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2 months ago | 
paulwaldman.substack.com | Paul Waldman
Thank you for reading The Cross Section, and if you find my work valuable and would like it to continue, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. Thanks. Amid the daily horrors emanating from the Trump/Musk White House, you may not have given much thought to the possibility of a rapid, nationwide economic downturn fed by hundreds of thousands of layoffs of federal workers.
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Nov 8, 2024 | 
paulwaldman.substack.com | Paul Waldman
Thank you for reading The Cross Section, and if you find my work valuable and would like it to continue, consider become a paid subscriber. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. Thanks. Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
paulwaldman.substack.com | Paul Waldman
If you’ve been wondering where the limits of assholery as an effective political strategy are, the Trump campaign may have just found it. Imagine if the “October Surprise” of 2024 turns out to be a hackish insult comic bombing on stage at a Trump rally, and turning just enough votes away from the Republican ticket to swing the election. That might or might not happen in the end.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
paulwaldman.substack.com | Paul Waldman
When Donald Trump first ran for president in 2016, some asked whether he was a fascist. The expert consensus at the time was that though he might have authoritarian impulses, it would be going too far to put him in the same basket as Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco. Ugly as his beliefs and rhetoric might have been, they were too scattered and his ignorance too genuine for it all to add up to a coherent philosophy. But we’ve come a long way since then.
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Sep 16, 2024 | 
paulwaldman.substack.com | Paul Waldman
The Republicans who enabled Donald Trump’s rise, supported him as president, and either cheered or went along willingly when he became their nominee for a third time have always had ready excuses to explain their complicity at the moments when his depravity became impossible to ignore.
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Sep 2, 2024 | 
paulwaldman.substack.com | Paul Waldman
"Kamala is brat!" If you have no idea what that means, or even if you do, the latest episode of Boundary Issues, the podcast I co-host with my sister Ayelet, is for you. Why is it that Democrats seem to be winning the war of memes in the 2024 presidential campaign, doing better at this battle of online signs and signifiers than they have in the past? And does it make a difference?
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Aug 5, 2024 | 
paulwaldman.substack.com | Paul Waldman
There are two reasons why Donald Trump and other Republicans would react to Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee for president with an eruption of race-baiting:They think it’s an effective campaign tacticThey just can’t help themselvesBoth can be true, of course, and that’s undoubtedly the case with Trump himself: Not only is he a bigot, he has an unswerving faith in the darkness of the American heart.
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Jul 26, 2024 | 
paulwaldman.substack.com | Paul Waldman
“I call her laughing Kamala,” Donald Trump recently said about his new opponent. “You ever watch her laugh? She’s crazy. You know, you can tell a lot by a laugh — she’s crazy, she’s nuts.” He’s right about one thing: You can indeed tell a lot by a laugh. And you can also tell a lot by how people react to a laugh.
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Jun 6, 2024 | 
paulwaldman.substack.com | Paul Waldman
Donald Trump has been using the word “fascist” a lot lately, precisely because it’s something he is regularly accused of being. “We’re living in a fascist state,” he says, and regularly calls his enemies “the fascists.” It seems to be an effort to do with “fascist” what he did with “fake news”: seize control of a term used against him, so it comes to mean its opposite and he is free to continue doing the thing the term was originally supposed to call attention to.
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May 31, 2024 | 
paulwaldman.substack.com | Paul Waldman
The Louisiana state legislature, where Republicans possess supermajorities in both houses, has been busy as the current session nears its end. Lawmakers repealed a law requiring that teenage workers be given lunch breaks. They classified abortion pills as “controlled substances” (though abortion is already illegal in the state in almost all circumstances). They made it illegal to get within 25 feet of police when they tell you to keep back, which will make it harder to film them.