We begin today with Rex Huppke of USA Today and his outrage—over every aspect of the Trump town hall debacle televised on CNN Wednesday night.
Donald Trump took full advantage of CNN’s willingness to give him a platform Wednesday night, spouting lies faster than a sprinkler on a cocaine bender and giving Americans a reminder — as if they needed one — of how deplorable he and his supporters can be.
Sexual abuse, like the kind a jury just found Trump liable of? That’s a laugh line for these folks. Literally. They laughed during CNN’s town hall as Trump continued to likely defame E. Jean Carroll, the woman he was just found liable of defaming.
The Jan. 6 domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol? Trump said he’ll swiftly pardon most of the now-imprisoned attackers, possibly even some of the Proud Boys who were convicted of seditious conspiracy, because they’re “great people.” And that brought applause from the crowd.
A rat-a-tat-tat string of lies about the “rigged election”? The crowd chuckled.
A lie about “finishing” the border wall he barely started? You know, the one Mexico didn’t pay for. The crowd applauded.
Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. Laugh, applaud, chuckle, clap, cheer.
Here’s more on the fallout from Number 45’s debacle of a CNN campaign rally town hall (along with some cautious optimism), from Heather Cox Richardson and her “Letters From an American” Substack.
A CNN media personality told Daily Beast media reporter Justin Baragona, “It is so bad. I was cautiously optimistic despite the criticism. It is awful. It’s a Trump infomercial. We’re going to get crushed.” A senior Trump advisor told senior NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent Garrett Haake that the campaign team “is thrilled with how the night went.” The person called the event a “home run” and said “when the left’s melting down, we know it was a good day.”
Maybe. But according to legal analyst Andrew Weissman, Trump’s embrace of the January 6 rioters and promise to pardon them if he’s reelected feeds a potential case against him. He made similarly revealing comments about his theft and retention of documents marked classified. It was that very kind of indiscretion that enabled Carroll’s lawyers to beat him in court.
More important, though, while Trump’s base will love his performance, watching his lies and cruelty while his supporters laugh and cheer him on will remind voters of exactly what they worked so hard to reject in 2020. A Biden campaign advisor told NBC News White House correspondent Mike Memoli: “Weeks worth of damning content in one hour…. It was quite efficient." It might turn out that, as journalist Ana Navarro-Cárdenas tweeted, “[Joe Biden] is the winner of tonight’s town-hall.”
David Lerman, Aidan Quigley, and Laura Weiss of Roll Call report on some items that are being considered by the teams negotiating the debt ceiling rise, ahead of their next meeting on Friday.
A two-year appropriations deal is under consideration, according to sources familiar with the talks, along the lines of three separate laws since 2015 that were paired with suspensions of the debt limit.
The White House and top Democrats are pushing for two years of debt limit breathing room, as in the 2019 deal cut with former President Donald Trump. That law contained two years of spending caps, which Speaker Kevin McCarthy pointed out as far back as January.
Such an arrangement would, in theory, remove the threat of fiscal cliffs facing lawmakers and the economy until after the 2024 elections.
But it was clear Republicans aren’t yet on board with a two-year deal, in part because it lessens their leverage going into next year’s campaign. And Democrats still don’t want to link spending limits with the debt ceiling, preferring to deal with the two issues on separate tracks.
Nate Cohn of The New York Times points out that the ABC/Washington Post poll showing Trump seven points ahead of Biden does contain valuable information consistent with other polling.
Make no mistake: This survey is an outlier. The Post article reporting the result acknowledged as much. But of all the cases over the last few years when an outlier has dominated the political discourse, this may be one of the more useful ones. For one, it may not be quite as much as an outlier as you might assume. Even if it is, it may nonetheless help readers internalize something that might have been hard to believe without such a stark survey result: Mr. Trump is quite competitive at the outset of the race.
[...]
Interestingly, the January and September surveys showed all of the same peculiar results by subgroup — Mr. Trump’s lead among young voters (18 to 39), and the staggering Democratic weakness among nonwhite voters. And while this was not included in the most recent poll, Mr. Trump led among voters making less than $50,000 per year, historically a Democratic voting group. No other high-quality survey has consistently shown Mr. Biden performing so poorly, especially among young voters.
All of this means that the ABC/Post poll isn’t quite like the usual outlier. This consistent pattern requires more than just statistical noise and random sampling. Something else is at play, whether that’s something about the ABC/Post methodology, the underlying bias in telephone response patterns nowadays, or some combination of the above. It should be noted that the ABC/Post poll is nearly the last of the traditional, live-interview, random-digit-dialing telephone surveys that dominated public polling for much of the last half-century. So it’s easy to understand why it could produce different results, even if it’s not obvious why it produces them.
Pro tip: Look for trends when comparing polls.
John Cassidy of The New Yorker notes some remaining structural weaknesses in the economy—but insists that the media also needs to report that the economy is in overall good shape, for now.
This poll was most likely an outlier; other recent polls have put Biden’s approval ratings in the low forties. But the survey data, taken over all, do illustrate a significant political challenge facing the President as he sets out on the 2024 campaign trail. Job creation is arguably the single most tangible measure of how an economy is faring, and under Biden it has been consistently strong. (I hear you say, “What about inflation?” I’ll get to that.) Yet, in an Economist/YouGov poll that was also released last week, just twenty-seven per cent of respondents said the economy was “Excellent” or “Good,” compared with sixty-nine per cent who said it was “Fair” or “Poor.” Even among the respondents who’d voted for Biden in 2020, a majority—fifty-six per cent—said the economy was “Fair” or “Poor.”
What is responsible for this disconnect? If you speak to Democrats, some of them blame the media for focussing on negative economic news, and they have a point. Friday’s jobs report showed that the labor-force participation rate for prime-age workers—those between twenty-five and fifty-four—rose to 83.3 per cent last month, the highest figure since 2008. In the main body of the American workforce, labor supply has now fully recovered from the pandemic. The jobs report also showed that the jobless rate among Black Americans has dropped to 4.7 per cent, the lowest rate since the government started collecting this figure, in 1972. The tight labor market is benefitting some of the poorest and least-advantaged groups in our society, and Biden’s policy of propping up over-all demand with a big stimulus early in his tenure is at least partly responsible for it. But neither of these data points got much pickup, certainly not in the broadcast media.
The media could certainly do a better job of highlighting the crosscurrents in the economy, including the positive ones. That said, it didn’t make up the big jump in inflation over the past couple of years, or the ongoing public concern about them. The Economist/YouGov survey asked people to rank the importance of more than a dozen issues, including jobs, inflation, health care, national security, crime, and abortion. The one most commonly ranked as very important was “Inflation/prices.”
Stephen Simpson of The Texas Tribune points out that that the investments that Texas has already made in mental health services are not sufficient; the Lone Star State ranks dead last in the country as it pertains to access to mental health care.
To date, Texas has invested $25 billion during Abbott’s watch as part of a statewide behavioral health plan to address the state’s floundering mental health system as demand continues to grow with the state’s booming population. It’s a tremendous dollar amount to be sure, but one that has done little to lift Texas nationally when it comes to mental health offerings.
In 2022, the state ranked dead last when it comes to access to mental health services, according to Mental Health America, a nonprofit advocacy group.
Today, 98% of Texas’ 254 counties were wholly or partially designated by the federal government as “mental health professional shortage areas.”
Also unclear is how all this funding is supposed to reach potentially violent shooters. While studies consistently show that most mental illness doesn’t lead to mass violence, there’s been a psychiatric component linked to all seven mass shootings in Texas during Abbott’s term as governor.
Finally today, Stefano Pitrelli, Annabelle Timsit, and Niha Masih of The Washington Post report that Italy is forming a commission to investigate a nearly 20% increase in the price of pasta.
Adolfo Urso, the country’s business enterprise minister, called for a Thursday meeting of a new commission to discuss the increase in the price of pasta, according to an official at the Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about government matters. Pasta prices were up 17.5 percent year-over-year in March, local media reported, citing the ministry.
The price jump is more than double Italy’s consumer price inflation, which stood at 8.1 percent in March, according to the European Central Bank, and comes as the price of wheat has dropped. On Thursday, the commission will assess the role that raw material, energy and production costs may be playing in the price increase.
Consumer groups have accused producers of speculation and filed an official complaint, asking authorities to investigate. Producers say a mix of factors — including higher energy costs and supply chain disruptions and inflation — is driving up their costs, forcing them to charge more for pasta, a staple of the Italian diet.
Sounds like the egg problem here in the States.
Have the best possible day, everyone!