Josh Marshall
Campaign Comes Into Focus 
The Post has an interesting story today about why both presidential campaigns seem to feel they have an interest in leaning into Biden’s stutter. The stutter is something that earlier iterations of Biden’s political life story narrative treated as a challenge he overcame in the past, in his childhood. But as a President it’s clear he did not entirely overcome it. He may have tamed it. But it’s still there and it’s a component of his sometimes halting or garbled speech. The change — from describing the stutter as something Biden overcame to something he still wrestles with — has a few different drivers. One is that we just think about these things differently today as a society. It’s what we might call the Therapeutic Turn in American culture. It’s that whole mix of the valorization of empathy, the therapeutic overcoming of physical, intellectual or mental challenges and the call for society to loosen or expand the strictures of what is acceptable for full participation in public life. It’s deeply ingrained in what we might call Blue State political culture.
Read MoreThere were a few responses to yesterday’s Backchannel about the “everything sucks” era that I wanted to share with you.
The first is from TPM Reader JY …
Read MoreIt would be great to get to 175 new TPM Members tonight, the end of the second day of our drive. We’re currently at 156. If you’ve been on the fence or maybe just waiting till you have a free minute, maybe just take a second right now and join us. Just click right here.
Late Update: 173! Two more to go for the night!
This post is just to inform or remind you that after Don Lemon was let go by CNN, Elon Musk signed him to a new gig doing a show on Twitter. And then after this debut interview with Musk, which asked a few challenging questions, Musk immediately fired Lemon. If you go to the end of this segment it shows where Musk says “you are upsetting me” just before the interview ends and he fires Lemon.
Living In the Everything Sucks Era—At Least for Now
The chart below is from something called the CBC 2023 Resident Survey. It’s a survey of New York City residents in which residents share their opinion about the city’s quality of life and government services. It purports to be “the most comprehensive, statistically valid, post-pandemic view into how New Yorkers feel about the City’s quality of life and how they rate City government services.” For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to assume the claim about statistical validity is accurate. And most importantly, it says that the methodology used in the previous two surveys is roughly the same, thus giving us some fair measure of change over time.
Needless to say, the change from 2008 and 2017 to 2023 is quite stark.
Read MoreTPM People, thanks for getting us off to a strong start in our annual membership drive. Coming into our second day we’ve now signed up 125 new TPM Members. We want to get that number to 1,000. So still a long ways to go. But that is a very solid start.
If you’re a reader but not a member, give us a go. The price is quite low, just a few bucks a month. The direct benefits make it well worth the money and you support the really first-class, news-moving work our team is doing every day. If you need a bit more inspiration you can read this post for some examples of our big exclusives or this video of our Josh Kovensky on TV last night discussing his latest blockbuster story. Then, when you’re all pumped up, stop by our sign-up page right here.
Our goal for the first day of our membership drive was 100 new members. As of 10:03 PM on the east coast we’re at 99. Click here to put us over the edge.
Off to a good start, folks. We’ve signed up 70 new TPM Members so far today in the first day of our annual TPM Membership drive. We would love to get to 100 by the end of the day. If you’re not a member, please take a moment to join us. Click here to sign up! Want to know more about the drive? Click here.
Folks, let me cut to the chase. Today kicks off our annual TPM membership drive. It is, as always, critical. Our team works all year producing the coverage, commentary and, we hope, insight that makes TPM a valued and trusted news source and our publishing team works just as hard fine-tuning our membership model, trying to add to our subscription numbers. But we rely on a key bump in the numbers during the annual drive. That’s what kicks off today. So if you’re a reader but not a member, please consider joining us. Or maybe you’re a former member. Can we coax you back? Think of it as fake it til you make it. Sign up for a year or even a month. See how it goes. We think you’ll want to stay.
What kind of work will you be supporting? We pride ourselves on punching way above our weight. We always have. Our membership page says, “Small Team, Big Results.” We work hard to make that true every day. But just consider some of our big exclusives since our last drive: There was our big series on The Meadows Texts. More recently we brought you our exclusive series on The Chesebro Docs and our big exclusive on the SACR Document Trove, our exposé on the secret society of White Christian men prepping a Christian nationalist government to take over after the fall of the American “regime.” Of course, everyone was on the Santos story. But TPM was the first to report the most substantial of the *alleged* (ahem) crimes that got him indicted and finally led to his expulsion from Congress. Sometimes, of course, we just love us some good old fashioned sleaze, with some sports adjacency thrown in — like our look at just who paid for Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders epic six figure Super Bowl Extravaganza. (She sleazed it up bigly but good lord that was a good game!) Of course, as has always been the case at TPM, most of our best work doesn’t come in one-off big exclusives. It comes with a close, incremental, informed coverage of critical topics that often fall just below the national news radar. An ongoing example of that has been Kate Riga’s coverage of SCOTUS, the federal judiciary and particularly the tentacles the right-wing legal project has driven down into it in recent years, creating pipelines from the country’s most radical Trumpite judges right up to the high court. I even chip in myself with a few pieces.
That’s the work you’re supporting with your membership dollar. That’s the club we want you to become part of by subscribing. Some fun stats: Over 90% of our revenue comes directly from members. And the overwhelming majority of that revenue goes directly to the people who do the work. Salaries and benefits make up 74% of our expenses. It’s not going to some derivatives or debt service or into a corporate vortex that’s impossible to understand. This is a fully independent outfit. All the strategy emerges from inside the organization and that’s where all the final decisions are made too.
This is where you come in. If you’re not currently a member, please take a moment and join today. Just click right here. We want to sign up 1,000 new members during our drive. A huge number, but we think we can do it. If you’re already a member and are just really jazzed up about TPM after reading this you can always contribute to the TPM Journalism Fund. That’s really for another day and our other big annual drive. Today is about bringing more of you into the club. So what do you say? Join us!
How Not To Fall For Yet More Trumper Textualism About His Latest Threat of Violence
If you’ve followed the uproar over ex-President Trump’s promise of a “bloodbath” if he’s not elected you’ll see it’s partly been diverted into a kind of textualist grudge match over whether he meant apocalyptic and blood-drenched civil violence or simply stiff competition for the U.S. auto industry. If you look at the actual words it seems clear he initially riffs on his claims about the auto industry but then doubles down on the promise of a bloodbath, suggesting that problems with the economy will be the least of the country’s problems. You can interpret it either way in large part because Trump always expresses himself in the kind of disjointed word salad which always require the words to be reconstructed after the fact, thus giving a fair amount of leeway to whoever wants to do the interpreting and reconstructing.
But that’s a feature, not a bug.
Read More