As we can see, the New York State civil judgment against Donald Trump, totaling roughly $450 million, and Trump’s seeming inability to post a bond for the amount in order to appeal the judgment, is the real deal. But it has also reminded us, brought us back to the Russian nesting doll, the infinitely layered onion of Donald Trump not being real. The effort to collect the judgment spins us right back around to why there is a judgment in the first place. Trump is now fundraising off threats to “seize Trump Tower.” The New York Post is headlining the same basic idea. But as a friend reminded me yesterday evening, Trump doesn’t own Trump Tower.

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.

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.