The Weekly Sift

The war has accelerated or made evident a trend that was already there, which is that the whole Trump administration is about a kind of rebalancing of power, so that we are less powerful and our rivals are more powerful.

– Timothy Snyder

There is no featured post this week.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. The Hungarian election has no direct effect on the US, but Viktor Orbán’s landslide defeat (after Trump and Vance pulled out all the tops to support him) has to worry the Trump regime. Orbán was the prototype, and he failed.
• Climate change. The difficulty opening the Strait of Hormuz and the resulting $100-per-barrel oil should motivate more countries to transition away from fossil fuels.
• Israel/Palestine. The focus of conflict has moved to Lebanon, where Israel is applying a tactic it used in Gaza: domicide, i.e., to “systematically destroy and damage civilian housing to render entire areas uninhabitable”.
• Ukraine. One winner from the Hungarian election is Ukraine. Orbán was Putin’s man in the EU, and his objection was standing in the way of the EU making a 90 billion euro loan to Ukraine.
• Epstein. The Iran War had gotten the Epstein scandal out of the headlines, but Melania put if back in. What was she thinking?

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the “peace” talks with Iran

One downside of taking a vacation is that I have missed my chance to say “I told you so” about the ceasefire and negotiations, because I did not in fact tell you so. During my vacation I told other people that Trump would announce a fake ceasefire, falsely claim that Iran had agreed to all kinds of concessions, and then resume the war when the reality became clear. But I have no written record to point to.

The reality is this: Trump badly miscalculated when he started this war. American air power can destroy anything it wants in Iran (other than the deeply buried uranium stocks), but it can’t make the Iranians surrender.

Trump, though, lives an in alternate reality where his power is absolute. J. D. Vance’s mission was doomed from the start because he went to Islamabad not to negotiate peace, but to dictate terms to an enemy Trump falsely insists is defeated. Vance explained his failure: “They have chosen not to accept our terms.” Of course they wouldn’t. As pummeled as Iran’s military currently is, the nation is not defeated. Defeating them will require either hundreds of thousands of ground troops or a willingness to commit genocide.

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Increasingly, however, Trump’s alternate reality is being taken seriously in mainstream media. After Vance’s entirely predictable failure, The Washington Post wrote:

The involvement of Vice President JD Vance had raised hopes around the world that the weekend negotiations in Pakistan would solidify the ceasefire with Iran and put an end to the war within reach.

Really? Bill Grueskin commented on BlueSky:

In what universe did this take place?

The WaPo article went on to describe Vance as “President Donald Trump’s most high-profile war skeptic“, which is probably how Vance will try to pitch himself in 2028. But there is no evidence that his pre-war self-description as a “skeptic of foreign military interventions” actually resulted in any protest once Trump started bombing.

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As many people have reported, Trump went into the war with his Venezuela adventure as a model: A quick decapitation strike would convince the new leaders to do whatever Trump wanted.

Trump understood the Venezuelan leaders, because fundamentally they are like him: They are interested primarily in their own wealth and power, so there is nothing they are willing to die for. Iran’s leaders, on the other hand, are willing to lose everything including their lives. So Trump has no idea how to deal with them.

So Trump’s latest idea is to blockade the Strait of Hormuz himself. He didn’t like the idea that Iran could profit by charging tolls on the Strait, so he’s going to block everything, no matter what that does to the price of oil. And that would make sense if the Iranian leaders were motivated by profit the way Trump is. But they’re not, so Trump is essentially doing their job for them: Iran intended to disrupt the world economy by driving up the price of oil, and now Trump is helping them do it.

In a few days it will be clear that this move didn’t work either, so Trump will go back to threatening to kill Iran’s “whole civilization“.

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Two points:

• Ending a country’s “civilization” is a war crime. And since the world does not recognize a Nuremberg defense (“I was just following orders”), Trump will be involving members of the American military in war crimes. If anyone you care about is in the military, this should worry you.
• Like Netanyahu before him, Trump has fallen for the fallacy that if your opponent is evil, you can’t become the bad guy. But you can. Hamas is certainly evil, but nonetheless Netanyahu became the bad guy in the Gaza War. The Iranian regime is likewise evil. But if Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran turns genocidal, he will be the bad guy.

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For a high-level view of the Iran War and its place in geo-political strategy, I recommend listening to an hour-long conversation between Timothy Snyder (author of On Tyranny) and Phillips O’Brien (author of War and Power). That’s where the quote at the top comes from.

One scary conclusion they come to: The Iran War proves we would lose a non-nuclear war with China over Taiwan. Modern war is less about the big, expensive systems the US military is based on and more about manufacturing large numbers of cheap drones and similar devices. In World War II, the US was “the arsenal of democracy“, because we could manufacture planes, tanks, ships, and other munitions in larger quantities than anyone else. We’ve lost that edge. In the Iran War, we are firing advanced munitions like Tomahawk and Patriot missiles many times faster than we can build them.

Conversely, if you want to manufacture large numbers of things quickly today, where do you go? China. In a war with China, if we couldn’t win in a week, we would run out of weapons and lose.

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Snyder and O’Brien both like the nonprofit foundation Come Back Alive, which supplies the Ukrainian military. As they describe it, CBA connects what the Ukrainians need to garage-level workshops that make drones and anti-drone tech. Their tech evolves constantly and is currently some of the best in the world.

and Hungary

The model for Trump’s Project 2025 and his overall attempt to strangle American democracy has been what Viktor Orbán did in Hungary: change election laws to favor his party, get legal immunity from a corrupt judiciary, use government power to push the media into friendly hands, turn the universities away from objective scholarship into pro-government propaganda vehicles, tame big business through corrupt government regulating and contracting, and so forth.

The goal, at least immediately, is not a Hitler/Stalin style dictatorship where political opponents can be killed at will or arrested and sent to concentration camps. Instead, the government establishes a soft autocracy that maintains the appearance of freedom and democracy, but stacks the deck in ways that prevent the formation of any effective opposition. Vox sums up:

The basic goal was to create a system where the government doesn’t have to formally rig elections, in the sense of stuffing ballot boxes. It could generally rely on the background unfairness of the system, the structural disadvantages opposition parties face, to reliably maintain a constitutional majority. Political scientists call this kind of regime “competitive authoritarianism” — a system in which elections are real, but so unfair that they can’t reasonably be termed democratic contests.

… The result of all this has been a remarkably durable authoritarian system. In the 2014 and 2018 elections, Fidesz [i.e., Orbán’s party] managed to retain its two-thirds majority in parliament with less than half of the national popular vote. In 2022, the various opposition parties united around a single candidate and party list to try and overcome its structural disadvantages — and Fidesz actually improved its vote share, easily retaining its two-thirds majority.

The flaw in that model is that if the public gets sufficiently united against the government, the official thumb on the scale might not be heavy enough.

Sunday, Hungarians took advantage of what power they have left to oust Orbán. After 16 years in power, his party was decisively swept out. The opposition has won a 2/3rds supermajority in Parliament, which is big enough to undo the constitutional changes Orbán made.

I happened to be in Budapest Thursday, on a tour I arranged last fall without any journalistic motive. I don’t speak Hungarian and had little opportunity to talk to the locals, but I did see the election posters dominating every flat surface, and workmen setting up for a huge opposition concert Friday. I worried about a violent outcome to the election, so I was not sorry to get out before the action started.

and the astronauts

Sadly, the Artemis II mission all but vanished from the headlines. I’m showing my age here, but I remember when the whole nation was transfixed by each new space flight. One of the few things my grandfather and I were both interested in was watching the countdown for John Glenn’s launch. In school, we took time out of class to watch an unmanned mission that did nothing more than stick a TV camera onto a rocket and slam it into the Moon.

The four astronauts of Artemis II looped around the Moon, went farther from Earth than any human ever has, and successfully returned to Earth on Friday.

and you also might be interested in …

The week’s most mysterious story is why Melania called a news conference to read a statement saying that she was not connected to Jeffrey Epstein. She was not responding to anything obvious in the news cycle, so her main accomplishment was to start people wondering whether what she is denying is actually true.

New York magazine speculates:

The most logical explanation: The First Lady is trying to get ahead of forthcoming story about her ties to Epstein. But there are no specific rumors about such a story circulating on social media; it’s all just conjecture based on Melania’s statement.

But The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi offers a simpler theory:

I have another possible explanation. And that is that the Trumps aren’t just morally bankrupt, they’re also very, very stupid. A lot of people seem reluctant to acknowledge this about the president; they will tie themselves into knots trying to argue that his erratic actions actually represent a genius playing four-dimensional chess. He’s not really a madman, they insist, he’s just playing one on Truth Social! I understand why people want to believe this: it’s comforting to think there’s some sort of method behind the madness. But if there is any sort of method, I certainly can’t see it. All I can see is a man who thinks he can bully his way through life.

Here’s the thing: even if you are blessed with “a very high IQ”, when you are as rich and powerful as the Trumps, you can easily lose perspective. People rarely say “no” to you. Your employees don’t tell you that your ideas are ridiculous because they don’t want to lose their jobs. Melania may not be the president, but she is in the same sycophantic bubble as her husband. It’s possible she just thought she could hold a press conference and command all us plebs to stop talking about her, and we would immediately obey.

It’s hard to top The Onion’s take on this: “Melania Trump Slams Baseless Reports Linking Her To Wrong Wealthy Pedophile“.

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US Congressman and recent top contender to be the next governor of California Eric Swalwell has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least four women so far. He has denied the accusations, but a Democrat can’t ride something like this out the way Republicans can. He has suspended his campaign for governor, and I’ll be surprised if he hangs on to the House seat.

I’m always amazed by candidates who imagine something like this won’t come out. How do you recruit people to spend two years or more trying to get you elected, when you know that something you’ve done could result in all their effort being wasted?

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As Congress returns to work, there is still no plan to fund DHS, and Trump really wants action on the vote-suppressing SAVE Act.

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The regime revealed plans for Trump’s “arch of victory” monument, which is planned to be 250 feet tall. This motivated The Contrarian’s Tim Dickinson to review all the things Trump wants to name after himself.

All this self-aggrandizement is futile. As soon as he’s gone, everything he’s done will be reversed. The Kennedy Center will be the Kennedy Center again. Trump class battleships will never be built. The White House ballroom will be repurposed and renamed.

As for the money he’s planning to add his signature to, I think we can shame him out of it. You can get little stamping pads to add comments to currency. I think every Trump dollar should have “is America’s worst president” added to it.

Remember what Conan O’Brien said at the Oscars: “Welcome back, we are coming to you live from the Has a Small Penis Theater! Let’s see him put his name in front of that.”

and let’s close with something far out

The Artemis II crew got some new views of the Earth and the Moon. Here we see how everything is relative: the Earth setting over the Moon looks tiny.