Los Angeles protests, June 2025

Up until a few days ago when the Court of International Trade ruled that Trump did not have the authority to impose broad tariffs on US trading partners¹, one of the noisiest news stories was the release of the book titled Original Sin, by CNN news anchor Jake Tapper and British journalist Alex Thomson. As its subtitle conveniently informs us, the book claims to document “President Biden’s decline, its cover-up, and his disastrous choice to run again.” The “original sin,” in the authors’ view, Axios’s Mike Allen tells us, was Biden’s decision to run again. Setting aside Democratic party insiders such as Jaime Harrison and Jake Sullivan disputing key claims made in the book, and setting aside the sloppy and unclear appropriation of a term that theologians have debated since at least the time of St. Augustine, I would assert that the bigger story is Trump’s very public cognitive deterioration and its effect on what passes for policy in the current administration.

The firehosing and resilience targeting continue. Though not always strictly disinformation, the barrage of sometimes contradictory news and announcements about changes to government services and regulations that people rely on has comparable effects. If you haven’t read disinformation researcher Brooke Binkowski’s series on How to Fight Disinformation do yourself a favor and set aside some time to read it. It was written between 2020 and 2022 and its focus is primarily climate-change related, but many of the players and certainly the same techniques make an appearance, and the parallels to the current situation are extensive.

One reason I mention firehosing and resilience targeting is that it is a challenge to choose a topic to focus on in the current information environment. This week the events that probably received the most media attention (news, social, etc.) were the machinations in Congress surrounding the budget.

As the first post after Trump II inauguration this will be a little different from our recent articles. It’s a bit of patchwork rather than a true narrative thread – partly because of the firehose of executive actions and other activities, which were intended to be disorienting (and were). First we address the disinformation that there is no resistance to the administration’s anti-democratic behavior. In fact, resistance has taken the form of virtual and in-person rallies, communications to Congress, numerous lawsuits, etc. Then we recap some recommendations for coping with these “Tryin’ Times.”

Election analyses this soon after the election are nearly all based on exit polls. Exit polls are subject to “sampling bias,” meaning that members of various social or economic groups aren’t necessarily represented in the polls in the same proportion as they are in the actual population. For instance, college graduates and younger voters tend to be over-represented. Also, the overall winner of the exit poll must match the winner of the actual election, and if it doesn’t the pollster will make statistical adjustments to the results, which can further exacerbate the over-representation.

In 2020, for instance, exit polls underestimated the share of voters who were white without a college degree, and overestimated the share of white women who voted for Trump. As Wired’s Gilad Edelman wrote, though “None of this is to say that any of the emerging narratives about how various groups voted this year are wrong. We just don’t know yet.” More accurate analyses must wait until states finish updating their voter files – some time next year – and public information about who did and did not vote will be available. At that point studies validated against voter files will be released, such as Harvard’s Cooperative Election Study and the Pew Research Center’s validated voter survey.

As of this writing, the Cook Political Report’s National Popular Vote Tracker, which uses official sources from the states, shows Trump with 49.83% of the vote, vs. Harris’s 48.28%. A Trump victory, yes, but not the grand mandate his minions have trumpeted, and in fact – as we noted on our home page – in the history of presidential elections only five popular vote winners have prevailed by less.

So with the caveats above in mind, let’s take a look at the exit polls.