Dark Matryoshka

Like a Russian nesting doll of fuck-ups

– Jeremy Konyndyk, former USAID official
on Trump’s foreign-aid freeze

This week’s featured post is “Campaign or Movement?“

This week everybody was talking about tariffs

After long threatening tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China, Trump ordered tariffs on Saturday: 10% tariffs on China and energy imports from Canada, 25% tariffs on Mexico and non-energy imports from Canada. The tariffs take effect tomorrow.

It’s always hard to know what Trump’s true intentions are, so it’s possible some deal to avoid the tariffs might be worked out before they take effect. Ostensibly, the reason for the tariffs is that the three countries aren’t doing enough to prevent fentanyl from being smuggled into the US. So if there’s even a fig leaf’s worth of progress on that issue, Trump could cancel the order and declare victory. [Sure enough: The Mexican tariffs have already been paused for a month.]

If not, Canada has already announced its reprisals. Mexico has pledged to retaliate, but so far I haven’t seen specifics.

and Musk’s takeover of government systems

Much of Trump’s first two weeks has consisted of the new administration puffing up to look bigger and more powerful than it actually is under the law. For example, Trump confidently cancelled the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship without having any authority to do so. His government spending “freeze” was promptly unfrozen by two federal judges — again, because it is not based on any legal authority. (Once Congress has appropriated money, the executive branch has a responsibility to spend it as directed.)

But simultaneously, important things are happening in the shadows, with even members of Congress puzzled about what is going on. It’s hard to get clear information, but it seems that private-sector employees of Elon Musk’s companies have been inducted into his DOGE department, and have been taking over major government computer systems. Wired reported Wednesday on Musk’s takeover of the computer systems at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the federal government’s HR department. Other Musk loyalists have taken control of the payment system at the Treasury’s Bureau of Fiscal Service. BFS writes $6 trillion of checks each year. Still others have captured the General Services Administration.

It’s not clear what kinds of abuse Musk intends, but using the BFS payments system he could do his own version of impoundment: simply kill the checks paying for any program he disapproves of. Conversely, Matt Yglesias suggests a different use:

— Appropriations lapse in March, government shutdown
— But DOGE just illegally keeps paying the bills Trump believes should be paid

A fourth agency Musk has taken over is USAID, which oversees foreign aid grants. Musk has declared USAID “beyond repair” and says he intends to shut it down. His legal authority to do this is, well, zero.

DOGE was established by executive order two weeks ago, and given the mission to modernize “Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity”. I don’t see how you get from there to shutting down an agency established by Congress. USAID’s security officers tried to prevent DOGE employees from getting access to systems with sensitive and perhaps classified information, but those officials were then put on administrative leave.

On his blog Doomsday Scenario, Garrett Graf imagines how our press would cover this if it were happening in a Third World country “Musk’s Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government“.

What started Thursday as a political purge of the internal security services accelerated Friday into a full-blown coup, as elite technical units aligned with media oligarch Elon Musk moved to seize key systems at the national treasury, block outside access to federal personnel records, and take offline governmental communication networks.

With rapidity that has stunned even longtime political observers, forces loyal to Musk’s junta have established him as the all-but undisputed unelected head of government in just a matter of days, unwinding the longtime democracy’s constitutional system and its proud nearly 250-year-old tradition of the rule of law. … The G-7 country’s newly installed president, a mid-level oligarch named Donald Trump, appeared amid Musk’s moves to be increasingly merely a figurehead head of state.

The freeze on money for states was set aside by two judges, but the freeze on foreign aid grants apparently stands, with potentially deadly results.

Some of these grants fund NGOs in third-world countries where a little money can mean the difference between life and death.

Among the programs that remain grounded as of Friday: emergency medical care for displaced Palestinians and Yemenis fleeing war, heat and electricity for Ukrainian refugees and HIV treatment and mpox surveillance in Africa.

Meanwhile, The Guardian reports on two other programs on hold. One is working on malaria vaccines, and the other studies drugs for HIV prevention.

Some products, such as injectable HIV prevention drugs, are not yet available outside research settings, he said, leaving participants with no alternative source to continue treatment.

If the level of drugs in a participant’s body falls to nonprotective levels, it not only puts them at risk of infection, but means their infection is more likely to develop drug resistance. That makes their treatment more complicated, and if they then infect someone else, the resistance will spread.

Ostensibly, the freeze is just 90 days, so that the programs can be reviewed by Trump appointees. But there appears to be no mechanism for a review to take place.

One example of abuse is in the all-government emails that have been coming from OPM. One (I know somebody who got it, and then saw it reported) announced a “mandate” that all federal employees return to the office five days a week. It offered a “deferred resignation” option for people who didn’t want to come in: Simply by replying to the email with “resign”, an employee could continue to be paid until September, when the resignation would take effect. Major media falsely characterized this as a “buyout” offer.

From top to bottom, this email had no legal authority behind it. Work-from-home options are written into several ongoing union contracts, which nameless minions inside the Trump administration — or even Trump himself — have no power to cancel. So there is no legal across-the-board return-to-the-office mandate.

There also is no “buyout” offer. The OPM email doesn’t say the resigning workers get to stop working, only that they won’t have to come into the office. It doesn’t say they can’t be fired before September. And the money to pay them has not been authorized. (The whole government is only funded through March 14.)

So the memo basically has no legal content. It makes an unauthorized threat and offers an unauthorized escape from that threat.

and plane crashes

Wednesday, an Army helicopter and an American Eagle jetliner collided over the Potomac River near Reagan National Airport in D.C. Trump promptly repeated the pattern I pointed out three weeks ago: Despite the fact that he knew nothing about the actual causes of the crash, he blamed it on his political enemies. Rather than turn tragedy into a unifying national experience of sorrow and grief, he turned it into a divisive experience of finger-pointing and misinformation.

This time the culprit was DEI: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. His implication was that somebody somewhere in this tragedy wasn’t a White man, and that it all could have been prevented if that particular position had been filled by a White man.

All the Trump acolytes — J. D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, etc. — echoed his sentiments, with Trump Jr. bragging that the new administration puts “merit ahead of skin color”. What’s really laughable about this is that no merit-based system would produce a Vice President Vance or Defense Secretary Hegseth. Both of these men are completely unqualified for the jobs they hold, and it’s impossible to imagine a woman or a person of color being chosen with so little relevant experience.

and you also might be interested in …

Another Trump order that is being challenged in court relates to his order insisting there are only two sexes. One consequence of this order is that transwomen in federal prison have to be reclassified as men and moved to a men’s facility. The danger of rape and other brutalization should be obvious.

One such prisoner has succeeded in getting a court to block her transfer, and rights organizations have filed a second case covering three women.

and let’s close with some getaways

Can’t manage a vacation right now? Check out “The 20 Most Beautiful Places on Planet Earth” in this video.

February 3, 2025 – 11:29 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (6)

Campaign or Movement?

Does the Trump resistance need a rival candidate, or a cultural turnaround?

This week, two very different articles caught my eye. In one, The Washington Post ranked “The 12 Democrats who make the most sense for 2028“, starting with Tim Walz at #12 and concluding with Josh Shapiro at #1. In the other, Rolling Stone picked “The 100 Best Protest Songs of All Time“, reminding us of moments when history was moved not so much by politicians as by songs (or perhaps, going further back, by novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin or pamphlets like Common Sense).

Three years out from the 2028 campaign — assuming elections are still meaningful in three years — should we be uniting behind a candidate or promoting a broader cultural movement?

Maybe it’s the people I hang around with, but the anxieties of my friends keep manifesting in two opposite ways: Many are just refusing to watch the news at all. And the others are obsessed with campaign-and-candidate analysis: What states do Democrats need to flip? What demographic groups might be persuadable? What policy positions should our messaging emphasize? And most of all: Who can lead us to that promised land?

I’ve been pretty useless in those conversations, because (while I am watching the news) anything about candidates and strategy leaves me cold right now. I think they play into an unhealthy framing: politics as game. We lost the last game, so how are we going to win the next one?

What I think we need to reestablish in America is that politics is about something, and the things it is about are important. Our politics should be about the People banding together to make systems work for us rather than grind us into the dust.

And that’s what the list of protest songs symbolizes for me. Not candidates and campaigns, but ending wars, establishing justice, and liberating people from oppression.

What MAGA does. MAGA, of course, is both a candidate and movement. It’s a cult of personality, full of images of Trump as a superhero or God’s chosen one. But it’s also a culture of grievance revolving around the message that favored groups in America — Whites, men, Christians, etc. — are actually victims of some vast Satanic force. And America itself — the richest most powerful country on Earth — is the most aggrieved nation of all, battling a world system that is unfairly stacked against it.

In 2024, Trump often played the role of a typical American presidential candidate: He raised money, held rallies, won primaries, made TV commercials, and toured swing states. But it was the MAGA cultural movement that lifted him out of situations that would have doomed any previous candidate. Elected Republicans were ready to be done with Trump after the 2020 loss and his failed coup on January 6. But the movement would not hear of it, and party “leaders” were forced to come around.

If we could unstring the MAGA movement by winning an election, 2020 would have done it. But instead, being rejected by the voters was just one more grievance to add to its list. Getting past the MAGA moment in our politics will have to involve a change in the larger culture, not just a winning campaign.

What happened in 2024? Everyone has their own theory about what went wrong in 2024, and just about any of them can be justified if you slice and dice the exit polls with that conclusion in mind. Harris should have run further to the left or the center, said more or less about the economy, defended trans youth or thrown them under the bus, defended Biden better or denounced him. Maybe she should have picked a different VP, or maybe Harris herself was the problem and we should have run a White man. Maybe Biden should have gotten out of the way sooner. On and on.

But OK, I get it. Without some reasonable explanation, people begin to think that the currents of History are against us, or the Universe is, or God. Without a plan (or even a fantasy) of what we might do next, despair can seem overwhelming.

So let’s briefly talk the language of analysis. After considering the various theories, I’ve come down here: Trump won because he managed to cast himself as the candidate of change and Harris as the candidate of the status quo. The problematic part of Trump’s candidacy, which Harris tried to point out but never made stick in the minds of low-information voters, is that Trump was specifically running against the best parts of the status quo: the rule of law, the separation of powers, democratic process, and even the existence of Truth itself. What we’re seeing in the early days of the Trump administration is that he has no program for change beyond aggrandizing himself: His supporters are good and should be rewarded; his detractors are bad and should be punished.

But try as he might, it will be hard for Trump to avoid responsibility for the status quo going forward. So in my mind, the fundamental question for Democrats to answer in 2026 and 2028 is: What’s wrong with the status quo?

That was a hard question for Democrats to message in 2024, because the Biden/Harris administration really did have accomplishments it deserved credit for (but never got). It managed the post-Covid economic rebound well, resulting in spectacular job creation with inflation no worse than the rest of the world. It made investments for the future, ended the long fruitless war in Afghanistan, and began taking action against climate change. Biden left office with excellent economic statistics: GDP rising, unemployment low and steady, inflation under control.

But claiming credit for all that sounds a lot like claiming responsibility for the status quo, and arguing that it’s not so bad. (And it honestly wasn’t as bad as Trump kept making it sound. There never was an immigrant crime wave, for example. Or a crime wave of any kind.)

So let’s start here: What’s not to like about the status quo? Plenty, as it turns out. Put aside the statistics, and consider how life looks to a large number of Americans.

  • It’s hard to get out of college without a lot of debt.
  • Once you get out, it’s hard to get a career started.
  • If you do get a career started, it’s hard to find a house you can afford in a town with good schools.
  • If you’re not in a town with good schools, it’s hard to pay for private schools for your children.
  • If your children have any special problems — physical handicaps, learning disabilities, neuro-diversity, etc. — you’re on your own.
  • At any moment, you might fall through one of the cracks in our healthcare system and be bankrupted.
  • At every moment, you’re vulnerable to the risks of a market economy: Your good job may vanish. To get employed again, you may have to move away from your town with good schools.
  • Even if the difficulties of your own life work out, you may have to take care of your parents and deal with a nursing-home industry that can eat life savings of almost any size.
  • It’s hard to get your children through college without burdening them with a lot of debt.

In short, America may be a rich country statistically, but most Americans don’t feel rich. Life looks like a labyrinth with lots of dead ends.

Now, all those difficulties have been building for decades, so there’s no particular reason voters should have blamed them on Joe Biden or his party. (Republicans have held the presidency for 6 of the last 11 terms, and none of those situations improved during Trump’s first term.) But the Democrats did not tell a convincing story of how they were going to take on these problems.

To be fair, neither did Trump. It’s hard to look at any of the hardships on that list and paint a plausible picture of Trump solving that issue, or even helping you deal with it. Much of what he has proposed — eliminating ObamaCare, say, or defunding the Department of Education — will probably make some of them worse.

But Trump did do something politically clever. He told unhappy voters who to blame: immigrants who are stealing your opportunities; women who don’t know their place; rebels against the God-given order, where there are only two genders and you mate with the opposite one; people who worship the wrong God, or none at all; so-called “experts” who make you feel stupid by quoting “facts”; Chinese scientists who engineered the Covid bio-weapon, a.k.a. the Kung Flu; environmentalists who care more about fish or birds than about you or your children; and (most of all) liberals who enable all the other villains by putting the government on their side rather than yours.

What was going to solve these problems was not any particular Trump plan, but rather the abstract “greatness” of America, or perhaps of Trump himself. Or alternately, the greatness of God, who will once again shower His blessings on America once the atheists and Satanists are removed from power.

It’s not a rational story, but it is a story.

Prospects for 2026 and 2028. My thinking going forward is based on the assumption that Trump will provide his followers with entertainment and satisfying spectacles (like immigrant children in cages or FBI agents on trial), but he won’t actually improve anyone’s life. (He didn’t in his first term either, though he was able to take credit for the economic momentum established in Obama’s second term.) We can see that already in the skyrocketing price of eggs. Somehow, neither Trump’s inherent greatness nor his Day-One executive order is bringing prices down, and he has never had any actual plan to fall back on.

So if the labyrinth of American life looks difficult now, it’s not going to look any better in 2026 or 2028. Trump will likely have consolidated his influence over most major media platforms (both broadcast and social), but there are limits to propaganda’s effectiveness when it tells you that you ought to be happy when you’re not.

Consequently, I expect there to be considerable discontent with Trump in 2026 and 2028, just as there was in 2018 and 2020. (Now, it’s entirely possible that by then he has made elections irrelevant. I don’t expect that, but it’s a possibility. In that case, though, this whole discussion is moot; neither a candidate nor a movement has any hope.)

If that’s the lay of the land, how do we want to be positioned? In my mind, this is where the candidate-centered vision falls short — unless your candidate is a genuinely mythic figure whose mere presence will give the electorate hope. Unfortunately, I don’t see any of those on the horizon. If I’m, say, a 20-something worried about my future, I don’t think “Gretchen Whitmer will save me” goes very far. Nothing against Gretch — I’ll be happy to vote for her against the MAGA candidate in 2028 if it comes to that — but there’s nothing messianic about her or Gavin Newsom or anybody else on the Post’s list of 12. Plus, I expect the failure of salvation-by-Trump to discredit the whole idea of individual saviors.

Instead, I picture just about any Democratic candidate having a message like this:

  • I know many of you are facing a difficult path into the future.
  • Our explanation of who you should blame is better than MAGA’s. The oligarchs are to blame. While the American economy remains productive, the benefits of that economy keep getting channeled towards a smaller and smaller group of people, who keep exchanging wealth-for-power and power-for-wealth, with a profit on every transaction. (This point comes from the playbook of the Bernie/AOC left, but there’s no reason a centrist can’t use it too.) If Elon is still around (doubtful, I think), he can be the poster boy for the corrupt interplay between corporate and government power.
  • We have specific ideas that can help you, but the general idea is simple: The productivity of America needs to be redirected towards making people’s lives better, rather than further enriching the oligarchs.

The protest songs almost write themselves. America has a long tradition of songs about people being cheated out of the fruits of the economy they built. Here’s one from the Depression:

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, 
Made it race against time. 
Once I built a railroad; now it’s done. 
Brother, can you spare a dime? 

What about now? It’s important to recognize that Democrats currently have no national power base, so demanding that they “do something” is unrealistic. They can’t bring legislation to a vote. They can’t launch investigations or subpoena witnesses. They can vote No on things that do come up for a vote, but if all (or nearly all) Republicans vote Yes, those things will pass anyway.

The urge to do something is misplaced for another reason: Trump is the one who needs to show quick results right now. He has a unleashed a flurry of activity, and that will carry him for a while. But without some actual progress, the public disgust with the game of politics will rebound against him. All his activity will look (in MacBeth’s words) like “sound and fury signifying nothing”.

Some liberal pundits are calling for the kind of resistance shown in 2017, with millions of marchers and other displays of energy. But demonstrations that are simply anti-Trump harden people into their current stances. We just had an election about Trump, and we lost. Demonstrations will come into play again, I imagine, and probably soon. But it’s important that the demonstrations be about something more than Trump. Heather Cox Richardson puts it like this:

This is the time for the American people to say “Hang on just a red hot minute here. It’s my country. Those are my tax dollars. And this is what I want the government to do.” And to reshape the way we approach this moment from saying “I gotta stop this. I gotta stop this. I’m afraid of this.” to say “I care deeply about cancer research, something Trump has stopped money for.” [Lists other things you might care about.] Those things are ways to define America in this moment as something other than what Trump is trying to kill. Because that takes the initiative away from him, and away from his people, and gives it back to us.

The important thing to ask about any political activity is “Will this persuade anybody who wasn’t already on our side?”

Unfortunately, protests that are about something more than Trump require waiting for things to play out a little. There need to be visible results worth protesting, not just possibilities.

Similarly, Democratic votes in Congress will start to mean something again as we approach March 14, the date when the government runs out of money. If Speaker Johnson can’t muster unanimity among his troops — something he has never done in the past — then Trump and Johnson will need Democrats. Then there will be leverage to make demands.

More importantly, March 14 is when Trump’s vague promises and intentions have to resolve into actual numbers and legislation.

In the meantime, the only arena currently open for struggle is the courts, and they are being used. State-level Democrats have filed lawsuits to block illegal Trump actions, and so have organizations like the ACLU. Legal action means delay, and delay works in our favor.

These last two weeks have felt like an assault, as Trump tries to panic and stampede us. It’s a time to endure, to remember your core values, and wait for the wind to blow itself out. And if you can learn the guitar while you’re waiting, that would be good too.

February 3, 2025 – 9:18 am Categories: Articles | Comments (29)

Tagged , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

As the deluge of probably illegal executive orders continued into Trump’s second week, I kept finding myself in conversations about 2028 candidates and campaigns that I had no interest in. So I figured I should explain why. That’s the subject of the featured post “Campaign or Movement?”, which should be out around 9 EST or so. The gist of the post’s message is that I don’t want to be trapped in a game-player mentality, where the focus is on replaying the 2024 campaign, but winning this time.

Instead, I think we need to fight the politics-as-game framework, and focus more on what our politics is about — which should be more than just winning. Fighting MAGA is going to require a movement, not just a campaign.

The weekly summary also has a lot of week-two notes: tariffs, Elon’s takeover of government computer systems, and a few other things. It should be out between noon and one.

February 3, 2025 – 8:42 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (5)

Four Lights

There are four lights.

– Captain Jean-Luc Picard,
refusing to let his Cardassian torturer define reality

This week’s featured post is Week One.

This week everybody was talking about Trump

If you’re sick of hearing about him, forgive me, because it’s Week One of his new administration. The featured post is all Trump, and so is most of this weekly summary.

I continue not to take seriously his threats against Greenland and Denmark (or Canada). But Trump himself does seem to take his threats seriously. Saturday, the Financial Times reported on a pre-inauguration call between Trump and Danish Prime Minister Marie Frederiksen. The Guardian (not behind a paywall) summarizes:

Trump, then still president-elect, spoke with Frederiksen for 45 minutes last week, during which he was described to be aggressive and confrontational about Frederiksen’s refusal to sell Greenland to the US.

The Financial Times reports that according to five current and former senior European officials who were briefed on the call, the conversation “was horrendous”. One person said: “He was very firm. It was a cold shower. Before, it was hard to take it seriously. But I do think it is serious and potentially very dangerous.”

He threatened tariffs targeted against Danish imports, which likely would result in reprisals from the entire European Union. The EU undoubtedly wants to avoid a trade war with the US, but a territorial threat against a member nation is bound to galvanize the whole union.

Also from The Guardian:

Speaking onboard Air Force One on Saturday, Trump said: “I think we’re going to have it,” and claimed that the Arctic island’s 57,000 residents “want to be with us”.

But Greenland’s Prime Minister Múte Egede says:

We are Greenlanders. We don’t want to be Americans. We don’t want to be Danish either. Greenland’s future will be decided by Greenland.

And why would they want to be Americans? Unlike the US, Denmark at least offers the full services of a prosperous socialist nation, like free health care. The whole Greenland situation raises an important question: Does the second Trump administration include anyone willing to tell the boss that he’s out of his mind?

and the bishop’s rebuke

The MAGA movement depends on a couple of head-scratching beliefs:

  • The richest man in the world (and a bunch of other multi-billionaires) is on the side of ordinary working people.
  • Christianity requires political positions that are incompatible with the teachings of Jesus.

The second problem got exposed Tuesday when Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, whose home church is the National Cathedral, led the traditional post-inaugural church service. Her sermon, which was grounded across-the-board in the teachings of Jesus, called for honoring the dignity of all people, being honest, and practicing humility. Speaking directly to Trump, she asked for mercy on those who are frightened, including LGBTQ people and refugees. She reminded him that

[T]he vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes, and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches, mosques and synagogues, gurdwara, and temples.

Trump was furious, and repeated a bunch of easily debunked lies. (My links in the quote below.)

The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard line Trump hater. She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart. She failed to mention the large number of illegal migrants that came into our Country and killed people. Many were deposited from jails and mental institutions. It is a giant crime wave that is taking place in the USA. Apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one. She is not very good at her job! She and her church owe the public an apology! t

Of course Trump’s yes-men had to join in.

Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) said Budde, born in New Jersey, “should be added to the deportation list.” 

Others’ attacks were more personal. 

Fox News’s Sean Hannity said Budde, whom he described as a “so-called bishop,” “made the service about her very own deranged political beliefs with a disgraceful prayer full of fearmongering and division.” Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire, a conservative media company, said Budde is a “fake bishop” and mocked her appearance. 

“Who knew Satan wore granny glasses and stole his haircut from John Denver?” Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld said.

This is what happens when MAGA World is confronted with actual Christianity, rather than the corrupted version Trump’s followers preach.

and Musk’s Nazi salute

In the post-inauguration rally at the Capitol One Arena in DC, Elon Musk gave a speech, during which he offered the crowd a Nazi salute, pictured above. (It’s not any better in the context of the full video.)

Of course, Musk and his fellow Trumpers deny that he did any such thing. The idea that Musk’s gesture is a Nazi salute is “legacy media propaganda” and a “dirty tricks campaign” by liberals. (Because who among us hasn’t accidentally done a Sieg Heil in a moment of exuberance? Happens all the time.)

Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.

A lot has been made of the fact that Trump’s people have learned from his first administration and will be more focused and effective this time around. But Trump’s opponents have learned too. Here’s Josh Marshall’s response:

Back in the first Trump presidency, Trump’s critics spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get Trumpers to admit they’d done this or that, to apologize, whatever. This was always a mistake. I don’t need anyone to validate what I saw. I saw it. I don’t care what the explanation is.

This is the right reaction. Don’t be trolled. Don’t be gaslit. Of course Elon, Trump, and his various minions are going to send increasingly blatant signals of support to their fascist allies. Of course they’re going to deny doing so. They will acknowledge no shame and make no apologies.

The point of asking for an acknowledgment and/or apology is to support a notion of shared reality: This is what we require before we’re willing to admit someone back into the consensus. But as we saw in Trump’s first term, that ship has sailed. The Trumpers have no interest in sharing our reality. They want to overwhelm us with their claims until we don’t know what is true any more. Asking them to acknowledge truth simply puts the ball in their court; it gives them the power to say “no”.

Given that consensus is no longer a possibility, the important thing is to hold onto our own sense of reality. We saw what we saw, and we’re not going to let an authoritarian political movement push us into a mindset where maybe we didn’t see what we saw.

“There are four lights.”

and you also might be interested in …

Remember when egg prices were too high and Biden was to blame? Well, they’re even higher now, and the problem is a public health issue: Bird flu is killing chickens, and entire flocks are being sacrificed to stop the spread of the disease. The lesson here is that presidents, even a chosen-by-God president like Trump, don’t have magic wands to wave over such problems. There’s a real world out there, with real cause-and-effect mechanisms.

The accusations against author Neil Gaiman have gotten very detailed and compelling.

Friday night, Trump fired inspectors general from more than a dozen federal agencies. Inspectors general are supposed to provide oversight, and to be Congress’ eyes and ears in the executive branch, so if you wanted your underlings to break the law, getting rid of the IGs is a good first move. However, firing them without warning or justification is illegal.

The WaPo covered this in a typically Trump-normalizing way, saying only that the firing “appeared” to be illegal. The sun appears bright this morning and the sky appears to be blue, but who can really say?

Trump’s attempt to eliminate all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs from the government added a McCarthyite touch. A memo went out to all government employees — I have a friend who got one — instructing them to report any DEI programs that might have changed their names lately or otherwise attempted to fly under the radar. Failure to rat out your colleagues could result in “adverse consequences”.

and let’s close with a rationalization

I can stop buying books any time I want. Cartoonist Tom Gauld understands me.

January 27, 2025 – 11:12 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

Week One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 27, 2025 – 9:44 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

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

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

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

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

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

January 27, 2025 – 8:15 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (4)

Apt Comparisons

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

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

– Senator Tammy Duckworth

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

This week everybody was talking about the LA wildfires

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and Jimmy Carter

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

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

and Trump’s legal issues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and his fantasies of conquest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and you also might be interested in …

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

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

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

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

In some alternative timeline:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and let’s close with something colorful

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

January 13, 2025 – 11:39 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (7)

A Disastrous Development in Our Response to Disasters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he followed up with

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 13, 2025 – 8:53 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

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

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

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

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

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

January 13, 2025 – 8:36 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)

Con and Context

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

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

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

This week everybody was talking about the new Congress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and two terrorist attacks

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

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

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

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

His political manifesto seems pretty clear:

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

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

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

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

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

and it’s January 6 again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and Trump’s sentencing

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

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

and the growing subservience of The Washington Post

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

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

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

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

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

The American Association of Editorial Cartoonists released a supporting statement:

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

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

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

and you also might be interested in …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and let’s close with something practical

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

January 6, 2025 – 11:55 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (16)