Trump, the U.S. Midterms, and Superstitions

Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviews Rick Rosner about Trump, the U.S. midterms, fuel prices, tariffs, and polling. Rosner also reflects on number superstitions, distinguishing personal habits from beliefs about reality. The discussion explores political misinformation, mental health, and the limits of diagnosis before turning to mortality and tragedy in Los Angeles.

Rick Rosner: So let us talk about what things look like with two and a half months to go until the U.S. midterms. It has just been a massive fuck-up on Trump's part, which makes liberals hopeful about retaking the House and the Senate.

On February 28, Trump went to war against Iran and, in my view, achieved none of what he wanted. The national average gas price is now up about 50 percent from before the war, and diesel is up roughly 77 percent.

This kind of fuel-price increase immediately before a midterm is extraordinary. Out of a career of doing stupid shit, it is probably the stupidest thing Trump has ever done.

Moreover, he is not helping himself now with this flailing concentration on weird vindictiveness and self-celebration, trying to get his name on the Kennedy Center. If he cannot do that, he talks about tearing it down—just weird assholery.

Then he starts a tariff war with Canada again, with just a few months to go until the midterms. There are now additional 50 percent tariffs on certain Canadian goods, and Canada has retaliated with its own tariffs.

That is extremely stupid. For one thing, Canada is a large, resource-rich country. It has about one-ninth the U.S. population, is the second-largest country in the world by total area, and has the longest coastline of any country.

There is a lot of shit from the U.S. that Canadians enjoy, but Canadians are not necessarily going to suffer severe hardship from avoiding some U.S. goods. Plus, Canada is usually seen as a pretty inoffensive country internationally. Trump saying all this shit about Canada being terrible is just weird.

It seems obvious to a lot of Americans that something is seriously wrong with Trump. His approval numbers are extremely poor. Silver Bulletin currently has his net approval near its all-time low for his second term, although not quite at the record low.

Here is another whole topic I will hit briefly. With six and a half weeks to go until the midterms, conservative pollsters have been putting out a large number of polls that show Trump somewhat more favourably than many center- or left-leaning polls.

By my count earlier this week, right-leaning pollsters had put out 41 polls since the beginning of August, compared with only 10 from neutral or left-leaning pollsters. Depending on how a polling aggregator weights and adjusts individual pollsters, a large volume of polling from one group can affect the topline average.

I do not know exactly how much difference that makes. Maybe half a percentage point or a point in some averages. It is some more fucking bullshit.

In any case, the House has 435 seats, and all of them are up for election every two years. Different forecasting models are producing different seat estimates, with substantial uncertainty around them.

However, the higher gas prices go, and the longer they stay high, especially as the election gets closer, the more political pressure there is on the party in power.

Today, the national average for regular gas is about $4.48 a gallon. Diesel is about $6.49 a gallon, which is a new national record and roughly 67 cents above the previous AAA record of $5.816 set in June 2022.

Diesel is used to transport a huge share of goods in America. Trucks move about 73 percent of domestic freight by weight, and most heavy trucks run on diesel. So inflation isn't terrible, but it is about 3.4 percent, which is not good. All of this stuff is brutal for the Republicans.

Jacobsen: You have had superstitions around numbers in the past. It is not gematria. It is not numerology. It is just about how certain numbers feel to you, right? How have your number superstitions changed over time?

Rosner: They are durable.

Jacobsen: Why are they durable?

Rosner: Well, they change. My superstitions are grabby in an OCD-ish way. If I see something, I might pick it up. For instance, I read that four is considered an unlucky number in some East Asian cultures, so now I do not like four. I read that eight is considered a lucky number in some of those cultures, so I like eight.

For example, my bids on eBay might have ended in 88 cents. However, I do not do that anymore because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, and I realized that "88" is also used as a white supremacist and neo-Nazi symbol for "Heil Hitler." So I do not really want to use 88 anymore.

It is all nonsense, but it is stuff like that. If I read about somebody else's OCD-ish behaviour, maybe I get contaminated with it. It is similar to what happens with everybody else who has this kind of thing.

I am lucky that I do not get contaminated with the really time-consuming and brutal ones, like, "Is the stove off?" and having to check it 20 times, or having to check it an even number of times, or shit like that.

Jacobsen: Do you feel stupid about them, or do you accept, "This is how I am"?

Rosner: Yeah, this is how I am. I am lucky not to be more debilitated by it.

Jacobsen: And fundamentally, do you believe these things have any connection to the real world beyond your own psychology?

Rosner: No. No.

Jacobsen: What do you think is the dividing line between someone who thinks the universe is speaking to them through numbers and someone who has ordinary superstitions? People have superstitions about 23, seven, whatever.

Rosner: Most people do not think that deeply about their superstitions. Most people are not called on to account for their superstitions, so they do not think about whether they really have any significance.

Some people have taken it upon themselves to really think about it. However, anyway, people who have thought about it and decided that their superstitions really do mean something can get pretty extreme. I am followed by a woman on Twitter who is a flat-earther. If she tweets at me at all, it is to call me stupid. If I tweet something liberal, it is, "You are so dumb. You fall for everything."

I believe this woman may have mental-health issues, but obviously I cannot diagnose her. More broadly, the stronger your belief in your superstitions becomes, to the point where you have a whole system explaining why they provide a pathway to understanding the universe, the more concerned I would be about whether something else is going on psychologically.

When you ask AI about stuff like this, it usually distinguishes between a clinically defined delusion and a false belief shared by a peer or political group. For instance, many Trump supporters have believed that Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election, despite the lack of evidence sufficient to overturn the result.

However, sharing a false belief with your peers does not, by itself, mean that somebody clinically has a mental illness. The same applies to anti-vaxxers. They may belong to communities where certain beliefs are pervasive, and they read material that reinforces those beliefs.

If those beliefs become sufficiently rigid, idiosyncratic, or disconnected from reality, that could raise questions about a person's mental health. However, you cannot diagnose somebody just from their politics or superstitions.

I was going to guess, based on nothing, that 10 percent of MAGAs are mentally ill and maybe 3 percent or more of people on the extreme left are mentally ill. However, those are just guesses, not clinical estimates. In the general U.S. adult population, about 23 percent experience some form of diagnosable mental illness in a given year, while roughly 6 percent experience serious mental illness.

When I am talking about mental illness among people on the political fringes, though, I am thinking more specifically about delusional thinking. There is obviously plenty of mental illness away from the political fringes as well, and mental illness among people on the fringes does not have to involve delusions.

When I think about the crazy fucking MAGAs, I tend to think about delusion.

There was a horrible thing that happened a few days ago. An SUV driver allegedly went the wrong way, ran a red light, and hit a Metro bus. Two people died.

Then the news helicopters showed up. L.A. has a ton of local television news, which means we have a lot of news helicopters, plus police helicopters, depending on the incident.

While covering the wreck where two people had died, an NBC4 news helicopter crashed nearby. The reporter and pilot aboard the helicopter died, as did a person on the ground. So five people died between the two crashes. That is a particularly L.A. kind of horrible sequence of events.

Jacobsen: What is the population of L.A.?

Rosner: Los Angeles County has about 9.7 million people. The City of Los Angeles has about 3.9 million.

Jacobsen: How many people die every day in L.A.?

Rosner: If you do some rough math, with a population of around 9.7 million, even an annual mortality rate of roughly 1 percent would mean close to 100,000 deaths a year, or around 265 deaths a day across the county. That is just a rough statistical estimate.

Sometimes we know the people. A neighbour's husband died of COVID last month. Distracted drivers have run over some friends of friends. People die. Of course, many people quietly die from illnesses.

Richard “Rick” Rosner (born May 2, 1960) is an American television writer, producer, game-show writer, media personality, and high-range intelligence-test participant. His credits include Remote Control, The World’s Funniest!, Twenty-One, The Weakest Link, The Man Show, Crank Yankers, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the Grammy Awards, and the Primetime Emmy Awards. He wrote more than 1,000 credited episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, won a 2012 Writers Guild Award as part of the After the Academy Awards writing team, received multiple Writers Guild nominations, and earned a 2013 Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series. Rosner achieved the only known perfect score on Ronald K. Hoeflin’s Titan Test, ranked among the leading scorers on the Omni Mega Test, and served six years as editor of Noesis, the Mega Society journal. He earned approximately twelve years of college credit within one year and completing requirements equivalent to eight academic majors. In 2013, the World Genius Directory named him “Genius of the Year - America.” Rosner appeared on Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, was profiled by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris in First Person: One in a Million Trillion, and has spent decades developing ideas in cosmology, intelligence, science, technology, television, and culture.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a blogger on Vocal with more than 200 publications on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978–1–0692343; 978–1–0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369–6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018–7399; Online: ISSN, 2163–3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719–6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The Good Men Project, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing, comprising more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications across more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic fellowships, and currently serves on several boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20–0708028), and others.