Category Archives: Articles

Renee Good and Our Epistemological Crisis

January 12, 2026 – 9:21 am

Is there any hope of finding a common reality?

Wednesday in Minneapolis, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot American mother Renee Good three times, killing her. There is so much to be upset about here, it’s hard to pick a focus. So I’ll start by listing a few and justify them later.

Those things are all true and objectionable, but most of them are being well discussed elsewhere. This morning, I want to take a step back and look at something else: the ability of right-wing media to keep telling a story conflicting with widely available evidence, and the apparent belief inside the MAGA news bubble that objective reality does not exist; what you think happened is simply a matter of who you choose to believe and what evidence you choose to examine.

To me, analyzing the videos of this shooting should resemble what happens in instant-replay review during a sporting event. A questionable play has happened, and then the refs examine the available video. Typically, one or two camera angles aren’t definitive: Looking at them, you can still imagine outcomes favorable to either team. But then you get the angle that makes everything clear. (Here’s the ball, here’s the goal line. It either did or didn’t cross. Or: Here’s the shooter when the clock hits zero. The ball either is or isn’t out of his hand.) Once you’ve seen the definitive angle, the other angles don’t matter any more. You don’t go back to a previous shot and say, “Sure, but in this one the other conclusion still seems possible.”

In this case, there are several decisive moments and angles, all consistent with each other. Like this one, which is a still from a bystander video analyzed in detail by the New York Times:

Ross is the agent behind the agent by Good’s door. His feet are clearly visible to the left of the vehicle, while the front wheels are steering right. (The orientation of the wheels is hard to see in this shot, but clearer when you see the continuous video.) So two conclusions are obvious: (1) Good was not trying to run Ross over, as Noem claimed. Her wheels were pointed away from him. (2) Ross was not in any danger of being run over.

Trump posted a different video along with his claim that “Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.” It is a distant video that lets you imagine that anything could have happened — exactly the kind that the football refs would ignore. And in fact, Ross was not harmed, something that is obvious from video of him walking up and down the street seconds later. (It’s possible he was brushed as the car went by, but nothing more.)

Still, you might imagine that Ross believed he was in danger, even though he wasn’t. That conceivably might justify a self-defense claim for his first shot. (The bullet hole is on the left side of the windshield, consistent with him standing close to the left front wheel, and not directly in front.)

But there are two problems with that justification: First, he’s in front of the car because he moved there. Moving into danger so that you can use that danger as an excuse to kill someone does not usually fly in court.

But even more damning: He shoots twice more. His second shot is through the open window in the driver’s door, and his third comes from behind as Good is trying to drive away. In other words: the SUV has already missed him. Shooting as your alleged assailant runs away is not self defense.

You could also imagine that Ross got scared, panicked, and fired three times before he realized he was safe. Even if true, that’s not much of an excuse. At the very least, a guy with responses this bad should never again have a job where he carries a gun. And if I were a prosecutor, I would see what degree of murder I could make stick.

So far I’ve just been drawing clear conclusions from objective evidence. But now I’ll say what I believe in my heart really happened: ICE’s stated mission is to round up deportable immigrants, but that’s not the whole story. Another part of its mission is to intimidate American citizens, particularly citizens in majority-Democratic cities who might be inclined to protest against Trump’s policies. Intimidation is why they wear masks. (They claim it’s to avoid reprisals, but that excuse doesn’t hold water. Local police and FBI agents also investigate dangerous gangs, but they don’t wear masks. Why are ICE agents more cowardly?) And if you watch ICE behavior, it’s clear what rules of engagement the agents been given: If somebody isn’t sufficiently intimidated, escalate the confrontation until they are.

Renee Good’s primary offense was not being intimidated. When agents gave her conflicting orders, she didn’t freeze, she started to drive away. This made Ross angry, and so he killed her, with “fucking bitch” as her epitaph.

Other ICE agents know this. That’s why they are using Good’s death to further intimidate potential protesters. Here, an agent warns a woman sitting in her car not to “make a bad decision and ruin your life”. Nice life you’ve got there; be a shame if anything happened to it.

What has truly amazed me, though, is not that liars will lie. I never trusted Noem or Vance or Trump or ICE, so seeing them gaslight the country is not the least bit shocking. (A columnist for National Catholic Reporter had a different reaction to Vance: “The vice president’s comments justifying the death of Renee Good are a moral stain on the collective witness of our Catholic faith.”)

What amazes me is the number of people who simply repeat what the regime tells them, either not looking at the evidence or (even worse) looking at it and seeing what they have been told to see.

Friday evening, my church organized a vigil for Good. We stood on our town common and quietly held candles with a few signs. According to a reporter for the local online news, 77 people (some church members and some not) attended, which is not bad for a hastily organized event in a small town.

When I came home from the vigil, I saw the Facebook comments on an article that announced it. (122 at last count.) Many of the commenters repeated the regime gaslighting: Why were we holding a vigil for a woman who tried to kill a federal officer? When others disputed this characterization and pointed to the videos proving otherwise, they were answered by vague references to other videos that supposedly support the regime gaslighting. (Like this one: It does not support the regime, but apparently they looked at it and thought it did.)

I wonder what DHS expects its sheep to see in a video it posted yesterday. It shows the street the shooting happened on, during the three minutes before the shooting. There’s a snowy middle-class residential neighborhood, a lot of honking cars moving slowly, pretty much what you’d expect from the videos already out. Absolutely none of the “violent rioters” a DHS official had mentioned.

Maybe the point of such a video is just that it exists. I could point to a brick and claim that it proves I’m right about something. And if you’re sufficiently sheeplike, you might say, “It must be true. He showed me proof.”

I find all this disturbing on a deep level. Apparently, many of our fellow citizens are living in a world where there is no objective reality. There is just disagreement, and some people are powerful enough to make their version of events stick.

A second disturbing feature in the comments I saw was the claim that Good was responsible for her own death, because she didn’t obey ICE agents’ commands. First off, I’m not sure what authority ICE agents have to give commands to US citizens. But suppose they can. The penalty for civil disobedience is not summary execution. Apparently, a number of Americans think it should be.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (11)

The Venezuela attack is a constitutional crisis for the United States

January 5, 2026 – 10:07 am

Is Congress still a branch of government?

As I often point out: A one-person weekly blog is a bad place to cover breaking news. This morning, the attack on Venezuela is in that nebulous zone between breaking news and an ongoing story: US forces attacked Caracas early Saturday morning, seized President Nicolás Maduro, and apparently left. We can see the general outline of what happened, but what it all means and where it’s all going is still very cloudy.

At the same time, we can’t just wait for the dust to settle, because this is an emergency moment not just for Venezuela, but for America.

For almost a year now, Trump has been pushing Congress into irrelevancy, and the Republican majorities in both houses and in the Supreme Court have been letting him do it: Congress no longer controls government spending. Agencies set up by Congress to be independent of the President have been taken over. The deadlines laid out in the Epstein Files Transparency Act have been ignored. The Education Department established by Congress has been all but eliminated.

And now, Congress has been shoved out of any role in making decisions of war and peace.

Apologists for the administration will tell you that this is nothing new. Ever since World War II (the last war officially declared by Congress), Congress’ constitutional power to declare war has been in tension with the President’s constitutional power as commander in chief. [1] Exactly where the boundary lies — what the President can do on his own and what requires congressional authorization — has been a topic of legitimate debate. A rule of thumb has been that decisions that need to be made quickly belong to the President, while longer commitments require Congress.

Congress asserted its power in the War Powers Act of 1973, which set clear limits on presidential discretion. Subsequent presidents have refused to recognize the constitutionality of the WPA, but have generally respected its boundaries as a matter of good form and sound politics. [2] So, for example, President Bush II sought congressional approval before invading both Iraq and Afghanistan. Lesser military actions have sometimes been initiated without Congress.

But the Venezuela attack is completely outside the bounds of previous constitutional debates. Not only did Trump not seek authorization from Congress, but the congressional “Gang of 8” — leaders of both parties in both houses, who by law are required to be kept informed — did not know about the attack until it was underway. Worse, briefings by Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth actively misinformed congresspeople about the administration’s intentions. [3] In short, Trump has given Congress no role whatsoever in this decision to go to war.

If Congress were taking seriously its constitutional obligation to preserve our system of checks and balances, it would immediately launch an impeachment. But unfortunately, Republicans in Congress are mostly taking an all’s-well-that-ends-well view: Maduro was bad and he is out now. The mission itself was a stunning display of tactical brilliance. So we should all just be happy with our military success.

The problem with that view is that nothing has ended yet. Immediately, power has not passed to the opposition leaders whose election victory Maduro stole. Instead, Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodríguez has taken charge of a governing structure that is very much intact. So far, she has sent signals in both directions, denouncing the US attack as “an atrocity that violates international law”, but also saying she want the US government to “collaborate with us on an agenda of cooperation”.

Trump, meanwhile, has said several times that the US is going to “run” Venezuela now and “fix” it. No one in the administration seems to know exactly what that means, or whether American troops will have to occupy the country and take casualties. He seems to imagine that he can manage Rodriguez with threats. But even if he can, will Rodriguez’ people let her stay in power as an American puppet?

Rep. Jim Hines, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee (which makes him one of the uninformed Gang of 8) summed up pretty well:

We’re in the euphoria period of acknowledging across the board that Maduro was a bad guy and that our military is absolutely incredible. This is exactly the euphoria we felt in 2002 when our military took down the Taliban in Afghanistan, in 2003 when our military took out Saddam Hussein, and in 2011 when we helped remove Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya. … Let’s let my Republican colleagues enjoy their day of euphoria, but they’re going to wake up tomorrow morning, knowing, oh my God, there is no plan here any more than there was in Afghanistan, Iraq, or in Libya.

[1] This is one of many situations where the Founders lived in a different world than we do now. The early United States had only a minuscule standing army. So any president who wanted to go to war first had to convince Congress to raise and supply a larger force. But World War II made the US a global superpower, so recent presidents have always had large military forces to command.

[2] One of the lessons of Vietnam was that it’s hard to sustain a war without popular support. Getting Congress to buy in is usually part of a larger effort to sell a war to the general public.

[3] Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told CNN’s “State of the Union” yesterday:

I can certainly tell you that the message that [Rubio and Hegseth] sent was that this wasn’t about regime change. When they came to Congress — and they literally lied to our face — they said, “This is just a counternarcotics operation. This is about trying to interrupt the drug flow to the United States.” Right around that same time, the White House Chief of Staff [Susie Wiles] said publicly if we ever had boots on the ground in Venezuela, of course, we would have to come to Congress.

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Three days in the life of a pathetic man

December 22, 2025 – 9:55 am

Everything Trump does to aggrandize himself just makes him smaller.

From the time he came down the escalator in 2015, Donald Trump has gloried in his ability to get a rise out of people like me. All our howls of outrage, all the shocked shouts of “He can’t say that!”, have been music to his ears. But lately he’s been losing his touch. Donald J. Trump, once the greatest troll of the social-media era, has jumped the shark. The realization that he is past his sell-by date seems to be driving him ever further off the deep end.

I catch on slowly, so I didn’t notice until his Rob Reiner tweet.

I don’t know if Gen Z even knows who Reiner was, but several of his movies — The Princess Bride comes to mind — became cultural touchstones for my generation. They didn’t often make the critics’ lists of all-time greats, but you could quote them decades later and people would know what you meant.

So Monday, Reiner and his wife were found dead in their home, apparently murdered by their troubled son in the kind of tragedy that touches every parent somewhere deep: What if my kid had inner demons that all my attention, all my love, all the resources I could bring to bear, were helpless to exorcise?

And Trump’s response Tuesday morning was to make this tragic murder all about himself: Reiner died because his Trump Derangement Syndrome made the people around him crazy. The President of the United States went on at some length in that vein.

When I read that post, I was surprised to realize that it didn’t make me angry. No “How can he say that?”. No desire to strike back with some cutting insult.

His tweet wasn’t outrageous. It was pathetic. What a sick, sad little man.

The next two days backed up that assessment. Wednesday we found out about the presidential plaques now lining the colonnade connecting the White House residence to the Oval Office. It’s a newly installed “walk of fame” with plaques for Trump (twice, since he’s both the 45th and 47th president) and his predecessors.

But of course, the plaques for past presidents are not really about them, they’re about him. Andrew Jackson, for example, was “unjustifiably treated unfairly by the Press, but not as viciously and unfairly as President Abraham Lincoln and President Donald J. Trump would, in the future, be.” Ronald Reagan “was a fan of President Donald J. Trump long before President Trump’s Historic run for the White House.”

Joe Biden — who committed the unpardonable sin of kicking Trump’s ass by seven million votes in 2020 — got the nastiest treatment, with the plaque proclaiming him “by far, the worst president in American history”, and representing him not with a portrait, but with a picture of an autopen. The plaque declares that Biden became president “as a result of the most corrupt election ever” and “brought our nation to the brink of destruction”. Barack Obama is characterized as “one of the most divisive political figures in American history” who presided over “a stagnant economy” until his handpicked successor was defeated by Trump. Bill Clinton’s plaque also ends with the defeat of his wife by Trump.

Am I angered? No, I’m embarrassed for my country. Trump probably pictures himself impressing foreign dignitaries by leading them along this walk. In fact, they also will be embarrassed, like your friends are when your senile grandpa starts bragging about things they all know he never did. By casting his plaques in brass, Trump probably imagines them being read decades or even centuries from now. But of course they will vanish the instant he is gone, because they are sad and pathetic. They reflect badly on the White House and whomever its future occupants might be.

Wednesday night, Trump gave a nationally televised address. Typically, presidents demand time from the major networks either when there is something of substance to announce (like a the raid that killed Bin Laden) or some tragedy that calls for a presidential response (like like the Challenger disaster). Prior to Trump, addresses like this were non-partisan: The President was acting as president, speaking to or for all of us, and not as a politician revving up his base.

But that kind of compartmentalization is foreign to Trump’s nature. He demanded national attention Wednesday not because Americans needed to know something, but because his ego was hurting: The economy is doing badly and the American people are increasingly blaming him for it.

His 18-minute address (about the same length as JFK’s Cuban missile crisis speech) contained no news worth mentioning — no major developments, no policy initiatives. (The one apparent announcement turned out to be flim-flam: His $1776 “warrior dividend” to members of our military isn’t new money; it comes out of funds already appropriated for housing allowances.) The self-justification started in his first line: “Good evening America. 11 months ago I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it.” From there he launched into the kind of self-contradictory excuses you might hear from an 8-year-old: I wasn’t fighting, and besides, he started it.

Everything is wonderful, and the fact that it’s not wonderful is Joe Biden’s fault.

Most presidential addresses call for a fact-check, but that would not do this speech justice. A reverse fact-check would be more appropriate: Try to pick out some statements that are true. It’s a challenge. Sentence after sentence, clause after clause, is a travelogue from a fantasy world where Trump is a world-defining super-president.

What a sick, sad little man.

Thursday, his handpicked board at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts attached his name to this once-iconic institution. It’s now supposed to be known as the Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But like the Department of Defense, the Kennedy Center was named in the statute that Congress passed to establish it, so Trump and his board of puppets have no power to rename it. The Washingtonian reports:

While the board’s “change” is basically just another flashy marquee that Trump has hung up in service of his inner real-estate developer, it’s likely to accelerate the tangible decline of the Kennedy Center’s reputation. Ticket sales have nosedived since the president took over in February, which has taken a palpable toll on the performers who work there—including the National Symphony Orchestra’s principal violist, who recently spoke to Washingtonian about his experience serenading half-empty audiences.

Maddening? No, pitiable.

One frequent discussion topic among my friends is how long it will take to undo the damage Trump has done to this country. Some of it, of course, can never be undone. The children who died of hunger or disease after he gutted USAID are beyond the help of future administrations. And we’ll never get back the four wasted years in the battle against climate change (plus a little from his undoing the small progress Biden had made).

I can’t guess how many responsible presidents will have to come and go before our allies trust us again. Or how long the CDC or the Kennedy Center will need to rebuild their reputations. How long before the Presidential Medal of Freedom becomes an honor again? Or until all the demons of bigotry he unleashed can be put back in their bottles? And what about our national sense of decency? Our respect for one another? To rebuild them will require decades of nurturing.

But Trump has never really cared about that kind of thing. He cares about promoting his name and about dictating the names others use. He cares about buildings and decor and gaudy gilding.

And I think he’s starting to realize that all those things will begin vanishing the instant he loses power. No one will ever again talk about the Gulf of America, or the Department of War, or the Trump-Kennedy Center. (JFK’s niece wants to wield a pickaxe to remove Trump’s name herself.) If he leaves before his term is up — this is precisely the situation Section 4 of the 25th Amendment was written for — not even Vance will want anyone to see those ridiculous plaques. The tasteless gilding of the White House will go away, and even his over-priced ballroom will be used for some other purpose and carry some other name.

As soon as he’s gone, the whole country (even most of the people who voted for him) will start pretending he was never there.

I think he’s starting to realize that, and so he’s been turning his Trumpiness up to 11. Every effort to aggrandize himself just makes him shrink faster, but he can’t help himself. It’s like he’s constantly screaming: “You can’t forget me!”

But we will, Donald. We will.

Maybe a small reminder will survive here or there. Perhaps, as in Shelley’s Ozymandias, somewhere the ruins of a statue will survey the wasteland of his legacy.

Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (14)

A MAGA National Security Strategy

December 8, 2025 – 10:26 am

America used to frame its self-image around freedom and democracy. Now it’s about making money and preserving whiteness.

Back in July, J. D. Vance tried his hand at answering the question “What is an American?” But first he had to say what an American wasn’t, namely, someone who agrees with the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence, that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time.

I don’t think many people would argue with the over-inclusive part. As Vance observed, there are probably billions of people who agree with the founding principles of the United States. They may even identify with America the way JFK was identifying with Germany when he said “Ich bin ein Berliner.” But that doesn’t make them Americans in any real sense. Now, if they come here, work, pay taxes, and pledge their allegiance to the government defined in the Constitution, we can start to have a discussion. But until then, hardly anyone would claim they’re Americans.

Where Vance caused controversy, though, was with “underinclusive”. If your ancestors fought in the Civil War, then you “have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say [you] don’t belong”, even if you don’t believe in the founding principles. Vance seemed to be saying that you could be, say, a Nazi. But if your ancestors fought for the fascist empire of its day, the Confederacy, maybe because they wanted to defend and preserve slavery, then you’re one of us.

In short, Vance’s America isn’t fundamentally about freedom or democracy or any other grand principle.

America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.

This is sometimes described as the “blood and soil” vision of a nation, and it quickly lends itself to what the far right calls “heritage Americans”, who are English-speaking and Christian and (predominantly) White and have a “way of life” that puts men (and not women) at the top of the pyramid. As one author explains:

Non-Christians can be tolerated, as long as they acquiesce to living in an unashamedly Christian America (i.e., submitting to Christian civil law, government support for Christianity, Christian moral, civil, and religious norms and customs, etc.). At the same time, both public and private citizens should be concerned to help the Christian Church flourish in our nation, since a collapse of Christian conversions, church plants, and influence will mark the end of America.

Like so much of Trumpism, this is deniable if you find it embarrassing (as I hope many Trumpists do). Vance didn’t actually spell all that out, and besides, it’s Vance, not Trump. Who takes what J. D. Vance says all that seriously anyway? And since Trump isn’t coherent enough to enunciate such a grand vision, MAGAts don’t have to own up to the full implications of redefining America in blood-and-soil terms.

NSS-USA. Last month, though, the regime put out a document that is harder to deny: National Security Strategy for the United States of America. The text part of it is only 29 pages, but I can’t recommend you read the whole thing, because (like nearly all regime publications) it’s full of praise for how Donald J. Trump rescued America from the pit of despair Joe Biden had left it in. Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of New York, and yadda, yadda, yadda.

But beyond the huckstering, the NSS-USA does have some real content. In particular, it declares an end to the era in which the US tried to be the linchpin of a rules-based global order, and tried (at least some of the time) to promote freedom and democracy. The NSS-USA characterizes this past policy both as “permanent American domination of the entire world” and as “lash[ing] American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty”.

But we’re done with all that now. Instead, we’re going to control immigration, make money, and launch a “restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health”. And we’re not going to try to export American values like human rights that disrespect “other countries’ differing religions, cultures, and governing systems.” (So if MBS wants to lure an Washington Post journalist into a foreign embassy, kill him, and saw his body into little pieces, that’s just how they do things in Saudi Arabia, and we want to do profitable business with them. As the Emperor Vespasian supposedly said about raising funds by taxing public toilets, “Pecunia non olet“, meaning “Money doesn’t stink”, no matter where it comes from.)

Here’s what that “reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health” means:

We want an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age. We want a people who are proud, happy, and optimistic that they will leave their country to the next generation better than they found it. We want a gainfully employed citizenry—with no one sitting on the sidelines—who take satisfaction from knowing that their work is essential to the prosperity of our nation and to the well-being of individuals and families. This cannot be accomplished without growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.

That’s why we have to turn our schools into propaganda mills that expunge any real discussion of slavery, genocide against the Native Americans, or the ongoing effects of racism and sexism. The American past must have nothing but “glories”, and we must ignore discouraging trends like climate change, the increasing concentration of wealth, or anything else that might cause our people to expect something other than the Golden Age of Trump. The NSS-USA doesn’t define “strong traditional families” or “healthy children”, but I hear a lot of ominous subtext there.

The document then goes region by region. Some of its goals are the same as previous administrations. We don’t want a hostile power to control the oil of the Middle East, and we want to maintain our access to other critical resources. We want to avoid seeing some rival power dominate the world.

But then it starts to diverge. It defines what is basically an American sphere of influence in the Western hemisphere. We want countries that are “reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States”. Beyond that, we don’t care what they do to their people.

The one place where we do want to interfere in other countries’ business is with our allies.

We will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies.

However, it looks like the regime sees those “elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions” mainly in our allies’ attempts to suppress right-wing radicalism. It promotes a view of Europe’s future that sounds a lot like proto-fascist parties such as Germany’s AfD (which Vance endorses). Due to immigration and falling native birth rates, Europe faces “civilizational erasure”. But the US wants Europe to “remain European” and to “regain its civilizational self-confidence”.

Europe’s support for Ukraine against Russia (i.e., its “unrealistic expectations for the war”) is due to its “anti-democratic” aspects.

A large European majority wants peace, yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments’ subversion of democratic processes. This is strategically important to the United States precisely because European states cannot reform themselves if they are trapped in political crisis.

Again, what this “reform” consists of is not spelled out, but I suspect the model is fascist Hungary.

American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history. America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism. … We want to work with aligned countries that want to restore their former greatness.

But that’s not where NSS-USA sees Europe heading, so it wants to “cultivat[e] resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”, I suppose this means supporting blood-and-soil European parties like France’s National Rally.

If Europe refuses to defend its white cultural heritage, though, it sounds like the Trump regime wants to cut them loose.

Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter

I mean, we signed a treaty with white countries. We can’t be expected to honor it if Whites become a minority.

Other than Europe, where we want political change to preserve a native-European racial mix, we care about other countries only as potential business partners. Nothing in the document suggests that Russia is an enemy, a rival, or a threat to anyone in particular. China is a frenemy, a rival we can do business with. I would really worry if I were Taiwan, because this is how NSS-USA views it:

There is, rightly, much focus on Taiwan, partly because of Taiwan’s dominance of semiconductor production, but mostly because Taiwan provides direct access to the Second Island Chain and splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters

Taiwan is a fellow democracy and a long-standing ally, but who cares? It produces semiconductors and has a strategic location. China would have to cough up some serious bucks to induce us to turn our backs on that.

The Kagan interview. Robert Kagan is a historian of US foreign policy with whom I have often disagreed. Recently he was interviewed by Bill Kristol, who I also differ with on many things. But despite past differences, I’m fascinated by this interview [video, transcript], which takes a view-from-orbit perspective on American foreign policy. It happened before the NSS-USA came out, but anticipates much of it.

Kagan’s view, basically, is that the American-dominated post-World-War-II world order is a pleasant aberration in history, because for 3/4 of a century other potential great powers like Britain, France, Germany, and Japan have been content to live inside the American orbit. The unspoken contract was that America would take the lead in international affairs, the dollar would be the world’s reserve currency, and so on; and in return, the US would guarantee its allies’ security and wouldn’t use its preeminent position to take advantage of them.

Ordinarily, sovereign nations wouldn’t trust each other to keep a deal like that. (One cautionary historical example is the Delian League, an anti-Persia alliance that got coopted into an Athenian Empire.) But this one has held largely because of the faith all the nations had in shared liberal values like democracy and human rights.

Kagan sees that deal unraveling, largely because Trump doesn’t share liberal values and wants to take advantage.

[T]hat bargain has been exploded. And that’s why we are entering a new era, because if these countries, as is now the case, cannot rely on the American security guarantee, and I think the Trump administration has made it very clear that they can’t, that it’s sort of the intention of the Trump administration to make it clear that they can’t really rely on the United States, on the one hand.

While on the other hand, the United States now is using its superior power to demand, what is in effect, tribute from its allies in the form of these high tariffs. And so the United States is taking advantage of its overwhelming power and abusing it with its own allies. I don’t see how the alliance structure can continue under those circumstances. And now all these countries that have relied on the United States for their security are now going to have to go back to the world that existed before this unusual era in which they can only rely on themselves for security. And that has vast implications for regional geopolitics and global geopolitics that I think, again, Americans have not really begun to contemplate.

(Kagan doesn’t mention this, but from my point of view the contract has been slowly eroding for several years, as the US has used the dollar’s central role to finance enormous budget and trade deficits. In essence, the world sends us goods and we send them dollar-denominated bonds that we could devalue at any time. The Fed could, for example, create enough dollars out of nothing to redeem all the bonds.)

Needing to be able to go it alone, without the US, will probably change the nature of those countries and their governments. Kagan gives the example of Japan, which he says came out of World War I with a largely democratic pro-American government. But in the 1920s, America instituted high tariffs and strong barriers to immigration.

[P]olitics in Japan completely shifts, and then you get the Japan that invades Manchuria in 1931.

For now, our NATO allies may cut deals with Trump and pay his tariffs, while grasping that he no longer guarantees their security against, say, Russia. Short-term, they have little choice. But that’s not a stable situation.

Germany having to re-arm to the point where it can actually meet Soviet power means a completely new Germany again. Now, maybe a heavily armed Germany will still be a liberal Germany, that’s possible. But it’s clear that Germany’s neighbors are going to have the same reaction to that level of German power that they’ve always had in the past. If Japan can’t rely on the United States, it’s going to go become a nuclear weapon state. It’s going to build up its capabilities, and tensions between Japan and China are going to increase exponentially. And if there’s one thing Americans have learned over the past century is that when other great powers get into wars, the United States is immediately implicated in that. That’s the great lesson of World War II. And that’s why we created this liberal world order in the first place.

And again, that’s another thing that I think Americans just are not conscious of. A lot of Americans think we created this liberal order to fight the Soviet Union, which was not true. It was created without regard, even without anticipation that the Soviets were going to be the big problem. It was to prevent a return to effectively a multipolar world.

Trump may think the US can just collect its tribute and live happily ever after. But history has never worked that way before. Picture, for example, a re-militarized Germany led by a xenophobic far-right party like the AfD. What could possibly go wrong?

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Crime in the Cabinet

December 1, 2025 – 10:04 am

Most administrations come and go
without credible evidence of a crime by a cabinet official.
There were two this week alone.

In January of 2017, as Barack Obama was getting ready to hand the presidency over to Donald Trump after eight years in office, the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky pushed back on the “myth” that Obama had presided over a “scandal-free administration”. Von Spakovsky listed six of what he described as “some of the worst scandals of any president in recent decades”.

One — using the IRS to “target political opponents” — was nothing more than a canard that circulated inside the conservative information bubble. (The IRS was skeptical of the tax-exempt status of new political organizations founded to take advantage of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Most of the investigated organizations were conservative, but that was due to the flow of money rather than specific targeting of conservative organizations. In the end, nearly all of them were recognized as tax-exempt. More importantly: No link back to the White House was ever established.)

Others — Benghazi, government personnel records getting hacked, losing track of guns allowed into Mexico as part of a smuggling investigation, veterans dying while waiting for appointments at the VA — were screw-ups not rooted in any nefarious intentions.

Only one — the Hillary Clinton email controversy — involved any credible accusation of a crime. That was investigated by the State Department during the first Trump administration, and the report found “no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.” No one was ever charged with a crime, much less convicted.

That’s not unusual. Crime in the cabinet is exceedingly rare. In the history of the United States, no cabinet official was convicted of a crime until 1929, when former Interior Secretary Albert Fall was found guilty of taking bribes in the Teapot Dome scandal. Three Nixon cabinet members and his vice president were convicted of crimes, which is one reason why the Nixon administration is remembered for its corruption.

But the Trump administration has a way of wearing down our standards and making us forget that lawlessness high in the executive branch used to be exceptional. For example, Trump officials violate the Hatch Act (banning government officials from using their offices for political activity) just about every day. Such violations went unpunished in the first Trump administration, so hardly anyone notices any more.

Even so, it was striking to hear two independent credible accusations of crimes by Trump cabinet officials in the same week.

  • DHS Secretary Kristi Noem all but confessed to contempt of court yesterday when she admitted she knew a federal judge had ordered a plane carrying detainees to El Salvador to turn around, but she ordered it to continue.
  • Department of War Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly gave an order to “kill everybody” in an attack on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean. Two survivors clinging to wreckage were then killed in a second attack. Even if the initial attack were legitimate (which it wasn’t), killing defenseless survivors is a war crime.

The second crime is more serious than the first, so let’s start there.

“Kill everybody”. Since September 2, the Trump regime has launched at least 21 attacks against boats on the high seas that it claimed were smuggling drugs, killing at least 83 people. Friday, that story got even worse, when the Washington Post published a report that Defense Secretary Hegseth had given a “kill everybody” order for the first attack. Two people survived the initial attack and were clinging to the wreckage when a second attack was ordered. It blew the survivors to bits.

If true, that incident is a clear war crime attributed to a specific person, Hegseth.

Horrifying as that is, I think it would be a mistake to lose sight of the larger picture: If we frame this wrong, it might seem as if the air campaign against the boats was fine until helpless survivors were targeted. It wasn’t. Whether Hegseth ever said “Kill everybody” or not, under his command the Department of Defense has committed 83 murders.

No operational consideration justifies the attacks. They are not like the drone attacks that have assassinated terrorist leaders, controversial and morally dubious as those might have been. In those cases, the targets might not have stayed in known locations long enough for a strike team to get there. Or the host country might not have allowed our strike team in. Often, the choice was either to send a drone or let the terrorists go on about their business.

That’s not the case here. These boats were in open seas dominated by our Navy. They could have been seized and could not have gotten away. Whatever drugs they might have been carrying would never have reached American consumers. The crews could have been captured alive, and might have given us valuable information about their suppliers or distributors.

So attacking the boats achieved nothing that couldn’t have been achieved without killing people. Instead, the Trump regime chose to kill 83 people.

Remember: Smuggling drugs is not a capital crime. Even if the alleged smugglers had been captured and given due process, they could not have legally been sentenced to death.

It’s worthwhile to put this in a more familiar context. In Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies, Harry Callahan is a cop who chafes under the legal restrictions that bind him, and that allow criminals to eventually go free. In the first movie, Harry dares a suspect to go for a gun so that he can legally kill him.

But the second movie, Magnum Force, pits Harry against a death squad of rogue cops who start a campaign of assassinations against the city’s underworld kingpins. The squad expects Harry to join them, but rogue assassinations are too much even for him. “A man’s got to know his limitations,” Harry says.

That’s what we’re seeing now: Trump and Hegseth have turned the US Navy into a rogue assassination squad. They see enough evidence to convince themselves boats are smuggling drugs, show that evidence to no one, and kill the alleged smugglers on their own authority.

Even if you’re as tough on crime as Dirty Harry, you shouldn’t approve. A government has got to know its limitations.

The Trump regime gives two justifications: First, the end justifies the means (which is precisely what Dirty Harry’s rogue cops argued). On October 23rd, Trump made the ridiculous claim that each boat blown up saves the lives of 25,000 Americans. (This is the same kind of math that caused Pam Bondi to claim that drug seizures during Trump’s first 100 days had saved 119-258 million lives.) He postulated that if he told the Congress about the operation (not to seek their authorization, which he says he doesn’t need) “I can’t imagine they’d have any problem with it. … What are they going to do, say ‘We don’t want to stop drugs pouring in’?”

Again, those boats could be stopped without blowing them up or killing anybody.

Second, the regime stretches the definition of “war” to cover this operation. The drug cartels, say Hegseth and Trump, are like ISIS or Al Qaeda. This is typical of the way the regime perverts language, so that reminding soldiers of their legal responsibility not to follow unlawful orders is “sedition”, or individuals deciding to cross our border is an “invasion”.

Smuggling has been part of the American economy since before the Revolution, from British tea to Prohibition whiskey to Colombian cocaine. It has never been considered an act of war. Those 83 people on those fishing boats were not soldiers and were not at war with the United States. They’re murder victims.

But just for a moment, grant the claim that these attacks are part of a war. That’s where the Post’s new revelations come in: Once your enemies are disarmed and helpless, it’s a war crime to kill them. If the report is true, Pete Hegseth and those down the chain who carried out his orders are guilty of war crimes.

It appears, at least for the moment, that Republicans in Congress are not going to cover this up.

Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and its top Democrat, Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, said in a joint statement late Friday that the committee “will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”

That was followed Saturday with the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, and the ranking Democratic member, Washington Rep. Adam Smith, issuing a joint statement saying the panel was committed to “providing rigorous oversight of the Department of Defense’s military operations in the Caribbean.”

Hegseth denies giving the order and calls the Post’s report “fake news”.

And before I leave this topic, there is one more dot worth connecting: Military judge advocate generals (JAGs) are supposed to vet these legal issues for the armed forces. But Hegseth purged the JAGs back in February, about a month into his term:

Hegseth told reporters Monday that the removals were necessary because he didn’t want [the JAGs] to pose any “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.”

The plan from the beginning was to give illegal orders and remove all obstacles to carrying them out.

Kristi Noem’s contempt of court. Remember back in March, when a judge ordered DHS not to deport a bunch of Venezuelans to the CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador, including turning around planes already in the air? And DHS in fact did not turn those planes around, defying the judge’s order?

The judge, James Boasberg, has kept pursuing the question of who is responsible and whether they should be charged with criminal contempt of court. Tuesday, government lawyers answered the first question: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem made the call, after consulting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General (now federal appellate judge) Emil Bove, and DHS acting general counsel Joseph Mazzara.

Dean Blundell cuts through the spin and legalese to draw this conclusion: The regime just threw Noem under the bus. Government lawyers say they’ll be happy to answer any further questions in writing, but that “No live testimony is warranted at this time.” In other words: We’ll answer the questions we want to answer with very carefully crafted spin, and we don’t want to give the court or anybody else the ability to frame their own questions or insist on clear answers.

Blundell summarizes:

  • They’re naming Noem now.
  • They’re trying to keep her off the stand.
  • And they’re trying to keep other insiders and whistleblowers from testifying live

Noem responded yesterday in an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl:

KARL: So, I have two questions on that. First of all, is that right? Does the — does the buck effectively stop with you on this? Was this your responsibility? And had you known the judge had ordered those planes to be turned around when that order was issued?

NOEM: Yes, I made that decision. And that decision was under my complete authority and following the law and the Constitution and the leadership of this president, who is dedicated to getting dangerous criminal terrorists and gangs and cartels out of our country. And I’m so grateful that we get the opportunity every day to do that and to make decisions that will keep America safe.

KARL: Did you know about — did you know about the judge’s order when you issued your order for the planes to go (ph)?

NOEM: You know, this is an activist judge. And I understand, you know, we’re still in litigation with this against this activist judge who’s continuously tried to stop us from protecting the American people.

We continue to win. His ridiculous claims are not in good standing with the law or the Constitution. We’ll win this one as well. And we comply with all federal orders that are lawful and binding and we will continue to do that.

But I’m proud of the decision that I’ve made. Proud to work for this president each and every day to keep America safe.

So there you have it: It’s up to the regime, and not the courts, to decide what is “lawful and binding”. She disagreed with the judge, so she ignored his order. If that’s not contempt of court, I don’t know what is.

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The Vibecession and the AI bubble

November 24, 2025 – 9:51 am

Depressed consumers and record-setting stock markets don’t usually go together.
Why are they both happening now?

I recently came across these two facts:

Those two puzzle pieces are hard to fit together. Naively, you might think the S&P 500 and the Index of Consumer Sentiment measure the same thing: optimism about the economy. But apparently the economy looks very different depending on where you stand: Investors are optimistic, consumers pessimistic.

Statistics. Government statistics paint a mixed picture: GDP growth for the first half of 2025 was 2.1%, which is about what it’s been averaging for years now, and is neither good nor bad. At 4.4%, unemployment is higher than it’s been lately, but relatively low by historical standards. (It was more than twice that high during the Great Recession of 2008-2009, and briefly peaked at 13.2% early in the Covid lockdown.) Inflation is running at about 3% — rising somewhat recently and higher than the Fed target of 2%, but well below the 7% of 2021, not to mention the 13.3% of 1979. Interest rates are in similar territory: A 30-year mortgage is running around 6.11%, which is neither exceptionally high nor exceptionally low, compared to, say, 3.15% in 2021 and 7% in 2023, not to mention 16% in 1982.

For a few years now, economists have been scratching their heads and talking about the “vibecession“, an economy that feels worse than the data justifies. (Paul Krugman has written several paywalled articles on this, beginning here.) In 2024, the Biden administration was fighting consumers’ pessimistic vibes, and now the Trump administration is. (The public’s assessment of Trump’s handling of the economy is deeply negative: 40% approval vs. 57% disapproval, according to the RCP polling average.)

Stocks. The stock market’s euphoria is somewhat easier to square with the ho-hum economic numbers: The record gains don’t represent a broad optimism about the economy, but instead are concentrated in a handful of stocks that have something to do with artificial intelligence (AI). For example, a flagship consumer company like Proctor & Gamble that has little to do with AI has seen its stock fall this year, from 180 in January to about 150 now. Pepsi was at 165 early this year and is at 146 now. Target is down from 145 to 87.

Understand that I have cherry-picked those companies to make a point; most stock prices have increased somewhat this year. But a J. P. Morgan analyst wrote in September:

AI related stocks have accounted for 75% of S&P 500 returns, 80% of earnings growth and 90% of capital spending growth since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

The poster child for the AI boom is Nvidia, which you may not realize has recently become the most valuable corporation in the world, with a market capitalization (i.e., stock price per share times number of shares) that briefly topped $5 trillion at the end of October. Even more impressive: It didn’t cross the $1 trillion mark until sometime in 2023. The stock (adjusted for splits) was below $15 at the beginning of 2023 and hit $212 a few weeks ago.

Other AI heavyweights include Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Broadcom, IBM, Oracle, and a few other corporations. Not all of their stocks have soared as far and as fast as Nvidia’s, but their investors have been doing quite well.

Why don’t consumers identify with this boom? It’s simple: AI hasn’t really affected everyday life much yet, so it doesn’t feel like we’re in the middle of a generation-defining revolution. I know lots of people who have played with ChatGPT or some other AI app, and I’ve gotten used to the AI summary at the top of Google searches (though I don’t trust it yet). But I know very few people who either buy significant AI-related products or use AI tools to produce products they couldn’t produce otherwise.

At the moment, AI’s significance in the economy doesn’t justify its significance in the stock market. We’re at a point with AI similar to where we were with the internet in 2000: Most of us could check weather.com or order a cheap book from Amazon, but our lives had not yet significantly changed. Like the Internet stocks in 2000, AI stock valuations are based on visions of a future that is still to arrive.

Is AI in a bubble? That gap between investor’s visions and current reality raises a question: The Internet bubble popped, with great losses to many investors and an impact on the broader economy. Is AI also a bubble, and what will happen if it pops?

I’m currently reading 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History by Andrew Ross Sorkin. I’ve also lived through the internet bubble of 2000-2001 and the subprime-mortgage real estate bubble of 2008. One common characteristic of bubbles is that accounting departments get a bit creative near the end. Everyone is convinced the market will keep going up, and a rising market can hide a lot of corner-cutting. (As legendary investor Warren Buffet once put it: “It’s only when the tide goes out that you discover who’s been swimming naked.”)

That kind of questionable accounting is happening inside the big AI-related companies today. This post by Shanaka Anslem Perera is a bit wonky, but puts the puzzle pieces together, focusing on Nvidia.

Wednesday evening, Nvidia reported its third-quarter earnings, which were up and looked excellent. The stock surged. And then a combination of human and (ironically) machine intelligence started digging into the footnotes of that report: Nvidia was booking sales that its customers were slow to pay for. In short, it was delivering chips, but not raking in a corresponding amount of cash. Second, its inventories were growing, which contradicts the common belief that Nvidia benefits from insatiable demand.

A third tell-tale sign is the incestuous flow of capital among the various AI corporations.

Perera writes:

The structure extends throughout the AI ecosystem. Microsoft invested $13 billion in OpenAI. OpenAI committed $50 billion to Microsoft Azure cloud services over five years. Microsoft uses those committed dollars to purchase Nvidia GPUs for Azure datacenters. Nvidia books the GPU sales as revenue.

Oracle announced a $300 billion, five-year cloud infrastructure partnership with OpenAI. This partnership requires Oracle to deploy Nvidia GPUs. Oracle has pre-ordered $8 billion in Blackwell architecture chips from Nvidia. OpenAI’s ability to fulfill its $300 billion Oracle commitment depends on OpenAI generating revenue that currently runs at $3.7 billion annually—a gap of $56.3 billion per year.

The total network spans $610 billion in circular commitments, according to an analysis of SEC filings, venture capital deal databases, and disclosed partnerships. The money flows in loops: Nvidia invests in AI startups, startups commit to cloud spending, cloud providers purchase Nvidia hardware, Nvidia recognizes revenue, but the cash never completes the circuit because the underlying economic activity—AI applications generating profit—remains insufficient.

That’s a complicated diagram, and AI is an intimidating subject. But a parallel example from a more mundane industry makes the pattern easier to grasp: How Boston Chicken went broke in the 1990s.

In a nutshell, the Boston Market formula worked like this: the company raised money in the stock market and then loaned it to large, sophisticated franchisees (known as “area developers”), who used the funds to open lots of Boston Market stores in a short time.

These developers then paid the company a franchise fee for each new store, royalties on food sales and interest on the loans. So right away, the Boston Market operation looked hugely profitable. That boosted the stock, which gave the company yet more cheap capital to lend to developers, to open yet more stores.

Even if the individual Boston Market franchisees were hemorrhaging money, that would have no impact on the parent company’s bottom line. The franchisees’ costs and losses were their own problem.

As a whole, the Boston Market corporate/franchisee operation wasn’t profitable, but the corporate side of it looked profitable by pushing its losses off on the franchisees. Ultimately, the loans the corporation had made to the franchisees couldn’t be repaid, and the whole scheme unraveled.

Something similar is happening with Nvidia: It raises money on the stock market and invests it in companies like Open AI and Coreweave, who send it to Microsoft or Amazon, who in turn use it to buy Nvidia’s products. Eliminate the middlemen, and Nvidia is essentially buying its own products. You can’t make money doing that, no matter what your earning statements say. What’s missing here is the consumer: Who’s going to buy enough AI-related products to make everyone involved profitable?

Patterns like this can resolve in one of two ways: Either the industry as a whole starts making money, i.e., the AI-to-consumer link suddenly develops in ways that produce boatloads of cash to pay for Nvidia’s chips, or the whole thing collapses on itself.

For historical perspective on this kind of thing, one classic read is Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen. The book is 1931’s view of the roaring 1920s. By 1931, the Depression was deepening and all the investment booms of the 20s had gone bust. But the striking thing about them (from our point of view, which Allen could not foresee) is that the narratives behind those booms were not wrong: The story of the Florida land boom was that Northerners were going to start retiring to Florida. Suburban real estate bubbled because automobiles would make it possible to move away from the crowded cities. Even the stock market boom that ended in the crash of 1929 had good narrative sense behind it: The Nvidea of the late 1920s was RCA, because radio was going to change everything. Also: chains like Sears and Montgomery Ward were going to out-compete the Mom-and-Pop stores. The automobile market still had a lot of growth in it. Aviation was a field with a big future. And so on.

The visions that inspired the booms of the 1920s nearly all came true, but not until the 1950s, long after the original investors were bankrupt. That happened again in the internet bubble: The internet did change everything, but not as fast or as easily as the boom companies needed it to. Something similar could happen with AI. The seers of an AI-dominated future don’t have to be wrong, they could just be too optimistic about timing.

What happens then? The larger economy is always harmed when a bubble pops, because a large quantity of capital appears to suddenly vanish. Actually, it went away gradually over a period of time as people made investments that weren’t going to pay off within the time horizons they needed. But the bubble obscured that reality, so when it pops the loss seems instantaneous. Loans that seemed to have adequate collateral suddenly don’t, and companies that had seemed healthy are suddenly insolvent. Bankruptcies lead to other bankruptcies like falling dominoes — I can’t pay you back because I was counting on other people to pay me back.

Because I’m losing money in one area, I need to sell my investments in other areas to raise cash. So the losses spread. (Tech investors also tend to be cryto-currency fans, expect to see Bitcoin prices collapse first, before a widespread banking crisis. That’s already started.)

Even people and businesses that are solvent stop spending, just from the sheer uncertainty of everything. Eventually governments have to step in, both by spending to prop up demand and as a lender of last resort to keep the banking system from collapsing.

None of that is inevitable. But it looks increasingly likely.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (8)

Beth Macy Goes Home Again

November 17, 2025 – 11:23 am

The author of Dopesick goes back to her small Ohio home town and wonders: Could a troubled teen do today what she did decades ago? Maybe. But the hurdles to jump are higher now.

In the Broadway musical A Little Night Music, a minor character sings a poignant song about hope and hopelessness in the serving class. In “The Miller’s Son“, the verses argue with the chorus, as a kitchen maid alternately dreams of a better life and realizes that the only pleasures available to her are momentary ones that lead nowhere.

Her opening thought is that “I shall marry the miller’s son, pin my hat on a nice piece of property.” Each verse lets the fantasy run a little wilder: “I shall marry the businessman, five fat babies and lots of security”, and then “I shall marry the Prince of Wales, pearls and servants and dressing for festivals.” Of course, if the pleasures of the moment lead to a pregnancy, none of that is possible. But was it ever possible? She ends by bitterly repeating “I shall marry the miller’s son”, recognizing that for her such a match is no more likely than the Prince of Wales.

Beth Macy is 60-something now. She came from a poor family with an alcoholic father in the small town of Urbana, Ohio. She studied hard in school and was a good if unspectacular student. She went to college on a Pell Grant, became a journalist, and (eventually) an author of several best-selling books — one of which, Dopesick, about how corporate greed led to an opioid crisis in small-town America, was made into an Emmy-winning miniseries.

Her life, from one point of view, is the quintessential American rags-to-riches story we like to tell children: Work hard, don’t give up, and you can make something of yourself, no matter how unlikely that may seem at the moment. Abe Lincoln went from a log cabin to the White House; you can too.

But in her new book Paper Girl, Macy goes back to Urbana and (over a period of years) interviews everyone from her relatives to troubled high school students to the mayor. The main question on her mind: Is the path that she walked still open today? Along the way she learns a lot about hopelessness in the White working class, its turn to the political right, and political polarization in general.

Getting a degree. The quick answer to Macy’s original question is: The path is still open, but much narrower and more treacherous than it was in her day.

She follows several of Urbana’s young people who grew up in difficult circumstances, and runs into the same story again and again: They have the talent and ambition to get out of poverty and possibly make it in the wider world, teacher and other mentors are rooting for them, but something comes up. Juggling a job, school, and ongoing family trauma gets to be too much. Or some close relative needs care and has no one else to provide it. Or maybe it’s something as simple as a car repair they have no money to cover; the fifty miles to the state university turns into an insurmountable obstacle.

Almost as bad as the immediate problems is the fatalism they lead to: Of course something would come up. People don’t actually walk the path to education or training and a secure future any more. It was never in the cards for them to marry the miller’s son.

What reminded me of “The Miller’s Son” was how the get-educated path can sound just as improbable as the make-the-NBA or become-a-rap-star path. People have done it, but could you do it? Is it worth making sacrifices (and asking others to make sacrifices for you) to keep that dream alive?

Politics. So what changed between the 1970s and 80s and the 2020s? Part of it is political: As a society, we stopped investing in education. When Macy got her Pell grant, it was a free ticket to college, but it no longer is. Once, Pell grants were how we made real the promise of America, and we told ourselves (truthfully) that a college grad’s increased lifetime earnings would lead to income tax payments that more than reimbursed the government for its generosity. But during the miserly years of the Reagan revolution (and Clinton’s ratification of much of that course change), poor young people in college became just another kind of welfare queen.

And as federal support was drying up, colleges themselves have gotten more expensive, largely because states pay a much smaller part of the costs of their state university systems. Financial aid shifted from grants to loans, so that a graduate might start a career with six-figure debts. And if you didn’t graduate — if, say, something came up that knocked you out of college — you’d have almost as much debt but not the degree to help you pay it off.

Piling on further, the degree itself is not worth as much in the job market. Even a STEM degree might not help you if the job market is looking for some other kind of STEM degree the year you graduate. (For example, the freshmen who chose a computer science major four years ago may not have realized they’d have to compete with AI algorithms for entry-level jobs.)

I’m not sure anybody is asking this question, but they should: What kind of program would it take to make the promise of America real today?

Family. Macy quickly notices the symptoms that students’ lives have changed: High school graduation rates are down. Attendance is down. Ohio’s liberalized homeschooling laws make even those numbers look better than they actually are, as parents who can’t get their children to school and are sick of dealing with truant officers sign a paper saying their child is being homeschooled. No one checks that the child is actually getting an education.

Meanwhile, public schools are losing funds to Ohio’s private-school voucher program, which makes private schools less expensive for the well-off without truly making them accessible to the poor.

Of course, homeschooling only works if home is working. And here we run into the opioid crisis Macy chronicled in Dopesick. She tells stories of teens who either couchsurf or are homeless through high school, because one parent is a drug addict and the other is in jail. It’s hard to say whether there is more sexual abuse than in Macy’s teen years, but there is certainly a lot of it. Paying attention to trigonometry or Shakespeare is probably not at the forefront of many students’ minds.

Many teachers, counselors, and coaches try to step into the breach, but it’s too much for them. A gay man who runs a teen center wrangled a grant out of the state, but couldn’t get the local government to sign off on it because of homophobic fears that he was “recruiting” teens into the gay lifestyle.

Community. In Macy’s day, Urbana was a more integrated community, at least in the sense of class. One way she coped with her dysfunctional family was by spending a lot of time with friends whose families were thriving. But increasingly, Urbana is siloed into the haves and have-nots.

Urbana is basically the country club and the ghetto, and neither group has any idea that the other group exists.

So a present-day Beth Macy may not know about those thriving families or be invited into their homes. She might not hear friends’ professional-class dreams and wonder “Why not me?”

A journalist herself, who began her career writing features about local characters for local newspapers, Macy sees great significance in the decline of local journalism: Urbana’s main local news outlets are Facebook pages and advertising sheets that publish press releases rather than news stories. How do Urbana’s people hear about folks unlike themselves? How do they find out about events happening outside their silo?

The results are twofold: On the one hand, Urbana’s citizens have lost their town as a source of identity, causing them to seek identity in politics or religion. On the other, they have lost a sense of their fellow citizens as Us, and have a corresponding willingness to accept conspiracy theories about Them.

Polarization. Urbana, and in particular its working-class population, is among the victims of globalization. The family business that once was the town’s major employer was long ago sold off, and most of its jobs have gone overseas. When Bill Clinton was pushing NAFTA and similar once-Republican free-trade policies, the promise was that new jobs would replace the old jobs, and that the overall benefit to the American economy would allow us to invest in retraining the displaced workers.

That never worked out. The new jobs weren’t where they needed to be, and the retraining rarely prepared the displaced workers adequately. Most of them wound up working in places like WalMart and never regaining the financial stability the old jobs had offered. Many found ways to retire early or claim disability.

So when Trump tells such people that they’ve been forgotten, he’s not wrong. Much of what he tells them after that is false; the Haitians in nearby Springfield were never eating the local dogs and cats. But having seen them and offered at least some explanation of their situation gets him in the door. When he offers to deport the immigrants who are “stealing their jobs”, that’s at least a plan of some sort.

Now connect that with the sense of hopelessness in the young people: They can’t hope to get the jobs their parents or grandparents had. Getting post-high-school training and going on to land the good jobs that still exist — that seems like a pipe dream, not a realistic plan. Parents can’t look forward to their children having a better life than they did.

One of the questions “Make America Great Again” always raises is “When was the great age that ‘again’ promises to restore?” The obvious answers raise issues of racism and sexism: Was America great during Jim Crow? Was it great when women couldn’t get a credit card without their husbands’ signature? When gays had to be in the closet? When?

And yes, MAGA has always been tainted by a background scent of bigotry. But fundamentally, “again” appeals to the feeling among White working-class families that Americans like them used to have hope. Those dim memories make them feel entitled to hope, and to recognize that they don’t have it now.

Someone must have taken it from them.

That’s the opening that Q-Anon and other conspiracy theories exploit. Macy recounts many conversations with relatives or high school friends who have bought some form of conspiracy theory. When Macy tries to offer facts, she is told “You can’t trust the media.” And she replies “But I am the media.” If this provokes any cognitive dissonance in people who ought to trust her, it’s not enough.

That disconnect is, I think, typical of the college/non-college divide. If you went to college, and even moreso if you went to graduate school, you have a sense of the accessibility of expertise. I may not know Anthony Fauci, for example, but I know biologists who understand infectious diseases. There was a point in my life where I could have gone into biology or climate science or a discipline at the center of some other alleged conspiracy. When would the conspirators have read me in? Why don’t my friends ever tell me about such moments?

But if you didn’t go to college, those disciplines may seem so distant that literally anything could be happening there.

Privilege. I think I also understand now why the MAGA working class is so hostile to any “woke” talk about White privilege or male privilege. Again, racism and sexism probably play some role, but maybe not the main role.

It’s always been the habit or ruling classes to rob Peter to pay Paul. If a ruling class has a debt, chances are it will steal from someone else to pay it, like the United States taking Liberia to offer to freed slaves. I mean, God forbid that those who profited from slavery should shoulder the cost!

Integration of public schools followed a similar pattern: Well-to-do Whites thrust that social experiment onto working-class Whites, while either moving to upscale suburbs or sending their own children to private schools.

So if recognition of privilege takes hold, who will be asked to pay the debt owed to the un-privileged groups? White or male MAGAts anticipate being handed the bill themselves, and not being able to pass it on to the billionaires. And they’re probably not wrong.

How to win them back? For too long, Democrats have tried to depend on Truth to win out: Climate change is real. Privilege exists. Immigrants benefit the economy. Cutting rich people’s taxes never works out for those who aren’t rich. And so on.

What we miss is that Truth will not win out if the Truth is hopeless. If the Truth is: “You’re screwed. Try to get used to it”, that Truth will not win elections for us, even if the other party offers transparent nonsense.

We need to recognize the hopeless parts of America and begin speaking to them. We need to begin offering plans for them and their children and their communities to have futures they can believe in.

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What would a Republican healthcare plan look like?

November 10, 2025 – 11:04 am

The government can cut healthcare spending if it tempts people into gambling with their lives.

The longest government shutdown in American history came down to one issue: healthcare. Republicans have been persistent about dismantling the ObamaCare model, claiming that they have a different approach that will yield better care for less cost. And so the subsidies that kept policies on the ObamaCare marketplace affordable have been allowed to lapse for 2026 policies. Democrats tried to reverse that as a condition of reopening the government, but appear to have failed.

Of course, Trump has been promising to spell out a “beautiful” healthcare plan since 2015, and we’ve still seen nothing. Critics say Republicans don’t really have a plan, which is true in the sense that they don’t have a written piece of legislation that can be compared to the Affordable Care Act, apples to apples. (They also have nothing that could take effect in time to replace the 2026 ObamaCare policies they have now made unaffordable for millions of Americans.) Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene makes an even stronger claim, that even within the Republican House conference, Mike Johnson has not yet presented “a single policy idea”. Speaker Johnson counters that Republicans have “pages and pages and pages of ideas of how to reform healthcare”, and has pointed to a report the Republican Study Committee wrote in 2019.

It’s natural and probably appropriate to be cynical about that claim, but for a few minutes let’s take Speaker Johnson seriously. What’s in that report? It’s 58 pages, most of which are spent criticizing ObamaCare. But it does get around to presenting some ideas on pages 32-50: things like health savings accounts, allowing a wider range of choices in insurance, changes to the way employer-paid premiums are taxed, and so on — enough individual notions to get you confused about the overall picture. But basically it comes down to this: They want you to gamble with your life and health.

In order to understand their proposals, let’s lay out the context: starting with the pre-ObamaCare situation, then what ObamaCare did, and then the ways Republicans have broken ObamaCare since.

Before ObamaCare. When the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, about 16% of Americans — 48 million in all — did not have health insurance, and the number was growing every year. Tens of millions of others (the exact number depends on your definitions) had some form of “junk insurance” — a policy that worked just fine for relatively minor things like a broken arm, but would leave you in a lurch if you developed some really expensive condition.

People were uninsured for a variety of reasons: Some couldn’t get insurance because they had pre-existing conditions like cancer or heart disease that made them bad risks. Others were young and healthy and saw no reason to pay significant amounts of money for care they believed they would never use. (I did this myself at age 21 in the summer between my undergraduate and graduate-school coverage. Looking back, I feel foolish about that gamble, but I got away with it.) For others, health insurance had to compete with rent and food for their limited resources. Or perhaps their health was not so bad as to make them uninsurable, but bad enough that the rates they were offered were astronomical.

Junk insurance came in a variety of forms. Maybe, if you had survived some expensive illness like cancer, it would specifically exempt any condition related to a return of that illness. Maybe it would have an annual or a lifetime cap on what it would pay out. (If you had a debilitating disease like MS, or a child born with significant birth defects — as my college roommate did — you might go over that lifetime cap in just a few years. Then you’d be uninsurable.) Maybe it would have to be renewed every year or two, giving the insurance company a chance to drop you if it wasn’t making money on your policy.

In short, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of Americans lived with the worry that if they needed significant medical care, they wouldn’t be able to pay for it.

The roots of ObamaCare. This healthcare anxiety is a uniquely American problem, because other rich countries don’t regard medical expense as a personal responsibility, and instead pay for it through some national system. Statistics argue in favor of that approach: Among wealthy nations, the US stands out both for its per capita spending on health care, and for its low life expectancy. So we pay more, but get worse results.

But national healthcare is “socialism”, which is anathema to American conservatives. So in an attempt to stop the US from opting for a European-style national health system, the conservative Heritage Foundation created a different model in a 1989 report. The basic idea was that you achieve 100% coverage through a private-insurance system by

  • mandating that individuals have insurance
  • forcing insurance companies to cover everybody who wants their coverage
  • subsidizing insurance for those who can’t afford it

That model was the basis for the RomneyCare plan that Massachusetts adopted in 2006 under Republican Governor Mitt Romney. RomneyCare in turn begat ObamaCare in 2010.

So this is an important thing to understand about the politics of healthcare: Republicans have had a hard time coming up with a healthcare plan because Obama stole their plan. He left them with a difficult choice: They could have declared victory, but that would have meant joining forces with the Black guy in the White House, which was unimaginable.

I have occasionally wondered how Mitt Romney would have fared in 2012 if he could have run on his record as the Father of ObamaCare and general solver-of-impossible-problems. But this was not to be.

What Obama did. In addition to the Heritage Foundation’s mandate-and-subsidize idea, Obama and Romney recognized the patchwork way that most Americans were already covered: If you were old, you had Medicare; if you were poor, you had Medicaid; children got covered under CHIP; veterans had the VA; people with good jobs got coverage through their employers. American healthcare was like a big bed with a lot of small blankets that covered most people, but not everybody.

So a second fundamental idea of ObamaCare was to make the blankets bigger: Insist that companies employing more than 50 people full time had to offer health insurance, expand Medicaid so that it covered the working poor as well as the destitute, and so on.

Even the bigger blankets wouldn’t stretch to cover everybody, so the ObamaCare exchanges were created: marketplaces where individuals could buy their own policies, without regard to their previous health record, and with a sliding scale of subsidies depending on income.

The mandate-and-subsidize system only works if the term “insurance” actually means something, so ObamaCare also defined what private insurance had to cover. In particular, this made junk insurance illegal. Annual and lifetime caps were gone, as were provisions not to cover certain common problems. Many people who had junk insurance didn’t realize the risks they were taking, and resented the fact that their cheap policies were now illegal. This is how Obama’s claim that “If you like your plan you can keep” got picked out as the Lie of the Year for 2013. (Personally, I liked my employer-provided insurance, and I kept it.)

And it all sort of worked. As you can see in the graph above, the number of uninsured began to drop after 2010, dropped more when the exchanges came online in 2014, and didn’t start rising again until Republicans began breaking the system during the first Trump administration. And these numbers don’t give the ACA credit for the number of people whose junk insurance was replaced by real insurance.

John McCain turns thumbs-down on repealing the ACA with no replacement.

How Republicans have sabotaged ObamaCare. Republicans have tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act again and again ever since it was passed — at least 63 times in all. Their effort always foundered on the same point: Repealing the ACA would instantly create about 20 million uninsured Americans, and the Republicans had no plan for dealing with them. The closest they came was in 2017, with the slogan “Repeal and Replace”, where the “replace” half was always left vague. That vote came down to John McCain’s famous thumbs-down moment.

But failing to repeal didn’t mean failing to sabotage. The most obvious bit of sabotage was the ultimately successful attempt to end the individual insurance mandate, which assessed a penalty on people who went uninsured. At first they tried to undo it through the courts, and nearly succeeded. The Supreme Court overturned decades worth of interpretation of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause to find that it didn’t allow the penalty. But John Roberts saved the individual mandate by reinterpreting its penalty as a tax.

But Roberts also sabotaged the system by not allowing the federal government to withdraw all Medicaid funding from states that refused to expand Medicaid. This created a two-tier system where some states expanded Medicaid and others didn’t. Gradually, even red states like Oklahoma and Missouri expanded their programs, but 10 states are still holding out.

Republicans finished killing off the individual mandate in the Trump tax cut of 2017, which didn’t eliminate the penalty, but set it to zero. This created a hole in the system: If you’re healthy right now, you can save money by going uninsured, remaining confident that you can get insurance after you develop some health problem.

The RSC’s 2019 report castigates ObamaCare for this hole in the system, which the Republicans created themselves.

Unfortunately, because the ACA created a perverse incentive for people to forgo insurance until they developed an illness, costs across the board rose dramatically, which required higher premiums on the existing plans in the individual market exchanges. Not surprisingly, the premium spikes further repelled healthy individuals.

How Republicans want to “fix” ObamaCare. If you don’t think ObamaCare is working, the obvious way to fix it continues to be a universal single-payer healthcare system, like Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All. Countries with such systems continue to spend less on healthcare than Americans do, while getting better results in terms of life expectancy.

But Medicare for All is still socialism, which is still anathema. So what can be done?

The report is full of wonderful-sounding words like “choice” and “freedom”, but the essence of it comes down to this: The healthcare system can save enormous amounts of money if it exposes people to more risk.

I’ll give a personal example here: In 2023 I had a scary incident where I lost vision in my right eye for about five minutes. It was like looking at a gray screen. Afterwards, I returned to normal, as if nothing had happened. I’ve had no recurrences in the two years since.

All indications point to this incident being just one of those annoying brain things without long-term significance, like migraine headaches. But it could have been a stroke or a blood clot or a tumor. Medicare spent an huge amount of money checking all that stuff out. I didn’t keep track, but I’m sure it’s well into the tens of thousands.

And it all could have been saved if someone had said, “It’s probably nothing. Let’s ignore it and see if it happens again.”

Now, if some government or insurance bureaucrat says that, it’s horrible. They’re telling me to gamble with my life. But (from the Republican point of view) if I say it, that’s great. So that’s the heart of the Republican program: incentivize people to gamble with their lives.

They do this in a lot of different ways. For one, junk insurance is back.

[I]n order to provide Americans with health insurance options that fit their individualized needs and do not add unnecessary expenses, the RSC plan would undo the ACA’s regulations on essential health benefits, annual and lifetime limits, preventive care cost-sharing, dependent coverage, and actuarial value. … The cumulative effect of these changes would result in Americans being provided with more insurance choices that are personalized to their needs and available at affordable rates.

(“Actuarial value” is essentially a limit on the insurance company’s profit margin.) So if you have a strained budget, a cheaper plan that risks your future if you wind up with some expensive condition is “personalized” for you. It “fits your individualized needs”.

Several provisions are designed to promote individual plans that can be “personalized” in this way. The biggest is to change the tax laws that allow employers to deduct what they spend on employees’ health insurance. With ObamaCare’s employer mandate also gone, this will have the effect of ending a lot of employer-supplied health insurance, pushing all those people into the individual market.

The other big “personalization” tactic is to emphasize Health Savings Accounts. Lots of people have those now for medical incidentals like glasses. But under the Republican proposal, HSAs are cut loose.

Under current law, health savings accounts plans cannot be used in conjunction with plans that are not a “qualified high-deductible health plan.” This unnecessarily hamstrings the ability for millions of Americans to access this important savings tool. Accordingly, the RSC would eliminate this requirement to allow health savings accounts to be utilized even if a person does not have a health insurance plan.

So you can go without insurance and pay your own health expenses out of an HSA. This is the ultimate individualization: Imagine me with an HSA instead of Medicare. My vision blanks out for five minutes, and I’m left with a choice: Do I want to drain my HSA checking out things that probably are OK? Or do I want to just risk it?

The limits of freedom. The unexamined issue in the Republican plan is class. Yes, you have “choices”, but only if you can afford to pay for them. The poorer I am, the more likely I am to risk a junk policy to save money, and the more likely I am to forego testing or treatment if I think it probably works out for me. Those are “choices”, in the same way that poor people “choose” to save money on rent by living in their cars.

Of course, when you’re talking about 350 million people, “probably” leads to many, many cases where the improbable happens. So these personalized decisions will lead to large numbers of medical bankruptcies, and some non-trivial number of unnecessary deaths.

The other thing “freedom” doesn’t take into account is the burden of making good decisions, especially decisions about big issues that involve many details that only experts in the field really understand. As we saw in the real-estate crash of 2008, “freedom” in the mortgage market led to people signing documents they didn’t really understand and losing their homes. More recently, “freedom” from vaccine mandates is allowing diseases like measles and polio to come back.

And if we are all making these decisions as individuals, the success of insurance or healthcare-providing companies depends on their ability to influence those decisions. Think about all the ads you see this time of year boosting “Medicare Advantage” programs (which provide enormous advantages to the companies offering them). That kind of marketing could be round-the-clock for every kind of medical decision. Just as the system forced us to make more decisions, all the corporate powers of persuasion would be focused on manipulating us into choosing badly.

All that marketing would cost an enormous amount of money, which ultimately would have to be reflected in the prices we pay. Would it eat up all the “savings” that result from taking bigger risks with your life? Maybe.

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The Shutdown Gets Serious

November 3, 2025 – 9:51 am

If you’re poor in America, food and healthcare just got way more expensive.

Up until Saturday, most Americans had been able ignore the government shutdown. If you didn’t work for the federal government, weren’t visiting the national parks, and weren’t waiting for a government office to process your application for some kind of benefit, the shutdown seemed like one of those inside-the-beltway issues. Politicians were arguing with other politicians about the kinds of things politicians argue about. Trump wanted you to blame Democrats for something. Democrats wanted you to blame Trump. Blah, blah, blah.

Then on November 1, two things happened:

  • SNAP (food stamp) payments ended for 42 million Americans.
  • The ObamaCare open enrollment period began without the subsidies that have kept premiums affordable for 22 million Americans.

Both of these are important, but the loss of SNAP benefits is more immediate. The ObamaCare plans are for 2026, so we’re still a couple months away from people skipping needed medical care. But the SNAP lapse is already causing suffering: Americans who otherwise might have used their SNAP cards to buy food for their families Saturday were unable to do so. State and local governments, as well as private charities, are trying to step into the breach, but many people are still falling through the cracks.

The mind-boggling thing about the SNAP snafu is how avoidable it was: The Department of Agriculture has $6 billion in contingency funds that it could use, but it initially refused to do so. Friday, a federal judge ordered USDA to allocate the funds “as soon as possible”, and to report back by noon today. A second federal judge stopped short of issuing an order, but explained why such an order might come soon.

At core, [the Trump administration’s] conclusion that USDA is statutorily prohibited from funding SNAP because Congress has not enacted new appropriations for the current fiscal year is erroneous. To the contrary, Defendants are statutorily mandated to use the previously appropriated SNAP contingency reserve when necessary and also have discretion to use other previously appropriated funds as detailed below.

Other funds would clearly be necessary to pay full benefits, because SNAP costs $8.6 billion every month.

As of this morning, it was not clear what the Trump regime would do: Trump himself claims to be confused about what the government can do, is asking for more specific guidance from the judges, and warned that payments would be “delayed” in any case. Up until now, Trump has been cavalier about spending any money that isn’t nailed down; but now suddenly he is worried about the legal details.

All in all, his Truth Social post seemed more concerned with scoring political points than with human suffering.

I do NOT want Americans to go hungry just because the Radical Democrats refuse to do the right thing and REOPEN THE GOVERNMENT. … The Democrats should quit this charade where they hurt people for their own political reasons, and immediately REOPEN THE GOVERNMENT. If you use SNAP benefits, call the Senate Democrats, and tell them to reopen the Government, NOW! Here is Cryin’ Chuck Schumer’s Office Number: (202) 224-6542

We should know more this afternoon.

Unlike the lapse in SNAP benefits, the ObamaCare premium subsidies are not a consequence of the shutdown. They are, instead, what the shutdown has come to be about: The “clean” continuing resolution that Republicans want has no money to fund them; Senate Democrats are withholding their votes until an extension happens.

In other words: If Democrats cave, the government will open but the ObamaCare policies will still cost much more.

Republicans claim to be concerned about the price increase — which probably affects more of their constituents than Democrats’ — but they have no plan for dealing with it. Similarly, the Big Beautiful Bill they passed will cause millions of Americans to lose health coverage under Medicaid. Senator Hawley is so concerned about this that he has introduced legislation to reverse the Medicaid cuts he voted for.

Majority Leader Thune has offered Democrats a vote on extending the ObamaCare subsidies, if they first pass his resolution to open the government. But forcing a vote is only a way to score political points; it doesn’t help anyone pay for their health insurance.

Speaker Johnson continues to call ObamaCare unworkable, but again, Republicans have no alternative plan. We have been waiting for Trump’s healthcare plan since 2015.

To me, Trump’s finger-pointing raises an explanation for this mess: He believes his own propaganda, and believes the American people believe his propaganda.

If it were true that the American people broadly blame Democrats for the shutdown, then every new example of suffering caused by the shutdown would put more pressure on them to cave. So it would make political sense for the regime to engineer as much suffering as possible.

That seems to be what it has done.

But the public hasn’t been blaming the Democrats for the shutdown, and these two issues — hunger and health care — are where Democrats have their most credibility. So it doesn’t help Trump’s cause that a judge has to order him to feed the hungry. And since extending ObamaCare subsidies is exactly what Democrats have been demanding, letting them lapse is clearly Trump’s fault.

Finally, we get to Mike Johnson’s posturing: He has kept the House in recess since September 19. He claims there is no need to meet, because the House did its job then by passing a continuing resolution. By keeping the House in recess, he has made an excuse not to seat Democrat Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, who won a special election September 23. Grijalva would be the 218th signature on the discharge petition to force a vote on subpoenaing the Epstein files.

Johnson denies that protecting Trump from Epstein revelations is his motive. But all his rationalizations are starting to run thin. The continuing resolution the House passed only funds the government until November 21, which probably isn’t enough time to pass the appropriation bills needed to fund the government for all of FY 2026. So the House will be needed again soon, one way or another.

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Could a Third Term Happen?

November 3, 2025 – 8:46 am

It’s far-fetched but not impossible.

For months Trump has alternately encouraged and then tamped down speculation that he might seek a third term. Wednesday, he acknowledged the constitutional reality that “it’s pretty clear I’m not allowed to run”. But since it’s always a mistake to assume that any Trump statement is his final word, the third term idea will likely surface again at some point.

So how seriously should we take this? My conclusion: moderately seriously. Pay attention, but don’t lose your mind about it. That’s an attitude I’m trying to model this post.

The main reason to take it somewhat seriously is this: If Trump floated an idea like this and nobody pushed back, before long he’d be doing it. As you may remember from junior high, that’s how bullies operate. Every abuse, from pulling your pony tail to rape, starts as a joke. “Why do you have to be like that? I was just kidding around.” But if your response to the joke indicates that he might get away with it, it’s game on.

The main reason not to take it seriously is the 22nd Amendment, which seems pretty clear:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

And yet, Steve Bannon believes he has a way to get around that prohibition.

“There’s many different alternatives,” Bannon said when asked about the 22nd Amendment. “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is.”

And Trump himself said back in March “There are methods which you could do it.”

So let’s think about what those methods might be.

Is there a loophole? Sort of. In a New Yorker conversation with Michael Luo, Ruth Marcus explains:

Note that it says “elected . . . more than twice,” not “serve as President for more than two terms.” The way—maybe—to get around that would be to have Trump elected Vice-President, and then to have whoever is the incumbent President resign to make way for a third Trump term. (Trump himself, by the way, said that this approach was “too cute,” and that “the people wouldn’t like that.”)

Alternatively, and even more fancifully, Trump could be elected Speaker of the House (you don’t have to be a House member to be Speaker), putting him in line for the Presidency, and both the elected President and Vice-President would clear the decks for him.

Marcus’ “maybe” depends on how the Supreme Court interprets the 12th Amendment, which says:

But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

Again, though, Trump could argue that he’s not ineligible to be president, he’s just ineligible to be elected president. So maybe the same loophole covers the 12th Amendment too. An honest Supreme Court — especially one that puts so much emphasis on the original intent of the laws — would not allow this, but we don’t have an honest Supreme Court. So maybe it flies.

Could it work? Not if the 2028 election has anything to do with the will of the American people. Remember a few things:

Not to mention the fact that Trump is right: The plan to run a stooge (or two stooges) who then resign is too cute for the public to back. And then there’s the execution problem: Would you trust J. D. Vance to resign once he had been sworn in as President? Trump doesn’t seem like the trusting type.

Summing up: In any free and fair election, a Stooge/Trump or Stooge/Stooge ticket would lose in a landslide. Anybody who seriously proposes the plan, i.e., Steve Bannon, must also be planning to rig the election in a significant way. A small amount of corner-cutting wouldn’t do the job.

Whether that can happen or not is a different topic.

Does Trump understand that it won’t work? Hard to say. He seemed to understand it Wednesday, but I have long subscribed to the theory of Trump’s mind that David Roberts enunciated in 2016:

When he utters words, his primary intent is not to say something, to describe a set of facts in the world; his primary intent is to do something, i.e., to position himself in a social hierarchy. … Even to call him dishonest, to say he “lies,” doesn’t quite seem to capture it. The whole notion of lying presumes beliefs — to lie is to say something that one believes to be false, to knowingly assert something that does not correspond to the facts.

It’s not that Trump is saying things he believes to be false. It’s that he doesn’t seem to have beliefs at all, not in the way people typically talk about beliefs — as mental constructs stable across time and context. Rather, his opinions dissolve and coalesce fluidly, as he’s talking, like oil on shallow water. That’s why he gives every indication of conviction, even when, say, denying that he has said something that is still posted on his Twitter feed.

Wednesday, Trump found it useful to agree with people like Mike Johnson that he can’t run. (Of course, he also said this was “sad”, because “I have my highest numbers that I’ve ever had”, which is completely delusional. So Wednesday’s comment did not come at some moment of peak lucidity.) Tomorrow, he may find it useful to agree with Steve Bannon.

What makes this problematic for Republicans in general, even the fascist ones, is the Mad King problem: No one can tell Trump he is wrong. So if he starts asserting that one of the third-term scheme works, and in fact works easily because he’s so popular, who’s going to tell him that some serious election-rigging is needed?

Meanwhile, no Republican legally entitled to compete for the presidency can start organizing a campaign, for fear of antagonizing the Mad King. Typically, the primary field starts to assemble in earnest after the midterm elections, so there’s still time. But Democrats like Governors Newsom and Pritzker are already starting to position themselves. Republican candidates would too if the field were clear.

What does the third-term talk accomplish for Trump? At least for his followers (or for Republicans intimidated by his followers), talk of a third term pushes back the moment when he becomes a lame duck. No one is going to risk breaking the law for him if they anticipate someone else holding the presidency soon. But the fantasy of Trump remaining in office indefinitely keeps that realization at bay.

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