Tag: news

Amateur-Hour Crony Capitalism at the D.C. DMV

Like all state motor vehicle departments, D.C. requires residents seeking a driver license to take a written test and a driving test. The written test is what you’d expect. The driving test, as I learned this week, is a scam.

This past Monday, I called the D.C. DMV to confirm my Thursday driving test and to ask for some clarity on the type of car I could use. The DMV, understandably, does not provide vehicles for testing. But they have to really like yours. It needs to bear up-to-date inspection stickers and have an emergency hand brake between the front seats; all the windows have to work and you can’t have any lit service lights on your dashboard. If your car fails any of these criteria, you can’t use it for your road test.

When I told the DMV clerk I couldn’t find both a car that met the criteria and a friend who could go with me to the DMV, he suggested I rent a car from the “parking lot guys.”

Turns out these parking lot guys caused something of a scandal back in the early 2000s, when D.C. car owners complained to the city that DMV examiners were rejecting their perfectly good vehicles and encouraging them to rent from folks in the parking lot, who also seemed to have full run of the DMV testing center. An investigation ensued, but whatever came of it, the parking lot rentals are still plentiful and people are still being told that the cars they own and are legally allowed to drive in D.C. can’t be used in a D.C. driving test due to dumb shit like the check engine light being on and the emergency brake being on the driver’s side.

I wasn’t too keen on renting from the parking lot guys, particularly after reading that piece. So I asked the DMV clerk to reschedule me for later in the month. The next available date? June 21. (When I called on Feb. 10 about taking the driving test, the earliest date was April 14.)

Rather than wait five months after passing my written test to take my driving test, I found one of the parking lot companies online and scheduled a driver to meet me at the testing center on Thursday morning. My rental was $60 for the first hour. For twice that, he’d pick me up at my apartment. I opted for an Uber.

Coincidentally, the Uber driver who took me to the DMV testing center had a service light going on his dashboard. His car was clean and ran perfectly, and I felt incredibly safe while he drove it, but I could not resist informing him that the DMV would not accept his vehicle. This did not sit well with him. He was a Honda quality control manager for 14 years and would never drive a dangerous car. His check-engine light was only on because he replaced a tail light without detaching and reattaching the car battery.

When I arrived at the testing center, I saw six or seven guys standing next to Japanese sedans with magnetic driving school stickers slapped on the doors. Most of the cars in the parking lot were available to rent for the driving test. Very few of their rides looked safer or better maintained than the cars my friends own. I found my car and introduced myself to the driver, who slipped me a neatly folded stack of papers clipped to his license, which I was to give “to the people inside.”

The clerk accepted this paperwork absent the actual driver, charged me $10 for the road test, and then told me to go sit in whatever car I was using and wait for an examiner. When the examiner arrived, we drove an easy 10-minute loop through the neighborhood, during which I never had to parallel park or even turn around. At the end of the loop, I parked the car nose-first in an empty spot at the testing center, filled out a final form, and paid $47 to the DMV for my license, which will arrive in the mail.

Everybody was nice and the process was quicker than I anticipated, but this is a scam.

When the FBI and the D.C. Inspector General investigated the D.C. DMV testing center in 2001, they did so, according to the Washington Post, to verify “whether employees of the Department of Motor Vehicles reject the vehicles of customers seeking driving tests and improperly steer them to private businesses that rent cars on the spot for $30.” The DMV not only still does that, it does that in advance. While I get the sense that the clerk I spoke to over the phone was trying to be helpful, it would be more helpful if D.C. hadn’t needlessly imposed regulations narrowly limiting what kind of car could be used in a driving test.

These are not petty grievances.

D.C. has exactly one testing center for 700,000 residents, which is why there’s a multi-month gap between when you take your written test and when you can complete your driving test (and no, you cannot schedule the driving test before you’ve passed your written test). That’s absurd.

The check engine light, meanwhile, is one of the dumbest smart features of modern cars and a poor indicator of vehicle safety. That light could mean you need to replace a fuse or a sensor or a bulb, that you already replaced one of those things, or that your car is about to die. But because manufacturers give us only enough information to get us into a dealership, the only way to know exactly what needs checking is to fork over several hundred bucks (or more) to a mechanic or drive around and see what happens. Enough people have done the latter for all of us to know that we are not in imminent danger when riding in a car with an illuminated “check engine” light.

There’s a reason people cite their DMV when they knock government. The normal complaint is that the lack of competition allows agencies to treat taxpayers like captives, with long wait times, redundant paperwork, inefficient processing times, and poor customer service. But this parking lot racket is bad on another level. There is no evidence that the car requirements imposed by the D.C. DMV increase examiner or driver safety. The check engine light is a farce, and so is the hand brake: my examiner spent our entire ride holding a pen and clipboard. If I didn’t have the capacity to brake at a moment’s notice, she didn’t either.

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China Concerned About Relations Between North Korea and U.S., Teaser Trailer for Next Star Wars Movie: P.M. Links

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Katherine Mangu-Ward and Tyler Cowen on Robots, Death, and Complacency [Reason Podcast]

“When there’s volitility, people will latch on to some non-optimal ideas,” says George Mason economist Tyler Cowen in a conversation about his new book, The Complacent Class, with Reason magazine Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward. In a wide-ranging conversation that took place at the Mercatus Center in March, Mangu-Ward and Cowen cover automation, mobility, Donald Trump, productivity, immigration, whether complacency is a “rot” overtaking the United States, and whether we should be embarrassed by the fact that we order our dates, entertainment, groceries, and toilet paper without leaving our sofas.

Are you complacent? Before you listen to the podcast, take the quiz and find out.

Subscribe, rate, and review the Reason Podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

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On Venezuela’s Death Spiral

Authored by Steve H. Hanke of the Johns Hopkins University. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Hanke.

With the arrival of President Hugo Chávez in 1999, Venezuela embraced Chavismo, a form of Andean socialism. In 2013, Chávez met the Grim Reaper, and Nicolás Maduro assumed Chávez’ mantle.

The Grim Reaper has also taken scythe to the Venezuelan bolivar. The death of the bolivar is depicted in the following chart. A bolivar is worthless.

 

With the collapse of a currency comes inflation. By the time President Nicolás Maduro arrived, inflation was in triple digits and rising.

With the acceleration of inflation, the Banco Central de Venezuela (BCV) became an unreliable source of inflation data. Indeed, from December 2014 until January 2016, the BCV did not report inflation statistics. To remedy this problem, the Johns Hopkins-Cato Institute Troubled Currencies Project, which I direct, began to measure inflation in 2013.

The most important price in an economy is the exchange rate between the local currency and the world’s reserve currency – the U.S. dollar. As long as there is an active black market (read: free market) for currency and the black market data are available, changes in the black market exchange rate can be reliably transformed into accurate estimates of countrywide inflation rates. The economic principle of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) allows for this transformation.

I compute the implied annual inflation rate on a daily basis by using PPP to translate changes in the VEF/USD exchange rate into an annual inflation rate. The chart below shows the course of that annual rate, which peaked at 800% (yr/yr) in the summer of 2015. At present, Venezuela’s annual inflation rate is 286%, one of the highest in the world (see the chart below).

 

To stop Venezuela’s death spiral, it must dump the bolivar and adopt the greenback. This is called “dollarization.” It is a proven elixir. I know because I operated as a State Counselor in Montenegro when it dumped the worthless Yugoslav dinar in 1999 and replaced it with the Deutsche mark. I also watched the successful dollarization of Ecuador in 2001, when I was operating as an adviser to the Minister of Economy and Finance.

Countries that are officially dollarized produce lower, less variable inflation rates and higher, more stable economic growth rates than comparable countries with central banks that issue domestic currencies. Dollarization is, therefore, desirable. The chart below shows the normalized values of real GDP in terms of U.S. dollars between 2001 (index value = 100) and 2016 for nine Latin American countries. Three – Panama, Ecuador, and El Salvador – are officially dollarized, while Peru is semi-officially dollarized (read: both the Peruvian sol and USD are legal tender). In the three officially dollarized countries, real GDP growth has been more stable than and generally superior to growth in the countries that issue their own domestic currencies.

 

So, not all the news from Venezuela is grim. After all, there is a tried and true way to stabilize the economy, which is a necessary condition required before the massive task of life-giving reforms can begin. It is dollarization.

Just what does the Venezuelan public think of the dollarization idea? To answer that question, a professional survey of public opinion on the topic was recently conducted by Datincorp in Caracas. The results are encouraging. Sixty-two (62%) of the public favors dollarization. It’s time for enlightened, practical politicians in Venezuela to embrace the dollarization idea. The public already does.

This was originally posted on Forbes.

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Record High Multi-Family Construction Set To Wreak Havoc On Apartment Rents

Softening apartment rents, particularly in the massively over-priced, millennial safe-spaces of New York City and San Francisco, have been a frequent topic of conversation for us over the past several quarters…here are just a couple of recent examples:

Now, a new report from Goldman’s Credit Strategy Team, led by Marty Young, helps to highlight some of the key data points that suggest that sinking rent will likely not be just an ephemeral problem.

To start, an just like almost any bubble, sinking rents are the symptom of a massive, multi-year supply bubble in multi-family housing units sparked by, among other things, cheap borrowing costs for commercial builders.  Per the chart below, multi-family units under construction is now at record highs and have eclipsed the previous bubble peak by nearly 40%.

Goldman

 

Rents have already started to rollover but we suspect the correction has only just begun.

Goldman

 

And while much of the rent compression has come in high-cost and commodity-exposed regions…

  • Rent growth appears particularly challenged in then highest cost areas. San Francisco, CA, San Mateo, CA and New York, NY counties have seen negative rent growth over the past year, while more moderately priced counties have tended to have stronger rent growth.
  • Regions exposed to commodity sector pressures –n including oil and coal – are also seeing weaker rent growth. Apartment rents in the Houston, TX MSA fell over the past year, while rents in Dallas, TX grew.

…per the chart below, dozens of low-cost markets are also starting to experience substantial rent declines.

Goldman

 

Of course, despite all the warning signs for multi-family projects, not to mention the recent slew of retail bankruptcies which are about to flood the market with vacant commercial real estate, investors just can’t seem to get enough CMBX to satisfy their demand for ‘juicy’ 450 bps spreads.

Goldman

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US Conducts Successful Field Test Of New Nuclear Bomb

With the world still abuzz over the first ever deployment of the GBU-43/B “Mother Of All Bombs” in Afghanistan, where it reportedly killed some 36 ISIS fighters, in a less noticed statement the US National Nuclear Security Administration quietly announced overnight the first successful field test of the modernized, “steerable” B61-12 gravity thermonuclear bomb in Nevada.

In a well-timed statement, just as tensions over North Korea’s nuclear program and potential US airstrikes run wild, the NNSA said that in conjunction with the US Air Force, it had completed the first qualification flight test of B61-12 gravity nuclear bomb on March 14 at the Tonopah Test Range in Nevada.

In the press release, the NNSA said that the “non-nuclear assembly test” was dropped from an F-16 based at Nellis Air Force Base and was intended to evaluate “both the weapon’s non-nuclear functions as well as the aircraft’s capability to deliver the weapon.”

This test was the first of a series that will be conducted over the next three years to qualify the B61-12 for service. Three successful development flight tests were conducted in 2015.

“This demonstration of effective end-to-end system performance in a realistic ballistic flight environment marks another on-time achievement for the B61-12 Life Extension Program,” said Brig. Gen. Michael Lutton, NNSA’s principal assistant deputy administrator for military application. “The successful test provides critical qualification data to validate that the baseline design meets military requirements. It reflects the nation’s continued commitment to our national security and that of our allies and partners.”

The flight test included hardware designed by Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories, manufactured by the Nuclear Security Enterprise plants, and mated to the tail-kit assembly section, designed by the Boeing Company under contract with the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center. 


Phil Hoover, an engineer at Sandia National Laboratories, shows off a flight test
body for a B61-12 nuclear weapon

The B61-12 consolidates and replaces four B61 bomb variants in the nation’s nuclear arsenal. The first production unit is scheduled to be completed by March 2020.

The original B61 gravity bomb is the mainstay of the Air Force’s nuclear arsenal and one of the legs of the so-called nuclear triad, along with the intercontinental ballistic missiles deployed from either ground-based silos or oceangoing submarines. The B61 nuclear gravity bomb, deployed from U.S. Air Force and NATO bases, has almost 50 years of service, “making it the oldest and most versatile weapon in the enduring U.S. stockpile.” Numerous modifications have been made to improve the B61’s safety, security, and reliability since the first B61 entered service in 1968, and four B61 variants remain in the stockpile: the 3, 4, 7, and 11. However, the aging weapon system requires a life extension to continue deterring potential adversaries and reassuring our allies and partners of our security commitments to them.

The B61-12 LEP will refurbish, reuse, or replace all of the bomb’s nuclear and non?nuclear components to extend the service life of the B61 by at least 20 years, “and to improve the bomb’s safety,  effectiveness, and security” according to the NNSA. The B61-12 first production unit will occur in FY 2020. The bomb will be approximately 12 feet long and weigh approximately 825 pounds. The bomb will be air-delivered in either ballistic gravity or guided drop modes, and is being certified for delivery on current strategic (B-2A) and dual capable aircraft (F-15E, F-16C/D & MLU, PA-200) as well as future aircraft platforms (F-35, B-21).

President Trump has endorsed the ambitious and expensive plan to modernize the US nuclear triad, begun under his predecessor.

The March test of the B61-12 was the first in a series to take place over the next three years, with the final design review due in September 2018 and the first production unit scheduled for completion by March 2020.

Once the bomb is authorized for use in 2020, the US plans to deploy some 180 of the B61-12 precision-guided thermonuclear bombs to five European countries as follows:

  • Belgium – 20;
  • Germany -20;
  • Italy – 70;
  • Netherlands – 20;
  • Turkey -50;

… although in light of recent developments, and this weekend’s Turkish referendum which may grant Erdogan what are effectively dictatorial powers, it may consider reassessing the Turkish deployment.

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Draining the Swamp Apparently Means Hiding the White House Visitor Logs

The Trump administration won’t release White House visitor logs while Trump is in office, ending the voluntary disclosures that began under President Obama and drawing condemnation from transparency groups, who say the logs offered an incomplete but important window into outside influence in the nation’s highest political office.

TIME first reported the news Friday afternoon:

White House communications director Michael Dubke said the decision to reverse the Obama-era policy was due to “the grave national security risks and privacy concerns of the hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.” Instead, the Trump Administration is relying on a federal court ruling that most of the logs are “presidential records” and are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

Three White House officials said they expect criticism of the new policy, but believe it is necessary to preserve the ability of the president to seek advice from whomever he wants, “with some discretion.” They requested anonymity to discuss the policy before a formal announcement.

Under the Trump Administration’s directive, logs of those entering the White House complex will be kept secret until at least five years after Trump leaves office—at which point they will first be eligible to be requested by the public, press and scholars. The White House did not say who would maintain custody of the records during his time in office.

“Unfortunately, this is part of a record that has made the Trump administration’s first 100 days one of the least transparent in our history,” says Alex Howard, deputy director at the Sunlight Foundation, in an interview with Reason. “It follows a campaign where the candidate declined to disclose his tax returns, bucking one of our democratic norms, and then declared himself exempt from conflict of interest laws.”

The White House began releasing visitor logs as part of President Obama’s pledge to run “the most transparent administration in history.” The logs were maintained by the Secret Service and hosted on open.gov, a website that, as of Friday, is no longer functioning. (The Trump administration says scrapping the website will save $70,000 in taxpayer dollars by 2020. Meanwhile, his fabulous, just tremendous border wall is projected to cost $21.6 billion.)

Of course, Obama-era White House officials got around the added transparency measures by meeting off-site—often at the Caribou Coffee across the street from the White House—with lobbyists and other people whose appearance in the visitor logs would be politically awkward for the administration.

Not to mention the logs were intentionally incomplete. The Obama administration reserved the right to redact or withhold names from the visitor log as it saw fit, and it successfully defended that right in court against a group of transparency and government watchdog organizations seeking the full logs. A federal appeals court rejected their argument that the logs were subject to the Freedom of Information since they were maintained by the Secret Service, not the White House, which is largely exempt from public records requests.

Trump himself tweeted criticism in 2012 of the Obama administration’s court fights to keep its records firmly under White House control. “Why is @BarackObama spending millions to try and hide his records?” the future 45th president of the United States wrote. “He is the least transparent President–ever–and he ran on transparency.”

“We all know the Obama administration chose not to disclose when celebrities and friends of the president met with him,” Howard continued. “That said, it was still a meaningful window into who was going to the White House and who they met with.”

Howard notes that the logs showed Google’s director of public policy visited the Obama White House more than 100 times. “That’s a meaningful measure of the influence of one of the world’s top tech companies,” he says. “Whether you think that’s good or bad, it shows how influence is registered.”

As for the purported security risk, Howard says the Obama administration released 6 million visitor logs without incident, all of which are still available at the National Archives. “No one thinks Obama wasn’t able to get advice from anyone because they were releasing White House visitor logs,” he says. “If you have concerns, show me one example in the last eight years that resulted in harm.”

In a statement on the White House’s decision to stop releasing visitor logs, American Civil Liberties Union political director Faiz Shakir says “the only reasonable conclusion is to believe the Trump administration has many things it is trying to hide.”

“Trump has bullied the press when they report on him,” Shakir continues. “He has promoted the reporting of fake and outright false information. He imposed gags on federal employees in the earliest days of his administration. He has avoided disclosing his tax records, and he has avoided releasing information about his conflicts of interest.”

While the White House visitor logs weren’t as complete or transparent as the Obama administration would have had the public believe, their voluntary disclosure was, on the whole, one of the more commendable points in the administration’s otherwise spotty transparency record. The Trump administration’s decision to scrap that policy is yet another concrete sign that it will resist any effort to expose the business and ideological interests guiding its conflict-prone chief behind closed doors.

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Meet the Lawyer Who’s Suing Saudi Arabia for Financing the 9/11 Attacks

I’ve stopped calling what our government has done a cover-up. Cover-up suggests a passive activity. What they’re doing now I call aggressive deception.

– Former Senator Bob Graham, co-chair of Congress’s 9/11 Joint Inquiry

With the recent arrival of our new baby daughter, free time for reading has been in extremely short supply as of late. That said, I did find some time yesterday while she was napping to read a fascinating and infuriating article published at Politico about a New York attorney’s mission to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for its role in financing the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Longtime readers will be aware of the fact that I’ve never accepted the U.S. government’s fairytale story about how the 9/11 attacks went down, and my suspicions of deep Saudi involvement were confirmed by last year’s release of the infamous “28 pages.” Here’s an excerpt of what I wrote at the time from the post, The 28-Pages Are Way Worse Than I Thought:

continue reading

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Spend 4/20 at Reason in L.A. Talking About the Future of Drug Policy

SmokerAttorney General Jeff Sessions has called marijuana “only slightly less awful” than heroin. But with cannabis legal in 28 states and Washington, D.C., it’s clear that federal and state drug policy is at odds. Can the Trump Administration really stop marijuana legalization? How is California dealing with the uncertainty that surrounds this legal industry? What can we expect in the next four years—and beyond?

On Thursday, April 20, you are cordially invited to join Reason for a discussion of present and future drug policy with four experts in the field:

Reason.tv’s own Zach Weissmueller, who recently interviewed cannabis entrepreneurs about the future of drug policy under President Trump, will moderate this wide-ranging discussion.

Event info

Thursday, April 20. Doors open at 4:00 p.m., Panel begins at 4:20 p.m.

Reason’s Los Angeles headquarter, 5737 Mesmer Ave. 90230.

Post-panel tacos and margaritas by RASTA TACO

RSVP by Tuesday, April 18 to Mary Toledo, 310-391-2245 or mary.toledo@reason.org

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Professor Who First Predicted Trump’s Victory Just Predicted His Impeachment As Well

After his stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton in November, President-elect Trump took the time out of his transition planning to write a letter to American University Professor, Allan Lichtman, congratulating him for being the first to predict the outcome of the election even when polls declared Hillary a ‘yuge’ favorite: “Professor – Congrats – good call.”

That said, Trump may not be so enthusiastic about Lichtman’s next big prediction which he spells out in a new, soon-to-be-released book entitled “The Case for Impeachment.”  Within the new book, Lichtman, who is not a Trump fan despite his prediction, “explains how Trump threatens the institutions and traditions that have made America safe and free for 230 years.” 

Unfortunately, unlike his novel approach to predicting presidential elections, Lichtman’s “Case for Impeachment” seems to be a disappointing regurgitation of tired mainstream media narratives including treason with Russia (an argument Trump has pretty much rendered obsolete over the past week or so) and emoluments violations.  Per Politico:

Lichtman’s list of possible offenses that could get Trump to that point are familiar: charges of treason with Russia, abuse of power and emoluments violations. Lichtman also cites now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then a senator, who argued that a president could be impeached for offenses committed before he took office. Among those potential offenses, Lichtman lists Trump’s housing violations, charity problems, potential violations of the Cuba embargo and Trump University.

 

Imagine, Lichtman writes, if Trump gets Congress to lift sanctions against Russia by lying about some promise made by Vladimir Putin, or shakes the economy by lying about Bureau of Labor Statistics employment numbers.

 

It’s all part of a brief — designed to be damning — tour through Trump’s history. It includes section headings like “Trump Towers Become Vacant Lots” and “Lying His Way to the Presidency.” It eventually leads Lichtman to the conclusion that Trump might serve himself up for impeachment: “Trump’s disregard for lying in sworn testimony, examined in the context of the Bill Clinton precedent, shows how Trump’s opponents could set an impeachment trap for him through a civil lawsuit.”

Of course, Hillary and Obama were not guilty of any of the alleged offenses listed above…certainly Hillary couldn’t be accused of having “charity problems.”

AL

 

Fortunately for the Trump admin, Lichtman has some suggestions on how to avoid impeachment as well, namely pursue a liberal agenda.

Lichtman’s advice to Trump to avoid his prediction is a checklist that includes divesting, supporting the Paris Climate accord, using a fact-checker and treating women with respect. He also dares Trump to “add a shrink to the White House physicians.”

 

“Opponents will challenge your decision-making abilities and claim that they were right all along about your temperamental unfitness for the presidency, yet you have survived and thrived by defying the conventional political wisdom. Why not do it again?”

For those who missed it, below is our note on Lichtman’s original Trump prediction.

* * *

American University Professor, Allan Lichtman, has accurately predicted every U.S. presidential election since 1984 and now he’s calling 2016 for Trump.  Lichtman uses a system he calls the “Keys to the White House” which he developed after studying every election cycle from 1860 through 1980. 

Lichtman’s “Keys to the White House” are the following 13 true/false questions, where an answer of “true” always favors the re-election of the incumbent party, in this case, Hillary.  If, however, the answer to six or more of the 13 keys is “false” then the incumbent loses.

Here is how Lichtman answered his “13 Keys to the White House”:

1.  Party Mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.

Lichtman Answer:  False – “They got crushed.”

 

2.  Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.

Lichtman Answer:  True

 

3.  Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.

Lichtman Answer:  False

 

4.  Third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign.

Lichtman Answer:  False – “In his highest polling, Gary Johnson is at about 12 to 14 percent. My rule is that you cut it in half. That would mean that he gets six to seven.”

 

5.  Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.

Lichtman Answer:  True

 

6.  Long-term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.

Lichtman Answer:  True

 

7.  Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.

Lichtman Answer:  False – “No major policy change in Obama’s second term like the Affordable Care Act.”

 

8.  Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.

Lichtman Answer:  True

 

9.  Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.

Lichtman Answer:  True

 

10.  Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.

Lichtman Answer:  True

 

11.  Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.

Lichtman Answer:  False – “No major smashing foreign policy success.”

 

12.  Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.

Lichtman Answer:  False – “Hillary Clinton is not a Franklin Roosevelt.”

 

13.  Challenger charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.

Lichtman Answer:  True

We would probably be more likely to argue that the answer to almost every one of those questions is “False” but we’ll take Lichtman’s word for it. 

But, while Lichtman predicted a Trump victory, he did hedge the prediction by pointing out that Trump is unlike any candidate this country has seen since 1860. 

“Donald Trump has made this the most difficult election to assess since 1984. We have never before seen a candidate like Donald Trump, and Donald Trump may well break patterns of history that have held since 1860.”

Here is his full interview with The Washington Post:

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