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Vacancies are a Red Herring
Wednesday April 24th, 2024 at 3:20 PM

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Note: I originally wrote this post in November 2021 for UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, where I was policy manager at the time. Here is a link to the original post. I’m crossposting it here because the below chart no longer shows up in the original post, and several people have requested a version where they can see the relevant data.

Every time I do a talk or a panel about housing and homelessness, I get some version of the following question: “Can’t we just house people in all those vacant apartments?”

The premise of the question is that while it may seem like California is suffering from a housing shortage, our high-cost metropolitan areas are in fact full of housing that nobody is using. Many of these homes and apartments are being held as investment properties by various nefarious actors—predatory financial institutions, money-laundering oligarchs, etc.—who, in some versions of the theory, are keeping them vacant as part of a deliberate strategy to induce artificial scarcity and inflate housing costs.

Proponents of this theory note that rental vacancies (as measured by the United States Census Bureau) exceed the number of homeless people (as measured by Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual Point-in-Time count) in many cities. For example, in 2018 the Census Bureau counted approximately 34,000 vacant units in San Francisco; a citywide 2019 Point-in-Time count found closer to 8,000 homeless people. That means there are close to four empty homes for every one unhoused San Franciscan!

It’s a nice story. The numbers lend it some plausibility, it offers us an easily identifiable villain, and—most importantly—it offers us a convenient escape from the present homelessness crisis. Maybe we don’t need to build any additional housing, the story tells us. Maybe we don’t have to choose between ending homelessness and keeping our neighborhoods exactly the way they are. All we need to do is slot people into the housing that is already available.

Like I said, it’s a nice story. Unfortunately, it isn’t true.

The above theory—which, by way of shorthand, I’ll call the artificial scarcity theory of homelessness—is based on a misuse of the underlying data. Here is how the Census Bureau defines a vacant housing unit for the purpose of calculating its vacancy rate (emphasis mine):

A housing unit is vacant if no one is living in it at the time of the interview, unless its occupants are only temporarily absent. In addition, a vacant unit may be one which is entirely occupied by persons who have a usual residence elsewhere. New units not yet occupied are classified as vacant housing units if construction has reached a point where all exterior windows and doors are installed and final usable floors are in place. Vacant units are excluded if they are exposed to the elements, that is, if the roof, walls, windows, or doors no longer protect the interior from the elements, or if there is positive evidence (such as a sign on the house or block) that the unit is to be demolished or is condemned. Also excluded are quarters being used entirely for nonresidential purposes, such as a store or an office, or quarters used for the storage of business supplies or inventory, machinery, or agricultural products. Vacant sleeping rooms in lodging houses, transient accommodations, barracks, and other quarters not defined as housing units are not included in the statistics in this report.

The Census Bureau’s data makes no distinction between long-term and short-term vacancies. A unit that is unoccupied for a period of one or two weeks counts the same as a unit that is being held perpetually empty. In fact, the above definition explicitly includes newly built units for which the developer or property manager have not yet found an occupant. As soon as the windows, doors and floors are in place, a house transitions from being under construction to “vacant.”

We simply don’t know how many of the units in the Census count are being held vacant over the long term as investment properties. But it is worth noting that most homes and apartments go through a short period of vacancy between when they are built and when they become occupied; similarly, when a tenant moves out of an apartment, we can usually expect a brief gap in occupancy before the next tenant signs a lease. We can therefore surmise that routine, short-term vacancies represent a significant share of the overall vacancy rate. San Francisco almost certainly does not have 34,000 permanently empty units of housing just sitting around.

Furthermore, while the artificial scarcity theory significantly overstates California’s long-term vacancy rate, it also understates the scale of homelessness. That’s because the Point-in-Time count does not actually tell us how many people are homeless in a given city. Instead, as the Department of Housing and Urban Development says on its official site, the Point-in-Time count “is a count of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January.” (Emphasis mine.)

In other words, anyone who is homeless on any other night of the year—but not that one particular night—is not included in the count. Given that most people in the homeless population are not chronically homeless, that means the Point-in-Time count probably leaves out a lot of people. If we were to count the number of San Franciscans who were homeless at any point in 2019, we would probably end up with a number significantly higher than 8,000. (Furthermore, the point-in-time count is an undercount on even its own terms. Because it tracks only visibly sheltered and unsheltered people, it can miss individuals who are out of sight or in places other than shelters, such as hospitals and jails.)

Despite their limitations, both the Point-in-Time count and the Census Bureau’s vacancy rate are still useful. By comparing year-over-year Point-in-Time estimates, we can get a pretty good sense of whether the rate of homelessness is growing or shrinking. Similarly, we can learn a lot by looking at trends in city vacancy rates, or by comparing vacancy rates across cities.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine that the artificial scarcity theory of homelessness is correct: wealthy investors are gobbling up units in high-cost metros and leaving them vacant, thereby pushing costs even higher and forcing more people into homelessness. In other words, vacancies are driving homelessness; as a city’s vacancy rate increases, we would expect its homelessness rate to increase in tandem.

On the other hand, we would expect to see the opposite relationship if the artificial scarcity theory is wrong. Under that scenario, housing costs should be highest where the vacancy rate is lowest, because fewer vacancies indicate a lower supply of housing relative to demand. So a low vacancy rate becomes a proxy for high housing costs, and we find homelessness to be most extreme where there are the fewest empty units.

We can test which of the above theories is correct by comparing city Point-in-Time counts to vacancy rates. Lucky for us, some researchers have already done exactly that. The following chart is from an upcoming book by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Aldern called, appropriately enough, Homelessness is a Housing Problem:

Dot charts comparing the rental vacancy rate vs PIT count for cities (left) and counties (right)

What we see in this chart is the exact opposite of what the artificial scarcity theory tells us should be happening: the homelessness rate appears to be highest in the cities where rental vacancy rates are lowest. The second story—that high-cost cities like San Francisco have unusually low vacancy rates for the same reason that so many of their residents are homeless—is the correct one.

I understand the appeal of the artificial scarcity theory. While I don’t share the principled objections of many of its proponents to more housing development, there is no question that it would be nice to live in a world where we could solve homelessness without it. Building takes time and costs a lot of money, although there are ways the state could make it faster and cheaper. Furthermore, there is tremendous opposition to building more housing in the places that most need it, including (often especially) building more extremely affordable housing. If only we could end the homelessness crisis quickly, cheaply, and without grueling wars of political attrition.

The artificial scarcity theory promises a nice little workaround. It tells us that we already have all the housing capacity we need, and that we just need to make better use of it. In other words, it promises a shortcut.

Unfortunately, that shortcut is illusory. There are no shortcuts out of a genuine crisis, especially one that has been allowed to fester unchecked for decades. And we cannot adequately address a crisis unless we face up to the full magnitude of what that will demand. We cannot end the homelessness crisis without building more extremely low-income housing—and more housing in general.

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Mass graves in Gaza show victims’ hands were tied, says UN rights office | UN News
Tuesday April 23rd, 2024 at 1:14 PM

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The development follows the recovery of hundreds of bodies “buried deep in the ground and covered with waste” over the weekend at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, central Gaza, and at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City in the north. A total of 283 bodies were recovered at Nasser Hospital, of which 42 were identified. 

“Among the deceased were allegedly older people, women and wounded, while others were found tied with their hands…tied and stripped of their clothes,” said Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. 

Al-Shifa discovery

Citing the local health authorities in Gaza, Ms. Shamdasani added that more bodies had been found at Al-Shifa Hospital.

The large health complex was the enclave’s main tertiary facility before war erupted on 7 October. It was the focus of an Israeli military incursion to root out Hamas militants allegedly operating inside which ended at the beginning of this month. After two weeks of intense clashes, UN humanitarians assessed the site and confirmed on 5 April that Al-Shifa was “an empty shell”, with most equipment reduced to ashes.

“Reports suggest that there were 30 Palestinian bodies buried in two graves in the courtyard of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City; one in front of the emergency building and the others in front of the dialysis building,” Ms. Shamdasani told journalists in Geneva.

The bodies of 12 Palestinians have now been identified from these locations at Al-Shifa, the OHCHR spokesperson continued, but identification has not yet been possible for the remaining individuals. 

“There are reports that the hands of some of these bodies were also tied,” Ms. Shamdasani said, adding that there could be “many more” victims, “despite the claim by the Israeli Defense Forces to have killed 200 Palestinians during the Al-Shifa medical complex operation”.

200 days of horror

Some 200 days since intense Israeli bombardment began in response to Hamas-led terror attacks in southern Israel, UN human rights chief Volker Türk expressed his horror at the destruction of Nasser and Al-Shifa hospitals and the reported discovery of mass graves. 

“The intentional killing of civilians, detainees and others who are hors de combat is a war crime,” Mr. Türk said in a call for independent investigations into the deaths.

Mounting toll

As of 22 April, more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including 14,685 children and 9,670 women, the High Commissioner’s office said, citing the enclave’s health authorities. Another 77,084 have been injured, and over 7,000 others are assumed to be under the rubble. 

“Every 10 minutes a child is killed or wounded. They are protected under the laws of war, and yet they are ones who are disproportionately paying the ultimate price in this war,” said the High Commissioner. 

Türk warning

The UN rights chief also reiterated his warning against a full-scale Israeli incursion of Rafah, where an estimated 1.2 million Gazans “have been forcibly cornered”.

“The world’s leaders stand united on the imperative of protecting the civilian population trapped in Rafah,” the High Commissioner said in a statement, which also condemned Israeli strikes against Rafah in recent days that mainly killed women and children.

This included an attack on an apartment building in the Tal Al Sultan area on 19 April which killed nine Palestinians “including six children and two women”, along with a strike on As Shabora Camp in Rafah a day later that reportedly left four dead, including a girl and a pregnant woman.

“The latest images of a premature child taken from the womb of her dying mother, of the adjacent two houses where 15 children and five women were killed, this is beyond warfare,” said Mr. Türk.

The High Commissioner decried the “unspeakable suffering” caused by months of warfare and appealed once again for “the resulting misery and destruction, starvation and disease and the risk of wider conflict” to end. 

Mr. Türk also reiterated his call for an immediate ceasefire, the release of all remaining hostages taken from Israel and those held in arbitrary detention and the unfettered flow of humanitarian aid.

Massive settler attacks in West Bank

Turning to the West Bank, the UN rights chief said that grave human rights violations had continued there “unabated”. 

This was despite international condemnation of “massive settler attacks” between 12 and 14 April “that had been facilitated by the Israeli Security Forces (ISF)”.

Settler violence has been organized “with the support, protection, and participation of the ISF”, Mr. Türk insisted, before describing a 50-hour long operation into Nur Shams refugee camp and Tulkarem city starting on 18 April.

“The ISF deployed ground troops, bulldozers and drones and sealed the camp. Fourteen Palestinians were killed, three of them children,” the UN rights chief said, noting that 10 ISF members had been injured.

In a statement, Mr. Türk also highlighted reports that several Palestinians had been unlawfully killed in the Nur Shams operation “and that the ISF used unarmed Palestinians to shield their forces from attack and killed others in apparent extrajudicial executions”. 

Dozens were reportedly detained and ill-treated while the ISF “inflicted unprecedented and apparently wanton destruction on the camp and its infrastructure”, the High Commissioner said.

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How Casinos Enable Gambling Addicts - The Atlantic
Thursday April 11th, 2024 at 10:38 PM

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Opinion: How tenant unions are finding power in numbers to fight L.A.'s housing crisis - Los Angeles Times
Wednesday April 10th, 2024 at 4:17 PM

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Many Los Angeles residents struggle to stay in their homes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the city instituted a moratorium on evictions. Since those restrictions ended in April 2023, evictions have skyrocketed well past pre-pandemic levels. According to the L.A. city controller’s data, landlords filed 5,652 evictions in December alone.

The city’s answer is to send tenants to the courts and provide them with bare-bones legal representation. Yet few people have actually gotten access to an attorney to help them fight eviction, and even then, burdened with excessive caseloads, these lawyers negotiate measly sums in exchange for tenants’ relocation rather than fighting for them to stay in their homes.

But what if tenants fought their own battles in their own homes and in their own neighborhoods? As scholars studying the history of housing in L.A. and as organizers with the Union de Vecinos, a local branch of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, we have found that tenant unions are leading a more effective response to the region’s housing crisis.

In a tenant union, residents of an apartment complex join forces to represent their interests as a collective. Unlike the city’s delayed response to housing problems — which occurs only once residents reach the eviction stage or arrive at the courts — tenant unions are proactive. They negotiate directly with landlords and carry out protests, rent strikes, community events and other strategies to help protect their homes. And tenants get to be part of the conversation in solving the city’s housing woes.

There’s a long history of these unions leveraging their power in numbers.

In New York from 1917 to 1929, tenants used rent strikes to demand control over the quality and price of their homes — primarily by securing rent control. In our research, we discovered that by the 1960s and 1970s, poor tenants in public housing projects across the United States — from East St. Louis to San Francisco — organized. They used their collective power to push states to invest in making the projects habitable instead of just tearing them down.

Los Angeles has seen similar efforts. Since the 1990s, Union de Vecinos (neighbors’ union) has organized the primarily Latino, working-class community of Boyle Heights into committees that have used tactics such as community cleanups, rent strikes and protests to successfully fight gentrification. In 2015, Union de Vecinos helped found the Los Angeles Tenants Union, which now counts its membership across the city in the thousands and continues to win tenants the right to stay in their homes.

New local tenant union chapters have sprouted, including, most recently, among very low-income tenants living in downtown L.A.’s single-room occupancy hotels, the housing of last resort for many of the poorest Angelenos. Without consulting tenants, the city has plans to demolish SROs. But the tenants we’ve met have other ideas: organizing to demand not only that the historic hotels remain but also that they live up to their promise of providing safe, clean and healthy housing for low-income people.

We’ve seen how tenants can curb plans to destroy existing low-income and rent-controlled housing. Last year in Boyle Heights, for example, a tenant association in Union de Vecinos discovered its rent-controlled building was slated for demolition to make way for a mixed-use housing development. But the tenant association was able to push L.A. City Councilmember Kevin De León to institute an interim ordinance to halt demolitions in the neighborhood.

COVID-19 eviction moratoriums at the federal, state and local levels cracked open a window of possibility for tenants facing displacement: Temporarily protected from evictions during the pandemic, they had time to organize, putting them in a better position to fight for their homes in the future. Across the country, tenant unions have blossomed, knitted together nationally through the Autonomous Tenants Union Network.

But tenants continue to face challenges, especially in Los Angeles, where several pandemic-era renter protection programs have ended. L.A. should formalize tenants’ power over their homes by reducing landlords’ power to evict, and by using eminent domain and other means to expropriate property from slumlords and transfer legal ownership to the tenants.

The tenant association at Hillside Villa, a 124-home apartment building in Chinatown, has been demanding this for years. The L.A. housing authority was slated to buy the property and then transfer ownership to the tenants, which would have saved them from a huge rent hike that, in practice, meant a mass eviction. But the city has dragged its feet. Now residents face eviction. The city could still step in and prevent hundreds of families from losing their homes.

The city should move toward policies that yield housing to the people who already inhabit it. Tenant unions are much more effective than landlords at solving precarious housing issues by preserving and enforcing renters’ rights, ensuring good living conditions and keeping tenants housed. In the state of emergency that constitutes L.A.’s housing crisis, city and county officials should begin to listen to and work with residents, whose voices will only be growing louder. Only tenants can point the way to solutions that actually address the root causes of the housing crisis in a system that prioritizes the right to own property over the right to have a home.

Annie Powers is an organizer with Union de Vecinos and a PhD candidate in history at UCLA. Leonardo Vilchis-Zarate is an organizer with Union de Vecinos and a PhD student in Chicano/Central American Studies at UCLA. @lvilchisz

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Three students expelled following Student Accountability hearings, faculty criticize university response - The Vanderbilt Hustler
Wednesday April 10th, 2024 at 3:20 PM

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UPDATED: This piece was updated on April 6 at 1:17 p.m. CDT to include information and comments shared publicly on X by one of the expelled students.

Three students have been expelled, one suspended and 22 issued disciplinary probations following a week of preliminary hearings involving the 27 students suspended for their involvement in a sit-in protest at Kirkland Hall, according to the Vanderbilt Divest Coalition. In an April 5 email to the Vanderbilt community, Provost C. Cybele Raver shared that students have 10 days to appeal their cases, during which they are permitted access to campus and university resources.

In an open letter to Chancellor Daniel Diermeier, Raver, the Office of General Counsel and Faculty Senate President Andrea Capizzi, faculty members criticized actions taken by the administration throughout the month of March, including the distribution of interim suspensions to student protesters. As of publication, the letter has been signed by 154 professors. 

Vanderbilt Law School Associate Professor Terry Maroney, one of the letter’s signees, condemned what she said she and several faculty view as the university’s “overly punitive” disciplinary response. 

“Some of us participated in similar sit-ins in our own day; they form part of the protest lexicon. And while such civil disobedience carries consequences, the consequences our administrators have chosen — including expulsion and criminal charges — are draconian,” Maroney said. “We call on the Chancellor to change course.”

Accountability process outcomes

Preliminary hearings began on March 28 and continued through this week. Raver’s email cited the goal of the university’s student conduct policies as ensuring student safety and opportunity for success.

“After a thorough review of the incident, including examination of evidence and interviews with students, the Student Accountability, Community Standards and Academic Integrity staff issued a range of findings and sanctions that took the individual circumstances of each student’s conduct into account,” the email reads.

The university declined to share the specific number of students issued probations, suspensions and expulsions, citing federal privacy laws. However, a joint Instagram post by the Vanderbilt Divest Coalition and Columbia University’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter made this information publicly available.

“Student disciplinary outcomes are considered part of an individual student’s educational record, the contents of which are protected by federal privacy laws. We cannot release information that would make a student, or group of students, identifiable,” a university representative told The Hustler.

VDC’s post shared that all students issued disciplinary action are filing appeals for their cases. During the 10-day appeal window, students will be able to return to classes and access support for “mental health, academic progress and welfare.”

“All students are going through the appeal process to rectify these grossly oppressive decisions from administration,” the post reads.

First-year Jack Petocz, one of the students issued an expulsion, took to X to condemn the severity of the university’s response.

“Vanderbilt will let sexual assaulters walk free but expel passionate organizers,” Petocz tweeted. “I came to Vanderbilt with the dream of escaping the rampant bigotry and institutional repression I experienced in the Deep South. That dream has soured.”

The coalition has also coordinated a campus-wide walkout for April 8 at 12 p.m. CDT, beginning at Library Lawn. In their post, they criticized Chancellor Daniel Diermeier for being “notoriously cruel to student protestors,” citing his past writings on countering social activism and managing corporate reputations.

Raver thanked the Vanderbilt community for coming together to advance the university’s “educative mission” amid “difficult circumstances.”

“The gravity of this situation and these outcomes weighs heavily on those of us charged with carrying out our responsibility as leaders; we fully understand that student choices and decisions can lead to serious and costly consequences,” her email reads.

Faculty open letter

In the open letter, faculty members said they have been “deeply troubled” by the university’s actions over the past two weeks in response to student protests surrounding the administration’s cancellation of the referendum for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions amendment proposed to VSG. The letter was publicly signed by 105 faculty members, with an additional 49 who chose to remain anonymous.

“We hold a range of perspectives on this topic and on the BDS campaign at the heart of the recent protests,” the letter reads. “However, in our shared view, the administration’s response to student activism on this issue is inconsistent with Vanderbilt’s commitment to free speech and expression in a democratic society.”

The faculty expressed concern for the “suppression of student activism and speech” on campus, saying that the university has restricted student actions in ways that are “excessive and punitive.”

“The administration has confined student expression to a dwindling number of bulletin boards, locations and approved time slots, with implications that should alarm the Vanderbilt community,” the letter reads.

The letter also acknowledges the correspondence sent to Diermeier by the Metropolitan Council of Nashville, as well as the arrest of Nashville Scene reporter Eli Motycka.

“We are troubled that the administration’s suppression of student speech on campus and its treatment of a peaceful journalist have threatened Vanderbilt’s standing and reputation within the broader Nashville community and possibly beyond,” the letter reads.

The faculty members expressed support for students involved in the protests over the past month, condemning the university’s “implied characterization” of the protests as a threat to safety.

“We call on the administration to repeal all suspensions and criminal charges against the students and immediately reinstate their access to campus housing, meal plans, healthcare, and educational activities,” the letter reads. “Finally, we urge the administration to align its policies with its values regarding free speech, expression, and democratic activities, including protest.”

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Carwil Bjork-James expressed disappointment with the way the university responded to the protestors who participated in the sit-in, saying he believes leaders in a democracy should be open to disagreements.

“Chancellor Diermeier met our students not with dialogue but with security guards. And now the university has responded to a time-honored protest tactic, the sit-in, with punishment and expulsion,” Bjork-James said. “Our students stood up during a moral crisis, and we are failing them.”

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Trump’s bizarre, vindictive incoherence has to be heard in full to be believed | Donald Trump | The Guardian
Sunday April 7th, 2024 at 1:50 AM

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Donald Trump’s speeches on the 2024 campaign trail so far have been focused on a laundry list of complaints, largely personal, and an increasingly menacing tone.

He’s on the campaign trail less these days than he was in previous cycles – and less than you’d expect from a guy with dedicated superfans who brags about the size of his crowds every chance he gets. But when he has held rallies, he speaks in dark, dehumanizing terms about migrants, promising to vanquish people crossing the border. He rails about the legal battles he faces and how they’re a sign he’s winning, actually. He tells lies and invents fictions. He calls his opponent a threat to democracy and claims this election could be the last one.

Trump’s tone, as many have noted, is decidedly more vengeful this time around, as he seeks to reclaim the White House after a bruising loss that he insists was a steal. This alone is a cause for concern, foreshadowing what the Trump presidency redux could look like. But he’s also, quite frequently, rambling and incoherent, running off on tangents that would grab headlines for their oddness should any other candidate say them.

Journalists rightly chose not to broadcast Trump’s entire speeches after 2016, believing that the free coverage helped boost the former president and spread lies unchecked. But now there’s the possibility that stories about his speeches often make his ideas appear more cogent than they are – making the case that, this time around, people should hear the full speeches to understand how Trump would govern again.

Watching a Trump speech in full better shows what it’s like inside his head: a smorgasbord of falsehoods, personal and professional vendettas, frequent comparisons to other famous people, a couple of handfuls of simple policy ideas, and a lot of non sequiturs that veer into barely intelligible stories.

Curiously, Trump tucks the most tangible policy implications in at the end. His speeches often finish with a rundown of what his second term in office could bring, in a meditation-like recitation the New York Times recently compared to a sermon. Since these policies could become reality, here’s a few of those ideas:

  • Instituting the death penalty for drug dealers.

  • Creating the “Trump Reciprocal Trade Act”: “If China or any other country makes us pay 100% or 200% tariff, which they do, we will make them pay a reciprocal tariff of 100% or 200%. In other words, you screw us and we’ll screw you.”

  • Indemnifying all police officers and law enforcement officials.

  • Rebuilding cities and taking over Washington DC, where, he said in a recent speech, there are “beautiful columns” put together “through force of will” because there were no “Caterpillar tractors” and now those columns have graffiti on them.

  • Issuing an executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content.

  • Moving to one-day voting with paper ballots and voter ID.

This conclusion is the most straightforward part of a Trump speech and is typically the extent of what a candidate for office would say on the campaign trail, perhaps with some personal storytelling or mild joking added in.

But it’s also often the shortest part.

Trump’s tangents aren’t new, nor is Trump’s penchant for elevating baseless ideas that most other presidential candidates wouldn’t, like his promotion of injecting bleach during the pandemic.

But in a presidential race among two old men that’s often focused on the age of the one who’s slightly older, these campaign trail antics shed light on Trump’s mental acuity, even if people tend to characterize them differently than Joe Biden’s. While Biden’s gaffes elicit serious scrutiny, as writers in the New Yorker and the New York Times recently noted, we’ve seemingly become inured to Trump’s brand of speaking, either skimming over it or giving him leeway because this has always been his shtick.

Trump, like Biden, has confused names of world leaders (but then claims it’s on purpose). He has also stumbled and slurred his words. But beyond that, Trump’s can take a different turn. Trump has described using an “iron dome” missile defense system as “ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Whoosh. Boom.”

These tangents can be part of a tirade, or they can be what one can only describe as complete nonsense.

During this week’s Wisconsin speech, which was more coherent than usual, Trump pulled out a few frequent refrains: comparing himself, incorrectly, to Al Capone, saying he was indicted more than the notorious gangster; making fun of the Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis’s first name (“It’s spelled fanny like your ass, right? Fanny. But when she became DA, she decided to add a little French, a little fancy”).

He made fun of Biden’s golfing game, miming how Biden golfs, perhaps a ding back at Biden for poking Trump about his golf game. Later, he called Biden a “lost soul” and lamented that he gets to sit at the president’s desk. “Can you imagine him sitting at the Resolute Desk? What a great desk,” Trump said.

One muddled addition in Wisconsin involved squatters’ rights, a hot topic related to immigration now: “If you have illegal aliens invading your home, we will deport you,” presumably meaning the migrant would be deported instead of the homeowner. He wanted to create a federal taskforce to end squatting, he said.

“Sounds like a little bit of a weird topic but it’s not, it’s a very bad thing,” he said.

These half-cocked remarks aren’t new; they are a feature of who Trump is and how he communicates that to the public, and that’s key to understanding how he is as a leader.

The New York Times opinion writer Jamelle Bouie described it as “something akin to the soft bigotry of low expectations”, whereby no one expected him to behave in an orderly fashion or communicate well.

Some of these bizarre asides are best seen in full, like this one about Biden at the beach in Trump’s Georgia response to the State of the Union:

“Somebody said he looks great in a bathing suit, right? And you know, when he was in the sand and he was having a hard time lifting his feet through the sand, because you know sand is heavy, they figured three solid ounces per foot, but sand is a little heavy, and he’s sitting in a bathing suit. Look, at 81, do you remember Cary Grant? How good was Cary Grant, right? I don’t think Cary Grant, he was good. I don’t know what happened to movie stars today. We used to have Cary Grant and Clark Gable and all these people. Today we have, I won’t say names, because I don’t need enemies. I don’t need enemies. I got enough enemies. But Cary Grant was, like – Michael Jackson once told me, ‘The most handsome man, Trump, in the world.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Cary Grant.’ Well, we don’t have that any more, but Cary Grant at 81 or 82, going on 100. This guy, he’s 81, going on 100. Cary Grant wouldn’t look too good in a bathing suit, either. And he was pretty good-looking, right?”

Or another Hollywood-related bop, inspired by a rant about Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade’s romantic relationship:

“It’s a magnificent love story, like Gone With the Wind. You know Gone With the Wind, you’re not allowed to watch it any more. You know that, right? It’s politically incorrect to watch Gone With the Wind. They have a list. What were the greatest movies ever made? Well, Gone With the Wind is usually number one or two or three. And then they have another list you’re not allowed to watch any more, Gone With the Wind. You tell me, is our country screwed up?”

He still claims to have “done more for Black people than any president other than Abraham Lincoln” and also now says he’s being persecuted more than Lincoln and Andrew Jackson:

“All my life you’ve heard of Andrew Jackson, he was actually a great general and a very good president. They say that he was persecuted as president more than anybody else, second was Abraham Lincoln. This is just what they said. This is in the history books. They were brutal, Andrew Jackson’s wife actually died over it.”

You not only see the truly bizarre nature of his speeches when viewing them in full, but you see the sheer breadth of his menace and animus toward those who disagree with him.

His comments especially toward migrants have grown more dehumanizing. He has said they are “poisoning the blood” of the US – a nod at Great Replacement Theory, the far-right conspiracy that the left is orchestrating migration to replace white people. Trump claimed the people coming in were “prisoners, murderers, drug dealers, mental patients and terrorists, the worst they have”. He has repeatedly called migrants “animals”.

“Democrats said please don’t call them ‘animals’. I said, no, they’re not humans, they’re animals,” he said during a speech in Michigan this week.

“In some cases they’re not people, in my opinion,” he said during his March appearance in Ohio. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say. “These are animals, OK, and we have to stop it,” he said.

And he has turned more authoritarian in his language, saying he would be a “dictator on day one” but then later said it would only be for a day. He’s called his political enemies “vermin”: “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” he said in New Hampshire in late 2023.

At a speech in March in Ohio about the US auto industry he claimed there would be a “bloodbath” if he lost, which some interpreted as him claiming there would be violence if he loses the election.

Trump’s campaign said later that he meant the comment to be specific to the auto industry, but now the former president has started saying Biden created a “border bloodbath” and the Republican National Committee created a website to that effect as well.

It’s tempting to find a coherent line of attack in Trump speeches to try to distill the meaning of a rambling story. And it’s sometimes hard to even figure out the full context of what he’s saying, either in text or subtext and perhaps by design, like the “bloodbath” comment or him saying there wouldn’t be another election if he doesn’t win this one.

But it’s only in seeing the full breadth of the 2024 Trump speech that one can truly understand what kind of president he could become if he won the election.

“It’s easiest to understand the threat that Trump poses to American democracy most clearly when you see it for yourself,” Susan B Glasser wrote in the New Yorker. “Small clips of his craziness can be too easily dismissed as the background noise of our times.”

But if you ask Trump himself, these are just examples that Trump is smart, he says.

“The fake news will say, ‘Oh, he goes from subject to subject.’ No, you have to be very smart to do that. You got to be very smart. You know what it is? It’s called spot-checking. You’re thinking about something when you’re talking about something else, and then you get back to the original. And they go, ‘Holy shit. Did you see what he did?’ It’s called intelligence.”

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iridesce
17 days ago
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