Joe Biden’s Big Announcement

December 16, 2022

          On Thursday, Joe Biden made a “big announcement” on Twitter, as follows:

I had some MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENTS the last couple of weeks, too…

✔️ Inflation’s easing

✔️ I just signed the Respect for Marriage Act

✔️ We brought Brittney Griner home

✔️ Gas prices are lower than a year ago

✔️ 10,000 new high-paying jobs in Arizona

          While Biden’s list of accomplishments is impressive, it isn’t his usual style to publish those accomplishments on Twitter, preceded by an all-caps preface, “MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT.”

          What’s going on? Should we care?

          In short, Biden was “trolling” (mocking) a MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT that Trump promised to make on Wednesday. And yes, we should care—because (sadly) the dueling tweets give us insight into what the next eighteen months may look like for our democracy.

          Forty-eight hours ago, Trump teased his followers to expect a “major announcement” on Thursday, which turned out to be a marketing scam to promote “NFT trading cards” that depict Trump as a superhero at the unbelievably low price of $99. Before we go further, we need to discuss what “an NFT trading card” is. Most readers remember when stores sold bubble gum packs with baseball cards that kids frequently traded among themselves, usually to gain possession of the card that depicted their favorite player.

          Okay, so what is an NFT trading card? “NFT” stands for “non-fungible token,” or a fractional ownership share of a piece of property. It is similar to a cryptocurrency in that it is a unique digital identifier recorded in a “blockchain.” Ugh. So, what’s a “blockchain”? If you own a home or a used car, your title to the property is in a “blockchain” that shows the string of owners back to the original owner. Cryptocurrency adds a layer of anonymity to the chain of title by concealing the prior owners' identity —which is why drug dealers and contract killers prefer to be paid in Bitcoin.

          Owners of property can use NFTs to sell fractionalized interests in their property—physical or intangible. So, an enterprising investor could purchase Paul McCartney’s bass guitar and sell fractionalized ownership interests as an NFT. Or an artist could sell NFTs in a painting. Or someone could sell interests in a digital photograph that consists only of electronic bits stored on his computer’s hard drive.

          This brings us to Donald Trump’s “NFT trading cards.” Trump’s NFT trading cards depicting him as a superhero are nothing more than electronic bits representing a computer-generated picture of him as a superhero. For the low price of $99, his followers buy the right to claim that they “own” an interest in a collection of bits stored on an unknown computer server somewhere in the world (my guess is that the server resides in Russia).  

          In other words, they are not “trading cards” at all. They are a scam to fleece gullible Trump supporters out of $99. They are a sign that Trump views his supporters with utter contempt, as “chumps” who will send him money for phantasmagorical vaporware that they don’t understand, can’t trade, and will soon regret buying.

          If you think that NFT trading cards of Trump as a superhero are ridiculous, you are not alone. See almost any news outlet, but start here: Mother Jones, Donald Trump’s NFT Sale Is the Weirdest Thing on Social Media Today.

          What should we make of the above? First, the contrast between Biden and Trump could not be more vivid. Biden is engaged in the serious business of governing our nation, while Trump is looking for the next grift to con his followers.

          More to the point, should we view the NFT debacle as a sign of Trump’s demise as a serious contender for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination? Probably not, but it is difficult to know. For a thoughtful discussion, see Josh Marshall’s essay in Talking Points Memo, Is Trump Done?

          Josh Marshall says, in part,

Trump still has plenty of potential advantages. The more beatable he looks in the polls the more challengers he’ll draw. . . . I still don’t know that I’d bet against him. But he does continue to lose juice.

          Marshall added a coda to the above thoughts in his behind-a-paywall Editor’s Blog. Marshall writes about the possible outcomes if Trump is not the nominee:

The possible outcomes range from Trump mounting a third-party run to simply becoming a sullen and antagonistic thorn in the side of the new nominee. But even the latter, low octane route is potentially devastating in a closely fought national election, which basically all elections are today.

          We cannot assume victory in 2024, but as Marshall keenly notes, there are no easy offramps for Republicans: They can nominate a candidate they are trying to ditch. If they do ditch him, he will either run a third-party campaign that will hurt the GOP or Trump will sullenly snipe from the sidelines at whichever candidate beats him. Remember when Trump said the following about DeSantis?

If [DeSantis] did run, I will tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering. I know more about him than anybody other than perhaps his wife . . . .

          So, as Biden continues to rack up substantive victories that improve the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans, Trump wants you to buy a collection of electrons depicting him as a creepy superhero for the low, low price of only $99—but only if you act now! And the first 100 callers will receive a “Make America Great Again Again” hat for an additional shipping and handling fee of $40! Between those two candidates, who would you vote for?

Musk suspends journalists who posted publicly available LAPD police report.

          It appears that Elon Musk may be experiencing some sort of emotional or mental break. Late Thursday, Twitter began suspending journalists who report on Musk. One journalist posted a copy of a publicly available report from the Los Angeles Police Department that said “no crime reports have been filed yet” in relation to an earlier tweet by Musk claiming that a stalker had followed a car in the mistaken belief that Musk was in the car. The LAPD report raises questions about the credibility of Musk’s claim that he was under threat from a stalker.

          But that didn’t stop Musk from claiming that he was under an “assassination” threat because of the stalker and related reporting by the journalists. Twitter gave no explanation of why posting a publicly available statement by the police violates Twitter’s policies or poses a threat to Musk. See WaPo, Musk suspends journalists from Twitter, claims ‘assassination’ danger.

          Per WaPo, nine journalists from outlets including CNN, NYTimes, and WaPo have been suspended. Musk tweeted late Thursday that it was okay to criticize him “all day long but endangering my family is not.” Huh? None of the journalists were “endangering” Musk’s family. They reported on the contents of a publicly available police report.

          If your co-worker exhibited behavior similar to that of Musk, you would report that person to H.R. (or their family) to suggest an intervention or observation. Let’s hope that someone in Musk’s family is concerned enough about him to do the same.

Talking Points Memo reporting on Mark Meadows’s texts.

          As I noted earlier in the week, Talking Points Memo has obtained more than 2,000 texts to and from Mark Meadows surrounding January 6th. TPM has published twelve articles (and counting) that are available (for free) here.  The topics include calls for the imposition of martial law, the role of three dozen House members in urging Trump to overthrow the election, efforts to overturn the election in Georgia, and last-minute requests for pardons. It is a sordid tale, and TPM tells it well.

          The revelations have increased the urgency surrounding the passage of the Electoral Count Reform Act. See TPM, Following News About GOPers Role In Election Overturning, Schumer Lights Fire Under ECA Reform. Per previous reports, ECA reform is likely to be attached to the omnibus spending bill for 2023.

          Speaking of the omnibus spending bill, Congress has granted a one-week extension for passing that bill from this Friday to next—i.e., December 23, 2022. Oh, perfect! What could go wrong? See CNN Politics, Senate passes stopgap bill to avert shutdown at end of the week.

House Intelligence Committee says that Trump ignored intelligence reports of Covid threat.

          The House Intelligence Committee issued a report on Thursday that concludes Trump failed to communicate the urgency and severity of the Covid threat as reported to him by the intelligence community. See WaPo, Trump downplayed drumbeat of intelligence warnings on Covid, report finds. Per WaPo,

By February, the intelligence community “had amply warned the White House in time for it to act to protect the country. . . . Trump’s public statements over the next two months [February and March] “did not reflect the increasingly stark warnings coursing through intelligence channels,” including the president’s daily brief, available to Trump.

          The report also criticizes the intelligence community, as well:

Agencies didn’t move in the outbreak’s early days to use their clandestine sources for collecting unique, potentially useful intelligence about the unfolding situation in China, the committee found. Doing so might have provided administration leaders with more insight than was available in public health channels.

          As disconcerting as the report is, the next pandemic response will be worse if a Republican presidential candidate is elected after running on an “anti-vaccine” platform. Looking at you Ron DeSantis!

Texas AG makes chilling request for drivers license information on trans people.

          For unknown reasons, the Texas Attorney General requested that the Texas drivers license department provide a list with the number of Texas drivers who requested a change in sex identity. See Above the Law, Texas AG Paxton Wants to Build A Registry Of Trans People, But He Won't Say Why. Per ATL, Paxton’s office made the following request:

Need total number of changes from male to female and female to male for the last 24 months, broken down by month. We won’t need DL/ID numbers at first but may need to have them later if we are required to manually look up documents.

          Creating a registry of trans people in Texas is sinister. There can be no innocent explanation—and Paxton has refused to provide any information regarding his motivation. For a party that claims to stand for individual liberty, the GOP’s obsessiveness over people’s sexuality is creepy.

Language and gender.

          For those of you who lament the evolving use of “them/they” in place of him/her and he/she in English, we should recognize that English speakers have it easy. Many languages not only have gendered pronouns, but gendered nouns. For example, in French, a desk is masculine, but a chair is feminine because . . . well, for no good reason.

          The French are currently debating changes to gendered pronouns, but also to related terms that presume women are not professionals (like lawyers and doctors). See Euronews, What's the boeuf? Gender neutral pronouns spark fury of French establishment.

          While the transition to them/they is challenging in English, it is more difficult in France, where the “official” form of the language is determined by Académie Française, a body of forty “immortals” tasked with updating the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française. The “prescriptive” approach to language in France highlights why the better approach to language is “descriptive.” Rather than telling people what language “should be,” linguists should focus on what language “is.”

          By way of example, the Académie Française has opposed the recognition of the following French regional languages: Flemish, Alsatian, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Occitan, Gascon, and Arpitan. France is poorer as a nation for the failure of its “immortals” to recognize and support those languages—which are expressions of the culture, identity, and history of millions of French citizens.

          So, next time you stumble or trip over using “them” instead of him or her, remember that we have it easier than other countries facing the same issues. There is no stopping the evolution of language, so we should relax and accept it, as best we can.

          And to minimize the number of angry emails in response to the above, please note that I am not addressing issues of grammar, syntax, and style. They matter, but only in service of clarity—not as cudgels to prove a point. See, for example, Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Why Did We Stop Using 'Thou'? or, Beating people is not a good way to enact grammatical change.   

Concluding Thoughts.

          It is the weekend before the Christmas holiday in the US. Most of the political action will be in Congress as it careers toward fiscal disaster—or not. I will report on that topic as appropriate. And the January 6th Committee’s report will be issued on Wednesday, December 21st—a report that will deserve our undivided attention. But I hope that over the next two weeks we will be able to enjoy a reprieve from an exhausting year. We deserve it. So, when the news cycle permits, I will attempt to publish shorter newsletters that will afford all of us more time to focus on family, friends, and renewal.

          Have a good weekend! I will be in touch!