MONDAY: The Great I-Am has struck again!

MONDAY, AUGUST 18, 

Also, the cluelessness of NAME WITHHELD: By the time he was 12 years old, President Trump was already being mocked for his grandiosity by his older brother.

He'd been given the nickname "The Great I-Am." Or at least, so said the president's niece, Mary Trump, in Chapter 3 of her best-selling family memoir, Too Much and Never Enough:

CHAPTER THREE
The Great I-Am

[...]

Encouraged by his father, Donald eventually started to believe his own hype. By the time he was twelve, the right side of his mouth was curled up in an almost perpetual sneer of self-conscious superiority, and [his brother] Freddy had dubbed him “the Great I-Am,” echoing a passage from Exodus he’d learned in Sunday school in which God first reveals himself to Moses.

He was soon shipped off to military school. As we discussed at length in late April, Chapter 3 of the book is built around the development of those personality traits. 

For the record, Mary Trump is a clinical psychologist. That doesn't mean that her assessments of her famous uncle simply have to be right.

With respect to her famous uncle, it isn't entirely clear that the grandiosity ever left. Today, the president is running the D.C. police. He's also reshaping traditions of congressional elections, and he's directing a sweeping program of "mass deportation" which may, or may not, match what he said he wanted to do when he ran for election last year.

As of today, he's also decided to stage a crusade to change the method by which many Americans vote. As usual, he's advancing his new ambition with the standard barrage of claims which are baldly inaccurate—claims he may even believe.

There he's gone again! Earlier today, CNN's Daniel Dale offered the ten millionth useless fact-check:

Fact check: Trump falsely claims US is only country that uses mail-in voting

President Donald Trump made a series of false claims about elections in a Monday social media post in which he pledged to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and voting machines—including an inaccurate assertion that states have to run elections in the manner the president tells them to.

Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s comments.

“We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.”

False. Dozens of other countries use mail-in voting, as CNN and others have pointed out when Trump has made such claims before. These countries include Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Switzerland.

And so on from there.

That's the start of Dale's report on this latest blizzard of misinformation. With respect to the ludicrous claim that no one uses mail-in balloting but us, the president repeated that ludicrous claim as part of a rambling side trip during this afternoon's Oval Office press event with President Zelensky.

He's off on his latest crusade, trailing absurd misstatements behind him. Once an idea gets into his head, almost nothing can get it out.

With that, we'll briefly revisit another of the topics cited above:

The logic of district construction:

In last year's presidential election, Candidate Trump received 38.3% of the vote in California. That worked out to roughly 40% of the two-party vote.

A similar two-party distribution prevailed during last year's congressional elections in California. In those elections, Republican candidates received 39.2% of the votes across the state. Democratic candidates received 60.5%.

Once again, this raises a basic question:

If forty percent of some state's population belongs to Political Party B, is that political party entitled to something approaching 40% of the seats in that state's congressional delegation? 

An outcome like that might seem to be fair, but the long-standing answer to that question is no. Indeed, if the political blend of that state's population is spread evenly across the breadth of the state, Political Party A may end up winning every House race by a 60-40 margin.

Political Party B may end up with no congressional seats at all! There's nothing in American law or tradition which entitles the less popular party in a state to any House seats at all.

We mention this because of NAME WITHHELD, one of our dumbest "cable news" savants. The gentleman keeps insisting that California must already be heavily "gerrymandered" because its current House delegation includes 43 Democrats and only 9 Republicans.

Was gerrymandering involved in that outcome? We have no idea. That said, the breakdown of the California delegation follows the basic demographic pattern of the state, in which less heavily populated eastern parts of the state are more heavily Republican.

As you can see in the map at this link, the nine (9) Republican seats mainly come from those Republican inner-state regions. The population of the rest of the state is heavily Democratic, as are almost all members of Congress from those districts.

Under normal rules and procedures, we know of no reason to assume that something was wrong with the way California's independent districting commission created the 52 districts which produced that lopsided delegation.

NAME ITHHELD lacks the first freaking clue about the logic of this situation. He does know what he's supposed to say as a major figure on the Fox News Channel. Within our pitiful public discourse, the cluelessness about this basic matter is never going to end.

Now we're engaged in a great civil war about mail-in balloting itself! No one votes that way but us, The Great I-Am is now saying again. 

This is who and what we actually are! So is the silence of the various lambs at the various major news orgs of our self-impressed but unimpressive Blue American nation.

Mary Trump wrote a dangerous book. As we've noted in the past, everyone agreed to avoid those parts of her best-selling book!