It’s not hard to look around America today and see signs of decay, corruption and decline. I thought of this yesterday when I saw this Semafor article on Egypt’s ambitious push to transition its electrical grid to renewables. The gist is that Egypt is trying to move from getting 10% to 45% of it electricity from renewables in two years. That’s a mind-bogglingly ambitious goal. But it’s not based on ideology or high-minded goals about limiting climate change or the situation you have in the U.S. where renewables — wind and solar — are somehow considered “woke.” Egypt doesn’t have that luxury, notwithstanding being geo-politically aligned with the major fossil fuel exporters. Fossil fuels are not only pricey, they make especially developing economies vulnerable to constant price shocks, whether it’s the Ukraine War, Iran War or the inflation spike coming out of COVID. Egypt is focused on wind power. And there’s no way to hit that ambitious two-year schedule without China, building China’s soft power and economic reach at the same time the U.S. seems determined to throw ours away.

In the middle years of the Biden administration there was an idea that right-wing dominance of the media ecosystem, or simply social media breaking people’s brains, had blinded people to the fact that inflation was actually coming down fast. Indeed, by the time the 2024 election came around, inflation had come down dramatically and was close to what economists consider optimal — between 2% and 4%. (For all the ribbing economists took about predicting the COVID inflation would be “transitory” by any historical metric, it was.) Yet most people refused to believe that inflation had, in fact, been subdued. And “affordability” continues to be the political buzzword of the day going into the 2026 midterm elections. But this always struck me as a basic failure of analysis, imagining that the public at large and economists mean the same thing by inflation. They don’t. That should be obvious. And it probably is obvious to most of us. But a lot of us, including myself for at least part of the time, failed to draw out the proper conclusions.

Yesterday I noted G. Elliott Morris’s argument that extremely poor consumer sentiment in the U.S. is no mystery once you look properly at what Americans mean when they talk about prices and inflation. In short, just because prices stopped going up in the second half of Joe Biden’s presidency didn’t mean the public stopped being mad about them going up (and staying up) in the first half of his term. I’m pretty certain that this explains a lot about what sank Biden’s presidency and the dynamics of the 2024 election. But does it explain what’s happening now? When I wrote yesterday’s post, TPM Reader SB agreed, but argued that it went beyond that — that the still-declining consumer sentiment, the extremely sour public mood goes beyond the post-COVID inflation shock. It’s also about extreme wealth inequality, SB argued. Then, this morning, Paul Krugman began what he says will be a series of posts on his Substack in which he argues that while he agrees with the “excess price” framework, he’s not sure it’s a sufficient explanation.

Krugman didn’t really get into what exactly he thinks it is. As I said, he said he’ll address it in a series of posts. But the gist is that there’s a larger politico-economic explanation that goes beyond how long people stay mad about prices. Krugman says he thinks the deepening sense of economic gloom is driven by the fact that the public was upset about inflation, voted to move in a direction and then had the new guy do basically everything he could to stoke more inflation into the economy and generally whipsaw the economy in 20 different directions for a series of bizarre and obscure ideological fascinations.

It’s no great insight to say Trump’s impulsive Iran War has been a big political loser for him. Even some of his and the war’s supporters would concede that point. “Katrinas” are also wildly overdetermined and over-diagnosed in political talk. How many “Obama’s Katrinas” were there? How many did Joe Biden allegedly have? But it did occur to me this morning that it is something like that for Trump but for a specifically Trumpian reason. Donald Trump’s great super power is changing the subject. He never sticks to one racket or con until its rung out of all its juice. He’s always on to some new thing because — long before we lived in the broken world of social media — Trump has always lived in the attention economy. Attention is the great commodity. It’s even more powerful for Trump as a defensive weapon. When something isn’t going great he’s always creating some new drama, some new thing to change the subject to. But what we’re seeing now is that Trump simply cannot change the subject. The whole Iran War story is devastatingly bad for him. And he simply has no way to stop it from being the big, dominating story. He can’t make any shiny object take its place. He’s stuck, not just militarily but politically as well.

I’ve described to you many times how TPM was saved by an early shift to building a membership system. We began it at the end of 2012 and started building it in earnest in about 2014. That gave us a five or six year head start on almost everyone else. We were thus much better positioned when the collapse of the digital ad economy hit in the couple years just before the pandemic. But today I’d like to share with you another part of that transition because it intersects with a fascinating story of Trump era corruption published today in the New York Times. It’s the story of a couple Syrian-born billionaires, already in business with the Trump family, lining up Trump’s personal support to secure another vast payday. In “a sign of how powerful Mr. Trump has become,” Times reporter Eric Lipton says after laying out the basic facts of the story, “To get almost anything done in the nation’s capital requires not alienating a vexed and vengeful president, and, ideally, pleasing him.”

It’s that personalist rule I want to focus on.

And to do that let’s go back to TPM ad business.

The country is beginning to wake up to the sheer level of strategic failure of Trump’s impulsive and unilateral war on Iran. Let me start with an extended quote from a weekend article in the New York Times …

We had an illustration Tuesday night of one of the most crucial questions in our current politics and the one that will determine whether civic democracy can have a rebirth in the U.S. Gerrymandering is a bane to civic democracy because it dilutes the expression of the popular will by building district lines around partisan advantage or to diminish the power of disempowered minorities. Democrats spent much of the 2010s and 2020s fighting a legal and legislative battle against gerrymandering. But the Roberts Court has chosen to legalize every manner of gerrymandering, making the current a destructive race to the bottom.

Democrats had a choice. They could express effete outrage and a meaningless devotion to broken norms and principles and agree to wage elections on a permanently tilted plane. Or they could decide to play by the rules Republicans had forced on everyone. They did just that and it was unquestionable the right decision by every measure. It really never seemed to occur to Trump Republicans that Democrats would fight on the playbook Republicans created. There’s a special comedy to this because anyone familiar with the facts on the ground knew that Republicans had already used gerrymandering much more aggressively than Democrats. So there was much more juice in the gerrymandering lemon for Democrats if and when they decided to employ tactics Republicans have been using for more than a decade. It’s worth Democrats considering how deeply Republicans had internalized the belief that Democrats would simply never respond in kind.