Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.
Tom Nichols/The Atlantic:
A Failure of Imagination About Trump
American minds are not ready to think about how fast democracy could disintegrate.
In a recent interview with Time magazine, Donald Trump once again told Americans what he will do to their system of government. Why don’t they believe him? ...
One problem has been around as long as the republic: Americans don’t pay attention to politics, and when they do, they frequently blame the current president for whatever is going wrong in their lives. For most people, economic cause and effect is mostly notional; if gas prices are high today, or if someone is still not working despite low unemployment rates, it’s because of the guy at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Combine this with the peculiar amnesia that helps people forget how many Americans needlessly died of COVID while Trump talked about injecting bleach, and you have a population that fondly remembers how good they had it during a terrifying pandemic.
The Late-Night Laughs From Donald Trump’s Trial
What TV comedians communicate about average Americans’ takeaways from court proceedings.
Still, we can learn a bit about what parts of Trump’s trial are surfacing. Spoiler alert: Very little of it is on the substance of the case.
On the network late-night shows, hosts have zeroed in on a handful of topics. By far the most popular is the reporting from inside the Manhattan courtroom that Trump has fallen asleep at points during the trial. On April 15, the day the trial began, Jimmy Kimmel cracked that “If Biden is Sleepy Joe, I guess that makes you Doze-o the Clown.” On the same day, Stephen Colbert mentioned that reporting in his monologue and mimicked Trump waking up from a dream at the defense table. Seth Meyers got laughs just from showing a courtroom sketch artist’s depiction of a snoozing Trump, and this week he gently mocked a reporter who had observed the former president closing his eyes in court and said that he could have been “meditating.”
“He wasn’t f—ing meditating!” Meyers said with a laugh.
Wajahat Ali/The Progressive Magazine:
Biden Is Very Old and Out of Touch, and Here’s Why You Should Vote for Him
Joe Biden is far from perfect—and his handling of the genocide in Gaza is worth criticism. But he's better than Trump.
By now, you might have seen headlines about President Joe Biden’s advanced age as being one of the many reasons to vote against him in the upcoming 2024 presidential election in November.
Granted, he’s not a spry, agile buck of seventy-seven like Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, whose diet consists of Diet Coke, cheap steaks, and lawsuits. Biden also isn’t seventy-three, the youthful age of cherub President Ronald Reagan when he began his second term in 1985, after which he began showing early signs of dementia.
If elected again, Biden, who would be eighty-two on Inauguration Day in 2025, would be the oldest person to ever hold the most powerful office in the world. But here’s an even scarier number: Ninety-one.
That’s the number of criminal offenses facing Trump, who currently has four criminal indictments against him in four different cities. This alleged criminal behavior includes interfering in the Georgia election results, inciting a violent insurrection against the U.S. Capitol and trying to overturn the 2020 election, mishandling top-secret documents, and paying hush money to an adult film star during the 2016 presidential campaign. Oh, he was also held liable for sexually assaulting and defaming columnist E. Jean Carroll, and he owes a bigly number— $464,805,336.70, as of this writing—in fines for business fraud.
But former President Barack Obama once wore a tan suit and Biden is old!
Employers added 175,000 jobs in April, as labor market growth slows
The unemployment rate remained below 4 percent.
That marks the 27th consecutive month that the unemployment rate was below 4 percent. This was last recorded during a low-unemployment period between 1967 to 1970, and again for a longer period between 1951 to 1953.
“The labor market is still going strong even if it’s a slowdown,” said Andrew Flowers, chief economist at Appcast, a firm that helps companies recruit online. “One-hundred-and-seventy-five thousand jobs is more than enough to absorb the workers in this market and you can see that with the [low] unemployment rate.”
Could lower swing-state inflation rates help Biden and hurt Trump?
Inflation in several battleground states in the 2024 election is below the national average — in some cases by more than a full percentage point — as food prices retreat even while housing costs stay hot, according to a The Hill analysis of regional Labor Department data.
Recent polling shows the economy and inflation are top concerns for Americans going into the election,, gaining in importance specifically in states where Trump and Biden are on the ground campaigning. Seven states — Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina — are expected to sway the election.
What’s Really Happening on College Campuses, According to Student Journalists
POLITICO Magazine asked leaders of campus news organizations to set the record straight about campus unrest, antisemitism and what the media is getting wrong
With so many incidents taking place in so many places, it’s hard for anyone to grasp what’s really happening at America’s universities right now. So POLITICO Magazine reached out this week to top student journalists, who have been reporting on the turmoil at the ground level for weeks and months. As neutral observers able to interact with all sides, they can provide unique insights, even as they watch friends get arrested or worry if their graduation ceremonies will even take place.
Over email and phone calls the past week, editors-in-chief of campus publications from 13 different colleges and universities told us how support for Palestine has surged over the last seven months, how their peers define antisemitism and what the political consequences of these protests might be. They come from a wide variety of campuses all over the country, but collectively, the group painted a picture of students fighting to be heard by leadership — both on campus and nationally.
Brian Beutler/”Off Message” on Substack:
Democrats Need To Tell Better Stories
Facts are on their side, but voters believe Trump's lies because they add up to a simple story.
I think it has something to do with the fact that Democrats chose to wash their hands of pandemic politics (and of narrative-building generally) many years ago, while Trump has consistently exploited the pandemic to sidestep accountability for his many failures. “Biden has created a bunch of jobs” and “Trump’s jobs record isn’t really his fault because of the pandemic” are the two brickbats the parties bring to this particular fight, and so they were close at hand. But Pelosi’s weapon of choice was a fact, and Tur’s counterpoint was a story. A simple, legible story. And so to me it’s sort of no wonder Trump continues to whoop Biden in economic-stewardship polling, even as, under a full accounting of his record, it’d be insane to entrust him with the economy (to say nothing of another pandemic) ever again.
Labour will swing left as it heads for power
We are moving into a new Britain where the old calculations do not apply. Ever since the Brexit referendum of 2016, all who criticised right-wing populism were dismissed as elitist fools who did not understand the beliefs of ordinary, honest people. Now that right-wing populism has failed so utterly it is no longer even popular, new concerns will dominate. The attitudes of renters, young home buyers, Muslims, and the supposed out-of-touch progressives will matter.
Another episode from earlier this week made my point for me. The Financial Times claimed that Labour was about to unveil a weakened package of workers’ rights. Its promises to deliver higher sick pay, end employers’ use of ‘fire and rehire’, and reverse anti-strike legislation would be watered down or forgotten, apparently
The story tallied with the easy, fashionable view that Starmer’s Labour will say and do anything to win, and with Margaret Thatcher’s rather complacent Tory assumption that ‘the facts of life are conservative,’ and Labour must follow conservative policies when it is in power.
Starmer blew both assumptions away. He categorically denied the FT story saying, ‘We will not be watering down the New Deal for Working People’.
Cliff Schecter and Tony Michaels irreverently mock Rudy Giuliani’s career arc:
Greg Dworkin May 04, 2024 at 12:00PM From Daily Kos
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