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awprokop.bsky.social
Senior Politics Correspondent, Vox
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Back in May 2024, Trump told donors that, if he won, he'd expel any foreign student who protested Israel from the US. "We're going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years," he said. This probably should have been taken more seriously at the time. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

You're not behaving, JD, I'm calling the teacher

Would probably have been an amazing book if he'd had access to two more years of groupchats, though

Columbia gave in to Trump rather than suing because they figured there were too many ways he could claw back more funds... *and* because "the school believed there was considerable overlap between needed campus changes and Trump’s demands." www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

IMO, the Democratic Party made a mistake by throwing out their entire platform and messaging strategy and dictating that candidates are now only allowed to support proposals made in the book "Abundance."

I took neoliberalism as saying "government needs to get out of the way." I take Abundance as saying "government needs to get out of *its own* way."

Well I would at least be curious to see the counterfactual world of how "progressive Econ policy WITHOUT the biggest inflation in decades" played out. (Of course in practice, both before and after that inflation, progressive intellectual energy was devoted to downplaying concerns about it.)

The shift in opinion from "progressive/city governance is basically good or at least headed in the right direction" to "progressive/city governance is a miserable failure" has been really dramatic over the past decade.

Heritage Foundation paper mentions that some critics of elite universities want to tax their endowments, but argues that's a bad idea because its precedent could be used for a broader (gasp) wealth tax www.heritage.org/sites/defaul...

1980-2005: Center / Right Dominance 2005-2020: The Era of Rising Progressive Ambitions 2021-2024: Backlash and progressive disillusionment 2025: ??? www.vox.com/2024-electio...

I suspect one dynamic that explains this apparent incoming cave (and the lack of a lawsuit from Columbia for what seems like the clearly illegal revocation of their funds) is that the university's trustees likely agree with many of Trump's demands www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

The rumor in DC is that Ferguson is pretty openly hoping for Trump make him a judge

A key thing about the Tea Party is that in addition to being an anti-Obama movement it broke from the Bush-era GOP consensus on several issues — spending, bailouts, immigration — in an effort to rebrand the GOP as a "new" party. Curious whether a similar phenomenon will unfold on Dem side

There are too many bitter public online feuds among right influencers to keep track of at this moment. They won and they've defeated "woke" and now they're turning on each other.

Judges have been handing Elon and DOGE a series of defeats. But I'm reminded of the first Trump Administration, when the travel ban was quickly blocked. Trump officials responded by just doing a new version of it that was better tailored to hold up legally. One eventually did.

An important caveat to judge's new ruling against Elon re: USAID. The ruling does *not* order the re-hiring of mass fired USAID personnel or restarting of cancelled contracts. It says those decisions apparently went through USAID chain of command. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

A practical problem for Dems is: When they say economically populist things, rich people and businesspeople freak out. Hence why Harris backed down here. Trump in contrast had greater "freedom" to say economically populist things because the rich thought he was faking it/ were happy to get tax cuts

Should've made five such arguments, would've raised their success chances to 92% by this very legit math

Tesla has now lost basically all of the rebound in its price that Trump's South Lawn Showroom provided.

The two things that most surprised me in Shor 2024 post-mort: 1.) Size of shift of naturalized immigrant voters against Dems 2.) Size of shift of young voters (esp. men) against Dems (Knew both were happening to some degree, magnitude is bigger than I thought) www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/o...

I'm surprised Trump doesn't think Les Miz should be cancelled for glorifying student activist protests, but maybe he thinks it has a happy ending.

Bondi, Blanche, and Bove (good law firm name) all signed this

Alternative read: the poll shows that most of Trump's policies are unpopular, except for his immigration policies, which (so far) have been popular. It also shows Trump rapidly losing independents, his approval numbers rely on support from Republicans.

Love it or hate it, the existence of the filibuster has been extremely consequential this year in restricting GOP’s legislative options and forcing them to rely on reconciliation + exec power for their actual whole agenda. (This CR was not their agenda. It’s keeping the lights on.)

I don’t really buy that Spike Jonze intended this to be what was happening with the A.I. in HER, but the possibility does make the movie more interesting to me boxd.it/97mr07

The best case scenario for this is that this was a genuine mistake that House Rs refused to budge on because conceding the possibility of amendments would interfere with their efforts to jam the Senate. And that with the CR gone it can now be handled uncontroversially. Fingers crossed…

I don't think Elon cares about legal authority. In part for that reason I don't think we know what he'd cook up during a shutdown. Pre 1/20, did anyone predict even 5% of what he's done so far? The shutdown would be a practical opportunity for him -- a trial run for a much smaller fed workforce

Here's every CNN/SSRS poll of Trump's net approval on the economy taken while he's been in office. Things have changed. www.vox.com/politics/403...

Seeing claims that Harry Reid would've fought harder/better. In my recollection the most similar situation he faced was the Iraq war funding fights in 2007. Activists demanded no war funding unless there was a withdrawal deadline, but Bush refused. Ultimately Reid gave in and dropped his demand.

They actually only shut down the government once under a Dem president this century and it was when they had a House majority

Yeah so this happened again

Dunno how things will turn out. But I'm reminded of when it briefly looked like Dems were going to prolong Trump's impeachment trial by calling witnesses, after base pressure. They were fighting! But in truth they didn't think that fight would achieve anything. So, before long, the deal got cut