Left Jabs

Let me start by saying I will be watching the FIFA World Cup, no matter how politically disgraceful it ends up being. I’m used to it. I watched the one in Qatar in 2022, and the one in Russia back in 2018. So yes, I’m morally compromised. Yes, I’ve been thoroughly sportswashed. Yes, I’m watching anyway. That said, “politically disgraceful” is a more-than-apt description for how the tournament is already shaping up. But first, let’s review for Americans who still don’t get it. The World Cup soccer tournament — a month-long event — is landing in cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico next June, whether we like it or not. And we might not. There are all sorts of storylines one could follow between now and then, none of them having to do with the actual game of soccer. One of my favorites is the bromance of Trump and Gianni Infantino, the president — some say king — of FIFA, world soccer’s governing body. There’s a reason I bring this up now, because t...

  Last week began with Trump giving up on the Epstein files — yup, we heard about that on Monday. It ended Friday with Marjorie Taylor Greene announcing her resignation from Congress. Between those two bookends we got a blizzard of WTF moments, mostly centered around the snowballing Epstein scandal. What we seem to be witnessing, in real time, is the disintegration of Trump’s hold on the Republican Party. More than that, we’re watching the party enter into a sort of every-man-for-himself mode, in which all the thugs, scammers, and imbeciles who have propped Trump up for so long are now headed for the exits. Or, as my friends at the Professional Left podcast call it, the lifeboats. And why wouldn’t they? The good ship Trump is sinking in front of their eyes. He’s deteriorating both physically and mentally, and the questions about his health will only get louder and harder for his toadies to explain away. He will aggravate this by spewing rants that get more un...

By now, we’ve had a whole week to absorb what we might call the “Great Cave,” and its rather stunning ripple effects. We’ve watched the story morph from a devastating betrayal by Democrats to a devastating train wreck for Republicans, all in just a few news cycles. At every point I’ve tried to make sense of what’s happened, though it hardly seems to matter anymore. The effect has overtaken the cause. But here, nonetheless, is my take. Yes, it’s all speculation on my part, and we may never get the whole story, but still. When it first came out that eight senators — seven Democrats, one independent — were voting with Republicans to end the shutdown, the howls of agony could be heard coast-to-coast. And for good reason. It appeared that these senators were cravenly accepting defeat, just as victory seemed in their grasp. But was it really? Victory would have meant, more than anything else, saving the Obamacare subsidies, whose expiration will soon push health in...

  I n the run-up to last Tuesday’s election, it was hard to avoid the overpaid pundits repeating the oldest and laziest clichés in the pundit handbook: “Democrats need to move to the center.” “Democrats are out of touch with voters.” “Democrats can’t just talk about Trump and expect to win.” As it turns out, they don’t, they’re not, and they most definitely can, respectively. But while the election blew those clichés to bits, the “Democrats-in-disarray” story remains a staple of modern journalism. In the week since the election the same pundits, not content to have been wrong before it, have moved on to stories with headlines like “ Mamdani’s Victory Is Less Significant Than You Think” and “Election Wins Tuesday Won’t Ease a Divided Democratic Party’s Troubles.” One of the more obvious purveyors of this slop has been, no surprise, the New York Times , which is trying desperately to gin up a Democrat-versus-Democrat narrative to carry them into the next ele...

  I was sitting on my porch, in what has traditionally been a working-class suburb of Detroit. I was handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, some of whom were dressed as the Grim Reaper. I couldn’t help thinking how appropriate. How predictive of what could happen to many of their parents when the sun went down on Halloween, then dawned the next morning on the real horrors that Republicans have just inflicted on the American population. We’ve been waiting for that population to wake up and smell the fascism for forty years at least. But as of this week, the stink is unmistakable, and the wake-up call is grim indeed. As of this week, two simultaneous catastrophes — both man made and totally unnecessary — descend upon us, and the destruction being wrought by Republicans can no longer be shrugged off, even by Republicans. As of this week — barring some deal that is not now in sight — SNAP payments will be suspended, dooming many millions of people to serious ...

  I remember thinking that I should have brought more cash to Buenos Aires. It’s not that I intended to spend any more money on the vacation than I’d planned. It’s just that there were these nice young men, seemingly on every corner, offering me triple the official exchange rate for any American dollars in my wallet. If we’d thought to bring a few thousand in cash, a lot of our vacation could have been paid for. This was a dozen years ago, but little has changed. The Argentine peso has long been a poster child for unstable currencies, and outrageous inflation has been a fact of life for much of modern history. This is why those young men were so eager to swap pesos — which would be worth less the next day — for dollars that would presumably hold their value for a while. Now Trump has offered to do basically the same thing, but on a far grander scale. He’s promising a $20 billion “currency swap” with the Argentine government. Just as I did, he’s swapping good...