Comments
GELFAND’S WORLD - Mayor Bass and President Trump both got off to rocky starts this week. The mayor announced her candidacy for reelection. The president gave a speech claiming wondrous accomplishments and throwing mud at his predecessor. Put it all together and about all you can come up with are lame attempts at jokes like “freedom of depress.”
The Mayor
Well, there is that issue of the fire. The jokes kind of write themselves, don’t they? The Karen Bass campaign is red hot, or it’s a hurricane sweeping down from City Hall.
Here’s the thing. The mayor didn’t start that fire, and it is likely that under the conditions – hundred mile per hour gusts and sustained winds in the 60s and 80s – any little spark over a hundred square mile area would have resulted in a conflagration. The Pacific Palisades and the Altadena area suffered fire storms that rivaled those of World War II, if perhaps limited to smaller areas. The mayor’s defense is hardly more than that she didn’t have anything to do with the Altadena disaster which is, after all, far from the Los Angeles city limits. We should recognize that the fires spread the way they did because the climate has changed, and we should be thinking about preserving our civilization through the next dozen such events.
What the press and the public are failing to point out is that the mayor is responsible for a different problem. As in so many previous administrations, the city once again gave in on substantial salary increases for municipal employees. The increases were originally estimated to cost about a quarter of a billion dollars a year. That money has to come from somewhere. It adds up to all kinds of little problems like the reservoir that had not been fixed, the fire trucks that were stuck in the repair yard, and of course the small size of our police department. We should take note that the mayor didn’t do anything all that different from the previous two or three, but at some point, the voters ought to demand some real leadership. And that leadership would include standing up against salary increases for one or two cycles so that the city budget can catch up. We should also take note that Democratic candidates and voters should be able to accomplish this one little bit of fiscal reality. Those who do political commenting (such as CityWatch writers) should make themselves aware of the list of City Council representatives who voted for the increases.
The King’s Speech
Oops. He’s not a king, he’s the president. But seven million Americans felt that they had to provide this reminder in our recent “No Kings” protests. Anyway, he went on national television on Wednesday night and gave a speech in which he claimed all sorts of wonderful accomplishments and called his two most recent predecessors names. I’m going to guess that his most oft quoted claim will be that prices are down. I suspect that this will not be met with jubilation by American consumers.
Perhaps Americans will also recognize that, whatever Trump says, employment is not going up in the way that it typically does under Democratic presidents.
One little thing, but it is an ongoing issue: Trump continued to refer to the opposition as “The Democrat Party.” This is a traditional insult, but people should ask Trump whether he actually knows the name of the opposition party. Or can’t he remember it?
Perhaps we need a new slang term for The Donald – something analogous to the term “his rotundity” that was applied to John Adams. I think something like “His Petulance” would apply to Trump.
Petulance really is the right word to apply in this, his second time around. Sometimes he takes it even a bit further. Wednesday night’s presidential speech went so far beyond the usually accepted bounds of presidential behavior that it would have been shocking to any previous generation. There used to be a tradition that former presidents did not comment on or criticize the current president, and the current president would avoid verbal attacks on his predecessor, even while changing policies substantially. They treated running for office – the text of the campaign – as something that stopped after the votes were counted.
Well, we didn’t get that on Wednesday. The current president makes clear that he truly hates Joe Biden and can’t say enough bad things about him. The president refers to the former president’s alleged somnolence (“sleepy Joe”) and projects his own corruption onto Biden in an ultimately unconvincing way – when was the last time that Joe Biden took money from a mass media conglomerate and then allowed an improper corporate merger? But Trump still loves to toss the term “crooked” at Biden.
So what did we hear on Wednesday, and what does it signify?
Trump says that prices are down.
He says that “Tariff” is one of his favorite words, and implies that his tariff policy is doing good things for the country.
He claims that crime was at all time highs under Biden, and now it’s under control.
Etc. etc.
Taking them in order, I’ll leave it to the voters to decide whether prices are down. I’ve been to a few restaurants and supermarkets lately and I’m seeing nothing but inflation. Even Republicans have noticed the continuing increases in the cost of food and so much else, which goes to explain why a substantial majority of Americans who respond to pollsters are downgrading Trump and the whole melange of Republican policies.
As for tariffs, the American voters are responding to pollsters’ questions in a distinctly negative manner. There may be a few unregenerate Maga types who continue to recite the party line, but when asked, they tend not to understand what a tariff actually is. Some still believe that tariffs are paid by exporting countries rather than the American companies and consumers who are buying the products. Most American consumers recognize that something that was previously OK is now broken. In special elections, they have been communicating this sentiment with their votes.
What is also evident is that Trump never seems to create a serious policy and stick to it. The proposed tariffs on Chinese goods have swung all over the place as a function of – here it comes again – Trump’s petulance.
As for crime, it has been dropping fairly steadily for the past 30 years. We’ve had our ups and downs, particularly associated with a few social upheavals associated with the Covid-19 years, but if you look at the murder trend between 1985 and 2025, you will see the difference. What’s dramatic in the curve is that under Joe Biden, the murder rate dropped by approximately half whereas Trump’s first term showed a distinctly upward trend.
We would have to concede a point regarding overall immigration under Biden and Trump, in the sense that the Biden administration accepted people asking for amnesty, whereas the current administration is a lot less accepting.
What was peculiar about the King’s Speech was the zombie affect that Trump showed. There wasn’t a lot of kindness or what we would traditionally refer to as happiness. There was a lot of anger and – this is historically surprising but unmistakable – real hatred towards his political opponents. The traditional term “opponent” is absent from Trump’s vocabulary, and those who would have filled this role in previous presidencies are now enemies, with all that this entails, including the specious attempts at indicting those people who previously indicted him. As I’ve mentioned here previously, the difference between Donald Trump and Letitia James is that Trump is guilty while James is not. That distinction – the pursuit of truth about such matters – is absent from the Trump mind.
Political commenters interpret Trumps approach to this speech as desperation born of his falling poll numbers and the increasingly serious prediction that the Republicans are going to lose control of the House of Representatives come 2026. We might ask the following question of Trump and his people: If the economy is doing so well and is expected to rebound in early 2026, then why the panic on the part of Republicans? I suspect that House Republicans recognize the economic peril, which explains why so many of them are bailing out of their burning craft. Maybe that is why the president took to the airwaves on Wednesday. Pro football announcers long ago invented a term for this kind of action. They call it “throwing up a Hail Mary.”
There’s one more bit of Trump news that is bound to get attention. Trump’s continuing attempts at tearing down the White House (well, one wing of it anyway) continues with the creation of a hallway full of presidential portraits. The traditional approach to such an activity would be to cite the years of service and perhaps one or two challenges he faced: “Franklin Delano Roosevelt served during the Great Depression and through the majority of World War II and died in office in 1945.” Instead, Trump has added captions that are direct attacks on his immediate predecessors. It will be interesting to see whether the majority of the American people recognize these attacks as the continuation of Trump’s increasingly apparent dementia.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
