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The Greatness Paradox

May 26, 2025 – 8:50 am

Trump’s notion of national greatness is stuck in the Napoleonic Era.
That’s causing him to destroy everything that makes America great today.

Nothing is more central to the positive version of Trump’s image or to the aspirations of his followers than the idea of greatness. Throughout his political career, policies come and go, allies are cast out as enemies and then welcomed back into his good graces, and whether he wants more or less of something may change from the beginning of a speech to the end. But the slogan never changes: Make America Great Again. It’s been so steady that everyone knows it just by its initials, MAGA. You talk about MAGA followers or the MAGA Party, and everyone knows what you mean.

And who can argue with that goal? Don’t all loyal Americans want their country to be greater rather than lesser? The “again” may be controversial — when exactly are we talking about? — but “greatness”, who doesn’t aspire to greatness?

And yet, every day we see Trump tear down the things that have made America great: scientific excellence, the rule of law, trade, alliances, our open society, and the soft power that comes from the attractiveness of our vision. How does that make any sense? Is it just hypocrisy? Is “greatness” just a buzzword to exploit? A false banner for the gullible to flock behind?

I want to propose a different explanation. When we asked what era “again” referred to, we were on the right track, but we didn’t take it far enough. What era does “greatness” refer to?

Look at some of the things Trump thinks will make America “great again” and ask yourself what era they belong to. Invariably, they fit a Napoleonic view of greatness, not a 21st-century view.

  • Territorial expansion. Great nations gain territory while lesser nations lose territory. Taking over Greenland, regaining the Panama Canal, and annexing Canada, would be a sure sign of our renewed greatness.
  • Mercantile dominance. A great nation exports more goods than it imports, drawing in gold and silver. This was the dominant theory of economics at least until Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations came out in 1776 and for some while thereafter. Such mercantilism is the primary motive behind Trump’s tariff policy.
  • Manliness. In the Napoleonic years, Frenchmen were confident of their ultimate victory over England, because the English were “a nation of shopkeepers” that did not properly center martial valor in their national identity. This attitude resonates with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s prioritization of “restoring the warrior ethos” in our military, and getting rid of efforts to promote diversity and inclusion. “We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind. And refocusing on lethality”. As if armies still relied on glorious cavalry charges rather than drone pilots who might have any sex, sexual preference, or gender identity.
  • A Great Leader. A primary knock on democracy centuries ago was that it could not produce great leaders like Louis XIV or Peter the Great. Democratic leaders were barely larger than their voters and changed every few years. How could a comparative nonentity like Prime Minister William Pitt compete with a world-bestriding figure like the Emperor Napoleon? Similarly, how could a Kamala Harris or Tim Walz stand up to a contemporary czar like Vladimir Putin? Centuries ago, the pettiness and towering rages of absolute rulers were signs of greatness, while the self-control of a democratic leader seemed weak.

But think for a minute about what has made America great these last hundred years:

  • Science. Yes, the United States fielded valiant soldiers during World War II. But so did our enemies. Our margin of victory came from developments like radar, code-breaking, and the atomic bomb. As we enter into an era of war-fighting AI, global pandemics, and drones, scientific leadership is more important than ever.
  • Trustworthy institutions. The primacy of the US in the postwar era has less to do with being a military hegemon than with being at the heart of a global order. The dollar is the global currency. The US banking system is the nerve center of the world economy. US Treasury bills have been the default investment of all other nations’ central banks. Wall Street is the world’s stock market. Other countries tolerate this because (until recently) they have trusted US institutions to be reliable partners.
  • The rule of law. Why have so many entrepreneurs come to America to found their businesses? Because a fortune made in America was protected by law and safe from predatory rulers like Putin or Viktor Orban. Contracts were enforceable in America, rather than subject to reinterpretation every time an autocrat changed his mind.
  • Education. Around the world, families aspire to send their most promising children to top American universities like Harvard or Columbia. Much of that talent has stayed in America, and even the graduates who returned home brought with them American ideals and an appreciation of American culture.
  • Alliances and treaties. US power has been multiplied by the NATO alliance America leads. American support for international law and international standards has enabled global trade that produced much wealth.
  • Immigration. Immigrants have never been welcomed in America with open arms. But throughout our history, oppressed people around the world have seen America as a refuge, and have hoped their descendants could be fully integrated into our “melting pot”. This influx of energy and talent has kept our society young and vibrant. The freshness and openness of American culture has made the US a place of aspiration.
  • Moral leadership. No great power has ever been mistaken for a saint, and the US won’t be the first. But when disaster strikes anywhere in the world, the US has been among the first nations to help. This generosity has paid dividends for us, both in terms of influence and in our ability to fight epidemics overseas before they can arrive here.
  • Freedom. Much of the mystique of America has revolved around freedom: If you come here, you are free. You can say what you want and believe what you want without fear of government retribution.

Now look at what the Trump administration has been doing.

So is Trump pursuing national greatness? Yes, but according to a notion of greatness that passed its sell-by date centuries ago. He aspires to a Napoleonic greatness and is oblivious to everything that makes a 21st-century nation great. That’s why his policies have America on its way to the dustbin of history, not to a new “golden age“.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (13)

The Big Beautiful Bill

May 19, 2025 – 9:43 am

Since the Republicans took it over in January, one of our three branches of government has been AWOL: Congress. The Executive branch has been all too active, as President Trump has sought to exercise powers the Constitution does not grant him. That has kept the judicial branch busy as well, processing lawsuits that try to block Trump’s illegal actions.

But where has Congress been? Not only has it passed almost no laws, but it has watched mutely as the Trump administration refuses to spend money it appropriated and closes down agencies it established. The Senate shrugged as Trump nominated one absurdly unfit and unqualified character after another to the most important positions in our government. And as one scandal after another unfolded, Congress has not even held any noteworthy investigative hearings.

However, there is one congressional power that neither the President nor the Supreme Court has yet figured out how to usurp in any major way: authorizing the government to collect taxes and spend money.

So we saw Congress act back in March, when the government was about to run out of money. It did just about the minimum possible: passed a continuing resolution that kept fiscal 2025 spending at more-or-less the same level as fiscal 2024. But the money runs out again when FY2026 starts on October 1.

From the beginning, there’s been pressure on Congress’ Republican leadership to put its mark on the new budget. After all, if the government keeps spending the same amounts of money on the same things, what was the point of giving the GOP control? The Party needs a budget it can take back to its voters and say, “See? This is what you sent us to Washington to do.”

Or, to put it another way: Republicans own the FY 2026 budget. They can’t blame Biden or Nancy Pelosi or any of their usual scapegoats. So what are they going to do?

If you’ve ever managed anything — a household, a church, a business, or whatever — you know that budgets are where the rubber meets the road. You can say lofty things about your values, your principles, or who you care about, but it’s all just words until you have to put numbers on paper. When real dollars start coming in and going out, your rhetoric doesn’t matter any more.

That’s a particular problem for MAGA Republicans this year, because much of what they’ve been telling their voters isn’t true. In particular, they’ve been claiming for years that government spending is full of waste and fraud that serves no legitimate public purpose. So spending can be drastically cut without hurting anybody other than the bureaucrats and the fraudsters. They can spend even more on Trump priorities like border security and missile defense, and still find enough waste and fraud to give big tax cuts to the Dear Leader’s wealthy friends — all without increasing the national debt that they claim is destroying the nation.

But then there are those pesky numbers, and disciplines like arithmetic that they still haven’t managed to write out of the national curriculum. So as of yesterday, when the budget bill squeaked through the House Budget Committee on its second try, it can be summed up in three points:

In theory, this combination — transferring wealth from the working poor to the very rich, while worsening the debt problem Republicans claim is an existential threat to the Republic — should repel the White working-class voters who provided Trump’s margin of victory. But we’ll see. Whatever comes out of this process, Trump will claim that it’s wonderful. Perhaps his MAGA base will be loyal enough and gullible enough to believe him, as they so often do.

What Democrats need to do during this process is keep the discussion focused on things that are real, and cut through Republican attempts to cloud the real issues.

Work requirements. The biggest attempt to cloud the reality of the Medicaid and food stamp cuts is the imposition of work requirements on recipients. This sounds great to the typical MAGA voter, who has been fed story after story of able-bodied young men taking advantage of the system. These moochers, Speaker Mike Johnson says, “need to be out working instead of playing videogames all day.”

Johnson hopes you don’t know that numerous states have imposed work requirements, and it has never worked the way he wants you to believe it will.

When Arkansas applied this policy in 2018, it failed disastrously. Even though nearly all enrollees should have met the work requirement or qualified for an exemption, a large share tripped over the red tape and lost their health care coverage anyway. About 1 in 4 people in Arkansas subject to the requirements—about 18,000 people—lost coverage in just the first seven months of the new policy, before a federal judge determined that the policy violated the purpose of the Medicaid program and put a stop to it.

New Hampshire followed Arkansas’ lead in 2019, and similarly found that about 2 out of 3 enrollees subject to the new policy would have lost their health care coverage in the first two months—so the state suspended the program. Shortly after, it was halted permanently by a federal court.

And in Georgia, the only state allowed to continue a work requirement policy, which applied to a narrow eligibility expansion, the administrative costs to run the program were astronomical—nearly $60 million in the first year to cover just 4,200 people.

Think it through: If you’re going to require recipients to work (or engage in some other worthwhile behavior like school), they’re going to have to provide proof that they’re working, and do it on a regular basis. And you’ll have to hire more bureaucrats to check up on that paperwork.

Now picture the life of typical Medicaid or SNAP recipients, who are not playing video games all day. They’re working 30 hours or more a week at something close to minimum wage, dealing with inefficient public transportation or unreliable car pools because they don’t have a car, and probably juggling child care at the same time. Many of them are not well educated, so they have trouble navigating complex systems. Completing a new set of forms (with supporting documentation) every 90 days or so has a way of slipping through the cracks.

Now think about health insurance. If you’re healthy, nothing happens when you lose health insurance, at least not right away. Your kids will complain if you don’t get dinner on the table, and your boss may fire you if you’re late for work, but if your Medicaid paperwork slides a day or two, that doesn’t seem like an emergency. How are you going to allocate your time?

So yes, the government can save money by imposing work requirements. But those savings come from denying care to people who are actually eligible. (The people who are working the most hours are the ones who will have the hardest time keeping their paperwork up to date.) And much of the savings is eaten up by the increased bureaucracy.

Similar “savings”. The Contrarian reports:

The bill includes a range of other cruel Medicaid policies that should also come out. In yet another play to harass people off of their Medicaid coverage, it would roll back a rule finalized by the Biden administration to modernize and simplify how people enroll and stay enrolled in coverage. Repealing this rule will save the government $162 billion over the next 10 years— largely because rolling back the rule reinstates a lot of unnecessary red tape, which reduces the total number of people enrolled.

ObamaCare. For years Republicans tried to repeal ObamaCare, but now they’re taking refuge in it. Specifically, they argue that people who get kicked out of Medicaid can still get subsidized policies on the ObamaCare marketplaces.

Subsidized, but not free. And that brings up a public-policy aspect of healthcare: We don’t want people to gamble with their health insurance.

I know how this works because decades ago I did it myself: In the two or three months between the end of my final school year and the beginning of my first job-with-benefits, I went without health coverage. It would have cost me hundreds of dollars a month to fill the gap, which seemed like a lot of money to me at the time. I was healthy, so why not risk it?

I got away with it. Lots of people do. But the ones who don’t end up costing our healthcare system a lot of money, because emergency rooms are the least efficient way to take care of people.

Again, if you’re healthy, nothing immediately goes wrong when your health insurance lapses. The kids will suffer if you stop buying groceries, and they’ll complain if they have to keep wearing clothes they’ve outgrown. The landlord may throw you out if you stop paying rent. But if you don’t have health insurance for a month or two, maybe you get away with it. Doing without can look like the easiest way to fill the hole in your budget. And then months stretch into years, until something happens.

We don’t want to tempt people to make that trade-off.

Values. Finally, think about what we’re giving away here: health care and food. We’re not giving poor people sports cars and Super Bowl tickets. If someone “takes advantage” of you to get the medicine and treatment they need, or food for themselves or their families, are you really that upset? How many needy people are you willing to cut off to make sure that some handful of young men aren’t playing video games all day?

If your answer to that question isn’t tiny, you might want to take another look at your moral values.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (6)

What’s up with the Supreme Court?

May 19, 2025 – 9:19 am

Consider this a follow-up to last week’s post of qualified optimism about the prospects for American democracy to outlive the Trump administration. We continue to be steaming towards a direct clash between Trump and the Supreme Court. How that plays out will be a big factor in whether our way of government survives.

A lot of the pessimists I talk with say this clash has already happened and the bad guys won. Specifically, the Court told the Trump administration to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back from the concentration camp Trump has established in El Salvador. Trump has ignored that order and gotten away with it. So: courts and laws are powerless and Trump will do as he pleases. For all practical purposes, American democracy is already dead.

I read the situation somewhat differently. To me, the Supreme Court and the Trump administration look like two fighters circling each other warily, each waiting to see if the other really wants to do this.

It already seems clear that the Court will not endorse Trump’s most obviously illegal acts. It will not deny that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship, no matter how badly Trump wants that denial. It won’t agree that he can invoke wartime powers (like the Alien Enemies Act) when there is no war. It won’t endorse him unilaterally unmaking agencies made and funded by Congress. The administration seems to understand this, which is why it hasn’t pushed for the Court to resolve those issues quickly.

Instead, Trump’s lawyers keep offering the Court ways to surrender quietly, by writing itself out of the picture. For example, the portion of the birthright citizenship case that the administration argued in front of the Court this week did not seek an answer to the central question. Instead, it focused on whether lower court injunctions could cover the entire country. The acting Solicitor General argued for a system in which each loss in a lower court only affected the specific plaintiffs involved, leaving the administration free to ignore the birthright citizenship of any other Americans until they sued too. Only a Supreme Court ruling could shut the administration down completely.

This leaves an enormous loophole: If the administration simply refused to appeal a series of lower-court losses, none of the cases would make it to the Supreme Court, so there could be no national ruling against them.

In other words: You don’t have to endorse our position, Supremes, just write yourself out of the picture and let us proceed.

For its part, the Court has so far treated the Trump administration as if it were a good-faith actor, which it clearly is not. In the Garcia case, the Supremes supported a lower-court order to “facilitate” Garcia’s release, leaving the details to the executive branch. (That’s appropriate if the executive branch is acting in good faith, because the executive is presumed to be better equipped to deal with foreign governments.) In essence, it was offering Trump the opportunity to stop all this nonsense and start behaving like the kind of American president the Constitution envisions.

But of course he did not. The Trump administration interpreted “facilitate” in a ridiculously narrow way, and — surprise! — the details of Garcia’s release haven’t worked out. The government continues to give the lower-court judge a run-around as to what it is or is not doing to get Garcia back.

Sooner or later, Judge Xinis is going to tire of this and order the administration to present Garcia in his court on a particular date. That order will also get appealed up to the Supreme Court, which will then have to decide whether it is ready to confront Trump or surrender to him. If it isn’t ready to surrender, then Trump will have to decide whether he recognizes the authority of the Court. If he doesn’t, that’s the crisis point.

I don’t think anyone knows whether we’ll get there, or what will happen then. Trump himself may not know, and the answer may turn on how popular Trump is at the time, how the economy is going, how vigorously Republicans in Congress are standing up for him, how well organized anti-Trump protesters are, and a lot of other factors that have nothing to do with the case at hand.

It’s worth noting that so far the Trump administration is not acting as if it had thrown off the burden of judicial oversight. For example, on Friday the Supreme Court extended its previous ban on deporting any more people under the authority of the Alien Enemies Act until the administration’s invocation of the AEA’s wartime powers can be fully adjudicated. As best we can tell, the administration is obeying the order.

At least for now.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , , , | Comments (9)

As we approach our crisis of democracy, we’re in better shape than I expected

May 12, 2025 – 9:24 am

During my two weeks off, I drove cross-country and saw a lot of my old friends plus a few like-minded relatives. I was struck by how depressed so many of them are with the current political situation. Again and again, I had to be the voice of optimism in the room. For the sake of depressed Sift readers I didn’t see during my travels, maybe I should explain why.

Partly, I feel optimistic because I got my pessimism out of the way early. After Trump’s inauguration, I think a lot of people were expecting a second Trump administration a lot like the first. We got through that, they thought, so we’ll probably get through this too.

I was much more negative. Everything and everybody who had restrained Trump’s worst impulses during his first administration was gone now, so it seemed obvious he would make a play to become a dictator. It was also clear how that would play out: He would keep pushing until either Congress or the Supreme Court tried to stop him. Then there would be a crisis and we’d see who won.

We seem to be reaching that crisis point now, as the Supreme Court is going to have to decide whether to call Trump out on his flouting of their Abrego Garcia ruling. (To be clear, the administration is denying that it’s ignoring the Court’s order, but it’s interpreting that order in an absurd way that makes it meaningless.) So now we see whether the Court has the courage to stand up to Trump, whether Trump will decide that the Court has no power over him, and whether (if he does) Congress will just stand by and let him do it.

In addition, courts up-and-down the line have been restraining Trump’s illegal actions. And surprisingly often, Trump officials are obeying. Rümeysa Öztürk, the Turkish Tufts student masked DHS agents snatched off the streets, is now free on bail and walking the streets of Somerville rather than rotting in a Louisiana detention camp. She seems likely to prevail in her attempts to complete her degree in the US. Another detained student, Mohsen Mahdawi, is also free.

This is the point we have been headed towards ever since Trump was elected last November. What I feel good about is that we’re hitting this point in much better shape than I thought we would. For several reasons:

  • Trump is unpopular. Imagine if he had just taken credit for the good Biden economy rather than starting all this tariff nonsense. Imagine if Musk had focused on actual government waste and could point to real accomplishments.
  • He has visibly declined. Falling asleep at Pope Francis’ funeral (while wearing an inappropriate blue suit) is just the most obvious example. (Imagine if Biden had done that.) And while he’s always had moments of incoherence, it’s now unusual when he appears coherent.
  • The administration has multiple competing factions. You can see this in the persistent leaks saying Trump as about to reverse his position on something. That’s an internal faction trying to nudge him to reverse a position backed by a different faction.
  • His promises are failing. Trump has always been good at declaring victory and making his followers believe him. But he made some very definite promises that are obviously not being fulfilled: Prices did not start dropping “on Day 1”. He didn’t solve the Ukraine War in 24 hours. And so on.
  • Popular opposition is rising. Early in the administration, I kept hearing anti-Trump people express their sense of isolation. No more.
  • Congress is wavering. You can see this in the floundering negotiations over the FY 2026 budget. More and more Republican congresspeople are realizing that they can’t get reelected on Trump’s endorsement alone.

All these factors add up to give the Supreme Court a little more spine, and to make Trump and his minions waver about open defiance. If Trump were riding high in the polls, at the peak of his powers, leading a united administration, facing little public protest, and backed by a solid Republican majority in Congress, standing up to him would be far more difficult, even for somebody like John Roberts who has an independent constitutional mandate.

That’s not to say that everything is going to go smoothly. There still might be rough waters ahead, and a Trump dictatorship is not impossible. But trends are going our way, and we’re in better shape than we were on Inauguration Day.

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Reclaiming the Spirit of ’75

April 14, 2025 – 10:43 am

In its 250th year, New England’s revolutionary history has become relevant again.

Here in Massachusetts, April is the month of patriotism, centering on the April 19 anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord.

I live in Bedford, a town that sits between Lexington and Concord, and so has an understandable sense of inferiority (though Bedford’s Minutemen joined several other nearby community militias in mustering to defend Concord Bridge). Longfellow never wrote a poem about us, but we do have our own April revolutionary celebration: Pole Capping Day, on which people dress in colonial-era costumes, Minutemen march and fire muskets, and speeches are given. The center of the ritual is the erection of a pole, which some agile person climbs and adorns with a liberty cap, symbolizing Bedford’s rebellion against King George and the English monarchy.

Saturday, hundreds of people braved drizzle and sleet to celebrate. This year’s pole capping had an extra flavor, as autocratic rule no longer seems like a historical curiosity. For some while, townspeople have been decorating their yards with ambiguously historical/political signs: “No King”, “Resisting Tyranny Since 1775”, and so on. If anyone objects to these “partisan” messages, they have so far stayed quiet for fear of confessing their pro-dictatorial aspirations.

My church’s retired minister John Gibbons is the chaplain of the local Minuteman corps, and annually officiates in his colonial-parson costume. This year’s homily was cribbed from the Declaration of Independence, but seemed like a denunciation of the Trump administration’s current deeds and near-term ambitions. Consider these accusations against King George:

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

Back in 2009, conservatives (and various other people upset to find themselves living in a country with a Black president) misappropriated New England’s revolutionary tradition and called themselves the Tea Party. As I pointed out in 2014, in one of the Sift’s most viral posts, they were actually a Confederate party, and drew much more from John Calhoun than John Adams.

Over the next 15 months, a lot of 250th anniversaries are going to roll around. I hope we use them to reclaim the true spirit of American patriotism from the fascist posers who so often usurp that legacy. Let us rededicate “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” to the cause of the inalienable rights of all people, and resist all attempts to impose one-man rule on these hallowed shores.

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What to Learn (and not Learn) from Trump’s Tariff Blunders

April 14, 2025 – 9:29 am

Trump’s protectionist overreach shouldn’t send Democrats back to neo-liberalism and free trade.

I’m guessing you know the basics of this story, because it’s gotten blanket coverage in the media: Trump announced wild and ridiculous tariffs, global markets crashed, and then he partially backed off, leading to a partial recovery. (If you want a more complete review, it’s in footnote [1].)

Of course Trump never admits a mistake, so the party line is that he meant to do this all along; the whole fiasco is a negotiating tactic straight out of The Art of the Deal. And the Trump-worshiping chorus immediately fell into line: “an absolutely brilliant move“, “brilliantly executed“.

But anybody with their eyes open saw this episode for what it was: a colossal blunder that is far from fixed even now. Jay Kuo summarized: “Trump screwed up bigly on tariffs, and he knows it.” [more critiques, including mine, in footnote 3]

But even more interesting, I think, were articles defending Trump’s tariffs sort of. Typically the headlines were Trump-friendly, like “There’s a Method to Trump’s Tariff Madness” and “Stop Freaking Out, Trump’s Tariffs Can Still Work” in the NYT, or even “Tariffs Can Actually Work, If Only Trump Understood How” in the Financial Times. But the content of the articles was less favorable, more along the lines of: Higher tariffs might work, but not like this.

The best such article I found was Ross Douthat’s interview with Oren Cass (author of the “Stop Freaking Out” article). I’m not usually a big Ross Douthat fan, but here he asked the right questions and got significant nuance out of Cass.

Cass begins with a critique of the globalization era, arguing that while GDP has increased just as economic theory says it should, GDP doesn’t tell the full story.

when we’re looking at the actual well-being and flourishing of the typical working family and their ability to achieve middle-class security, we’ve seen real decay. And I think that explains why somebody like Donald Trump has become as successful politically as he has.

It’s striking how closely this echoes what Pete Buttigieg told Jon Stewart:

The bottom line is: If the economy and the government were working the way it should for most Americans, a guy like Donald Trump and a movement like Trumpism would not have been possible.

Cass notes the bifurcation between types of working people.

When you’re looking at these household income numbers, it’s important to notice how much they rely upon the household having two earners and how much more reliant they find themselves on government programs than in the past. … I think we have a problem, particularly for the right of center that sold this idea of a rising-tide-lifts-all-ships model and we all march forward together into the brave new future. What people are seeing instead is that some people got to march ahead into the brave new future and a lot of folks did not. … Research at very optimistic groups like the American Enterprise Institute shows that young men ages 25 to 29 are earning the same or less than they would’ve been 50 years ago. And I think it’s hard to sell that as a successful economy or one that’s likely to produce a flourishing society.

The conversation shifts to trade, and the corresponding loss of manufacturing jobs. Douthat asks the right question: What’s so special about manufacturing jobs? If the pay is the same, why should we care whether people work in a Ford plant or in a bank?

Cass has a set of answers:

  • Manufacturing jobs tend to be scattered throughout the country, while service jobs cluster around big financial centers. So loss of manufacturing has impoverished large sections of the country, particularly small towns in otherwise rural areas.
  • An economy with both manufacturing and service jobs has employment opportunities for a broader talent pool than a pure service economy has.
  • Our country is more secure militarily if we manufacture the products we need to defend ourselves (rather than depend on, say, Taiwan for our advanced computer chips; depending on a potential enemy like China is even worse). But it’s hard to preserve those industries in isolation, rather than as part of a diverse and robust manufacturing sector. “If you actually want to be an industrial power, you need the actual materials themselves. You need to know how to make the tools that make the materials, things like machine tooling, the actual excellence in engineering that’s going to lead to efficient production.”

His prescription is more nuanced than either Trump’s or the free traders’.

the equilibrium you’re headed toward is not one where we shut off trade. It’s one in which there’s more friction in trade, so that there’s a preference for domestic manufacturing

So he favors the across-the-board 10% tariff. That’s not high enough to bring back low-productivity manufacturing jobs, which is probably not a worthy goal anyway. If a t-shirt made in Indonesia now imports wholesale for $2.20 rather than $2, you’re not going to start making them in Mississippi. And because trade continues, that 10% tariff does raise revenue, but not enough to replace the income tax. It’s friction, not a locked door.

Higher country-specific tariffs might be used as negotiating tools against countries that have truly unfair trading practices. But the mere existence of a trade deficit doesn’t imply unfair practices.

And finally, he sees China as a special case. Because it is our main rival for global power, we can’t let ourselves depend on them for anything really important. So higher tariffs on Chinese imports make sense, but in concert with our allies, rather than fighting a one-on-one trade war.

we want to have a large, U.S.-centered economic and security alliance. We want to have very low tariffs within that group, obviously Mexico and Canada, obviously other core allies.

But unlike in the past, we have some demands. We want to see balanced trade within that group so that we reshore and reindustrialize significantly in this country, and we want to see a common commitment among all these countries to decoupling from China.

That’s the substance of his proposals, but he also makes an important point about how they would be implemented. The purpose of tariffs is to change long-term behavior, not to create short-term shocks to the system that might drive the world economy into recession or worse. It’s more important that corporations, governments, and other key decision-makers know what tariffs will be two and three years down the line than that significant change happen right away.

That means:

  • gradually phasing in higher tariffs over time
  • justifying those tariffs as part of a coherent strategy
  • building a consensus around that strategy — in particular getting them passed into law by Congress — so that decision-makers will know they won’t change every time the political winds shift

What we have instead — sudden tariff shocks based on the whims of one man, who might change his mind tomorrow — is all cost and little benefit.

Cass represents American Compass, a conservative think tank. But the substance of his proposals is not far away from the ideas of the Democratic left. To me, this suggests the possibility of bipartisan consensus on policy — if we could get Trump out of the way.

[1] A somewhat longer version of the story: Trump announced massive tariffs on April 2. World stock markets [2, a footnote to a footnote] spent a week crashing (with a temporary rally on April 8 when it was rumored he would back off), and then on April 9 he announced he would delay enforcing most of the tariffs for 90 days to allow the targeted countries to negotiate. However,

Trump said he would raise the tariff on Chinese imports to 125% from the 104% level that took effect at midnight, further escalating a high-stakes confrontation between the world’s two largest economies. The two countries have traded tit-for-tat tariff hikes repeatedly over the past week.

Trump’s reversal on the country-specific tariffs is not absolute. A 10% blanket duty on almost all U.S. imports will remain in effect, the White House said. The announcement also does not appear to affect duties on autos, steel and aluminum that are already in place.

The 90-day freeze also does not apply to duties paid by Canada and Mexico, because their goods are still subject to 25% fentanyl-related tariffs if they do not comply with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement’s rules of origin. Those duties remain in place for the moment, with an indefinite exemption for USMCA-compliant goods.

Then he announced a change that seemed designed to benefit Apple and its users.

On Friday night, the US president handed Apple a major victory, exempting many popular consumer electronics. That includes iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches and AirTags. Another win: The 10% tariff on goods imported from other countries has been dropped for those products.

The partial reversal on tariffs led to a partial stock-market recovery: The S&P 500 was at 5670 when the tariffs were announced, fell to just under 5000 at its low on Tuesday, and bounced back to 5363 by the end of the week, a net fall of about 5.4%

[2] If you want to get into the weeds, apparently the crash in the bond market had more influence on Trump. The Atlantic’s Rogé Karma explains why this was so unnerving:

Yesterday morning, the U.S. economy appeared to be on the verge of catastrophe. The stock market had already shrunk by trillions of dollars in just a few days. Usually, when the stock market falls, investors flock to the safest of all safe assets, U.S. Treasury bonds. This in turn causes interest rates to fall. (When more people want to buy your debt, you don’t have to offer as high a return.) But that didn’t happen this time. Instead, investors started pulling their money out of Treasury bonds en masse, causing interest rates to spike in just a few hours.

Suddenly the entire global financial system appeared to be at risk. If U.S. Treasuries were no longer considered safe—perhaps because the country that issues them had recently shown its willingness to tank its own economy in pursuit of incomprehensible objectives—then no other asset could be considered safe either. The next step might be a rush to liquidate assets, the equivalent of a bank run on the entire global financial system.

[3] Jay Kuo also provided this chart showing just how high the average tariffs are, even after Wednesday’s walk-back.

Paul Krugman posted his assessment yesterday:

I wanted to put up a quick response to yesterday’s sudden move to exempt electronics. What you need to know is that it does not represent a move toward sanity. On the contrary, the Trump tariffs just got even worse.

Main reason: The current tariff breakdown discourages US manufacturing.

Import Chinese battery: 145% tariff
Import Chinese battery inside Chinese laptop: 20% tariff
Import Chinese battery inside Vietnamese laptop: 0% tariff

I’m putting my own critique of Trump’s tariffs in this footnote, because I’ve posted it before and don’t want to get repetitive. Basically, Trump touts his tariffs as accomplishing three contradictory purposes:

To provide a revenue stream that can replace other taxes, the tariffs have to last for years and the US has to continue importing tariffed products. But to the extent that manufactured products and their supply chains move to the US, imports of tariffed products will fall, lowering revenue from the tariff.

In order to move manufacturing and its supply chains back to the US, the tariffs again have to last for years. Corporations will only move their factories if they expect the tariffs to remain in place into the distant future. But if the tariffs are a bargaining chip to be negotiated away, they won’t last. To the extent that corporations expect trade negotiations to succeed, they’ll leave their factories overseas.

Worse, the on-again/off-again nature of Trump’s tariffs, at least so far, discourages businesses from making plans that rely on those tariffs. So even if they last far into the future, they may not bring jobs back to the US. In many ways, the erratic policy we have seen the worst of all worlds.

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On Tariffs and the Markets

April 7, 2025 – 10:29 am

Wednesday, Trump announced sweeping tariffs against almost every nation on Earth, with Russia being a notable exception. The plan included a 10% tariff on all imports, supplemented by specific tariffs ranging up to 50% on a long list of nations (including a few islands that are uninhabited).

He pitched the tariffs as “reciprocal”, i.e., matching our tariffs on imports to the tariffs other nations have put on our exports. However, no one can find nations whose tariffs are anything like the ones Trump is imposing in return. In his announcement, Trump also referred to “non-tariff barriers” to American exports. He framed any trade deficit as the result of some form of unfairness to American exports, which the new tariffs attempt to equalize.

As a result, when people finally figured out how the tariffs were being calculated, the tariff rate was simply half of the trade deficit with that country as a percentage of that country’s total exports to the US. So it’s a function of that country’s trade surplus/deficit with the US, not any specific unfairness in its tariffs or laws.

That’s how the highest tariff rate wound up falling on Lesotho, a tiny poor country surrounded by South Africa. Lesotho makes denim for jeans and also exports diamonds and a few other commodities. Few Lesothans can afford imported goods from the US.

The administration has made three cases for its tariffs, which The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson points out contradict each other. The tariffs are supposed to

  • Raise $6 trillion in revenue (if you believe Trump aide Peter Navarro).
  • Restore free trade by incentivizing other nations to negotiate away their trade barriers against us (if you believe Palmer Luckey).
  • Bring manufacturing jobs back to the US (if you believe Stephen Miran, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers).

In order to raise revenue and increase US manufacturing, the tariffs have to last for many years, which they can’t do if they are a negotiating ploy to lower other country’s tariffs and trade barriers. Similarly, no tariff is going to restore coffee production to the US, because our climate doesn’t lend itself to coffee production.

Global stock markets reacted to the tariffs by collapsing. If you’re an investor yourself, you may not realize how unusual this is. A market truism is “Buy on rumor, sell on news.” In other words, you make your moves in anticipation of events, not in reaction to them. Once a thing is announced, you close the position you based on it and look for the next thing you think is going to happen.

So the widespread expectation, as the world awaited the tariff announcement, was that the stock market would get a small bounce out of it. Rumors of tariffs had been depressing stock prices for months, but once the news was out, investor attention would shift to something else. But the actual tariffs turned out to be far worse than anything investors had anticipated, so the reaction was down instead of up.

And boy, was it down. The S&P 500 lost more than 10% of its value Thursday and Friday, and opened sharply down again today.

So if the market isn’t anticipating tariffs any more, what is it anticipating? The recession these tariffs are expected to cause. J. P. Morgan is one of many forecasters now predicting a recession. Morgan economists anticipate the unemployment rate rising to 5.3%.

But no one knows how far the predicted downturn will go, because recession fears can be self-validating. People afraid of losing their jobs tend not to spend as much, which in turn causes other people to lose their jobs. Businesses expecting a downturn will cancel expansion plans and emphasize cost-cutting.

The administration’s response to these fears has been a no-pain/no-gain message that was totally absent from Trump’s 2024 campaign. On the campaign trail, Trump kept talking about positive change that would happen “very quickly” or “on Day One“.

But now, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant is talking about a “detox period” where the economy breaks its addiction to government spending.

The right-wing news bubble is doing its best to help push the administration’s story, or just to distract its viewers from the bad news. When the market started crashing Thursday morning, I channel-scanned and observed the same thing The Daily Show saw:

CNN: Stock market plummets
MSNBC: Stock market craters
Highlights for Children: Stock market down big
FOX News: New info about alleged cover-up of Biden’s decline

Fox also focused on some silly thing Alec Baldwin said, as if he were the voice of the Democratic Party. Fox also removed the stock ticker from the corner of its screen.

So the 30% or so of the country that is die-hard Trump is likely to keep drinking the kool-aid. But the additional 20% that won the election for him is experiencing considerable cognitive dissonance and even buyers’ remorse. To them, Trump was a great businessman who would handle the economy better than Biden did. That image is hard to sustain as you worry about your job, watch prices of foreign-produced goods rise, and see your 401(k) investments sink.

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Is this a turning point?

April 7, 2025 – 8:35 am

The scenario where American democracy survives Trump got a little more credible this week.

Consider the events of this week, all of which will be described in more detail in the weekly summary I’ll post later this morning:

It’s tricky to evaluate the significance of all this. If you look at it all pessimistically, Booker’s speech was a stunt that produced no direct congressional action, off-year elections are notoriously bad predictors of subsequent elections, Trump has announced and withdrawn tariff plans before that whipsawed the markets, and massive protests in his first term seemed to have little consequence. A month or two from now, none of this may look all that important.

But.

Six weeks ago, I posted “How Things Stand“, a summary of how Trump was threatening American democracy and where things might go from there.

So now we’ve seen Trump’s opening moves: a blizzard of executive orders claiming unprecedented powers that can be found nowhere in the Constitution. That was all predictable.

What wasn’t predictable, and is still unknown, is how the other American power centers would respond. I’m talking about Congress, the courts, the state governments, and the People. That’s all still very hard to predict, because each of those power centers will influence the behavior of the others.

It’s important for us to be neither complacent about all this nor resigned to our fate.

I projected a scenario that avoided the establishment of a lasting Trump autocracy, emphasizing that it was just a scenario, not a prediction. My point was that a way out of this was still possible. The first steps were:

  • Trump continues losing popularity. He never had much, but his brand becomes politically toxic.
  • That lack of voter support makes support from congressional Republicans waver. They may not openly defy Trump, but the slim Republican majorities (especially in the House) lose their cohesion, making it impossible to pass legislation without at least some Democratic support.

I had hoped that the looming government shutdown of March 14 would be the time when congressional support would waver, and that Republicans wouldn’t be able to pass a continuing resolution without negotiating a deal with the Democrats. That didn’t happen. Mike Johnson was able to hold his small majority together to pass the CR on a nearly party-line vote. Then Chuck Schumer folded in the Senate (for reasons I found plausible but not necessarily convincing), ending the threat of a Democratic filibuster. So the government is funded through September.

However, the events of this week show that we’re still on the path I laid out. Again, I’m not saying that success is certain, just that there is still a way out of this through political processes, without widespread riots or civil war.

There is no legal or political mechanism that directly links public opinion, market crashes, or elections for relatively minor offices to the kinds of legal or congressional action that will halt the Trump/Musk coup or lead to the restoration of American democracy. However, autocratic movements rely on a sense of inevitability and self-confidence, with each usurpation of power emboldening its leaders and foot-soldiers to dare the next one. Autocrats depend on a sense of public helplessness that demoralizes opposition and makes each successive victim feel alone and unsupported.

The narrative of Trump’s inevitability and his opposition’s powerlessness ran aground this week. He remains in office and retains his grip on the levers of executive power. But his true supporters have never been more than about 1/3 of the American public, and many in Congress, the courts, the media, the business community, and elsewhere have lined up behind him more from intimidation or a lack of attractive alternatives than real conviction.

The momentum that has swept Trump forward can turn, with each act of opposition emboldening the next. All along, there has been a scenario in which his seizure of unconstitutional power fails. That scenario is still intact, and is more credible today than it was a week ago.

The Hands Off march in Portland, Oregon Saturday.
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How Bad Was the Signal Fiasco?

March 31, 2025 – 8:51 am

By now you’ve undoubtedly heard the basics: Last Monday, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg reported that for several days (March 11-15) he had a connection with Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Waltz over the private messaging service Signal.

  • On March 11 Goldberg received a Signal connection request from Waltz. He was puzzled and doubted its authenticity, but he accepted.
  • On March 13 he was invited to join the “Houthi PC small group”, a chat that eventually included Vice President Vance, several members of the Trump cabinet, and a variety of other high-ranking members of the administration. Waltz described the group as a “principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours”. (Goldberg explains: “The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA.”)
  • On March 14, members of the group (who had apparently received a classified communication Goldberg did not get) began discussing whether to attack the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have been shooting missiles at ships in the Red Sea. Vance wanted to delay the attack for a month, Defense Secretary Hegseth was for launching it immediately, and some others ambivalent. Vance yields, texting to Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go”. (Strangely, President Trump was not on the chat and apparently did not make the final decision to launch the attack.)
  • On March 15, Hegseth began giving the group a play-by-play of the attack as it was carried out, beginning two hours before the bombs fell. Goldberg summarizes: “the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”

Up until he received news reports of explosions in Yemen, Goldberg had not completely believed the chat group was genuine. The previous day,

I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.

After becoming convinced that he had been overhearing an actual Principals meeting discussing highly classified information, Goldberg left the group.

So much is wrong with this series of events that the subsequent public discussion has often gotten confused, starting off talking about one issue before veering off onto another one. So let’s start by listing the various wrongnesses I’ve heard about or noticed.

  • The chat group shouldn’t exist at all. The Signal message chain in question was set up to be deleted after four weeks. This violates the Presidential Records Act and Federal Records Act, which require that require records to be kept of all communication involving official government business.
  • Signal is not an approved channel for discussing classified information. By law and policy, classified information can only be sent over very specific government systems.
  • Signal exchanges can be hacked. The security rules being broken here exist for good reasons, and are not just cumbersome or outdated regulations. The encryption feature in Signal is believed to be crackable by intelligence services of hostile foreign governments like Russia and possibly others. And even if an adversary has not hacked Signal, the cell phones or laptops several participants seem to have used could be compromised by malware.
  • Hegseth’s posts violate the Espionage Act. Apologists for the Trump administration have played legal/verbal games with the term “classified information”. Because Hegseth himself is the classifying authority for information like attack plans, they claim, he was implicitly declassifying it by posting it on Signal. But The Hill reports: “the Espionage Act … doesn’t rely on classification. Instead, it allows prosecution of those who share national defense information, whether intentionally or inadvertently. ‘While you can argue that it wasn’t classified — probably in bad faith — you cannot argue that it was not national defense information,’ said Kel McClanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, a nonprofit law firm.” Whatever word-games you play, information about an imminent or ongoing attack is precisely the kind of thing the classification system was designed to protect.
  • No one on the chat objected. Back in the days when I had a Top Secret clearance myself, I was occasionally in conversations where an issue was alluded to, and then someone would say: “But we can’t talk about that here.” Everyone on the chat had an obligation to say that, and no one did. (The implication here is that this situation is not unusual. Possibly, highly-classified Signal chats are a regular occurrence in the Trump administration. I have not heard any Trump official address this precise point.)
  • Goldberg should not have been invited to the chat. People tend to focus on this part of the wrongness, but look how far we’ve gotten without mentioning it. The Russians could have been listening, and could have tipped off the Houthis to counter our attack or move what we were targeting. Goldberg is an inconsequential risk by comparison.
  • Hegseth had an obligation to verify that everyone on the chat had appropriate clearances to receive the information he was sending, but he did not. This is a problem even if you overlook the fundamental insecurity of Signal. Even if everyone on the chat had been gathered in a secure location like the Situation Room, attack plans shouldn’t have been shared when an uncleared person (i.e., Goldberg) was present. Protecting defense secrets is Hegseth’s job, not Goldberg’s, so the fault lies with him.
  • Waltz endangered intelligence sources in his after-action report. “The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.” So the Houthis know that somebody with a view of the building that day was an American agent. Undoubtedly they are trying to find and kill this person.
  • The attack’s “success” is no excuse. Attorney General Bondi was one of many administration officials making this point: “what we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission”. The best analogy I’ve heard is to drunk driving: The fact that you made it home safely doesn’t excuse it, or justify doing something similar in the future. If you take enough unnecessary risks, you will pay eventually. (BTW: Was the attack a success? Killing people and blowing things up is not an end in itself. The point of the attack was to either incapacitate or intimidate the Houthis so that they’ll stop shooting at ships. We don’t know yet whether the raid achieved that purpose. “The Signal chat reveals no suggestion of a strategic framework — or even the concept of a plan — into which the attack clearly fit.”)

So this is the kind of multi-layer screw-up that is hard to wrap your mind around. (An analogy: Imagine that your 15-year-old daughter is threatening suicide because her uncle has broken off their incestuous relationship after discovering that she’s pregnant. What aspect of the situation do you react to first? What’s the core problem here?)

Responses. One of the adages I heard while growing up was “It takes a big man to admit he’s wrong.” By that standard, there are no big men (or women) in the Trump administration. Across the board, everyone involved or implicated in the meeting has deflected, pointed elsewhere, or outright lied in order to deny responsibility.

Goldberg’s first article was circumspect about what he revealed. He wrote in generalities, like the quote above about “targets, weapons, … and attack sequencing”. Not wanting to damage national security himself, he didn’t spell out any details.

But Goldberg’s caution just made an opening for Hegseth and others to lie about the content of the chat.

I’ve heard how it was characterized. Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.

White House apologists took up the “no classified information” talking point. Director of National Intellligence Tulsi Gabbard told the Senate Intelligence Committee

There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to make the whole incident a he-said/she-said issue.

Do you trust the secretary of defense — who was nominated for this role, voted by the United States Senate into this role, who has served in combat, honorably served our nation in uniform — or do you trust Jeffrey Goldberg?

Goldberg’s response was basically: Don’t trust me; trust your eyes and your common sense.

The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions.

Since there was “no classified information” involved, he had no reason not to publish chunks of the transcript of the chat. Goldberg summarized one section:

This Signal message shows that the U.S. secretary of defense texted a group that included a phone number unknown to him—Goldberg’s cellphone—at 11:44 a.m. This was 31 minutes before the first U.S. warplanes launched, and two hours and one minute before the beginning of a period in which a primary target, the Houthi “Target Terrorist,” was expected to be killed by these American aircraft. If this text had been received by someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media—the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds. The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic.

The release of the transcript should (but won’t) put an end to the attempts to dodge responsibility by vilifying Goldberg. (Leavitt: “arguably no one in the media who loves manufacturing and pushing hoaxes more than Jeffrey Goldberg.” Trump: “The guy is a total sleazebag.” Hegseth: “a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again”.) Goldberg’s transcript is either accurate or it’s not. If it’s not, other participants can release their own records. But they haven’t. So we can assume Goldberg’s reporting here is accurate, independent of what you think of the rest of his career. (Personally, I respect him as a journalist.)

How did this happen? The larger wrong — discussing an ongoing attack on an insecure platform — happened because the Trump administration is full of people who don’t take security seriously. Many of them — Hegseth in particular — are totally unqualified for their jobs. (Whenever the administration talks about “merit” as opposed to DEI, I think of Hegseth. Only a White man could ever get such an important job with such a flimsy resume and so many red flags in his personal life. Hegseth is a walking advertisement for why DEI is necessary.)

But none of that explains how Goldberg wound up on the chat. If we believe Goldberg’s account, it was a two-part process. First Mike Waltz (or somebody with access to Waltz’ Signal account) made a connection with Goldberg. Then two days later Goldberg was invited to join the Houthi PC small group. So it’s not just somebody hitting Goldberg’s number by fat-fingering a list. (That explanation would be more convincing if some “Johnny Goldsmith” should have been in the group and wasn’t. But I have heard no suggestion of who that person might be. And doesn’t anybody double-check lists with national security implications?)

The explanation (offered by Waltz) that Goldberg may have hacked his way onto the chat group is not only unlikely, but is damning in a different way. It’s bad enough to think that Trump officials are relying on an app that Russian or Chinese intelligence agencies might hack. But magazine editors?

Lacking any other explanation, I’m driven to a conspiracy theory formulated by former West Point history professor Terrence Goggin: “a highly effective cell operating deep in the Pentagon and National Security Council” that Goggin dubs “Deep Throat 2.0”. (Waltz denied this: “A staffer wasn’t responsible.”)

Goggin connects the Signal story with another leak that embarrassed the Trump defense establishment: The NYT finding out that Elon Musk was about to get a briefing on the Pentagon’s plans for a war with China.

Someone contacted the New York Times with a copy of a written order to brief Musk on the Operational Plan to oppose a massive invasion of Taiwan by the People’s Liberation Army Navy (“PLAN”). … Someone transmitted the written order instructing the Joint Chiefs to brief Musk to the New York Times, 12 hours before the briefing was to take place, in order for this to reach its 10 million digital subscribers worldwide. … The leak was timed for a last minute shock without warning, for maximum public damage and embarrassment. This was not an accident, but a deadly strike.

Adding Goldberg to the Houthi PC small group was similarly “not a mistake” but “a well planed clandestine operation”.

Clearly rattled, President Trump declared today that the uproar is a “Witch Hunt”. Actually he may be right. But the witches are His Own Men! It is a planned and organized operation to destroy his ability to govern with unqualified and deficient officials using and exposing his Administration’s own national security mistakes to do so.

Imagine that you’re a career staffer at the Pentagon. You’ve seen people live and die by the book, and now a bunch of yahoos who can’t be bothered to take even minimal security precautions are in charge. You’ve tried to impress on them the reasons for doing things in the standard way, but they always think they know better.

What better way to get your point across than to let the public see what’s happening?

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Politics in the Attention Economy

March 24, 2025 – 8:57 am

What happens to democracy when directing and misdirecting public attention becomes more important than convincing voters to agree with you?

Chris Hayes’ recent book The Sirens’ Call is worth reading in its entirety, but there is one particular aspect of it that I want to highlight. Once you’ve had this thought, it’s perfectly obvious, but I’ve never seen it spelled out so clearly before: Getting attention and holding attention are two very different problems. Getting attention is easy; holding attention is hard.

If you’re in a roomful of people and you want to get their attention, you have a lot of options: Drop something breakable, start yelling obscenities, run through the room naked or covered in blood, fire a gun in the air. The possibilities are endless.

But now imagine that you want to hold people’s attention long enough to explain something to them or convince them of something. That’s much harder. If the waiter who just dropped a tray of glasses starts trying to tell you about the dangers of climate change or rising government debt, you’re probably going to tune him out pretty quickly.

Traditionally, politics has been all about holding people’s attention long enough to change their minds about something or motivate them to do something. Politically active people might want to convince you that abortion is wrong or gays are people too or the rich have too much money or government regulations stifle economic growth, just to name a few possibilities. Yes, they need to get your attention. But more than that, they need to hold your attention long enough to present their case, maybe even long enough to overcome your initial resistance.

Hayes flashes back to something that seems unimaginable now: the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Back in 1858, people in Illinois more or less agreed that the biggest issue the nation faced was slavery and what to do about it. So that year’s two Senate candidates, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, toured the state together, debating the slavery issue for three hours at a time. (My home town, Quincy, hosted one of the debates.) That format gave each man a chance to explain some fairly complex and subtle ideas.

Admittedly, that’s unusual. For well over a century, most American politics has revolved around slogans: “Equal pay for equal work”, “No third term”, “Remember the Maine”, and many others. A slogan boils a political message down to its absolute minimum. You still have to hold attention, but you don’t have to hold it very long. Sometime a slogan is just a placeholder that your supporters will flesh out later; it makes people curious to find out what the slogan means. In 2024, “Make America great again” and “Democracy is on the ballot” were both like that. If you didn’t have at least a little background, both were so vague as to be meaningless.

But Hayes describes a way of managing attention that skips the difficult hold-attention step completely. It has been pioneered by the social-media platforms and has now been adapted to politics: If you want to keep somebody on your platform for hours at a time, you don’t need to produce an epic like Lord of the Rings or Lawrence of Arabia — content capable of holding a person’s attention that long. Instead, you just grab somebody’s attention, then grab it again, and grab it again. Keep doing that for hours. That’s the secret of the infinite scroll. Hardly anybody sits down thinking they’re going to devote the next two hours to TikTok or Facebook. They just look up and realize they’re late for something.

Now apply that idea to politics. What if I’m not trying to explain anything at all, even at the slogan level? What if I’m just trying to grab your attention in a particular way and prevent my opponent from grabbing it some other way?

This is something the Trump campaign seemed to understand much better than the Harris campaign. If a voter went into the voting booth thinking about inflation, immigration, or trans athletes, probably that vote would go to Trump. But a voter thinking about democracy, climate change, racism, or healthcare probably would probably choose Harris. It almost didn’t matter what a voter thought about any of those issues. Just direct their attention and you command their vote.

That was the method behind the madness of the Trump campaign. As far back as 2015, Trump has been saying things that were supposed to be political suicide. When he said that immigrants were “animals” or spouted “facts” about them that were obviously false, it didn’t matter if he looked like an ignorant asshole, because he made you think about immigration. If he grossly overstated the price of bacon and was proven wrong the next day, so what? He made you think about inflation — and the debunking article the next morning made you think about it again.

Harris could never catch up. I kept reading columns by pundits frustrated that Harris didn’t just say X — and those columns frustrated me, because I knew that Harris DID say X, but nobody paid attention.

The big thing I got wrong about the election was that I expected voters to get serious at the end of the campaign; low-interest and low-information voters who had been checked out all summer would check back in long enough to decide who to vote for. It never happened. Right up to the last day, Trump dominated the news cycle with his look-here, look-there, look-at-this-other-thing tactics. He had no message to speak of, just the idea that things were bad and he would somehow make them better.

What we’ve been seeing these last two months is the new attention-politics as a governing strategy. In traditional politics, an incoming administration tried to focus on a few simple themes, with the idea of raising enough public support to push one or two big ideas through Congress. So George W. Bush came in promoting his tax cut. Barack Obama was focused on his stimulus plan and then healthcare. (I remember the frustration many environmentalists felt when a carbon tax and other items from a climate-change agenda were sidelined so as not to interfere with the healthcare push.)

Trump hasn’t been doing anything like that. Instead, he’s doing a million things at once, including many that circumvent Congress in a way that is flatly illegal. By ignoring Congress and relying on executive actions, he avoids the need to marshal public opinion. Quite the reverse: It’s the opposition that needs to marshal public opinion to stop him. And that’s difficult, because what opposition leader or opposition agenda can get attention when Trump grabs all the attention in the room with a new outrage every day? (Invade Greenland! Annex Canada! Brief Musk about China war plans! Defy court orders! Fire the people who keep track of nuclear weapons! Turn Gaza into a seaside resort!)

I’m frankly unsure what I ought to be rooting for. Eventually, assuming Trump doesn’t establish his own version of the Thousand-Year Reich, some Democrat will figure out how to master the new attention politics and become president. But how good is that outcome really? The new politics lends itself to autocracy. Probably a Democratic autocrat would do more things I like than Trump is doing. But I’m not sure what would take us back in the direction of democracy.

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