely as I can put it. Last night, the Senate held a vote that will facilitate an end to the longest government shutdown in history. This was shocking for several reasons, the biggest of which being the Democrats caved even though they were largely winning the fight. In the battle for public opinion, the blame had fallen mostly on Donald Trump and the Republicans and not on the Democrats. That is a rare feat for the party which triggered the shutdown -- usually it is the other way around.

Continue Reading »