One of the most important things to understand about politics is the danger of literalism, assuming the straightforward meanings are the important ones. You can be following the libretto but the real action is in the score. Closely related to this is the danger of assuming that politics operates by a kind of Newtonian cause and effect. Object A moves when it’s hit by Object B. That’s logical and straightforward. But that’s often not how things work. You can see some of this this morning in the DC insider sheets that distill conventional wisdom.
This morning’s Punchbowl newsletter runs with the headline “Political winds whip the MAGA movement.” The movement is rocked by an argument about antisemitism, good or bad? Trump’s tariffs, his central policy, are on the rocks. Trump’s out of sync with the congressional Republicans on the shutdown. Republicans are losing the shutdown. He’s unpopular. Their policies are unpopular. Costs continue to rise. It all sounds pretty bad, and the Punchbowl editors add in the bad election night too. What’s notable though is how much of this was the case before Wednesday morning, before which they were generally saying that things were going great for Trump and the GOP.
That overstates it a bit. But not much. It’s no surprise that political observers’ sense of what’s happening, the big picture, would shift after an election night in which Democrats are widely perceived having exceeded expectations. What’s notable is that this new sense of the big picture is explained by things that were already the case before election day!
We see something similar in a Politico Nightly newsletter from last night on the Trump tariffs case before the Supreme Court. The piece begins with what seems to be the near-universal perception that the government’s lawyers had a rough time at oral arguments yesterday. At least three of the Republican justices were skeptical of the White House’s claim to powers to impose tariffs at will. After this was some discussion of the merits of the case and disagreements among conservative legal analysts. But then comes this remarkable passage which I’m going to quote at length …
Setting aside the merits, it is impossible to ignore the broader political context in which this is all unfolding — and it’s another reason why Trump might lose in court.
Donald Trump is very unpopular with the American public right now, and polls have consistently shown widespread opposition to his tariffs in particular.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s own approval rating is hovering near an all-time low after years of high-profile victories for conservatives and Republicans, including the overruling of Roe v. Wade and the unprecedented decision last summer granting Trump himself immunity from criminal prosecution.
So far this year, the court’s Republican appointees have largely let Trump have his way as he has shuttered federal agencies and fired federal officials in apparent violation of decades of laws passed by Congress. (The Trump administration claims that none of this matters because the president has the inherent constitutional authority to do these things if he wants.)
Against this backdrop, it would be a truly remarkable thing to see a Supreme Court that is this deeply unpopular with the public step in and bail out a president that is also deeply unpopular with the public — particularly on a highly salient public policy initiative that Americans themselves know and largely oppose.
This is all accurate. But there’s no way it would have been published before the results were in Tuesday night. That did underline the depth of unpopularity. But the piece itself is clear that this was all known, all the data was in on Monday. As I wrote yesterday, “the biggest impact of last night’s result may be to collapse D.C.’s collective denial about the sheer scale of Donald Trump’s unpopularity.”
An election results with fairly predictable results shouldn’t meaningfully impact a crooked Republican court majority’s decision over a technical point of law. At least there’s no clear and direct reason why one should impact the other. There’s no reason that a fairly predictable election result should rearrange current conventional wisdom about the political moment. But it does. A lot of this stuff is simply not literal and direct.