Here is a small bundle of updates on significant events unfolding in Israel and Gaza which are mostly out of the US headlines.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We’re seeing an ongoing — and to me, pretty comical — garbage fire at NBC News over the hiring of Ronna McDaniel (or who I guess we might call Ronna X, since her last name may be subject to ongoing contract negotiation) as a paid contributor. I’ll assume you’ve seen at least some reports on the controversy. I want to add three things. First a personal aside, second a guess about what happened and third something about the structural roots of “bothsidesist” news coverage.

In response to yesterday’s post on Ronna X TPM Reader JG said I may be missing the true elephant in the room, and by that he means something a number of others have suggested over the last 48 hours or so. That idea is that this doesn’t have anything to do with having Ronna on the air at all. She’s there to prepare for Trump’s possible return to power, an insurance policy, as it were. There’s an additional layer of this. NBC is a big corporation with a bunch of channels and entertainment brands. But it’s part of Comcast which is a huge media and telecom conglomerate with interests across various sectors of the economy. If you’re Comcast this isn’t just a matter of NBC News or NBC. You have to worry about whether Trump is going to go to war with Comcast itself, which is vulnerable on numerous business and regulatory fronts, if he gets mad at NBC News.

I guess I thought this was implicit in what I wrote yesterday. But it definitely wasn’t my emphasis. What I was focused on yesterday was how this works when you don’t have a lawless authoritarian in the White House. But when you do, well … yes, that introduces a whole new dimension to it.

We seem to have moved on, for the moment at least, from the Replace Biden!/Thunderdome Convention discourse. But a new poll out today reminds us of a key issue about Biden. Earlier this year a lot of people were operating on the assumption that the Democratic policy agenda is more popular with Americans and that President Biden is unpopular and old, both literally and metaphorically. So basically any other Democrat under 60 who’s got a little electoral success under their belt would be on course to defeating Trump, or at least doing substantially better than Biden.

In this post I’m going to suggest something that is possible but still unlikely. But it would be a big enough deal that I think it’s worth having in the back of your mind as we move into the 2024 election season. It’s become a cliche that House Republicans are beset by division, dysfunction and general comedy. In a way this has been the story for years and yet, despite the antics, total indifference to doing the actual work of governing and more, they still seem to do okay. And yet, I think there’s some argument that this Congress is in a different category. The entire 118th Congress has been one long-running shutdown drama. Mike Johnson is now effectively running the House with Democratic votes. Then there’s the indicator which is harder to brush off: a non-trivial number of Republican representatives are just quitting. In a couple cases, we’ve seen them quit without even having a new gig lined up. Apparently more may go.

Along with seven or eight other papers, which tend to be in swing or swingish states, I subscribe to The Cleveland Plain Dealer. So I get various emails from them. And one is an email that comes from their editor, Chris Quinn. I glance at these occasionally but they normally deal with local issues or issues about the paper that are more for local residents. But one came Saturday that grabbed my attention. The headline was “There aren’t two sides to facts” and, as Quinn explains, it’s an answer to Trump supporters who complain that the paper judges Trump and Biden by two separate standards.