The East Wing, it is no more. Sleeps with the fishes, it does!

And the children, they are devastated. Their parents, too. And the childless. The orphans are probably fine. They have real problems to worry about.

But people without real problems to worry about are damn near inconsolable!

Take one particular childless lunatic, for example: Will Stancil.

Bru, come on.

He’s the most “notable” person I saw run with this point, but there were lots of random nobodies on social media saying that Trump just did what Osama bin Laden only dreamed of: demolishing the White House.

Take a pill.

For one thing, the distinctive characteristic of terrorism is not “building go down.” It’s “building go down unexpectedly while filled with civilians in an act of politically motivated mass murder”—and, crucially, the terrorist doesn’t replace it with a nicer, more functional space afterward.

And again, let’s clarify what we’re talking about here: the East Wing. Not the West Wing. Not the Residence. The East Wing. If a terrorist blew up the East Wing, his boss at Terrorism HQ would say, “Goddammit, I knew he was going to fuck it up.” It’s the architectural equivalent of missing the target. If 9/11 had hit only WTC 7 and left the Twin Towers untouched, we’d call it “Close, but no cigar, Osama.”

The nature of the physical universe is such that to build a new thing where an old thing stands, one must first demolish the old thing. This is a temporary state of disorder.

Equating this thing with terrorism at all in any way is the sort of thing where, if you do it sober multiple times, you’re going to get a reputation! People start to talk. “This guy ain’t all there,” they’ll say.

Let’s back up for a second. Beep Beep Beep.

I haven’t gotten to write a post like this in a while because Trump 2.0 has, in fact, been worse than Trump 1.0. Unlike the first time around, there have not been many occasions this year when I thought, “calm down, dummies.” I’ve disagreed with how people go about voicing their frustrations or the extent of their outrage, but for the most part, I agree that the stuff he’s done this year has actually been bad. It’s basically just been disagreements of degree, which don’t really get my blood pumping.

It’s been a little disappointing for me because, I mean, this Substack is literally called CALM DOWN.

But after thinking about it for much of this week, I am happy to announce that I have concluded not only that people need to calm down about the ballroom, but that the ballroom is good.

Why Is The Ballroom Good, Ben, You Fucking Collaborator Moron?

I’ll tell you why, friend whose insulting tone I’m not taking personally!

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I’ve been reading Ezra Klein since he was in college and I was in high school. For twenty years, my reaction has been the same: here’s a nerd who believes what I believe and is smarter than I am—even if he’s less funny and, like most people, a little soft. So every time I see him get piled on by haters, I think: Is today Jimmy Shaker day? The day I get to use the skill I have that he doesn’t—cutting throats and sleeping well.

Today is Jimmy Shaker day.

Here’s what happened: Klein wrote a column and said some nice, obvious things about Charlie Kirk, a recent victim of political assassination—it was a tragedy, people who loved him were grieving, violence corrodes democracy. That alone irritated lots of people on the online left, but they accepted it. But then he added something even more dangerous: Kirk practiced politics the right way, he claimed. That sent them to the Moon. Suddenly, Klein was accused of whitewashing a monster, sanctifying him, excusing him. In their fantasy, Kirk’s body should be dangling upside-down off a cliff forever, but here Klein was saying nice things about him in the New York Times.

How dare he!

What the Left Refuses To Understand

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Last week, Charlie Kirk was gunned down in cold blood in front of thousands of people in a shocking, repugnant, evil act of political violence. I am pathologically addicted to erring on the “don’t worry, it will all work out” outlook of life, but this was so utterly disgusting and visceral that, beyond just making me incredibly sad, it also just made me more than almost anything else in the last few years think “uh oh.”

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For months, New York’s DSA crowd grumbled that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t endorsed Zohran Mamdani for mayor. He was their guy. She was once their national standard-bearer. The holdup seemed to confirm many of the “she’s selling us out to become establishment” fears that some of the socialist set have privately and not-so-privately harbored over the last few years.

Then, a few weeks before the election, she finally did it. Maybe it helped. Maybe it didn’t matter at all. Maybe the timing was strategic, or maybe she just didn’t want to look like she was sitting it out if he ended up winning. Politics is messy that way.

But here’s the irony: if Mamdani had lost, AOC might have had more control over her future. Now that he’s likely to become mayor, her 2028 ambitions—if she has them—are partially tethered to his approval rating. That’s just a reality. He doesn’t have to be LaGuardia! But he can’t be a disaster. A deeply unpopular Mamdani heading into 2027 would become a problem for any former DSA members running for the nomination, let alone one who happens to also be from NYC. Fair or not, AOC is close enough in style, substance, and branding that she’d be the one stuck answering for it.

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The stupidest people in the world are 9/11 truthers. They’ve had twenty-four years to come up with a theory for why the U.S. government would have orchestrated 9/11, and they still haven’t produced one that makes sense.

The classic version is that George W. Bush wanted to go to war in the Middle East. But if that were true, he could’ve just… gone to war …

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As of this week, Donald Trump is less popular at this point in his second term than he was at the same point in his first — despite starting this term with his highest approval ratings ever.

In his first term, Trump began unpopular, slipped a little further, and then plateaued. This time, he had a running start — and still, he’s falling.

Why?

It’s not because Democrats marched in the streets or flooded Twitter with outrage.
It’s because they didn’t.

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There are lots of good conservatives in America. Fine, thoughtful, friendly people with whom I disagree about a lot of political stuff, but it’s a free country so who cares. One of my foundational beliefs is that my political opinions don’t make me a better person than anyone else (for the most part; I mean, if you’re in the Ku Klux Klan or Hamas, I am a better person than you).

This description applies to a lot of you! Decent folks.

I say this because I want you to know that for the rest of this post, when I say conservative or Republican, I don’t mean you. I don’t mean, well, the good ones! Lol. I mean the other ones. The bad ones.

Friend, there are bad ones. And they’ve had quite a week!

• The Trump administration deported a bunch of people to Salvadoran prisons who they said were violent gang members here illegally, and though that probably describes some of them, they also sent some other people there too, including some poor guy who had an autism awareness tattoo in solidarity with his brother, which the immigration officers thought was a gang tattoo.

• They grabbed a Turkish PhD student in Boston off the street and sent her to a deportation facility in Louisiana because she published a column in the Tufts student newspaper supporting the Palestinian protests last spring.

• It came out that in January, ICE detained a 54-year-old man who they assumed was an illegal immigrant, but hours later, when they finally got around to talking to him, they learned he was an American citizen who fortunately had his wallet on him.

While some of this could maybe be just explained as profound carelessness, it’s such gross negligence that it’s indistinguishable from malice. Particularly sending the guy to the dungeon in El Salvador, which is something they have expressed no shame or contrition over and appear to not be interested in rectifying.

But of course, you might not have even heard of some of this stuff because, speaking of gross negligence, there was a bigger story this week!

Signalgate: Day 1

On Monday, The Atlantic published a story detailing how a few weeks ago, the White House National Security Advisor accidentally invited the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, into a Signal chat with the Vice President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and a bunch of other top-level national security people where they were chatting about whether to bomb Yemen. It started with some banal housekeeping about setting another meeting, and then JD Vance was basically like, “I don’t even want to bomb Yemen,” and like every other group chat in history, it got totally off-track, and they all argued about the policy merits. No one realizes that there is a mystery man who happens to be one of the most famous journalists in the world sitting silently in the chat. Then after they’re done arguing about whether to bomb Yemen, Slenderman-lookalike Stephen Miller came in and was like, “The president says we bomb,” and JD Vance was like, “Fine, I’m sorry, Slenderman, I will bring children into the forest for you to feast on” (or whatever the hell the Slenderman thing was). I’m paraphrasing.

And then the next day, the Secretary of Defense was like, “Hello, Angels! The bombings will commence in two hours,” and gave a bunch of operational details. Goldberg stopped quoting from the chat at this point because he didn’t want to share sensitive national security information, but he described it and it sounded a lot like stuff you don’t want the public to know.

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One of the people I find the most annoying on social media is this chick named Kate Willett. She’s nominally a comedian but what she’s really famous for is being a NIMBY socialist on twitter.

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Democrats are embarking on what will be a long, painful process of determining which toxically unpopular left-wing positions need to be abandoned to gain power in America. This shift will be messy and nearly impossible to execute in a deliberate way. Political parties no longer have the influence to implement a single compelling argument that reshapes their agenda. Instead, this evolution will unfold chaotically over the next few years. Feelings will be hurt, elections will be lost, and eventually, moderate Democrats will shed enough baggage to reclaim the House, the Presidency, and perhaps someday the Senate.

The question of what exactly needs to be discarded is highly contentious. Powerful advocacy networks exist within the liberal sphere to defend each position. The music has stopped. With only so many "seats" available, competition will grow progressively more intense.

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Well.
This obviously isn’t how I wanted the election to go!

Eight years ago, everyone I knew was having a nervous breakdown the day after Trump won. I, too, was shocked. I went into the office, and my colleagues were understandably dour. A companywide all-hands meeting was set up for later that week, where people basically just shared their feelings. My best friend at the time, James West, came into my office, and we engaged in some gallows humor. He mentioned how everyone was going to take cyanide or something like that. I agreed. Then he told me that, ironically, of all the people at Mother Jones, I was the one he was least worried about. He didn’t mean that I wouldn’t be rounded up because I was straight or something. He meant that psychologically, I wasn’t going to fall apart.

The Friday before the election, I’d gotten out of a mental institution after trying to kill myself that September. I had spent the entire month of October in a hospital, having coping mechanisms drilled into me so that I wouldn’t try to kill myself again. And the timing of that experience did, in fact, inoculate me against a lot of the hysteria that unfolded in those months. That conversation with James, and the fact that it proved prescient, is essentially the origin story for this Substack.

So, though it gives me no joy, it’s my solemn duty to tell people to calm down.

I said before the election that America is great, and no matter who wins, that will still be true. Guess what? I was right—it’s still true.

One of the reasons I hate the political rhetoric that describes elections in catastrophic, winner-take-all terms is that sometimes, you lose elections. And what then? What do you do when you’ve built it up as a titanic final battle for all the marbles…and then you lose? You’ve told your supporters to walk into the sea. And that’s not something people should do.

Life goes on. It does. We have more elections. It’s one of the nice things about living in a democracy.

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There’s a myth in Republican circles that goes something like this: Democrats and liberals would hate any Republican with the same level of anger we direct at Trump. Romney, McCain, Bush—doesn’t matter, they say. The left will always see Republicans as fascists, always reach for hyperbole. But this line of thinking misses something obvious: Trump is not just any Republican, and that’s why he’s treated as something different entirely.

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We’re now close enough to the election that it would be intellectually dishonest of me not to acknowledge the obvious truth that I am also personally experiencing all of the psychological things that everyone else who thinks about politics too much is currently experiencing. You are smart people. You knew that, but I just wanted to be explicit about it.…

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Donald Trump gave a speech today in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, the hometown of the late great Arnold Palmer. Speaking at an airport named for the golf legend, Trump made an off-color joke to the crowd about the size of Palmer’s penis.

“Arnold Palmer was all man,” the former president said.  “And I say that in all due respect to women, and I love women. But this guy, this guy, this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refuse to say it but when he took showers with the other pros they came out of there, they said ‘oh my God. That’s unbelievable. That’s unbelievable.’ I had to say it. I had to say it. We have women that are highly sophisticated here. But they used to look at Arnold, they said, ‘man,’"

The usual suspects are upset with the NYT and every other news organization for not describing this as “Donald Trump (SICKO) is obsessed with Arnold Palmer’s penis (BECAUSE HE HAS DEMENTIA). Is this the man you want with your finger on the button?1” Another day, another example of liberal media critics having a meltdown about reporters not using mean enough language to describe Donald Trump’s daily absurdities. They are so obsessed with making this same complaint over, and over that today, it is actually distracting them from what is actually an entirely fair media criticism of the coverage of this event: no one seems to have tried to find out if it’s true.

But I’m a real journalist. I ask the questions that matter. And I get results.

Did Arnold Palmer have a huge cock? An investigation.

The findings of my exclusive investigation2 into this matter suggest he did not.

A hooker’s account of sex with Arnold Palmer

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A year ago today, I woke up late and went to meet a friend of mine for lunch. One beer led to another and we decided to go out a canyon and shoot guns. Hours later, I came home and began tweeting about the “very nice Idaho day” I had had doing redneck shit like drinking beers and shooting the cans. Someone replied to me and said, “Is this really appropriate considering the terror attack taking place right now?” And I was like, “The what?”

It took a few seconds of looking to find headlines about this awful thing that had happened in Israel. My first reaction was relief that it wasn’t a terror attack on the US. About ten milliseconds later, I thought, this is a tragedy in a land of tragedies. Thoughts and prayers. And I went on tweeting about bullshit.

It wasn’t until the next day that I got around to actually reading some of the coverage and realized the magnitude, the horror, and understood it wasn’t just another case of sectarian violence in a land too often afflicted by it.

People often say stuff like “This story broke my heart,” but this story actually did make me have a very visceral reaction of despair and sorrow and anger. And then I went down the hole and read everything that could be read about Hamas’s evil attacks. And it was just worse with every detail. But as upset as I was, it would be totally dishonest to say that this affected me “as a Jew.”

I’m not a good Jew. I’m not religious. I don’t know that I even believe in God. I don’t really think about it a lot. I’m not a member of a synagogue…Like lots of American liberals, I have quite complicated feelings about Israel. I was as upset about October 7th as I would have been if it had happened anywhere in the world to any group of people. It was very sad and tragic but it had nothing to do with me. Obviously, I supported Israel shooting every member of Hamas in the head and throwing their bodies into the sea, but it didn’t require my personal investment.

It wasn’t until I saw the disgusting reaction from so many people on the American Left that my own identity was affected. It had already been a few years since I thought of myself as a part of the Left, but once upon a time, I had thought that.

The fact that so many people in this cohort that I at one time had somewhat identified with could instantly and gleefully side with the terrorist murderers made me the sort of angry that you only get when you feel betrayed.

I feel sort of silly admitting this because, obviously, Hamas killing people is worse than American morons posting watermelon memes and celebrating terrorism, but I’m an American. Of course, American discourse is more relevant to me than far-off violence.

I wrote about all of this at the time. The left’s refusal to treat the victims of October 7^th as flesh and blood humans was and is disgusting. And their response is well you’re doing the same thing to Palestinian civilians.

But I’m not.

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Everyone who follows politics was excited for last night’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.1

According to CNN’s snap poll, 50% of people who were going to watch expected Kamala to win, and 50% expected Trump to win. They’d never debated before. They’d apparently never even met. Trump has a terrible track record of general election debates against Democrats, but in June, he was the victor of what was probably the most influential general election presidential debate in US history. So, you know, maybe that was the beginning of something.

Another factor was at play in the expectation game: conservatives have been calling Kamala a moron for years. Her refusal to do interviews has led many of them to become more confident about that impression.

Biden was also criticized for not doing interviews. Democrats and liberal pundits dismissed those concerns. Then, he got up on the debate stage in June and instantly proved the concerns right. Would the same happen with Kamala?

On the other side of the aisle, you had the Democrats. They expected Trump to be some version of the guy we have seen for a decade. This is easy to say because it’s true. He’s an unchanging known quantity. People who find him funny find him funny. People who believe humor is a tool of the fascists hear only dog whistles. People who relate to the way he talks get him. Everyone else thinks he rambles like he has Alzheimer’s. You see his racism, or you don’t. Etc, etc., forever and ever, and because the race is tied after ten years of this, a touchstone fact about Trump for Democrats is that he is Teflon. He gets away with stuff politically, criminally, and financially.

How does one hold these two beliefs—that Trump is an evil moron AND teflon? By blaming the institutions that are supposed to hold him accountable. So Democrats expected Trump to perform poorly at the debate and for it not to matter because the media is a bunch of cowards and the voters are largely ignorant racist shitheads.

They set the table for this over the weekend with a fresh round of complaints at the NYT and Nate Silver for doing bad coverage and making bad polls. They were all ready to get outraged about a million things Trump said and then to be outraged again about whose fault it is that it didn’t change anything.

So, then, last night, we got these two crazy kids together, and it was time to dance. It was a very fun debate, indeed! For Democrats.

Kamala Won, Democrats Had Fun

Republicans did not see the humor in our national trip to the dog (eating) park.

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The Saturday before the Democratic Convention, I had drinks with a reporter who was in Chicago to embed with the protests. They’d spent days and weeks building relationships with the protesters and would be with them during the big event. The organizers had told the media they expected 30,000-40,000 protesters. But this reporter told me that privately, they’d been told to expect 100,000!

So, verily and merrily, on Sunday night, when the chants of protesters interrupted the audiobook I was pleasantly listening to in my hotel room, I raced down to Michigan Avenue to catch the gargantuan mass as it quivered and shook.

And yet, not so! Lo, the monster was not as promised. It was a kitty cat—a house one at that.

It was only a few hundred people. The voices had only reached me because of bullhorns. The police outnumbered them. Journalists might have outnumbered them too. I asked some of the cops, "Is this it?" And they sort of chuckled and said, "Yeah, it’s small."

As I walked back to my hotel, I saw one guy who had somehow ended up in a swarm of bicycle cops, laughing, "I’m just here for the DNC! I don’t want anything to do with these nuts!"

What was true on Michigan Avenue was true in the United Center: Democrats were not in the market for disruptions.

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They’re old hat by now, but everyone who was at the DNC in Boston in 2004 has a story about watching Barack Obama’s keynote. They’re all basically the same: most people had no idea who he was, then his speech blew everyone away, and afterward, everyone was saying to everyone else, “He’s going to be president one day.”

I can vouch for every bit except the end. I was there. I had no idea who he was, and by the end, I was knocked over in love with him. But I don’t remember thinking, or hearing someone actually say, “He’ll be president,” because he wasn’t even in the Senate yet.

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Let us recap the week that was. We will use an arbitrary point system to add spice and verve. Points are added and subtracted throughout. They are graded from the POV of someone who wants Kamala Harris to win the election. Finally, the points are added together. If this novelty is well received, it might be continued in future columns.1

Kamala’s First Week As New Biden

She looks great! (+1) It’s been a while since I've paid attention to her, and she looks good. (+1) Compared to the old mummies that have dominated our political lives for the last few years, she is a welcome relief of youthful vigor and coherence! (+3) 

Kamala has had a wonderful rollout. (+3) She moved quickly to consolidate endorsements in just the first few hours after Biden dropped out. (+1) She apparently made 100 calls that afternoon. In most situations, you’d be like, “ok, well, is that a lot for someone in the most important political moment of their life? Who can know?” But in this one, we have a very direct comparison: In the two weeks after his disastrous June debate—the one which would ultimately prove lethal to his political career—Joe Biden made a grand total of 20 calls. (+5)

No one else challenged her. (+6) This one wasn’t the biggest surprise in the world. (-2) She was obviously the favorite, and only some weird polls would have really changed that. (+2) 

She raised roughly a gajillion dollars. (+3) Money is always nice. (+30) Everyone loves money. (+45) The only people who don’t love money are communists. (+10) This capitalist money surge would have happened to anyone who replaced Biden on the ticket. (-3) But the Kamala team deserves a bunch of credit for making it clear she was that person almost instantly. (+3)

More important than the topline figures are the number of new donors, ones who hadn’t already given. Last I heard, it was 1.1 million. (+2) But that was days ago. (+1) Those are people who are newly activated by Kamala and, importantly, have more room to give. (+1) A lot of the Biden/Kamala money chest is from donors who are maxed out. (-1) (Obviously, most donors don’t max out, but it’s still a positive sign. There are new Glengarry leads.) (+1)

Overall, this demonstrated a real change in the enthusiasm gap. (+3) 

Kamala’s first speech was sort of a pseudo-speech because it was technically just a chat with the campaign staffers, but they let in the news cameras. (+1) It was really good! (+2) She sounded smart, happy, and confident. (+1) Biden called in, and they had some cute back-and-forths. (+1)

Then the Right spent days having a little conspiracy theory that Biden was dead. (+2) It is always nice when your political opponents devolve into hysteria. (+2) 

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In 2019, Matt Welch texted me with one question: do you support Joe Biden?

Yes, I told him.

Good, I figured, he said. Will you support him publicly?

Sure, I said.

Come on a SiriusXM politics show I’m hosting and talk about it.

I was the only liberal pundit he knew who was willing to do that in 2019.

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I have continued to support Biden for the last 4+ years and,…

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One of the more frustrating things about the Biden loyalists over the last two weeks is that they have spent a lot of time and energy attacking Democrats who want him to step aside but have never even once articulated a strategy to actually win the election.

They have a strategy to hold onto the nomination, I guess.…

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