With no goal to achieve, it’s hard to see how this ends.
Two weeks ago, I opened the weekly summary with a quote from the Roman philosopher Seneca: “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.” That continues to be the story of the Iran War. When reporting on the “success” of the war so far, SecDef Pete Hegseth talks about destruction:
During the briefing, Hegseth said the U.S. has struck more than 7,000 targets in Iran, wiped out its submarines and has “crippled” the nation’s military ports. “We are hunting them down methodically, ruthlessly and overwhelmingly like no other military in the world can do,” Hegseth said. “Today will be the largest strike package yet.”
The mission of Operation Epic Fury is laser-focused: Destroy Iranian offensive missiles, destroy Iranian missile production, destroy their navy and other security infrastructure – and they will never have nuclear weapons.
But only that last point “they will never have nuclear weapons” is a strategic goal, and the destruction Hegseth glories in does not lead to that goal in any clear way. The ayatollahs remain in power. Iran continues to have uranium it could enrich and oil it can sell to raise money. Given all that, a nuclear program could resume whenever the bombing stops, no matter how much rubble Iran will need to clear away.
In The Big Picture, Jay Kuo references another classic strategist, Carl von Clausewitz.
Clausewitz’s seminal work, On War … instructs that military force should never be an end in itself. War is the “continuation of politics by other means.” Military aggression, in Clausewitz’s view, must therefore always be in service of a political objective. Once a military campaign loses sight of that goal and focuses only on battlefield success, the real war is already lost.
Modern American military failure is largely a study in ignoring that warning.
Kuo recalls Vietnam, which I have also been thinking about. (Yes, I’m that old.) Hegseth’s predecessor Bob McNamara convinced himself that we were winning the war using statistics like body counts. Even if you believed the counts were accurate, McNamara didn’t seem to realize that we couldn’t win the war by killing more of their soldiers than they killed of ours. Killing the enemy is never an end in itself.
Same thing here. Iran’s regime doesn’t need to shoot down our planes or sink our ships to win this war. It just needs to survive, and so far, it’s surviving. By closing the Strait of Hormuz and raising the world price of oil, Iran is inflicting pain on the American consumer. Yes, our aerial bombardment is inflicting far worse pain on Iranians. But Iranians know what they’re suffering for and we don’t. It’s not at all obvious that they will demand an end to this war before we do.
This week, the Trump regime continued the pattern of saying many contradictory things at once. They seem confident that the MAGA faithful will decide to believe whichever one they want and be encouraged accordingly.
Oil prices dropped and stock prices rose this morning, because traders still take Trump’s statements seriously, no matter how many times they amount to nothing.
Regardless of what any of the parties say about their intentions, the war is escalating. The early strikes were aimed primarily at Iran’s leadership, and they succeeded in killing not only the supreme leader, but many of his top deputies. Military targets came next (with an occasional misfire producing civilian casualties). But those strikes left open the possibility that new leadership could command a viable country with a viable economy.
Iran attacked the world’s biggest liquefied natural gas complex in Qatar, targeted a gas field and facility in the United Arab Emirates, fired missiles and launched drones on a Saudi Arabian oil refinery and on two Kuwaiti gas units on Thursday, following Israel’s bombing of Iran’s South Pars gas field a day earlier.
Now Trump is threatening Iran’s power plants, which is a direct attack on the civilian economy.
In any conflict, Trump only knows two moves: escalate or walk away. His reputation as a deal-maker is a bad joke; he has no idea how to make deals. As I have predicted before, Trump will keep escalating until Iran surrenders, and Iran won’t surrender. So I see no limit on how far this goes. But Paul Krugman confesses that at this point, he doesn’t know what to do either:
I have no idea how this ends. I don’t even know what I would do at this point. I mean, take a time machine and go back and not do this, but now it’s going to be really, really ugly.
So having started this note with one quote from and ancient Roman, let’s close it with another. In The Histories, Tacitus wrote:
As so often happens in these disasters, the best course always seemed to be the one for which it was now too late.
The Iran War is turning out to have significance for military theory.
Back in 1936, the Spanish Civil War was far more than just a competition between fascist/catholic forces and democratic/communist forces. It was also a preview of the new warfare that would come into its own in World War II.
Ukraine is playing the role of Spain this time around. Russia began the war by attempting a World-War-II style blitzkrieg that aimed to put tanks in Kiev in a few days. It failed, and now, four years later, the war has turned into a drone-vs-drone battle in the near-ground air.
The current Iran War is a second chapter in this story. At the heart of the new warfare is a battle of resource attrition: Drones that cost thousands of dollars can destroy tanks and ships worth millions, and the Iron-Dome-style missiles that intercept drones also cost millions.
The reason we are getting fertilizer, mostly from Qatar, is that the fertilizer is made … from natural gas. Natural gas can be exported, is exported, in large quantities from the Persian Gulf, or was until this war began. That’s expensive. You have to super cool it and liquefy it and ship it out through special terminals and special ships.
And, you know, it can be done and it’s become really critical to a large part of the world. But the other thing you can do with the natural gas that’s available in the Persian Gulf area is convert it into fertilizer, which is a lot easier to ship. And so a lot of the world’s fertilizer turns out to come from that area and normally get shipped through the strait.
You can already notice the price of gas rising. But it might not be until fall that you notice the price of food rising.
I’m going to be taking the next two weeks off, this time for an actual vacation rather than because I’m putting together a talk somewhere. I’m hoping the world can behave itself while I finish moving and cruise the Danube.
Once again this week, the Iran War drowns out other news, though at least this time I’ll be updating the “ongoing stories” part of the weekly summary. Everything we’re finding out supports what the pessimists have been saying all along: Escalation will continue, because there is no other plan. The featured post this week will be a collection of notes on the war and its consequences. It should be out shortly.
The weekly summary will cover the latest news about ICE, the Trump regime’s continuing losses in court, the strange case of conspiracy-theorist-turned-MAGA-defector Joe Kent, the death of Robert Mueller, and a few other things. I’ll try to get it out around noon EDT.
The transition to pathocracy begins when a disordered individual emerges as a leader figure. While some members of the ruling class are appalled by the brutality and irresponsibility of the leader and his acolytes, his disordered personality appeals to some psychologically normal individuals. They find him charismatic. His impulsiveness is mistaken for decisiveness; his narcissism for confidence; his recklessness for fearlessness.
This week’s featured post is “The Longer View“, where three articles try to answer the question “What’s wrong with those people in the Trump administration?”
Ongoing stories
This week I didn’t have the time and energy to look at the ongoing stories I usually keep track of. I’ll try to do better next week.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was still talking about Iran
I don’t think I need to say a lot about the progress of the war: The US and Israel continue to blow things up in Iran and in Lebanon, and while Iranian casualties are far larger than ours, we’re still getting our own people killed. And they’re dying for some goal that seems to exist only in Trump’s inarticulate mind. He certainly hasn’t figured out a way to explain it to the rest of us.
As the cartoon indicates, even though everyday Americans are largely insulated from the killing (at least until the next big terrorist attack), the war has significant effects everyone can see: immediately, higher gas prices, and down the road, higher prices overall.
Trump appears to have thought through none of this. Articles about how the go-to-war decision got made are largely based on anonymous sources, so they’re not as reliable as I’d like. But they do all paint a similar picture: Trump imagined his Iran attack going like Venezuela: He’d take out the country’s leadership, and the next leaders would be so intimidated they’d cooperate with whatever plan he came up with. It would all be over in a few days.
No one else thought it would go that way, including a lot of folks inside the administration. What has happened since was easily predictable: Iran’s theocratic leadership would take a next-man-up approach. The next leader would face the prospect of martyrdom with the same dispassion the last leader did and would refuse to surrender. Iran would attack US allies in the region with missiles and drones, and they would shut the Strait of Hormuz, jacking up world oil prices.
But in his second administration, Trump has surrounded himself with opportunists, weaklings, and cowards. No one is willing to lose his job to save the country from some wrong-headed notion that gets into the Great Leader’s head. So: We’re at war, gas prices are high and rising, overall inflation will start rising soon, victory remains undefined, and the Iranian regime is as entrenched as ever. We face the prospect of either stopping our attack without any lasting accomplishment, or significantly escalating the war with either ground troops or nuclear weapons.
So far, I haven’t heard anyone in the administration talk specifically about nuclear weapons, so my mention of them in the previous paragraph may seem unwarranted.
But I worry about them anyway. As I’ve said before, Trump has only two ways of dealing with opposition: buy them off or intimidate them. If opponents refuse to be intimidated, he makes a series of ever more extreme threats — which he is then on the spot to carry out.
Wednesday, Iran flexed its cyber-terrorism muscle. The Iranian hacker group Handala somehow got high-level privileges on the network of medical device maker Stryker. At the very least, the attack will delay delivery of devices. But it raises the possibility of homocidal mischief in the future.
Chillingly, Stryker’s chief of IT emphasizes that nothing went wrong on the technical side:
I build the robots that perform your surgery. The defibrillators that restart your heart. The systems that let your nurse find your doctor at three in the morning when something goes wrong. Twenty-five billion dollars a year. Fifty-six thousand employees. Sixty-one countries. Every device in every country, managed from one console.
On March 11th, someone who was not me sat down at that console and erased everything. I should be precise. They did not hack us. They logged in. … My security tool did not fail. It performed exactly as designed. It wiped every device it was told to wipe, without error, on schedule. The architect of my destruction was my own IT budget line item. The command went out. The devices obeyed.
The man who rammed his vehicle into a synagogue in Michigan quite likely was motivated by learning that four of his family members had been killed in Lebanon by an Israel bombing raid. He was wrong to do what he did, and it is fortunate no one died but the perpetrator. But it’s not hard for me to imagine being in that situation and feeling like the only conceivable response is to kill someone.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump called on the UK, China, France, Japan, South Korea and other countries to send ships to the waterway, the world’s busiest shipping route, which is being violently blockaded by Iran. In his post, Trump alleged that “many countries, especially those who are affected by Iran’s attempted closure of the Hormuz strait, will be sending war ships, in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the strait open and safe”.
In a later post, Trump extended his call to all “the countries of the world that receive oil through the Hormuz strait” to send naval support.
German chancellor Friedrich Merz’s spokesperson, Stefan Kornelius, underlined that “it is not Nato’s war. Nato is an alliance to defend the alliance area.”
The time to look for allies is before you start a war, not after. Trump is like the guy who starts a bar fight nobody else wanted without giving his buddies any warning, but then expects them to come fight on his side.
Josh Marshall asked the same question I’ve been wondering about: Why do oil markets respond to what Trump says, when so much of what he says is nonsense?
Courts have been proving troublesome to the Trump administration.
Friday, a judge unsealed an opinion quashing subpoenas in the investigation of Fed chair Jerome Powell. The investigation appears to be nothing more than an effort to harass Powell into doing what Trump wants: lowering interest rates. The US attorney’s brief in support of the subpoenas vaguely asserts that cost overruns in renovations at the Fed might be due to fraud, and that testimony Powell gave to Congress might be false. No further specifics are given.
After the opinion was released, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro went on a rant about “activist judges”. But
The striking thing about the brief, and about Pirro’s press conference, in fact, is that neither seems remotely concerned with establishing that there is a predicate for a criminal investigation at all. … [N]either shows any awareness that investigative agencies aren’t supposed to initiate criminal investigations at all without an appropriate evidentiary predicate.
In her rant, Pirro “said she was willing to see acquittals and willing to see grand juries reject her proposed indictments”. Grand juries used to almost never reject the government’s attempts to indict someone. But now they regularly do, because the government pursues so many indictments purely to harass Trump’s enemies.
Lawfare examines proposals circulating in administration circles for Trump to declare a national emergency to take control of the fall elections. Unsurprisingly, such an order would likely be illegal.
Under the new law, a voter registration applicant’s citizenship status must be verified by the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. Until that happens, an applicant will be registered as an unverified voter and must vote with a provisional ballot that will not be counted if his or her legal status as a citizen cannot be verified through the department’s records.
The law doesn’t just impact new registrations. It also requires the Florida Department of State to verify the citizenship status of all registered voters who have not already been verified as U.S. citizens. If the citizenship status of a registered voter cannot be established or the voter record does not indicate that the registered voter’s citizenship is verified, the department must notify local election officials, who then notify the registered voter.
Unless courts intervene, we can expect chaos in Florida in November.
Remember all those people claiming that ICE agents were randomly rounding up brown people because they had arrest quotas to meet? A wild, crazy accusation, right?
Well, now some ICE agents have been interviewed under oath, and it turns out they were supposed to make eight arrests a day. They found people to arrest using a custom AI-app that made a lot of mistakes. And this part is beyond parody:
JB said the team decided to follow the van once it departed, even though officers didn’t confirm whether the driver of the van was, in fact, the registered owner of the vehicle. JB found it suspicious that the driver was making multiple stops for passengers, saying: “You don’t know if it’s human trafficking or smuggling.” The fact that the occupants were “only speaking Spanish” during the stop seemed to “confirm” there was smuggling or “harboring people that are not supposed to be here in the United States”, JB said.
It was a car pool, taking farm workers to their worksite. But
JB’s team pulled over a van of farm workers heading to their job early in the morning, smashed the car windows and detained all seven occupants.
One of them, a plaintiff in the suit that resulted in this deposition, had entered the US legally. But she
was taken to a detention center in Washington state before ICE released her “without explanation and left her to find her own way back home to Oregon”.
Under the proposed rule, the attorney general could ask any independent disciplinary authority to suspend ethics proceedings against a Justice Department lawyer (on threat of unspecified enforcement action) and send the matter to the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility. But a review by that office is not a serious substitute for a state bar investigation. Even before Mr. Trump, the office, which answers to a political appointee, had a reputation for operating like a black hole, with the details of investigative findings almost never made public.
and trans people
The effort to demonize and dehumanize the trans community continues.
So, most but not all states allow you to change or choose the gender marker on your driver’s license. Blocking that is one level of discrimination, but the state of Kansas has taken it a step further: They retroactively cancelled any license where the gender had been changed while it was legal to do so: 1700 of them in all.
Hundreds of trans drivers already received letters from the state informing them their documents were “invalid immediately” and they “may be subject to additional penalties” if they continue to drive, unless they surrender the license to the Kansas Division of Vehicles and receive a new one with their birth sex.
Does forcing the gender on a drivers license to match the one on the corresponding birth certificate solve any problem? Let’s think about what drivers licenses are for and how they’re used. It makes perfect sense for states to want to keep track of who can drive on their roads and to impose standards to disqualify unsafe drivers. In addition, drivers licenses get used as an commonly available form of ID.
Why is gender on a license at all? Like height and eye color and the picture, it helps verify that you really are the licensed person. But if your appearance corresponds to a different gender than the one on your license, that actually makes the license less useful as ID. Worse, it sets you up for discrimination and abuse: Anyone who has a legitimate reason to ask for your license now knows that you’re trans.
Now think about situations where you might show your drivers license. Is there any reason why a policeman or a cashier or anybody else needs to know what gender is on your birth certificate? I can’t think of one. So this law solves absolutely zero problems.
All it does is harass trans people and expose them to discrimination and abuse. The only motive Kansas had to pass this law was to encourage such discrimination and abuse.
Last week, I talked about how the Supreme Court only takes “sincerely held religious beliefs” seriously if they are conservative religious beliefs about topics like abortion or gender.
Example: On March 2, the Court set aside a California law that prevents schools from telling parents about a student’s change in gender presentation without the student’s permission. The Court said the law prevents parents from implementing their sincerely held beliefs in the religious upbringing of their children.
It remains to be seen whether teachers and school districts who keep a child’s confidences will be held liable in some way. If a child ever confided some deep issue to me and asked me not to tell their parents, I would hope that my first response would not be to go rat them out. (I haven’t had that conversation about gender transition, but I have occasionally kept confidences about drugs or sex.) That practice comes from my sincerely held moral beliefs, which I fear the current Court would not recognize.
I also wonder when a student’s behavior might trip such a requirement. If Samantha tells her teachers she wants to be called Sam, and starts wearing gender-nonspecific jeans and t-shirts, are they supposed to call the parents?
It’s a telling point that the version of the SAVE Act (another law that solves no problems) that Trump is throwing his hissy fit about isn’t just about making it harder to vote, it’s also about attacking trans people. The version of SAVE passed by the House and held up in the Senate just focused on disenfranchising people who don’t have passports or easy access to their birth certificates or marriage licenses. But Trump wants to add:
NO MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS: NO TRANSGENDER MUTILIZATION FOR CHILDREN!
Translation: Ban transwomen from women’s sports and make gender-affirming care illegal for minors. Those provisions deserve their own argument, which maybe I’ll get to later. But the simpler question is: Why should they be part of a voter-suppression law?
The answer is simple: Transfolk are to Trump what Jews were to Hitler or Blacks have been to the KKK. His base has been trained to hate them, and he can sometimes transfer the energy of that hatred to some other issue, even a completely unrelated issue like voting.
Trump just declared that he’d ban trans women from the Olympics. Only one openly transgender woman has ever competed in the Olympic Games in its history. In 2020. She did not win a medal. This is fabricated controversy to fuel bigotry. Like banning trans women from owning nuclear weapons.
and you also might be interested in …
Courts near the border are clogged with misdemeanor trespass cases that serve little purpose and are usually thrown out by judges. By declaring the border area a military zone, the administration created a new crime that most people who commit it have never heard of.
More and more, the Bezos-owned Washington Post is becoming a mouthpiece for a billionaire agenda. Here’s what I saw in their opinion section on just one day (yesterday). This piece on Pittsburgh sets up a false dichotomy between city services and progressive politics, essentially blaming progressive Democrats for the state of the city, which is painted in the same gloomy colors MAGA uses to describe all Democrat-run big cities. Pittsburgh’s new centrist Democrat mayor is a “lesson” for the national party to shift away from its progressive wing.
Zohran Mamdani wants to tax New Yorkers “to death“, but
Of course, New York doesn’t need more revenue — the city could simply cut expenditures, starting with Mamdani’s $127 billion spending plan for fiscal year 2027.
which is described in the next paragraph as “a socialist laundry list”.
Chicago also is portrayed as on the brink of insolvency. And San Francisco’s BART is “headed for a financial death spiral”. What looks on the surface like a fluffy denunciation of fancy coffee drinks is some guy from the Hoover Institute quoting Edmund Burke about how our failure to control our appetites is ruining society. A fair point, maybe, but why is the example a type of excess associated with upscale liberals, rather than say Bezos’ half-billion-dollar yacht?
And James Talarico’s candidacy isn’t inviting Christians to return to the teachings of Jesus, it’s a return to the failed views of liberal Christians in general, which the religion market rejected in the 20th century in favor of right-wing Christianity.
None of these pieces is outright pro-fascist, and any one of them might have a place on the editorial page of a newspaper trying to present a balance of views. But the WaPo bombards readers with all of them on the same day, with no voices at all from left of center.
NPR has an article about Spartanburg County, South Carolina, which is experiencing “the biggest measles outbreak in the U.S. in more than three decades, with nearly 1,000 confirmed cases”. The reason? The vaccination rate has fallen to 89%, well below the 95% necessary to achieve herd immunity.
And why are parents so reluctant to vaccinate their kids? One of the reasons is “lingering resentment over COVID mandates”.
“I think it should have been a choice. It shouldn’t have been shoved down your throat like you have to do it.”
It’s amazing to me how quickly the popular culture has minimized the COVID pandemic. (Starting with Trump, who minimized it while it was happening.) 1.2 million Americans died of COVID. When the country has to deal with a disaster that big, you’re not going to keep all your freedom. I mean, think about 9-11, and how much disruption of daily life followed from that. But in terms of deaths, COVID was hundreds of times larger than 9-11. At the pandemic’s peak, it was like a 9-11 was happening every day or two.
So yes, once a vaccine existed, the government absolutely should have “shoved it down your throat”. And they should shove a lot of other vaccines down your throat too, so that the general population doesn’t have to worry about polio or smallpox.
A deposition under oath made it clear that a DOGE staffer tasked with flagging National Endowment for the Humanities grants to cancel due to DEI actually had no idea what DEI was and no education in the humanities. Having no knowledge himself, he used ChatGPT to
search programs and grants to cut using terms such as “Black,” “gender,” “LGBTQ+,” and “equality.” However, DOGE would not search for cuts from anything involving terms like “caucasian” and “heterosexual.”
That and similar clips went viral, but I can’t link to them because a judge has ordered them removed. Apparently, they exposed the DOGE tech bros to “widespread ridicule”.
Imagine that: Young idiots served as judge and jury over NEH grants they did not understand. And now they’re being ridiculed. How unfair!
I’ve been a fan of Kat Abughazaleh since days when she used to do quick summaries each week of what Fox News was covering. Now she’s running for Congress in Illinois’ 9th district. The Democratic primary is hotly contested, and Kat (a Palestinian-American who has been outspoken about the Gaza genocide) has been targeted by AIPAC.
Ever find yourself watching Trump officials and thinking “What’s wrong with those people?” Three writers offer their answers.
We’ve known for a long time that the Trump administration works on a flood-the-zone theory: Do so many outrageous things simultaneously that the American People have a hard time comprehending them all, much less organizing a response. Are they disenfranchising large numbers of voters? Never mind that, ICE is murdering US citizens on the streets of Minneapolis. Want to do something about that? That’s yesterday’s news; the Epstein files are hiding evidence of billionaire pedophilia. Concerned about that? Never mind, we’re in a war now. On and on.
Further impairing our comprehension is the barely explicable attitudes central figures in the administration take. Again and again, before I can even get to the policy content of some statement, I have to deal with my first response: What is wrong with these people?
Trump said he was “surprised” that Iran decided to attack other Middle Eastern countries in response to the U.S.-Israeli operation, and that U.S. strikes on Kharg Island on Saturday “totally demolished” most of the island but that “we may hit it a few more times just for fun.”
Just about any appearance by Secretary of War Defense Pete Hegseth includes a what’s-wrong-with-him moment. Friday during a press briefing about the Iran War, he said there would be “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies“. [Note the web site that link is on: war.gov] Just Security posted an article by Danial Maurer, a former Army JAG who has taught at West Point. Maurer imagined the memo a Pentagon legal counsel should have sent to Hegseth in response: It points out that “no quarter” is a war crime. The phrase refers to the ancient practice of killing opponents even if they try to surrender.
Maybe Hegseth intended to threaten war crimes and encourage his underlings to commit them. Or maybe he was just blabbing — saying a bunch of tough-sounding words without knowing what they mean. Either way: What’s wrong with that guy?
Trump gave his whole cabinet shoes identical to his own favorites, and “everybody’s afraid not to wear them.” For some reason he made Marco Rubio’s way too big. And Rubio wears them. Our Secretary of State attends important gatherings in clown shoes. What’s wrong with him?
Pam Bondi blew off questions from Congress about DoJ’s failure to interview survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes by pointing to the stock market:
The Dow is over 50,000 right now. … That’s what we should be talking about.
I was listening to that hearing live, and I had trouble even getting to the policy implications of her statement. Because all I could think was: “What’s wrong with her? What kind of human being thinks like that?”
Why are all these people so cruel, insensitive, self-centered? so devoid of qualities that we expect not just from leaders but from ordinary people?
Most of us don’t have the time or the presence of mind to step back and try to answer that question. But a few recent articles have been written by people who do.
The most interesting to me is “The Problem of Pathocracy” by Dr. Steve Taylor, which was published by The Psychologist, a journal of the British Psychological Society. It’s a recent article, but the theory it presents goes back to the pre-Trump era. Polish psychologist Andrzej Lobaczewski, who experienced both Nazi and Communist regimes, coined the term pathocracy decades ago.
As he put it, pathocracy is a system of government ‘wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people’. Since he was living under a ‘pathocratic’ regime himself, Lobaczewski took great risks studying this topic. He was arrested and tortured by the Polish authorities, and unable to publish his life’s work, the book Political Ponerology, until he escaped to the United States during the 1980s.
According to Lobaczewski, the transition to pathocracy begins when a disordered individual emerges as a leader figure. While some members of the ruling class are appalled by the brutality and irresponsibility of the leader and his acolytes, his disordered personality appeals to some psychologically normal individuals. They find him charismatic. His impulsiveness is mistaken for decisiveness; his narcissism for confidence; his recklessness for fearlessness.
Soon other people with psychopathic traits emerge and attach themselves to the pathocracy, sensing the opportunity to gain power and influence. At the same time, responsible and moral people gradually leave the government, either resigning or being ruthlessly ejected. In an inevitable process, soon the entire government is filled with people with a pathological lack of empathy and conscience.
The first Trump administration included a large number of relatively “responsible and moral” people with conservative political views: Mike Pence, Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, John Kelly, and so on. But by the end of that term, all but Pence had been fired or resigned under pressure, and Pence was persona non grata after he failed to join Trump’s coup attempt in 2021. And so, as Lobaczewski predicted, we are left with a government “filled with people with a pathological lack of empathy and conscience”.
Not only is Trump’s sociopathy enabled by such people, they are drawn to him. He gives them permission to be what they always wanted to be. We can see the same process working on a larger scale: Across the country, people don the red hat because it lets them insult and abuse the kind of people they have always hated.
That leads to a second article: “Polarization and Strife” by A. R. Moxon on his blog The Reframe. That article was originally written in 2022, but Moxon reposted it this week because of its relevance to recent events.
This article flips the script on the word polarization. People complain about how polarized our society has gotten: Friendships are ending and relatives become estranged because of political disagreements.
But Moxon calls attention to a different kind of polarization, one that has always been with us: polarization between the comfortable and the marginalized, “gay or bi or trans or nonbinary, Black or brown, Muslim or Jewish or Sikh or Hindu, or undocumented, or disabled, ill, neuroatypical, impoverished, or unhoused people, and many others, too”.
The “unpolarized” world so many people are nostalgic for is one where the marginalized could be safely ignored. You could say words like bitch and faggot and nigger and retard, because all the comfortable people agreed that those marginalized groups don’t matter, and members of the groups themselves had been intimidated into silence. So you could insult or abuse marginalized groups openly, and no one would call you on it. But today you can’t even do it if you’re just joking, because nobody has a sense of humor any more.
Moxon looks at this not as polarization, but as solidarity: More and more comfortable people are feeling empathy for the marginalized and refusing to watch passively as they’re abused.
Consider the idea that treating certain people as if they don’t matter enough to care about their dignity and their lives—and doing this so thoroughly and effectively that society treats them as if they are nonexistent and disposable—creates a much deeper polarization than any fight over the holiday dinner table or on the airwaves over whether or not it’s good to do so.
And: the more peaceful that subjugation, the greater the polarization.
Consider a corollary, that as people stop going along with this unnatural injustice, it will decrease the peace of that subjugation; will increase resentment and strife, for as long as there are people still willing to fight to subjugate others.
But the strife isn’t polarization. It’s distressing, but it’s not polarization. The strife is the first early sign that we might be willing to stop being polarized by bigotry and injustice.
The third article I want to call your attention to is “The Most Divorced Men in History” by Andrea Pitzer, published on her blog Degenerate Art. Pitzer focuses on the weird affect of so many people in the Trump administration. Past administrations have at times had cruel policies, but they usually seemed apologetic about it: We don’t want to hurt anybody, but there’s this greater good to weigh the suffering against.
Trump’s people, by contrast, seem genuinely gleeful about the harm they can do. Stephen Miller, for example, appears to glory in the distress he causes immigrant gardeners and farm workers and healthcare aides. Greg Bovino gave a swaggering style to the ICE thugs who terrorized Minneapolis. Elon Musk seemed joyful and pleased with himself as he slashed programs to feed hungry people and inoculate children against infectious diseases. In the end, he caused vast numbers of deaths and didn’t even save the government money, but he appears untouched by the kind of regret the rest of us feel when we tap a stranger’s bumper in a parking lot.
Pitzer goes out on a limb and associates this kind of high-level viciousness with a phenomenon she sees in everyday life: divorced-guy energy.
What do I mean by “divorced guys”? I mean that they all have the energy of the man who won’t stop talking about the woman who left him and what a monster she is, with the clear implication that her mistreatment of him was entirely undeserved.
Several examples of this personality type exist in the right-wing influencer universe. In some cases, as with incels, the guys haven’t even been left by a partner yet, but they already speak about punishing women or restricting their rights as if the other sex has already betrayed them. In other cases, as represented by Andrew Tate, the men advocate the active physical and psychological abuse of women as a group as a means to power in a physical hierarchy in which men are supposed to dominate by default.
But the heart of divorced-guy syndrome in the U.S. today is the Trump administration. I mean that metaphorically, in which we see variations on the “divorced guy” energy of the podcasters, blaming women or assigning them very subservient roles. But I also mean it literally. The administration is filled with people who’ve had literal and often bitter divorces, and who seem to be tapping into some kind of primordial hatred of women that fuels their current work. Think Donald Trump. Or Russell Vought. Or RFK Jr. Or Pete Hegseth. I have no idea whether their issues actually rose out of their relationships with their moms, but they have played out through adult relations with women that have often ended in divorce.
Like Lobaczewski, Pitzer is pointing to the prevailing spirit in an administration, not something that affects each member individually. A few Trump officials, like Miller and Bovino, seem not to have experienced a literal divorce. And Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem are not even guys. But the administration as a whole accounts for a fairly large number of divorces, starting with Trump’s two-and-counting.
I would like to propose that the seething root of resentment that typically fuels these men is hatred of women. We are also witnessing tidal waves of racism and homophobia and disdain for the poor, but I have come to wonder if misogyny might not only sit alongside the rest but might even undergird the whole thing.
Patient zero in their hate, more often than not, is a woman each resents. The later targets might well be people who want simply to be treated as human that they refuse to treat as human because they need more targets for their fury. So instead, they come to feel they have been attacked by the actions or even the existence of minority groups. They direct their same kind of fury against those groups as they do the women they’re mad at.
She mentions Hillary Clinton as an example of a woman MAGA can’t stop hating, no matter how long she has been out of the public eye. More recent examples include AOC and the other members of “the Squad”.
Pitzer references an article by Maleah Fekete in the journal Rural Sociology, about risk-taking behaviors among rural working-class men — the heart of MAGA. Male recklessness is a major factor in the rise in “deaths of despair”. And periods of extreme recklessness often start with some triggering event.
Two-thirds of the triggering events involved relationship dissolution, which respondents frequently framed as a woman leaving. Importantly, these accounts reflect respondents’ interpretations of relationship dissolution rather than objective accounts of responsibility or causality.
Once again, the war in Iran dominates the news, and yet we know so little about it. Why did we attack? What are our goals? How will the tactics we are using achieve those goals? There’s not enough there for a featured post, but it seems silly to focus on something else.
So instead of being news-focused, the featured post will cover some general sociological and psychological analyses of the administration that have come out recently. Why are they the way they are? I’ll try to get that out between 10 and 11 EDT.
So the actual news will all be in the weekly summary: the war, the ongoing persecution of trans people, the administration’s continuing legal problems, the WaPo’s sudden change into the voice of the billionaire agenda, and a few other things. Expect to see that around noon.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. Trump continues to lose in court. I’ll try to do a round-up next week.
Climate change. Trump killed a report on the health of nature in the US, but the researchers released it anyway.
Ukraine. Ukraine is offering us anti-drone tech for our war with Iran. Russia is offering Iran targeting information on our forces. So Trump lowered sanctions on Russian oil. No wonder Adam Kinzinger wonders what Putin has on Trump.
Epstein.Miami Herald: “Three FBI interviews that contain graphic sexual and physical assault allegations against President Donald Trump were released Thursday by the Justice Department.” If the purpose of attacking Iran was to make Epstein go away, it’s not working.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about the Iran War
When I wrote last week, the war had only just started and it was hard to know what was happening. So I focused on the Trump regime’s lack of preparation: The first lesson of our defeat in Vietnam was that a long-term war effort would fail without popular support. So any war but the briefest needs to be preceded by marshaling public opinion at home. George W. Bush did nearly everything else wrong in Iraq, but that part he understood. Conversely, Trump had done virtually nothing to explain why we needed to attack Iran.
At the time it was still plausible that there was a clear reason, but we weren’t being told what it was. This week it became apparent that there is no explanation for why we attacked Iran. Or at least there is no explanation that connects clear national goals with some likely outcome of this war. For several days Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth contradicted each other and sometimes themselves. It was about nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles or regime change or freedom for the Iranian people or punishing evil or making the world safe for Israel or remaking the Middle East or some other thing that you would hear about one day but not the next. The war would be short or maybe long or maybe something in between.
If the goal of your military action is clear, your exit strategies should be straightforward. Indeed, you shouldn’t need a ‘strategy’ at all. When your goals or met you’re done and you leave. … This war is probably just about Donald Trump being in charge. That’s not a clear or definable goal. It leaves the initiative in the hands of whoever currently controls the Iran state and military. It’s a recipe for unclarity.
Here are the most insightful takes on the war I’ve seen:
James Fallows’ “The Arrogance of Ignorance”. He’s been reporting on war and the military since the1980s, and boils the lessons we should have learned during that time, but haven’t, into five points.
“How does this end?” That’s the question to ask before you begin.
The importance of morale and moral factors. Your side needs to believe that you are right and your cause is just.
The memories a war creates will persistent for decades. Iranians still remember 1953, when the US engineered a coup to topple the elected government and install the tyrannical Shah.
What if the war comes home? Even a country that is dominant militarily can be vulnerable to terrorism.
Leadership matters. Fallows drives this point home with the following juxtaposition of photos: George Marshall and Pete Hegseth.
[T]hink of the clowns and posturers who now have the controls. They don’t know what they don’t know. They have no idea what they are unleashing. It took years for the United States to get into its quagmire in Vietnam. It took many months to prepare the groundwork for the disaster in Iraq. These people have changed the world, for the worse, in just nine days. And none of us knows how it will end.
One leader views the world as a transactional playground where everything is for sale, while the other views his own survival as a world-historic necessity, regardless of the ruin it brings to his people.
Trump really has only two methods of trying to influence people: He buys them off or he intimidates them. He does not understand people who act out of values deeper than greed or fear (which is why he gets so frustrated with “the Deep State”, i.e., government workers who believe in the mission of their agency). And he is fundamentally incapable of forming a shared understanding of the situation and arriving at a win/win solution.
Khamenei, on the other hand, did not want money and welcomed the prospect of martyrdom. So none of Trump’s levers could move him. Quite possibly, Trump won’t do any better moving Khamenei’s successor, his son.
Marcy Wheeler looks at how the NYT and other mainstream publications indulge Trump’s fantasies of omnipotence.
The most irksome reporting, however, is the response to Trump’s promise, on the fourth day of this war, that he will jerry-rig a program to ensure the “FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD … as soon as possible.”
His “program” is an order to the US Development Financing Corporation to offer risk insurance to ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz “at a very reasonable price. Wheeler points out that such a program would take time to set up and funding from Congress. Maybe it could work if somebody had thought of it months ago and had it ready to implement as soon as the first bomb dropped.
But Politico covers this as if Trump’s tweet had already created this program in a “Fiat lux!” sort of way. Clearly the world sees through this: That’s why the price of a barrel of oil has jumped from below $60 in January to over $100 today.
The Times has identified the weapon seen in the new video as a Tomahawk cruise missile, a weapon that neither the Israeli military nor the Iranian military has. Dozens of Tomahawks have been launched by U.S. Navy warships into Iran since Feb. 28, when the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran began.
James Fallows commends the NYT for reporting this straight rather than watering it down to please Trump.
Not “appears to contradict” or “is at odds with” or “may give rise to suspicions that.” Flat out: “Contradicts.” “Video shows.” About the US blowing up a school full of little girls.
If your pastor is telling you that murdering Iranians will hasten the return of Jesus, you’re not a church member. You’re a cult member.
and the primaries
The flashy news from Tuesday’s primaries in Texas, Arkansas, and North Carolina was the Texas Senate race. (Complete primary calendar here.) James Talerico defeated Jasmine Crockett on the Democratic side, while Republican incumbent John Cornyn goes to a run-off with Ken Paxton.
Turning Texas blue is a longstanding dream of the Democrats. The hope is that Texas follows the California model: Republican hostility to the growing Hispanic population eventually makes the state unwinnable for them. So far it hasn’t happened. Beto O’Rourke got within three points of Ted Cruz in 2018, but so far that has been the high-water mark. (Cruz beat Colin Allred in 2024 by 6.5%.)
This race was interesting from both sides. Cornyn and Paxton have waged a nasty and expensive campaign, and unless Trump forces one of them to drop out — he’s been making noises — the run-off is likely to be even nastier and more expensive. Paxton is the more true-blue MAGA, but is a scandal machine. The Texas House passed 20 articles of impeachment against him in 2023, mostly focusing on misuse of his office and bribery, but the Senate didn’t convict him. Last year, his wife of 38 years filed for divorce “on biblical grounds”. His legal problems go back to 2008, and he appears to have never held an office he didn’t misuse for personal gain.
Talerico is a Presbyterian seminarian who speaks the language of religion comfortably without compromising progressive positions on the major issues. I discuss what this might mean for the nation in the featured post.
Give Crockett credit for offering a timely and complete concession to Talerico. The only way Democrats pull this off is if they stay united. Crockett showed the kind of class that used to be standard, but is rare these days.
One of the winners in Texas was Rep. Tony Gonzalez who, despite being married with six children, pressured a staffer into an affair; she later committed suicide by setting herself on fire. Fortunately for Republicans, party leadership is wiser than Gonazlez’ voters: They forced Gonzalez out on Thursday, but want him to serve out his term because they have such a small margin in the House. (Moral considerations only go so far. Power is more important.)
Prior to his withdrawal, Gonzalez provided a lesson in how Republican Christianity works. Here, Gonzalez admits to the affair, but assures the voters that it’s all fine now.
I have reconciled with my wife Angel, I’ve asked God to forgive me (which He has), and my faith is as strong as ever.
What the staffer’s family thinks is not worth mentioning.
I love the “which He has.” Not “I believe He has” or “I trust He has” or “My faith tells me He has.” Just “He has.”
How convenient a powerful man must find it, to believe in a God who lets you speak for Him. And once God had spoken (through Rep. Gonzalez), what voter would dare not to forgive him too? No wonder Gonzalez’ faith has remained strong, probably just as strong as it was when he was screwing his staff.
Republican Christianity is a very convenient religion. I recommend it to powerful-but-amoral people everywhere.
and Noem
Kristi Noem finally lost her job as Homeland Security Secretary, but not for of the reasons you might expect. It wasn’t that her agents murdered two people in Minneapolis, or that she blatantly lied about it. It wasn’t because DHS under her leadership routinely ignored court orders. It wasn’t that she had DHS buy a $70 million luxury jet under the guise of “deportations”, but really for her own use.
An executive jet the Department of Homeland Security has told the White House’s Office of Management and Budget it needs for immigrant deportation flights and Cabinet officials’ travel features a bedroom with a queen bed, showers, a kitchen, four large flat-screen TVs and even a bar, according to images of the aircraft obtained by NBC News.
I can’t quite imagine who we’d want to deport in that kind of luxury. But that is just corruption; you can’t get fired for that in this administration.
It also wasn’t because of her barely-hidden affair with underling Cory Lewandowski. (They’re both married.) And it wasn’t even because she wasted $220 million of DHS money on TV ads that seem aimed more at raising her name recognition and personal profile than any legitimate DHS purpose.
During a congressional hearing this week, Ms. Noem was asked if Mr. Trump had approved a $200 million-plus government ad campaign in which she was prominently featured. Ms. Noem said Mr. Trump had tasked her with “getting the message out to the country.” Asked if Mr. Trump had signed off on the campaign before the ads aired, Ms. Noem responded, “We had that conversation, yes, before I was put in this position and sworn in and confirmed. And since then as well.”
That’s Rule #1 in the Trump regime: Nothing is the Boss’ fault.
You can now add a third covered-up murder to Noem’s tally: We now have video showing that Ruben Ray Martinez was not trying to run over an ICE agent when he was shot nearly a year ago. Like Rene Good and Alex Pretti, Martinez was a US citizen.
and you also might be interested in …
The February jobs report was terrible: Nonfarm payrolls fell by 92K workers. It’s a mistake to read too much into any single month’s report, but the trend over the last year is not looking good. And things are not likely to improve now that oil prices are soaring.
Cutting-edge discoveries and clinical investigations—on subjects ranging from mRNA vaccines to diabetes and dementia—are denied crucial resources while junk science and fringe beliefs are elevated without justifiable explanation. … Kennedy has continued to spread misinformation and push politicised agendas at the expense of the country’s most vulnerable. When called to account for his decisions by Congress, he has been evasive and combative. The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in 1 year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm.
This is discouraging. A 25-country survey by Pew Research asks whether your fellow citizens’ morals are very good, somewhat good, somewhat bad, or very bad. US citizens showed the least trust in each other, with only 47% rating fellow citizens as very or somewhat good. No other country was under 50%, and Canada was the most trusting at 92%.
With so many substantive reasons to denounce Trump, I don’t like to focus on his symbolic outrages. But when he attended the return of the coffins of the first six American troops to die in the Iran War — known to the military as the “dignified transfer” and considered a solemn ritual — he wore a white USA golf hat that he sells on his website.
Fox News apparently realized how bad this was, because they “inadvertently” deceived their viewers to cover for him. Instead of showing the actual footage, they replayed video from a dignified transfer in December when he wasn’t wearing a hat.
The next time someone asks why you don’t like Trump, show them this 6 1/2 minute video from Dean Withers. He goes through Trump’s character, domestic policies, and foreign policies in an amazing amount of detail.
Thursday, Alabama is scheduled to execute Sonny Burton. Burton was involved in a 1991 robbery in which someone got killed. He was not the shooter. The shooter has already died in prison. He’s 75, and the victim’s daughter has asked for clemency. Will Governor Ivey intervene?
and let’s close with something anachronistic
What if “Staying Alive” had been done in the 1500s as a four-part madrigal?
Republicans have left an opening. Can Democrats like James Talarico take advantage?
Ever since Jerry Falwell launched the Moral Majority and got credit for electing Ronald Reagan in 1980, conservative Republicans have seemed to own Christianity.
Not really, of course. There was always a Christian Left, going back to Dorothy Day in the 1930s, and even further back to St. Francis or even that ultimate bleeding heart, Jesus. Both the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement had strong liberal religious components.
But from the 1980s on, in the media and the public mind, Christianity in politics somehow came to mean conservative politics. “Moral” issues were defined as the issues religious conservatives cared about: abortion, gay rights, and so on. When Supreme Court decisions purport to defend “conscience”, or people’s right to act on their “sincerely held religious beliefs”, you can bet that those beliefs are conservative. Only rarely have treating women like people, fighting oligarchy, refusing to racially discriminate, opposing cruelty towards immigrants, preserving the environment, or allowing LGBTQ people to lead full lives been framed as “moral” issues.
Texas has gone as far as to legally prohibit its [mortality review] committee from reviewing deaths that are considered abortion-related. This could include some miscarriage care, health officials told ProPublica.
In times past, the choice between Democrat and Republican wasn’t always so clear, and Christians tended to split down the middle. A shared worldview across the aisle led to more options in the voting booth. As things stand now, no such options remain. The Democratic Party has so situated itself against the God of heaven and against His Word that no Christian can justly, nor obediently cast a vote for anyone who claims the Democratic platform. … For these reasons, Christians cannot vote for any member of the Democratic party while also saying “I believe and follow the teachings of King Jesus.” From Vice President Harris all the way down to local City Councils and school boards.
The “reasons” given are abortion [1], LGBTQI+ rights, and DEI (which doesn’t even rate an explanation).
Democrats, for the most part, have dodged this challenge. Conservative Catholics like J. D. Vance can claim to know better than the Pope, but liberal Catholics like Joe Biden or John Kerry have had to strike nuanced positions (like disapproving personally of abortion while defending a public right to choose it) while trying to change the subject. Barack Obama’s liberal Christian religion was seen as a political problem, not a strength.
Enter Trump. During the Trump era, Republicans have leaned even more heavily on the conservative Christian vote while putting their Christian supporters in an ever-more-difficult position. Trump, after all, represents the virtual antithesis of Christianity.
He has been accused of sexually assaulting a minor. And even if that turns out not to be true, he’s been suppressing the Epstein files to hide something.
He lies so constantly that he has worn out the fact-checkers. Anything short of an outrage-producing howler gets ignored now.
When you get down to cases, it’s actually harder to see how a Christian can support Trump rather than a typical Democrat.
Pastors who are committed to Trump politically have twisted themselves into all kinds of contorted positions. Bible verses get re-interpreted to circumvent what they obviously say. The importance of morality and character in public leaders (something we heard a lot about when Bill Clinton was president) is discounted, because “God uses flawed people“. When Republicans have scandals, we hear about God’s mercy and forgiveness — even if the offender denies the sin and refuses to make things right with the victim. But Democratic sin is unforgivable.
This can’t go on forever. At some point, the gulf between Trump and Christ grows so large as to be unbridgeable. And that raises the question: Can Democrats make an explicitly Christian play for the Christian vote?
Talarico. That’s going to be tested in Texas, where Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico won the Democratic senate primary Tuesday. Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons comments:
Talarico’s message is not about moderating progressive commitments to win over religious conservatives. It is about courage. It is about saying plainly that support for LGBTQ+ equality, reproductive freedom, public education and church-state separation can flow directly from Christian faith. He’s openly Christian and firmly pluralistic.
That does more than close a messaging gap: Talarico and those like him can change the terrain. When leaders speak about faith with confidence instead of defensiveness, they show that democracy and devotion are not in conflict.
His Republican opponent — whether it will be the incumbent John Cornyn or challenger Ken Paxton (who presents about as many moral issues as Donald Trump) — is bound to double down on the Christians-can’t-vote-for-Democrats message. Texans can expect to hear a lot about Talarico’s support for reproductive freedom and trans rights. We’ll see whether such attack ads can drown out the voice of an authentic liberal Christian whose worldview is rooted in what Jesus actually said rather than the conservative positions that have attached to him like barnacles.
But what about church-and-state? A second question Talarico raises is whether Democrats should compete explicitly for the Christian vote. One popular liberal viewpoint is an interpretation of church-and-state separation that extends to political argument rather than just government: Our government needs to remain secular and not favor any particular religion, so our candidates should campaign in a purely secular way.
I think this view misses an important point: People come to their political positions through their values, and many people’s values are grounded in their religion. If you can’t use religious language, you end up arguing against opinions already set; you can’t get into the mill where those opinions were forged and might be re-forged.
And finally, purely secular politics runs into a widespread American belief: that religious convictions are more serious and solid than secular ones. One reason Democrats are always under more pressure to compromise than Republicans is that the public sees conservative positions as religion-based and therefore immovable. Democratic positions seem more political than principled, because we so rarely seem to “speak from the heart”.
Many, many liberal positions rise out of deeply held moral values that are as serious as any religion, and many of those values are in fact religious. In the privacy of their own minds, many Democrats think in religious terms. If those terms have to be edited out before we speak in public, we will sound inauthentic.
[1] I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating that the anti-abortion position is entirely un-Biblical. Nothing in the Bible indicates that fetuses have souls, and Genesis 2:7 shows the soul entering the body not at conception, but with the first breath (which is a common Jewish belief).
Occasionally someone argues that Jesus or the prophets would have denounced abortion had they known about it, but this is nonsense. Surgical abortion may be a recent development, but from the beginning of time women who didn’t want to be pregnant have tried to induce miscarriages. If you see some spiritual difference between mifepristone and pennyroyal, you are more perceptive than I am.
Jesus and the prophets had to know about this practice, but for some reason they didn’t find it worth commenting on.
This lack of Biblical support is not so important for Catholics who oppose abortion, because the institution of the Catholic Church reserves the right to create new doctrine. But Protestant denominations — especially conservative ones — explicitly reject this view: Churches are not supposed to add or subtract from the message of the Bible.
Anti-abortion has been grafted onto the Bible. It wasn’t there originally.
So we’re still at war and we still don’t know why. I’ll cover that in the weekly summary, but it’s hard to write at length about all the things I don’t know.
Instead, I want to look at an interesting question raised by James Talerico’s senate candidacy in Texas: After years of Trump’s blatant immorality and policies directly opposed by the Sermon on the Mount, can Democrats start competing for the explicitly Christian vote? And if so, should they? I’m not sure how long that article will take, but I hope to get it posted by 10 EDT.
That leaves the weekly summary to cover the war, last week’s primary elections, Kristi Noem’s departure, and a variety of other things. I’ll try to get that around noon.
Boil it all down and what do we have? We have a military operation with no clear ends at all. Stop asking what the US government’s intentions are, they do not exist outside of the personal interests of Donald Trump. They can and will therefore change in a heartbeat as he searches desperately for whatever end gives him the best chance to declare victory.He has made the national interest entirely personal.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. The Iran attack further undermines the role of Congress in our democracy. But congressional Republicans seem content to watch their institution fade into irrelevance.
Epstein. From the beginning, I’ve been in denial about the depth and persistence of this scandal. It’s not going away. So I’m moving it onto the Ongoing list.
Climate change. My limited attention didn’t spot anything this week.
Gaza. The US has opened two consular offices in West Bank settlements that past administrations of both parties have deemed illegal.
This week everybody was talking about the attack on Iran
In the featured post I focus on how little Trump seems to care about either Congress’ approval or the public’s.
and the State of the Union
In past years I’ve often devoted a featured post to analyzing the State of the Union, but this one doesn’t deserve that kind of attention. Ordinarily, a president whose party controlled Congress would list things he wants Congress to do in the coming year, and use his public platform to build popular support behind those proposals. But Trump views himself as a dictator, so he didn’t bother to ask Congress for much of anything — not even for approval of the Iran attack that was undoubtedly already in the works.
The one noteworthy thing is a speculative theme I’ve seen in several places, notably from David Frum in The Atlantic: Trump has now broken the State of the Union tradition so badly that Democrats should put an end to it if they hold the House majority next year.
Lots of people think the State of the Union address is mandated by the Constitution, but in fact it isn’t. Here’s the relevant text:
He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient
Notice: no set schedule and no requirement for an in-person speech. Washington and Adams did speak to Congress on a more-or-less annual basis, usually sometime in early December. Jefferson began sending written messages instead, a practice that continued until Woodrow Wilson revived the in-person speech in 1913.
If you look at old state-of-the-union messages, they are not political speeches. What they resemble instead are the reports corporate presidents send to their boards of directors: This is what your government has been doing this last year and what we plan to do in the coming year. They aren’t full of well-crafted phrases and soaring rhetoric. But they did have policy announcements: James Monroe announced the Monroe Doctrine in the 1823 SOTU.
The first SOTU broadcast over radio was Calvin Coolidge’s in 1923. The first televised SOTU was by Harry Truman in 1947. Broadcasting changed the nature of the speech, turning it into an address to the nation rather than a message to Congress. Now it’s an annual pageant for the president to try to whip up support.
This year’s address was shameful, as so many of Trump’s speeches are. It was full of lies, way too long, and insulting to the Democrats in Congress. It contained no proposals of substance. It’s sole point was that Americans should love Trump and hate his enemies.
Before the speech, Democrats debated among themselves about whether to attend or boycott. Why subject yourself to two hours of lies and insults? I “boycotted” in the sense that I had better things to do with two hours of my life. (I scanned the transcript.)
Here’s the piece of the SOTU ritual that Trump has forgotten and needs to be reminded of: He is not the master of this event; he is a guest of the Speaker of the House. He comes in response to an invitation. Guests should act with a certain decorum. In particular, they should not gratuitously insult their hosts.
The Democrats are widely expected to regain the House majority in the fall. So when it’s time for the 2027 SOTU, the Speaker may be a Democrat like Hakeem Jeffries. He should not invite Trump to come speak in person. Trump should not be invited back at all until he pledges to behave as a guest should.
and ICE
Every week, more horror stories.
Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a refugee from Burma who was nearly blind, died after Border Patrol agents took him into custody, determined that they couldn’t hold him, and then abandoned him outside a closed Tim Horton’s franchise on a freezing-cold night in Buffalo. His family (who put up fliers asking if anyone had seen him) wasn’t told about his release or where to find him. His body was found five days later.
A Nashville man who was in this country legally and had a work permit was stopped, had his windows broken, and was taken away. His wife says he showed the agents his papers but they didn’t care.
The Portland Press Herald has found 35 Maine residents (out of the 206 swept up by ICE in the recent Operation Catch of the Day) who have been arrested and detained, but were then released by immigration judges who found that the government had no reason to hold them. Many of them have done nothing wrong.
[South Portland resident Evaristo] Kalonji’s name was on ICE’s target list even though the agency knew he had no criminal record, according to notes the government submitted in court that were viewed by the Press Herald. He said he had left his native Angola, completed an ardous journey up through the Americas and arrived in California a few years ago. He presented himself at the border, he said, then applied for asylum, so the Department of Homeland Security knew he was here.
He spent weeks in custody, paid a $3000 bond, and was released back into the same situation he was abducted from: He’s living with his family and working while he waits for his next asylum hearing.
“People were held in detention facilities for weeks for an immigration judge to essentially find that they were not a danger or a flight risk and should be released,” said Jenny Beverly, an immigration attorney in Portland and a former immigration judge. “That tells me that the arrests were needless to begin with.”
Being in detention meant Kalonji and others missed paychecks. Some lost their jobs. Their families and friends scrambled to raise money to continue to pay their bills, to pay bond, while waiting anxiously for news.
Here’s what grinds on me: The Maine detainees were brought to a detention facility in Burlington, Massachusetts — the next town over from where I live. The site was built to be a temporary processing center, but has turned into an overcrowded jail where people spend weeks or months under “inhumane” conditions. I’ve protested outside this facility, which is a quick walk from the popular Burlington Mall, with its Nordstrom’s and Victoria’s Secret. (Mall police chase away protesters who try to use the mall’s parking.) But those of us who live nearby have no way of knowing what goes on inside.
You may feel like all this Gestapo activity is far away from you. But it probably isn’t.
So now Bill and Hillary Clinton have both testified before the House Oversight Committee that is investigating the Epstein files. Reportedly, they answered every question. Both denied wrongdoing, and Hillary said she had never met Jeffrey Epstein, although she did know Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.
There is way more evidence linking Trump to Epstein than either of the Clintons. So why isn’t he testifying?
and deadly AIs
The Pentagon was negotiating a contract to use Anthropic’s AI app Claude, a competitor of ChatGPT. They hit a snag when Anthropic wanted the contract to ban Claude “being used for the mass surveillance of Americans or deployed in autonomous weapons with no humans involved”.
That demand didn’t just result in Anthropic losing the contract, but being declared a “supply chain risk“, which would blacklist the company from just about any government work. Axios says this designation is “usually reserved for companies from adversarial countries, such as Chinese tech giant Huawei”.
The future is not working out the way Isaac Asimov pictured. Sticking to his three laws of robotics will get you punished.
In 2023 the Florida Legislature passed a bill that bans curriculum at state-funded schools that supposedly teaches identity politics or diversity, equity and inclusion, or that suggests racism, sexism and other forms of oppression are embedded in American institutions.
You might wonder what kind of sociology textbook Florida professors could find that stays clear of all that. Well, Florida has made its own.
Florida’s new 267-page sociology textbook is an abbreviated version of the 669-page free and open-source “Introduction to Sociology 3e” and excludes chapters not just on race and ethnicity and gender and sexuality — the usual targets — but also on media and technology, global inequality and social stratification.
The word “racism” appeared 115 times in the original textbook, but just six times in the censored version. Sociology Professor Robyn Autry comments:
Because sociology aims to better understand “today’s most divisive issues,” it’s hard to imagine how any sociology course, especially an introductory one, can be taught without delving into topics that have been censored. And that appears to be the point for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies on the board of governors. It’s rational to conclude that they don’t want sociology taught at all, and that it’s not just particular topics but the discipline as a whole that bothers them.
Robert Cassanello, president of the United Faculty of Florida, warns:
I have it on good authority that next year they’re going to look at the psychology and American history textbooks. It’s an assault on critical thinking.
Until I went looking for that video, I never realized that “Dads unsupervised” is a popular YouTube search term. Here’s something else it will get you.
Two decades ago, George W. Bush and his cabinet spent months raising support for an invasion of Iraq. Two days ago, the Trump regime attacked Iran without giving us any coherent explanation.
Saturday, the US and Israel began an air war against Iran. The widespread attacks had a variety of goals, but decapitating the government was clearly one of them: One early death was that of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, an ayatollah who has been in power since the death of the founder of the current theocracy, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989.
The first American deaths were reported yesterday: three service members who had not yet been named. Five more have been seriously wounded.
It’s hard to know what to write about this, because we have been told so little. Comparisons to George W. Bush’s Iraq fiasco are everywhere, but this attack differs in one important respect: Bush spent months trying to raise public and congressional support for his invasion. Trump, on the other hand, has given no credible explanation. In retrospect, many Americans resented Bush’s deceptive propaganda, but at least he acted like our opinions mattered. Trump seems not to need either our approval or that of Congress. (The Constitution and the War Powers Act say he does need Congress’ approval, if things like that still matter.)
I remember where I was when Bush came on every TV network to announce we were going to war. Trump hasn’t bothered. He posted to social media an 8-minute video full of rhetoric and falsehoods, and never answered the questions “Why this? Why now?” Stylistically, he talked at us rather than to us — standing behind an official podium and hiding his eyes in the shadow of the visor of a USA cap.
No senior Trump administration officials or cabinet members appeared on the Sunday show television circuit a day after the US and Israel began a major military operation in Iran, killing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. … The White House’s communications operation indicated that it would let allies on Capitol Hill do the talking, three people familiar with the discussions said.
Why would Trump want Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton to make the case rather than Marco Rubio or Pete Hegseth or J. D. Vance? To me, the answer seems obvious: Republican senators aren’t official representatives of the Trump regime, so anything they say is deniable.
Trump has sent them out to lie to us, and doesn’t want to be answerable when those lies collapse.
Every hint of an explanation that we’ve been given so far is full of holes. We were told in June that the bombing raids then had “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability. But only months later we have to attack again because Iran “can never have a nuclear weapon.”
As they made their public case this week for another American military campaign against Iran, President Trump and his aides asserted that Iran has restarted its nuclear program, has enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days, and is developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of hitting the United States. All three of these claims are either false or unproven.
Lay down your arms. You will be treated fairly with total immunity. Or you will face certain death.
But there’s no way an air campaign can back that up. The Iranian forces would have to surrender to somebody on the ground, somebody with the institutional power to hold tribunals for some people but not others. Who is that?
Trump also claimed to be doing this for the Iranian people:
When we are done, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations. … America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.
What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario.
In Venezuela after Maduro was captured, his vice president took power and the entire regime remained intact. All they did was let Trump control their oil.
So much for the Iranian people.
In the absence of any plausible explanation from Trump, we’re left to imagine some other motive. Here’s the opinion of Phillips P. OBrien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland:
Boil it all down and what do we have? We have a military operation with no clear ends at all. Stop asking what the US government’s intentions are, they do not exist outside of the personal interests of Donald Trump. They can and will therefore change in a heartbeat as he searches desperately for whatever end gives him the best chance to declare victory. He has made the national interest entirely personal.
Trump attacked Iran to change the media narrative in the US. The testimony of the Clintons to the House Oversight Committee has raised the question of why Trump doesn’t testify. And polls show Trump’s party headed for a historic defeat in November, losing the House and possibly even the Senate.
This bombing campaign is what Iran’s regional rivals get in exchange for a series of bribes to Trump and his family: the UAE’s half-billion-dollar investment in Trump’s crypto company; a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar; Jared Kushner’s firm getting $2 billion in Saudi money to invest despite their high management fees and lack of experience; an Abu Dhabi firm using $2 billion in Trump meme coins to complete a business transaction; and perhaps countless others that are still hidden behind the veil of Trump’s real estate and crypto-currency operations. Rachel Maddow says: “And now for that low, low price, they appear to have rented the services of the United States military to start a war that they want, but that the American people do not, and that our American government hasn’t bothered to explain in terms that are even internally consistent, let alone rational and sound.”
A big, expensive distraction? A quid for the sheikhs’ quo? Trump may not like those theories. But if he doesn’t want them settling into the public mind, he needs to give us something better.
The Weekly Sift 