The mailbag posts from electoral-vote are proving to have interesting little nuggets of information.

Sunday Mailbag:

Trump:

R.A.G. in Luverne, MN, writes: Speaking from experience, my hearing went out at the age that Donald Trump is now. I see many of my behaviors then being exhibited by TCF now—the head twisting, the neck stretching, the deer-in-the-headlights look and, especially, the left-field responses to misheard questions. His bad hearing is exacerbating what appears to be frontotemporal dementia and, as empathetic people, we need to show concern for his well being by starting a GoFundMe page so that he can afford to buy some decent hearing aids to ameliorate some of his suffering.

B.W.S. in Pleasant Valley, NY, writes: As a TV news production assistant in an earlier life, I can shed some light on Donald Trump's use of quotation marks in his social(?) media posts: It's an old teleprompter convention. Unlike cue cards, where you can noticeably increase the size of certain text, or draw outlines around the letters or underline them or whatever, prompting systems don't really have any good way of indicating inflection—which words a reader should emphasize. Even for those devices that might have been capable of displaying bold, underlines or italics, they all would have made the screen too busy and confusing. Quotation marks were an easy fix; every keyboard had them, they were relatively small and unobtrusive, but still hard to miss, couldn't be mistaken for anything else, and they had the added advantage of being portable to any other system in the world without patches.

So Trump, having been a media personality since time out of mind, just instinctively writes like everything is going to be on TV eventually. It's almost like a tragic, backwards version of The Truman Show.

T.S. in Seattle, WA, writes: You wrote about Donald Trump lying. I don't believe he lies the same way past politicians have lied.

I'd like to pose a possibility here: that Trump does not "lie," but instead he subscribes to a self-help system by which he can create reality by believing in it and speaking his views with conviction.

This is similar to the "prosperity gospels" or the book The Secret, which advocate for the idea.

Trump lives in a rarified world where, if he says "many people are saying X," there are tons of fawning sycophants around him who will go on TV and say X, which enables him to create reality. He also has tons of enablers and employees whose job it is to make his ramblings real. This is part of why he can never back down, why he uses sharpies or altered photos of a person's knuckles to make things he said in the past "true."

If this is correct, this would explain the key difference between him and someone like Marco Rubio, who lies but doesn't believe it.

Tariffs:

G.A. in Santa Cruz, CA, writes: You have often wondered if there is any plan behind the Trump trade wars. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick just said the quiet part out loud. The goal is to eliminate income tax for all but the top 10% of earners and replace the lost income with tariffs. The numbers do not add up, but since when have Republicans worried about numbers? They can run in 2026 or 2028 on a platform of eliminating income tax. That will sound great to low-information voters who do not realize that tariffs are effectively a regressive sales tax that disproportionately impacts the lower/middle class. In this context, the goal is to collect as much revenue as possible from tariffs, which means make them absurdly high (which he is doing).

J.D. in Concord, NH, writes: The New Hampshire State Capitol, located in downtown Concord, hosts protests of all kinds. "Nazis" are not an uncommon sight. These wannabe Nazis are always obnoxious and usually carry a large provocative sign of some sort. This week, the "Nazi" sign said "TRUMP LOVES EPSTEIN"

He's definitely losing his base...

I especially love this idea.

J.L. in Albany, NY, writes: Regarding the escalating War of the Gerrymanders, I can think of one way to defuse this whole thing: Change the Apportionment Act of 1929.

The House currently has 435 members. There's nothing in the Constitution that says it needs to be 435, though. This was set by the Apportionment Act of 1929. Another bill from Congress could change this.

Back in 1929, when this bill was passed, the number of people per representative was, at minimum, 22,765. Suppose we set the House to have N members per state, where N was the state's population divided by 22,765. Suddenly, California would have 1,733 members, Texas would have 1,375, New York would have 873, and so on. (Yes, I figured out the numbers. I'm a math geek!) The House would swell to almost 15,000 members. This would definitely need to be addressed, but most members could cast votes and attend meetings remotely until better accommodations are made.

The large number of representatives would make gerrymandering difficult to impossible. Even if you could squeeze out 5 more representatives from Texas, what difference would that make in a count of 15,000?

We could combine this with eliminating districts entirely. So Texas wouldn't have 1,375 districts. Instead, the Republican Party and Democratic Party would each produce a list of 1,375 candidates. If the Republicans won [X] seats, then the first [X] on their list would get seated. If the Democrats won [Y] seats, then they'd seat [Y] people.

The parties would need broad support across the state to get as many candidates seated as possible. Appealing to extreme views in "Small Town A" might mean the loss of far more votes in "More Moderate Town B."