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Doug Muder is a former mathematician who now writes about politics and religion. He is a frequent contributor to UU World.

Week One

January 27, 2025 – 9:44 am

Trump is president now, and that fact has consequences. But he’s not all-powerful. We need to educate ourselves about how to oppose him most effectively.

Last Monday, while I was taking some time off, the second Trump administration began. During the campaign, Trump made a great deal of noise about what he would do on Day One, including be a dictator. (So far, that seems not to have happened.)

So let’s look at what did happen. Day One (or Week One) is shorthand for two things: his inaugural address and his first executive orders.

The Inaugural Address. Inaugural addresses have no force of law behind them, but they provide a motivating vision for the new administration. They are typically occasions for soaring rhetoric, like “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” or “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” or “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

But Trump does not soar, he markets. In particular he markets himself: “I was saved by God to make America great again.” (FDR survived an assassination attempt just a month before his first inaugural; he didn’t consider it worth mentioning.) And he makes salesman-like promises about his effect on the nation.

From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer. … America will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before. I return to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success. A tide of change is sweeping the country, sunlight is pouring over the entire world, and America has the chance to seize this opportunity like never before.

Elon Musk sounded a similar note in his inauguration day speech (and then gave a Nazi salute).

This was no ordinary victory. This was a fork in the road for human civilization. … It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.

The whole world will benefit from this surge in American power.

Our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable.

However, the clock has already run out on Trump’s promise to end the Ukraine War in 24 hours. So far, Putin seems unimpressed by his threat of sanctions and tariffs — as if the Biden administration had never considered putting economic pressure on Russia.

And that leads to the other thing I draw from this address: Truth will continue to place no restrictions on what Trump says. His 49.8% plurality is “a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place”. It demonstrates that “the entire nation is rapidly unifying behind our agenda. … National unity is now returning to America, and confidence and pride is soaring like never before.”

We will be a rich nation “again”. (The Biden economy’s post-Covid recovery has been the envy of the world.) “America will be a manufacturing nation once again”. (200K manufacturing jobs were lost during the first Trump administration, while 775K manufacturing jobs were added during Biden’s four years.) His government will wave a magic wand to roll back recent price increases:

I will direct all members of my cabinet to marshal the vast powers at their disposal to defeat what was record inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices.

And he will achieve these results by reinstating the 20th century economy, based on oil and gas, the “liquid gold under our feet”. He will “drill baby drill”. (American oil production is already at an all time high, easily surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia. Given how expensive the world’s remaining oil is to find and produce, it’s not clear how much lower oil prices can possibly go in the long term.) He will end the nonexistent “electric car mandate” and let Americans “buy the car of your choice” (which I just did by buying a hybrid in September; pure EVs currently account for just 8% of sales and no one is forced to buy one).

The speech doubled down on many of the lies of the fall campaign: “millions of criminal aliens” come here “from prisons and mental institutions” and belong to “foreign gangs and criminal networks”. They bring “devastating crime to U.S. soil, including our cities and inner cities”. (Violent crime has been dropping nationally, and in nearly all American cities. Trump has never provided the slightest evidence for his “prisons and mental institutions” claim. The vast majority of undocumented people keep their heads down, work hard for very little money, and do jobs it would be hard to fill without them.)

New tariffs will bring in vast new revenues from “foreign sources”.

Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.

(Tariffs are paid by American importers, not foreign exporters, and ultimately the money comes from American consumers.) China is running the Panama Canal (it isn’t), and “American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly” (not true).

Rhetorically, Trump’s speech evoked a lot of 19th-century imagery, including the phrase “manifest destiny”. He talked about the “untamed wilderness” and winning “the Wild West” (as if the continent had been empty and Native American civilizations had never existed). Ominously, he envisioned once again becoming “a growing nation” that “expands our territory”.

Three kinds of executive orders. I agree with Jay Kuo in dividing Trump’s executive orders into three classes. My reframing of those classes goes like this:

legitimate orders that exercise recognized presidential powers. They may not be moral or wise, but yes, a president can do that.
speculative orders that test what the courts or Congress will let him get away with. It sure looks like laws or the Constitution forbid this, but who’s going to tell him?
fanciful orders intended to excite his base and/or troll his opponents. Like when King Canute ordered the tide not to come in. He’s just trying to upset you, so don’t fall for it.

Legitimate orders. Presidential pardon power is essentially unchecked, so Trump’s pardon of all 1250+ January 6 criminals is a done deal. That includes the people convicted of seditious conspiracy, as well as the folks who sent more than 100 police to the hospital.

Similarly, Trump and the Republican Senate majority have the power to turn the Defense Department over to an inexperienced misogynistic guy with a drinking problem. There’s no recourse; it’s done. Fortunately, all Senate Democrats voted against the nomination, so when the inevitable Hegseth scandal arises, they’ll be in prime I-told-you-so position.

Presidents have broad latitude over programs concerning refugees, so Trump’s order suspending the refugee resettlement program looks sound. Remember: These are not people sneaking over the border. These are people from countries with recognized problems that previous administrations have given refuge to. They have applied via a legal process, been vetted, and may have waited a long time. Some are victims of natural disasters. Others are people we owe something to, like the Afghans who helped our soldiers.

He really can pull the US out of the Paris Climate Accords, but not immediately. He can impose tariffs, which will backfire on him, because they will raise prices on US consumers.

Since these cases are just Trump using the powers the voters (unwisely) gave him in the election, all we can do in response is register our disapproval, publicize the unfortunate results as they appear, and hold Trump-supporting officials responsible in future elections. In some cases, protests or civil disobedience might be appropriate.

David Litt has some good advice about messaging on these issues: Fight big lies with small truths.

Everyone will have different ways of winning the ideas war over the next four years and beyond. For right now, if a total stranger asked me to sum up this week, I’d say something like this:

“There’s a guy named Daniel Rodriguez. On January 5^th, 2021, he texted his friends ‘There will be blood.’ On January 6^th, when he stormed the Capitol, he grabbed a police officer and shocked him repeatedly in the neck with a stun gun. A jury of peers sentenced him to twelve years in prison for his violent crime. And less than 24 hours after taking office, Trump let Daniel Rodriguez back out on the street.”

I could say more, of course. But that’s the most important thing: a story about one person, who isn’t Donald Trump – and one action Trump took which just about everyone can agree makes us less safe.

In other words, don’t hit your Trumpist friends and relatives with big rhetoric about ending democracy and establishing dictatorship, because they’ll just write you off. Come at them with small stories about people Trump has wronged, and specific ways that he is making all our lives harder.

Speculative orders. These are the most dangerous ones, because if the courts and Congress don’t step up to oppose them, Trump will amass dictatorial power. And if public opinion doesn’t rise against them, Trump may decide that his “mandate” extends to defying the other branches of government.

The most egregious of his speculative orders was the one ending birthright citizenship, i.e., the full citizenship of anyone born in the United States. What’s dangerous about this is that it violates the clear text of the 14th Amendment.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The order attempts to wriggle through a loophole created by “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”, which until now has chiefly been interpreted to mean people the US government has to deal with through some other government, like diplomats and their families. But Trump wants to reinterpret it like this:

the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.

U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, was having none of it. He quickly issued a 14-day restraining order, pending a hearing on whether to extend his order to a permanent injunction.

“I’ve been on the bench for four decades, I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is,” Coughenour said, describing Trump’s order as “blatantly unconstitutional.”

Undocumented immigrants are subject to US courts and can be arrested by the police without consulting any other country’s government. Clearly the US claims jurisdiction over them.

I wish I could remember who pointed out an unintended consequence of nixing birthright citizenship: Disputes over citizenship become open-ended. Previously, if someone doubted your citizenship, you could produce your birth certificate and be done. But under Trump’s interpretation, your birth certificate just pushes the question back a generation: What about your parents’ citizenship status? And their parents? Where does it end?

Coughenour’s common-sense reading of the Constitution should stand at least until the case reaches the Supreme Court, which may or may not side with the Constitution against Trump.

Other speculative orders include his attempts to redefine the civil service, creating the kind of political machine the Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 was intended to outlaw. Federal employee unions are suing over that.

It’s also not clear how much of Trump’s attempt to define two genders will be upheld. A trans woman in federal prison is already suing, claiming that her pending transfer to an all-male facility will expose her to rape. An aside: The order is laughably wrong about science:

“Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.

Since male characteristics don’t develop until 6 or 7 weeks into gestation, the order literally means that everyone is female.

Speculative orders are subject to the same public-opinion responses as legitimate orders, but the main battleground will be in the courts. So you’ll want to stay informed through some reliable legal news source. (I recommend Law Dork.) Also, contribute to the ACLU. If you’re in a blue state, encourage your attorney general to sue the Trump administration. Ditto for any union you belong to.

Fanciful orders. A lot of what Trump does or announces is intended just to make headlines and get people arguing with each other. So the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America? Just laugh. Or when he ordered his underlings to stop inflation, i.e., “to deliver emergency price relief, consistent with applicable law, to the American people and increase the prosperity of the American worker”? Laugh.

Every time you get upset about something like this, you’re distracting yourself from an issue where you might actually do some good.

Hopefulness. Frankly, I expected worse from Trump’s first week, so I’m modestly encouraged.

If you read novels an memoirs from the Nazi era in Germany, one thing that stands out is how artful the Nazis could be at pushing people into compliance. There is a boiling-the-frog aspect to many of these stories, and many people were left thinking, “If this is as bad as it gets, maybe I can deal with it.” Of course, it always got worse, but somehow it never seemed like the right moment to take a stand. The result was that many people missed their chance to oppose Hitler, and then later missed their chance to get out of Germany.

What I was most afraid of going into the second Trump administration was that Trumpists would display a similar kind of deftness. Extreme things would happen, but always with hint that maybe it won’t be so bad.

But Week One makes it clear that these people are not deft. They are not clever. They aren’t even unified. The Mad King is in charge, and none of his advisors is in a position to make him face reality. That will lead to mistakes, and mistakes can be exploited.

The Monday Morning Teaser

January 27, 2025 – 8:15 am

I know most of you are sick of reading about Trump and his various plans, plots, and threats. Unfortunately, that’s really what the news has been during his administration’s first week, so that’s what I’m writing about.

That said, I’ll be trying to maintain a different attitude than a lot of the media, even the liberal media. My focus will be on what you need to pay attention to and what kind of attention you should pay. I’ll try to avoid both normalizing and the hand-wringing, isn’t-that-awful coverage we see so much of.

This week’s featured post is “Week One”, covering the inaugural address and some of the early executive orders. I’ll be pointing you to good sources of information and recommending some Substack blogs to follow. I wish I could do an exhaustive classification of all the orders, but there are just too many of them.

Sadly, the weekly summary will also center on Trump. Or, more precisely, people reacting to Trump: Greenland’s prime minister, Bishop Budde, and a few others. I’ll also discuss Elon’s Nazi salute, but from the point of view of how we should think about and/or respond to this kind of trolling.

I just started a cold last night, so I don’t know what to predict about my energy. Posts will appear when they appear, and be as close to complete as I can manage.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (4)

Apt Comparisons

January 13, 2025 – 11:39 am

No sift next week. The next new posts will appear on January 27.

From what I can tell, the manager of your local Applebee’s has more experience managing a bigger budget and more personnel than Pete Hegseth.

– Senator Tammy Duckworth

This week’s featured post is “A Disastrous Development in Our Response to Disasters“.

This week everybody was talking about the LA wildfires

As I write, the fires in the the Los Angeles area are still burning, driven by dry conditions and hurricane-force winds. A weekly blog is not the right way to cover breaking news, so I won’t offer anything more than a few observations.

Fires driven by such strong winds don’t look real; it’s like somebody has speeded up the video.

The problem wasn’t only a shortage of manpower. Even the most formidable human efforts are useless when bone-dry undergrowth is whipped by the strongest winds the area has experienced in years, with gusts up to 100 mph. “When that wind is howling like that, nothing’s going to stop that fire,” says Wayne Coulson, CEO of the aerial firefighting company Coulson Aviation that’s battling the fires. “You just need to get out of the way.”

The New York Magazine article that quote is taken from gives some context:

Historically, the danger of wildfire has waned with the arrival of winter rains, but in recent years that pattern has changed. “On average, California’s rainy season is occurring about a month later than it did historically,” Swain says. And that increases both the length and the potential intensity of the fire season. By this time of year L.A. normally should have received several inches of rain, but it’s only gotten a fifth of an inch since last July, making the period the second-driest in over a century of record-keeping.

The trend isn’t limited to Southern California. Climate change has increased the number and severity of wildfires around the world, with higher global temperatures leading to drier weather in some regions. The Russian arctic, which hadn’t historically been prone to wildfire, has started to experience it on an epic scale, while southeastern Australia is burning with new intensity. Europe, too, has seen a steady increase in wildfires. Last year’s wildfires in Canada choked the eastern U.S. in smoke and painted the daytime red.

This is something to bear in mind whenever someone makes the argument that programs to cut fossil fuel use are expensive or uneconomical. Fossil fuels are a false economy. The reason we keep having these increasingly expensive disasters is that we have burned too much “cheap” fossil fuel. And yes, the money we spend subsidizing electric cars or installing solar panels this year won’t lessen our risk of climate-related disasters next year; there’s way more lag time in the system than that. But refusing to change at all is going to be much expensive in the 10-20 year time frame.

Republicans may not believe in climate change, but insurance companies do. Why aren’t the wealthy climate change deniers funding new insurance companies to take advantage of established companies pulling out of Florida and other climate-threatened places?

As Noah Smith points out, climate change doesn’t just increase risk, it breaks the whole model of insurance. Statistically, fire insurance works because house fires are usually uncorrelated: The insurance company can deal with one person’s house burning down, because it is still getting premiums from all the other houses in the neighborhood. But when the whole neighborhood burns down at once, the company could be in trouble.

and Jimmy Carter

Carter deserved better than to have his funeral driven out of the headlines by a natural disaster, especially one caused by climate change. If all world leaders had followed Carter’s lead in taking climate change seriously, that disaster might not have happened at all.

It’s hard not to pair Carter’s funeral with Trump’s looming inauguration. Americans used to value decency and virtue in their leaders, but on the whole we no longer do.

and Trump’s legal issues

Despite a flurry of legal filings, Trump was unable to prevent being sentenced for his 34 felony convictions. His sentence amounts to approximately nothing, but his convictions stand. A week from today he will enter office as the first convicted felon to become president.

While this is a victory of sorts for the rule of law, it also shows how close we are to being a government of men, not of laws. There was no real legal reason to block his sentencing, but four Supreme Court justices wanted to anyway. Trump’s argument was based on expanding the reasoning of the Court’s immunity decision, which similarly had no legal basis beyond the Court’s partisan makeup.

It is notable, however, that even in this low-stakes dispute, four justices dissented. That suggests there is strong support within the Court for reading the July immunity decision very broadly. And, of course, if any one of the five justices in the majority should flip their vote, Trump will prevail the next time this dispute arrives on the Supreme Court’s doorstep.

Two days before that decision, Trump and Justice Alito spoke on the phone.

Alito said in a statement that the two did not discuss the case or any others involving Trump. He said they talked about William Levi, Alito’s former law clerk, and if he was qualified for a potential position in Trump’s administration.

Alito says this as if his excuse makes the call OK. It doesn’t. Quite the opposite, giving Alito’s former clerk a position in his administration could be considered a favor. Alito, of course, was one of the four justices who wanted to block Trump’s sentencing.

Other legal maneuvers attempted to block release of Jack Smith’s report. How that will play out is still up in the air. Obviously, if Trump can run out the clock until his inauguration, he can block release of the report himself. He’s hoping to use the courts to do that.

and his fantasies of conquest

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m having a hard time taking seriously Trump’s threats against Panama, Greenland, and Canada. I think he’s trying to burnish his image as a strong man, because his weakness is about to be exposed. In The Atlantic, Robert Kagan considers the possibility that Ukraine will fall in the next 12-18 months without more aid from the US.

When Trump said during his campaign that he could end the war in 24 hours, he presumably believed what most observers believed: that Putin needed a respite, that he was prepared to offer peace in exchange for territory, and that a deal would include some kind of security guarantee for whatever remained of Ukraine. Because Trump’s peace proposal at the time was regarded as such a bad deal for Kyiv, most assumed Putin would welcome it. Little did they know that the deal was not remotely bad enough for Putin to accept. So now Trump is in the position of having promised a peace deal that he cannot possibly get without forcing Putin to recalculate.

Kagan puts his finger on the key point: Losing Ukraine weakens America in the eyes of the world. It’s the exact opposite of America becoming “great again”.

The liberal world order is inseparable from American power, and not just because it depends on American power. America itself would not be so powerful without the alliances and the open international economic and political system that it built after World War II to protect its long-term interests. Trump can’t stop defending the liberal world order without ceding significantly greater influence to Russia and China. Like Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and Ali Khamenei see the weakening of America as essential to their own ambitions. Trump may share their hostility to the liberal order, but does he also share their desire to weaken America and, by extension, himself?

Trump has boxed himself in. The only way to make Putin respect his “strength” is to push a massive new Ukraine aid package through Congress, which is the exact opposite of what his MAGA base wants.

Trump keeps moving the goal posts. During the campaign, Trump said he would solve the Ukraine War in 24 hours. Now his point man on the issue is saying 100 days.

Tuesday, Don Jr. and assorted MAGA influencers like Charlie Kirk went to Greenland for a photo op with “supporters” of the idea that Greenland should join the United States. But later it turned out that the photo op was staged.

Danish media reported Thursday that a series of photos featuring Kirk and Greenlandic residents in MAGA hats was staged. The MAGA cohort reportedly rounded up homeless people from the area—including one person from under a bridge—promising them a meal at the Hotel Hans Egede in exchange for their participation in the pro-Trump photo circuit.

Videos of the trip that circulated on X describe the Greenlandic participants as “the local community in Nuuk,” but several local sources that spoke with DR News described the photographed individuals as “homeless and socially disadvantaged” people who are often outside the supermarket directly across from the hotel where the Trump event was held.

“All they have to do is put on a cap and be in the Trump staff’s videos. They are being bribed, and it is deeply distasteful,” Tom Amtoft, a 28-year resident of Nuuk, told the Danish news outlet.

Trump has floated the idea of using tariffs against tiny Denmark to force the Danes to hand over Greenland. However, Denmark is part of the European Union, so tariffs targeting Denmark would mean a trade war with the whole continent.

Here’s the best response to Trump’s proposal to change the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

and you also might be interested in …

The Biden administration’s last jobs report is stunningly good. 256K new jobs, unemployment falling to 4.1%. Paul Krugman assembles statistics on the health of the economy overall, and comments

the fact that [Trump] inherits an economy in such good shape is actually a problem for his agenda

A statistical analysis in The Lancet claims deaths in Gaza have been underestimated.

Elon Musk is moving the goal posts: Previously he said he’d find “at least $2 trillion” to cut in the federal budget. He now claims there’s “a good shot” at cutting $1 trillion.

In some alternative timeline:

The feud within MAGA is real. Here’s Steve Bannon commenting on Elon Musk:

He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down. … I will have Elon Musk run out of here by inauguration day. He will not have full access to the White House. He will be like any other person.

Speaking of Elon, his X platform has turned into a great place to spread racism.

There have been several reports of the newest Grok update being used to create photo realistic racist imagery of several football players and managers. One image depicts a player, who is black, picking cotton while another shows that same player eating a banana surrounded by monkeys in a forest. A separate image depicts two different players as pilots in a plane’s cockpit with the twin towers in the background. More images depict a variety of players and managers meeting and conversing with controversial historical figures such as Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Callum Hood, the head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), said X had become a platform that incentivised and rewarded spreading hate through revenue sharing, and AI imagery made that even easier.

“The thing that X has done, to a degree that no other mainstream platform has done, is to offer cash incentives to accounts to do this, so accounts on X are very deliberately posting the most naked hate and disinformation possible.”

The price of political influence in the Trump administration is rising faster than the price of eggs. Want face time with Trump and his VP on Inauguration Day? It will cost you twice as much as it would have in 2017.

To get access to the candlelight dinner with Trump and the vice-president’s dinner with Vance, donors would need to have contributed at the $1m level. A $500,000 contribution would limit access to only the candlelight dinner, unlike in 2017 when it was enough for both.

Here’s the central problem with the idea that “drill baby drill” will lower the price of energy (and eventually everything else”): We have a lot of oil and gas in the ground, but we don’t have a lot of cheap oil and gas in the ground. Every time the price goes down, more and more potential drilling sites become unprofitable.

Case in point: Wednesday, the Interior Department held an auction for drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — and had no bidders.

The sale, which was required by Congress, marks the second time in four years that an effort to auction oil and gas leases in the pristine wilderness — home to migrating caribou, polar bears, musk oxen, millions of birds and other wildlife — has been a flop.

The repeated failures suggest that oil companies are either not interested in drilling in the refuge or do not think it’s worth the cost, despite insistence by Mr. Trump and many Republican lawmakers that the refuge should be opened up for drilling.

Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation suit against Fox News for lying about its software’s performance during the 2020 election is still alive. Fox settled a similar suit by paying Dominion Voting Systems $787 million in 2023.

Imagine if everyone Fox has lied about had the deep pockets of a major corporation.

and let’s close with something colorful

The Guardian published an unusual year-in-review piece: 2024’s best photos of the Northern Lights.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (7)

A Disastrous Development in Our Response to Disasters

January 13, 2025 – 8:53 am

All my life, America’s leaders have encouraged us to unite in the face of disasters.
But now Trump is using them to tear us apart.

This week, if you wanted to pay attention something other than Jimmy Carter’s funeral, you had two choices: the L.A. wildfires or Donald Trump’s wild statements about taking over Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even Canada. Both of those stories will get attention in this week’s summary (the next post), but what interested me more than either was something in the intersection: Trump’s wild statements about the wildfires, and the disturbing approach he is taking to public disasters in general.

When a community faces a catastrophe, it can respond in one of two opposite ways:

Survivors can bond together to mourn the dead, care for the injured, and rebuild. Shared pain can create new bonds across former social divisions. People untouched by the disaster may realize that only circumstance separates them from the victims, and may develop a new empathy not just for recent victims, but for the less fortunate in general. A post-disaster attitude of “We’re all in this together” has a chance to grow and spread.
The community can damage itself further by finger-pointing, scapegoating, and other forms of turning against itself.

History provides examples of both responses. On the positive side, political partisanship in the United States all but vanished after Pearl Harbor, and lapsed at least temporarily after 9-11. But on the negative side, persecution of Jews sharply increased during the Black Death in Europe, as unfounded rumors of Jews poisoning wells spread widely. All through history, disasters without an easily grasped cause have led people to seek scapegoats. Sophocles’ play “Oedipus Rex” begins with a report from the Oracle of Delphi that one person’s crime has brought a plague to the city. In the Biblical story of Jonah, sailors cast lots to decide who to blame for the storm that threatens to sink them.

Sometimes a community goes both ways simultaneously: At the same time the US was uniting to fight World War II, it was rounding up Japanese Americans and putting them in camps. After 9-11, President Bush put considerable effort into talking Americans out of blaming the attack on Muslims in general, though some did anyway.

Bush’s rhetoric was an example of responsible leadership, which does its best to turn the community response towards positive rather than negative responses. (Using 9-11 to promote an invasion of Iraq, on the other hand, was irresponsible leadership.) Responsible post-catastrophe leadership also has several other identifiable traits:

Unfounded rumors spread wildly after disasters, so responsible leaders set up reliable systems of information. They speak calmly and stick to facts in order to calm public panic.
They call attention to heroes rather than villains, promoting the notion that community members should help and trust each other.
They promote trust in the institutions set up to deal with the catastrophe, and pledge that those institutions will get the backing they need to resolve the situation.

Now look at how President-elect Trump and the right-wing media that takes its cues from him have responded to the Los Angeles wildfires. Wednesday, he posted:

One of the best and most beautiful parts of the United States of America is burning down to the ground. It’s ashes, and Gavin Newscum should resign. This is all his fault!!!

And he followed up with

Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California. Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!

and

NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA. THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!

Just about every sentence in these posts is false. The December bill that appropriated money to keep the government open added $29 billion to FEMA, and FEMA told CNN Wednesday that it had a $27 billion balance in its accounts.

That sum may well prove inadequate to meet the needs created by every disaster that ends up happening this year, but it’s not “no money.”

There were indeed some dry hydrants, but that had nothing to do with any general lack of water in Southern California, or some mythical “water restoration declaration” Newsom refused to sign. Most of the problem was a more specific lack: of water that had been pumped into tanks in the hills above LA. This created a lack of water pressure in key places, but not a regional lack of water. Shifting more water resources from Northern to Southern California would not have helped.

Firefighting planes were grounded by hurricane-level winds, not by some action of Governor Newsom.

In short, Trump spread lies in order to scapegoat Gavin Newsom, a prominent Democrat who might be his opponent when he runs for an unconstitutional third term in 2028.

Other voices on right-wing media were quick to blame DEI or whatever else they don’t like.

This is all of a piece with the right-wing response to the New Orleans terrorist attack on New Years. Long after it was known that the suspect was a US citizen born in Houston, MAGA supporters were still spreading the rumor that he had crossed the border illegally two days before. This allowed them to smear undocumented immigrants while simultaneously pinning responsibility on President Biden’s immigration policies.

Our media occasionally combats this scapegoating on a small scale, by fact-checking clear lies. But the larger story is going almost completely uncovered: Responsible leadership in times of crisis is a thing of the past. We can no longer expect that our leaders will take care to learn the facts before they speak, pass on reliable information, or try to prevent panic. Instead, they will tell lies that turn public fear and anger against their political enemies. Rather than use a crisis to bring people together, they will use it to create scapegoats and turn different groups of Americans against each other.

In the long run, that reversal of policy may be more destructive than fire.

Posted in Articles | Tagged propaganda, Trump administration | Comments (8)

The Monday Morning Teaser

January 13, 2025 – 8:36 am

Jimmy Carter deserved better than to have his funeral pushed out of the headlines by a climate-change-related disaster, much less by Trump’s wild ravings about conquering Greenland.

As always, I recognize the inadequacy of a one-person weekly blog to cover an ongoing regional catastrophe, so I’m not going to try to do justice to the LA fires. And what drew my attention about Trump this week wasn’t his threats to break our treaty with Panama or turn on our NATO ally Denmark. Instead, I was struck by his quick response in using the California fires to tell defamatory lies about Governor Newsom and environmental policies in general.

The news media occasionally fact-checks Trump’s statements, but the larger story is going unreported: Previous presidents — and responsible leaders at all levels — have responded to disasters by reinforcing reliable sources of information, fighting rumor and panic, and promoting the community’s impulse to draw together. Trump does the exact opposite: To him, a disaster is an opportunity to tear us apart, not pull us together.

This is big, and I call attention to it in this week’s featured post “A Disastrous Development in Our Response to Disasters”. That should be out before 9 EST.

The weekly summary has a little about the wildfires, some coverage of the Carter funeral, Trump’s bizarre threats of conquest, his minor legal setbacks, and a few other things. I’ll aim to have that out by noon.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (2)

Con and Context

January 6, 2025 – 11:55 am

For journalists, failing to situate Trump’s words and actions in the context of an ongoing con is tantamount to deception. It’s not just failing to tell the whole story, it’s failing to tell the central story.

– Dan Froomkin, “Trump coverage needs to change and here’s how“

This week’s featured post is “A Meditation on American Greatness“

This week everybody was talking about the new Congress

The headline news was that on Friday Mike Johnson hung on to the speaker’s gavel. Initially, it looked like he had failed to win a majority on the first ballot, with all 215 Democrats voting for Hakeem Jeffries, 216 Republicans for Johnson, and three Republicans not voting for Johnson. (Six other Republicans expressed their reluctance in a minor way by passing during the alphabetical rollcall. They voted for Johnson when called a second time.) But the vote was held open long enough for Johnson to negotiate with two of the holdouts and President-elect Trump to call them. They flipped their votes, giving Johnson a 218-vote majority.

Johnson’s reelection avoided all kinds of chaos and a possible constitutional crisis: The House and Senate are constitutionally obligated to meet today in joint session to count electoral votes, but the House can’t function without a speaker. If no speaker had been elected yet, the country would be in uncharted territory.

What Johnson’s narrow first-ballot election portends is open to interpretation. Until Republicans took control of the House in 2023, speaker elections typically weren’t very newsworthy. The majority party hashed out its differences between the November election and the January vote, and the identity of the new speaker was not in doubt when the new Congress convened. In 2023, though, Kevin McCarthy needed 15 ballots over five days to win the speakership, a position he held for only nine months before losing a motion to vacate the chair. The House was then incapacitated for three weeks before the Republican majority united around Mike Johnson.

Compared to what McCarthy went through, and what the House endured trying to replace him in October 2023, Johnson’s reelection was smooth sailing. But compared to any other recent speaker election, this one was full of drama and anxiety. In “normal” years, the visible intervention of the President-elect would have been frowned upon; electing a speaker is the internal business of the House, and not a matter for the executive branch to weigh in on.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that Johnson was originally the candidate of the right wing of the Republican caucus, the very people who were dragging their feet about reelecting him. What happened in the meantime? Reality happened. The right-wing “Freedom” Caucus is a movement of ideological purity. But the Speaker has a responsibility to govern the nation. Again and again, the House would need to pass some kind of bill to keep the government functioning, and no ideologically pure bill could pass the House, much less get through the Democratic Senate and be signed by President Biden. So Johnson, like McCarthy before him, was forced to either compromise with Democrats or lead the country into disaster. His decision to avoid disaster made him impure, causing “Freedom” Caucus Republicans to support him only with reluctance and as a favor to Trump.

Going forward, Johnson’s majority in the House is narrower than McCarthy’s, but the GOP also holds the White House and a majority in the Senate. So in theory, Johnson should not have to compromise any more. He’ll be negotiating with Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune rather than with Biden and Chuck Schumer.

However, reality is due to raise its head in a new way: Trump comes into office having raised impossible expectations. MAGA voters expect him to cut taxes, shrink the federal deficit, strengthen the military, and do wildly expensive things like round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants — all without touching Social Security and Medicare. All this is supposed to happen in “one big beautiful bill” that presumably will also deal with the looming debt ceiling crisis.

At some point, somebody is going to have to write that bill. And all but two House Republicans (maybe fewer if Trump’s nominees from the House are approved and not yet replaced) are going to have to vote for it.

Friday’s vote for speaker is only the overture to that opera.

and two terrorist attacks

Within about eight hours on New Years Day, the United States suffered two terrorist attacks: A man drove a pickup truck down Bourbon Street in New Orleans and then began shooting, and a Cybertruck exploded outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. The New Orleans attack had more casualties: 15 killed (including the driver during a police shoot-out) and 35 injured. The Cybertruck attack killed only the perpetrator, but seven other people were injured.

It’s striking how differently the two attacks have been covered. The New Orleans attack fit a familiar pattern: A native-born American from Houston with a Muslim-sounding name, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, became radicalized, presumably online. While there is no indication of foreign direction or assistance in the attack, he claimed to be inspired by ISIS and had a ISIS flag in the truck.

The coverage of the attack otherized Jabbar, painting him as a radical Islamist attacking the United States from the outside, and playing down the fact that he was a US Army veteran. Right-wing media pushed the false claim that he was foreign-born, and “crossed the U.S.-Mexico border at the Eagle Pass crossing just two days ago”. In reference to the attack, Trump posted “the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country”.

At first, the Las Vegas attack seemed anti-MAGA, pairing a Musk-related vehicle with a Trump-related target. But as details emerged, Matthew Alan Livelsberger proved to be a Trump supporter. A decorated active-duty special forces soldier from Colorado Springs, Livelsberger’s first marriage broke up in 2018 at least partially due to his support for Trump. He had told people he intended to vote from Trump again in 2024.

His political manifesto seems pretty clear:

Consider this last sunset of ‘24 and my actions the end of our sickness and a new chapter of health for our people. Rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans! We are second to no one.

That aspect of the story has been almost completely buried. Instead, the narrative has shifted into another familiar pattern: Livelsberger is a victim, a troubled soul with PTSD.

We see this again and again in our news coverage: Muslims who kill are evil members of a global conspiracy, while right-wing White Christians who kill are troubled loners. Tom Scocca:

Two disturbed guys rent trucks and commit public acts of violence to deliver explicit ideological messages: one gets the scare story about who radicalized him, the other gets a sympathetic, nonpolitical account of his trauma

Amanda Marcotte notes the similarities rather than the differences between the two attackers: They were both men who had a certain amount of professional success while making a mess of their personal lives. Both found an extremist ideology through which to channel their rage and deflect blame for their problems, ultimately resulting in violence.

and it’s January 6 again

Four years ago, Donald Trump inspired rioters who attacked the US Capitol and delayed a constitutionally mandated joint session of Congress to count electoral votes from the 2020 election. The point of doing this was to reverse a free and fair election that he lost.

At the time, both parties were united in condemning this attack. But within months, Trump had pulled the Republican Party back into his orbit.

Last March, the Supreme Court ruled that section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which appears to ban insurrectionists from holding public offices like the presidency, has no real meaning. It was therfore unnecessary to determine whether Trump’s actions on January 6 amounted to insurrection. A few months later, after delaying long enough to make further prosecution impossible before the election, it ruled that presidents are, for nearly all practical purposes, above the law.

This November, 49% of voters decided that attempting to overthrow democracy was not a deal-breaker. Today, Congress will certify his election, setting up his inauguration on January 20.

One thing that won’t happen today: Democrats won’t riot, and the Capitol won’t be occupied by a violent mob. That’s because Democrats are not traitors, as so many Republicans are.

By all accounts, Trump is getting ready to pardon people convicted of January-6-related crimes. Many of the low-level trespassers and minor offenders have probably learned their lesson and won’t commit further Trump-inspired crimes. But I expect that a core of folks are learning the opposite lesson: that crimes committed in Trump’s name are not really crimes and will be tolerated.

An essential piece of any fascist movement is a Brownshirt contingent of violent followers who will do the Leader’s will in ways that the official police can’t or won’t. I expect the pardoned rioters to form the core of Trump’s Brownshirts.

and Trump’s sentencing

Friday, Trump will be sentenced for his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records. The judge has indicated that there will be no jail time.

Trump’s rhetoric is all about the prosecutor and the judge, but he was found guilty by a jury of 12 ordinary Americans. His attorneys had full opportunities to make their case, but the jury unanimously found him guilty beyond a reasonable. doubt.

and the growing subservience of The Washington Post

Meanwhile, at The Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes submitted a cartoon showing media barons — including Post owner Jeff Bezos — making offerings before a statue of Trump.

Along with Bezos, Telnaes depicted Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman shown bringing Trump sacks of cash. Los Angeles Times owner and billionaire medical innovator Patrick Soon-Shiong was shown bearing a tube of lipstick. Also lying prostrate was Mickey Mouse — the avatar of the Walt Disney Co. Last month, Disney settled a Trump defamation suit against ABC News by agreeing to pay $15 million to an as-yet non-existent Trump foundation and $1 million toward his legal fees.

The sacks of cash refer to the million-dollar contributions the aspiring oligarchs have made to Trump’s inaugural fund. Most of the legal opinions I’ve seen say that ABC would have won the lawsuit and didn’t need to pay Trump anything. The contributions to Trump’s inaugural fund dwarf what the same rich men gave to the comparable Biden fund.

The WaPo refused to publish the cartoon, whereupon Telnaes quit after working at the WaPo since 2008. She explained on Substack:

While it isn’t uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within a cartoon if it strikes that editor as unclear or isn’t correctly conveying the message intended by the cartoonist, such
editorial criticism was not the case regarding this cartoon. To be clear, there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.

The American Association of Editorial Cartoonists released a supporting statement:

With the resignation of editorial cartoonist and Pulitzer Prize winner Ann Telnaes from The Washington Post, corporate billionaires once again have brought an editorial cartoon to life with their craven censorship in bowing to a wannabe tyrant. Her principled resignation illustrates that while the pen is mightier than the sword, political cowardice once again eclipses journalistic integrity at The Washington Post.

The AAEC called on its members to draw cartoons supporting Telnaes and use the hashtag #StandWithAnn. Here are a few responses:

And while we’re talking about Bezos and the Orbanization of the press, Amazon is bowing down to Trump in another way: Amazon Prime will be releasing a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump. Melania herself is the documentary’s executive producer, a position which typically implies editorial control.

and you also might be interested in …

There’s an ever-growing consensus that what Israel is doing in Gaza really is genocide. Here’s Amnesty International’s report. Germany’s Der Spiegel reports that “The Israeli army is systematically destroying towns in northern Gaza and expelling the population … laying the groundwork for a military occupation – and for the possible construction of new Jewish settlements.”

Not to be missed: A guy who infiltrated right-wing militias and gave his files to ProPublica.

Every year, TPM announces its Golden Duke Awards, for outstanding achievement in political corruption and scandal. This year, the best general interest scandal was the Supreme Court. I interpret this as a collective award, encompassing the particular scandals of Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, as well as the general political hackery of John Roberts. The best sex scandal is Matt Gaetz. And so on.

Jess Piper expresses her frustration with the voters in her state of Missouri, who repeatedly pass progressive referenda, but then also vote for Republican legislators and other state officials who will circumvent whatever the people have just voted into law.

In spite of Trump’s rhetoric, the US is actually in pretty good shape right now:

For the first time since that transition 24 years ago, there will be no American troops at war overseas on Inauguration Day. New data reported in the past few days indicate that murders are way down, illegal immigration at the southern border has fallen even below where it was when Mr. Trump left office and roaring stock markets finished their best two years in a quarter-century.

Jobs are up, wages are rising and the economy is growing as fast as it did during Mr. Trump’s presidency. Unemployment is as low as it was just before the Covid-19 pandemic and near its historic best. Domestic energy production is higher than it has ever been.

The manufacturing sector has more jobs than under any president since Mr. Bush. Drug overdose deaths have fallen for the first time in years. Even inflation, the scourge of the Biden presidency, has returned closer to normal, although prices remain higher than they were four years ago.

We can expect to hear negative views of the US for at least another couple months, and then Trump will start taking credit for Biden’s good results, which much of the country will begin to notice for the first time.

Heather Cox Richardson notes that Biden’s strong economy results from a policy change that Trump is likely to reverse:

Trump has promised to swing the country away from Biden’s investment in rebuilding the middle class. Biden’s focus on employment meant that unemployment dropped dramatically during his term, more people got access to affordable health care, labor unions showed historic growth, and real wages went up so much that according to economist David Doney, workers now have the highest real hourly wages since the 1960s.

Good news for workers was good news for everyone: the country’s economic growth was more than double that of any other country in the Group of 7 (G7) economically advanced democracies.

But Trump has been very clear that he rejects this system and intends to take the country back to supply-side economics, in which the government encourages the concentration of wealth at the top of the economy.

Oh, and what about inflation? Paul Krugman notes how closely US inflation tracked Europe’s inflation, and concludes that Biden’s policies probably weren’t at fault.

One of my regular walking partners has Covid. Be careful out there, folks. It’s not over.

and let’s close with something practical

Over the holidays, I flew for the first time in a year and a half. So of course the question came to mind: Why is it so hard to get people on and off and airliner?

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (16)

A meditation on American Greatness

January 6, 2025 – 9:19 am

One counterproductive argument I keep hearing goes something like this: A Trump supporter says “Make America Great Again”, and a Trump resister responds “When was America great? During slavery? When women couldn’t vote? The Native American genocide? Jim Crow?”

The problem with this argument is that it typically ends with each side hardened into its position. The resister goes away believing the supporter wants to return to an era when White male Christians reigned supreme and everyone else was second-class or worse. The supporter goes away believing that the resister resents anyone who has pride in America, and that liberals want Americans to feel ashamed of their country. But the supporter is never going to give up patriotic pride, and the resister is never going to voluntarily go back to times of oppression and domination. Both are immovable.

Imagining any kind of compromise within this frame is impossible. Is the Trump resister going to give ground and admit that a little bit of racism and sexism might be beneficial? Will the Trump supporter agree to be a little bit ashamed of his country? Not likely.

I want to claim that the root of the problem here is the frame, not the participants or their points of view. The problem is that the issue has been framed as being not doing.

If you start talking about doing, the logjam resolves: All through its history, the United States has done both great and terrible things.

As a liberal and a Trump resister, I have no trouble admitting that America and Americans have done great things over the decades. Like these:

The US played a key role in defeating both Nazi Germany and Soviet Communism.
After World War II, we helped rebuild Europe (including Germany) through the Marshall Plan rather than keep potential economic rivals down.
All through our history, we have created opportunity for people who were destitute in other countries (like the survivors of the Irish Potato Famine).
The example of our revolution and our constitution inspired the expansion of human rights around the world.

I could go on. If you’re searching for reasons to take pride in America, there are lots of them.

But here’s the key point: I can acknowledge those facts without forgetting that they all had downsides. We have never entirely lived up to the ideals of our revolution. The opportunities we offered immigrants weren’t available to everyone. Our fight against fascism in World War II also included the Japanese internment. During the Cold War we supported many oppressive right-wing regimes in the Third World, and also fought a ruinous war in Vietnam.

The problem with framing “greatness” as a state of being and pinning it to America in some past era is that those downsides either go away or become insignificant. Worse, saying America was great then, but is not great now, implicitly promotes the idea of going back. And none of those eras is a time we should want to go back to. Jim Crow America is nothing to be nostalgic about, even if that’s who we were on D-Day.

Idealizing past greatness also makes an unfair connection between our great and terrible deeds. We created unprecedented economic growth in spite of our social injustices, not because of them. Forcing gays back into the closet or women back into the kitchen won’t end inflation or bring back well-paid working class jobs.

But has America done great things? Of course it has. It’s important to recognize those achievements and take inspiration from them, because looking ahead, we need to do great things again. Converting our economy so that it no longer relies on cheap fossil fuels, for example, will be a huge undertaking. But the nation that put a man on the Moon and built the interstate highway system should be up to the task.

In fact it is the Left, not the Right, that most needs to believe in our ability to do great things. At the root of MAGA fascism lies a zero-sum view of the world: There is a limited amount of goodness to be had, so we — native-born White male Christians, or whoever “we” refers to in some particular context — have to seize all of it. There is a limited amount of freedom in the World, so any gain for women or gays or people of color must be a loss for everyone else.

Believing that the goodness in the world is a limited pile of pirate treasure, and then seizing more than your share of it, is a very shallow conception of greatness. Our greatness needs to be greater than that.

In short, it’s a mistake to get baited into arguing that America was never great. You’ll never win that argument and you shouldn’t want to. Great things still need to be done, and Americans need to see ourselves as the kind of people who can take on those challenges.

Posted in Articles | Tagged framing | Comments (15)

The Monday Morning Teaser

January 6, 2025 – 8:47 am

This week’s featured post expresses my frustration with having heard way too many arguments that go like this:

Trump supporter: Make American great again!
Trump resister: America was never great.

I think we liberals shoot ourselves in the foot when we accept the Yes/No frame on American greatness and take the No side.

Of course there’s a jingoistic flavor of patriotism that we want to oppose. But there’s also a healthy kind of patriotism that we want to promote, the kind that sees historical American ideals like “inalienable rights” and “liberty and justice for all” as aspirations we want to achieve someday rather than as cynical propaganda. And as the world faces threats like climate change, we need to believe in an America that can take on big challenges and do great things.

And that’s the key framing change: doing as opposed to being. Rather than argue about whether America is great, or was great at some point in the past, we should be affirming the idea that America has at times done great things and could do great things in the future. We’ve also done terrible things, of course, like enslaving millions of Africans and all but wiping out the Native Americans. There’s no need to sugarcoat that.

But so much of MAGA is based on pessimism and weakness: We can’t take care of all our sick and old people (even if most of Europe can). We can’t kick our fossil fuel habit. We can’t overcome racism, sexism, and all the other traditional bigotries. But the Obama landslide of 2008 centered on the slogan “Yes we can”. Believing in our potential to do great things is as essential to liberals and progressives as it is to the Trumpists.

So “A Meditation on American Greatness” should post around 10 EST.

That leaves a lot for the weekly summary: the new Congress electing (barely) a speaker, the two New Years terrorist attacks, the January 6 anniversary, Trump’s upcoming sentencing in New York, the WaPo cartoonist incident, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that posted by noon.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (3)

Daddy Issues

December 30, 2024 – 11:55 am

When Elon tweets something and when Trump tweets something,
Republicans don’t know who their Daddy is.

– Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

This week’s featured post is “Cracks in the MAGA Coalition“.

This week everybody was talking about Jimmy Carter

President Jimmy Carter died Sunday at the age of 100, after 22 months in hospice care.

Carter was president from 1977 to 1981. His single term was marred by high inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis, but looks much better in retrospect than it did at the time. I find myself pining for the roads not taken. Carter created possibilities which his successors did not pursue, and the world is worse for America’s failure to follow his lead.

Carter was the first president to recognize global warming as a problem. He installed solar panels on the White House roof (which his successor, Ronald Reagan, promptly removed). While the country did not take the path to sustainable energy he envisioned, much of the sustainable energy used today is based on research funded under his presidency. Rolling Stone makes the case that he was America’s Greatest Environmental President.

In 1978, he brought Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin together to negotiate the Camp David Accords. The two countries have not fought a war since, and for a time, peace in the Middle East seemed possible.

Today, Carter is best known for his post-presidency. He ran for president in 1976 as a born-again Christian, and his subsequent life exemplified the Christ-like values so often lacking in Evangelical leaders. He and his wife Rosalynn (who died in 2023 after 77 years of marriage) championed Habitat for Humanity, and into their 90s were still swinging hammers to build houses for the poor. The Carter Center has been a voice for peace, democracy, and human rights for more than 40 years.

After his presidency, he returned to his farm in Plains, Georgia. He regularly taught Sunday school classes at his church. (My sister recently posted a picture she and her husband took with the Carters after attending his class in 2015.)

His death should remind us all of an era when we expected our leaders to be virtuous people — and occasionally they even were.

Jay Kuo posted a charming memory about meeting Rosalynn Carter when he was a child.

and US expansion

Recently Trump has tweeted about a variety of possible “territorial expansions” of the US — conquests, really, because there’s no sign any of these folks want to be part of the MAGA empire.

Greenland. On December 22nd, Trump released a statement that “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.” Apparently, having Greenland continue as a territory of our NATO ally Denmark is not good enough.

And you’ll never guess why we have to take over Greenland: global warming. Here’s former Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien on Fox News:

It’s strategically very important to the Arctic which is going to be the critical battleground of the future because as the climate gets warmer, the Arctic is going to be a pathway that maybe cuts down on the usage of the Panama Canal.

So climate change is a hoax when we’re talking about limiting the burning of fossil fuels, but it’s absolutely real when it justifies taking territory from our NATO allies or ruling indigenous peoples against their will.

Panama Canal. On Christmas, Trump charged that Chinese soldiers are operating in the Canal Zone illegally. (A Hong Kong based corporation has the contract to manage two ports near the Canal’s entrances. That’s the closest anyone has come to making sense out of Trump’s ridiculous claim.) He suggested that the spirit of the agreement through which the US returned the Zone to Panama in 1999 has been violated, and said he was going to demand it back.

James Fallows (who during the Carter administration was involved in formalizing the treaties that returned the Canal to Panama) covers all this in much more detail. The push to return the Canal to Panama, he says, originally came from the military, which doubted its ability to defend the Canal if the local population viewed it as an enemy occupation. (If you’re worried about Chinese influence now, imagine if they could arm an indigenous uprising.) That’s why he estimates the chances of the US actually retaking the Canal by force as “zero”.

The issues Trump raises about Chinese soldiers and discriminatory pricing are complete fantasies.

Fallows also points out that the Canal is a climate-change issue: Operating the locks requires water, and depends on rainfall in the local watershed. Lately that rainfall has been declining.

Canada. This is almost certainly trolling on Trump’s part. In his Christmas message he tried to appeal to Canada’s citizens: If they became “the 51st state”, he claimed, their taxes would go down and they’d reap all kinds of benefits. (Of course they’d also lose their health coverage, and their life expectancy would probably drop 3 1/4 years to match ours.)

I find myself unmoved by these visions, which I suspect are entirely vaporous. (In other words, I don’t expect to see US aircraft carriers move to menace Nuuk.) During Trump’s first term, Rachel Maddow used to say, “Watch what they do, not what they say“, implying that Trump might be doing something behind the scenes that contradicted his public rhetoric. The same thing applies here, but in reverse: He’s saying things that will excite his base and inflame his critics, but I suspect no action will result. So I refuse to be inflamed.

Liberals often suggest that Trump’s outlandish rhetoric is supposed to distract us from something else he’s doing. But here I think his own supporters are the target, and they’re supposed to overlook what he isn’t doing. Trump is not going to cut trillions from the federal budget, he’s not going to lower the price of eggs or gas, and if you’re not rich you won’t notice whatever tax cut you get. But if he can get his supporters excited about Greenland and Panama, they may not notice the bankruptcy of his other promises.

Fallows has this right: The point of Trump’s rhetoric is to stoke his followers’ sense of grievance.

and Matt Gaetz

Just as I was getting ready to post last week, the House Ethics Committee released its report on Matt Gaetz.

In sum, the Committee found substantial evidence of the following:

From at least 2017 to 2020, Representative Gaetz regularly paid women for
engaging in sexual activity with him.
In 2017, Representative Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl.
During the period 2017 to 2019, Representative Gaetz used or possessed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on multiple occasions.
Representative Gaetz accepted gifts, including transportation and lodging in
connection with a 2018 trip to the Bahamas, in excess of permissible amounts.
In 2018, Representative Gaetz arranged for his Chief of Staff to assist a woman with whom he engaged in sexual activity in obtaining a passport, falsely indicating to the U.S. Department of State that she was a constituent.
Representative Gaetz knowingly and willfully sought to impede and obstruct the Committee’s investigation of his conduct.
Representative Gaetz has acted in a manner that reflects discreditably upon the House. Based on the above, the Committee concluded there was substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules, state and federal laws, and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress

The 42-page report outlines that “substantial evidence”. Gaetz’ protest is that the Justice Department also investigated him and did not press charges, which he (falsely) claims “exonerates” him.

Reading the report, you can see how many of the witnesses might not be credible in court, where a beyond-reasonable-doubt standard would apply to any criminal charges. In court, Gaetz’ refusal to answer questions or explain his actions would not count against him.

However, the evidence in the report is quite persuasive if the question is “Should this man be in Congress?” or “Should this man be Attorney General?”. I find it striking that the dissenting opinion at the end of the report says “While we do not challenge the Committee’s findings …” and only protests that the report should not have been released after Gaetz resigned from the House. In short, not even the Republicans on the committee were willing to defend Gaetz’ conduct or claim the process had been “weaponized” against him, as Gaetz himself claimed.

and you also might be interested in …

Whooping cough is on the rise, largely because fewer children are being vaccinated for it. Cases are up five times over last year’s totals.

You might naively think that as sea levels rise, they’ll rise the same amount everywhere. Apparently this is not true. The US Southeast seems unusually prone to sea-level rise, with an increase of seven inches since 2010 in some places.

Now that the Supreme Court has banned universities from considering race in their admissions process, Black enrollment in elite programs has dropped. Harvard Law School has 19 incoming Black students, down from 43 the previous year.

It makes headlines when police kill some unarmed person of color for no justifiable reason, but such incidents are comparatively rare. More significant, this WaPo article claims, are the less extreme but more-or-less constant abuses dished out to women, the poor, and the homeless.

I remember a similar point being made after the killing of Michael Brown started demonstrations and violence in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. The national coverage focused on that particular death and the conflicting accounts of what really happened. To the community, though, the killing was just an extreme example of what they saw every day.

SkepChick thinks the case against black plastic utensils has been overblown.

and let’s close with something timely

Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, when many of you will be tempted to make resolutions. Resolutions, as we all know, are extraordinarily hard to keep. The ideas always sound great: Who doesn’t want to exercise more and read more and learn a new language? But there are reasons you have lived your whole life so far without doing those things, and those reasons don’t go away just because you get a new calendar.

So more often than not, making a resolution is just setting yourself up for failure. But there is an alternative: CGP Grey suggests declaring a theme for your year rather than committing to specific goals you will probably not achieve.

So rather than commit to read one book a week, you could declare 2025 the Year of Reading. It’s a softer goal, one that will allow you to try, fail, and come back to try again. Or rather than committing to lose 15 pounds, run two miles a day, and become a vegetarian, you might declare a Year of Health. Each day, you might remind yourself that you’re trying to be healthier this year. And who knows? Maybe you will be.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (12)

Cracks in the MAGA Coalition

December 30, 2024 – 9:51 am

Fractures are already showing in the MAGA coalition,
and they haven’t even taken power yet.

When a party out of power suddenly finds itself on the verge of taking control of the White House and both houses of Congress, you’d expect to find them coasting on a wave of good feeling. Victory salves all wounds, so everybody should be ready to dance with everybody else at the inaugural balls.

Strangely, though, MAGAWorld is full of conflict these days. One Trump-supporting fascist (Steve Bannon) is calling another Trump-supporting fascist (Elon Musk) a “toddler” who needs a “wellness check” from Child Protective Services. And American workers, says Vivek Ramaswamy, can’t compete with immigrants because they suffer from our “culture”, which venerates mediocrity over excellence.

But wait: Isn’t the whole point of Trumpism that “real” (i.e. White Christian) Americans are victims of the liberal Deep State that wants to “replace” them with brown-skinned Third Worlders? What’s going on?

First skirmish: Foreign investment. Trump owes his election to two groups whose interests don’t match up: White working class voters and ultra-rich technology barons like Elon Musk. During the campaign, Trump could keep his plans vague enough that both were satisfied, and many low-wage workers could imagine that the richest man in the world was their friend.

But now that the election is over, the question keeps coming up: Who’s the real president, Trump or Elon? At first I interpreted such comments as Democratic trolling, trying to stir up trouble in MAGAWorld by taking advantage of Trump’s ego. (I remember in his first term how similar questions about Mike Pence riled him. Speculation at the time was that Trump would bask in the glory of the presidency, leaving Pence to do the actual work of governing.)

But more and more, there seems to be something to the murmurs. The move to reject a compromise and risk a government shutdown last week started with Musk, and Trump eventually got on board. Musk was the leader and Trump the follower.

Support for the stopgap spending bill then collapsed, forcing [House Speaker Mike] Johnson and his leadership team to scramble to find an alternative path forward. As they did, Musk celebrated, proclaiming that “the voice of the people has triumphed”.

It may be more accurate, however, to say that it was Musk’s voice that triumphed.

In the end, Congress passed a continuing resolution that still included the most important extras Democrats wanted: rebuilding the Key Bridge in Baltimore and disaster relief. And it kept government spending at basically the levels set before Republicans took control of the House two years ago.

Trump did not get the extra he wanted: suspending or eliminating the debt limit. But Musk did get what he wanted: The original proposal included an “outbound investment” provision limiting how American companies could invest in China.

We have heard for years about the problem of manufacturing businesses shipping jobs overseas to China, with its low worker wages and low environmental standards. China typically forces businesses wanting to locate factories in its country to transfer their technology and intellectual property to Chinese firms, which can then use that to undercut competitors in global markets, with state support.

Congress has been working itself into a lather about China for years now, and they finally came up with a way to deal with this issue. Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bob Casey (D-PA) have the flagship bill, which would either prohibit U.S. companies from investing in “sensitive technologies” in China, including semiconductors and artificial intelligence, or set up a broad notification regime around it.

One corporation that would be affected by this is Musk’s Tesla.

Elon Musk’s car company has a significant amount of, well, outbound investment. A Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai opened in 2019; maybe a quarter of the company’s revenue comes from China. Musk has endorsed building a second Tesla factory in China, where his grip on the electric-vehicle market has completely loosened amid domestic competition. He is working with the Chinese government to bring “Full Self-Driving” technology to China, in other words, importing a technology that may be seen as sensitive. Musk has battery and solar panel factories that are not yet in China, but he may want them there in the future.

Lo and behold: The outbound investment provision vanished from the final version of the continuing resolution. In other words, Republicans in Congress spent their negotiating chips getting what Musk wanted, not what Trump wanted.

Second skirmish: H-1B visas. A second conflict is still playing out: One of the most important issues for the MAGA base is immigration, and in particular protecting the jobs of American citizens from immigrant competition. “They’re taking American jobs” is one of the most effective attacks on immigrants at all levels, even the ones working jobs hardly any Americans want, like picking crops by hand or watching rich people’s kids for practically no pay.

However, American corporations have a different agenda: They want to hire the best people in the world and pay them as little as possible. This is not new. America has been draining the brains of the world at least since the 1930s, when Jews and other anti-fascists escaped from Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. We may sympathize with the American physicists who suddenly had to compete with the likes of Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, or American actresses who lost roles to Marlene Dietrich or Hedy Lamarr, but in retrospect it’s hard to feel bad about letting those people into our country.

Similarly today, the US tech industry employs foreign-born workers in jobs many Americans would undoubtedly like to have. The legal vehicle that allows this is the H-1B visa. Employers can sponsor foreign nationals with at least a bachelors degree to apply for H-1B visas that allow them to live and work in the US for three years, with a possible renewal to six years. Currently, 85,000 such visas can be issued each year. 84% of them go to people from India or China. Maybe a handful of those immigrants really are exceptional Einstein-like talents we’d be foolish to turn away, but probably not all 85,000 of them.

The employer has to affirm that the worker will be appropriately paid and that his or her (mostly his) employment won’t negatively impact similar American workers. In practice, though, these provisions are hard to monitor or enforce. Critics charge that H-1B workers are easily abused, because (if no other employers are waiting in the wings) the employer can expel a worker from the US just by withdrawing sponsorship. So H-1B workers can become cheap-but-highly-trained labor that corporations may prefer to American workers that the company doesn’t hold as much leverage over.

Obviously, the tech barons want to be free to import as many cheap engineers and programmers as they want, while Americans with comparable credentials want H-1B visas limited or eliminated. This conflict goes to the heart of what “America First” really means: Should we be strengthening Team America by bringing in talent wherever we can find it, or should we be defending the livelihoods of individual Americans? (An analogy to bring this home: Imagine you’re a young outfielder for the New York Mets, and that you’ve been struggling for playing time so you can prove yourself. How do you feel about the team signing Juan Soto? Your team is better, so your odds of going to the World Series have improved. But your individual prospects have taken a hit.) TPM:

The two sides began to argue on Sunday, after Donald Trump appointed Sriram Krishan, a partner at Andreesen Horowitz, as a White House policy adviser on Artificial Intelligence to work with Sacks, the Trump administration’s crypto and AI czar.

This may seem like a relatively minor White House appointment. However, Krishan has also been a proponent of removing country caps on green cards and H1-B visas, which allow American companies to hire foreign workers for certain specializations.

Nativists like Laura Loomer (who not so long ago was rumored to be having an affair with Trump) found this appointment “deeply disturbing“. Musk and Ramaswamy replied by attacking American workers, with Musk approvingly retweeting a post that described American workers as “retarded”.

Then Musk was attacked back, and responded by taking away privileges on X from people who criticized him. (Remember when Elon was a “free speech absolutist“? It turns out that just applies to Nazis.)

I think Paul Krugman has put his finger on what’s at stake here:

Every political movement is a coalition made up of factions with different goals and priorities. Normally what holds these factions together is realism and a willingness to compromise: Each faction is willing to give the other factions part of what they want in return for part of what it wants.

What’s different about MAGA is that I’m pretty sure that almost all of the movement’s activists (as opposed to the low-information voters who put Trump over the top) knew that he was a con man, without even concepts of a plan to reduce prices. But each faction believed that he was their con man, putting something over on everyone else.

But now the two most important factions — what we might call original MAGA, motivated largely by hostility to immigrants, and tech bro MAGA, seeking ~~a free hand for scams~~ low taxes and deregulation — have gone to war, each apparently fearing that they may themselves have been marks rather than in on the con.

Posted in Articles | Tagged immigration, Trump administration | Comments (13)

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