Monday, July 28, 2025

Choices

It's alright for you if you run with the pack.
It's alright if you agree with all they do.
If fascism is slowly climbing back,
It's not here yet, so what's it got to do with you?

So close your eyes, stop your ears,
Shut your mouth and take it slow.
Let others take the lead, and you bring up the rear,
And later you can say you didn't know.

- "Song of Choice" by Peggy Seeger

This week's featured post is "'Unitary Executive' is a Euphemism for Tyrant".

The quote above deserves some curation. Peggy Seeger was Pete Seeger's half-sister, and wrote many songs with her husband Ewan McColl. I'm a little sketchy on the exact provenance of "Song of Choice". Some web sites claim McColl was a co-author, and I haven't seen an exact date for it. It appears in a 1992 collection of Seeger's songs, which includes songs that go back as far as 1955. One version included the line "In April they took away Greece", which might refer to a Greek coup in 1967.

I heard the song for the first time Saturday at the Lowell Folk Festival, where it was sung by the Irish band Solas. Its contemporary relevance is obvious.

This week everybody was talking about ...

Oh hell, they were talking about Jeffrey Epstein, but I can't bear to lead with that again.

Let me tell you about a legal victory this week instead: Trump's attempt to undo the 14th Amendment's guarantee of birthright citizenship has lost again in court. This time the loss was in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, one step below the Supreme Court.

This case has wandered through a legal labyrinth, so let's review: One of the first things Trump did after getting sworn in for his second term was to sign an executive order denying the citizenship of any child born in the US if the mother's status within the US was either undocumented or temporary. He was attempting to stretch the one loophole in the 14th Amendment, that birthright citizenship requires that the child be "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, i.e., not born to a foreign diplomat or a sovereign Native American tribe.

No court that has heard this argument has found it credible. Two district courts have rejected it, and it was quickly blocked by a nationwide injunction. The administration appealed not the case itself, but the injunction, and got the Supreme Court to put limits on nationwide injunctions without addressing the citizenship issue itself.

A subsequent judge got around that ruling by declaring the children affected by the order to be a class and issuing an injunction in the class-action lawsuit. Another district judge ruled that only a nationwide injunction could provide relief to the states that filed the lawsuit in his court. The appeals court upheld that injunction Wednesday.

The Trump administration had hoped to sow chaos by limiting injunctions to the jurisdictions where cases had been filed and the states willing to file suit. In red states, then, children of undocumented immigrants could be treated as non-citizens at least until a full resolution of the case by the Supreme Court, and the Court could enable that abuse just by stalling a final decision. But so far that plan is not working.

More good news from the courts: One judge has ordered Kilmar Abrego Garcia released on bail pending his criminal case, while another is barring ICE from arresting and deporting him to some random country as soon as he goes free. He's not out yet, but it could actually happen.

Abrego Garcia is the guy the Trump administration sent to their Salvadoran gulag by mistake. They've been trying ever since to avoid admitting that mistake or rectifying it.

and trade deals

Trump's on-again-off-again tariffs are due to come back on Friday, as the 90-deals-in-90-days he envisioned weren't happening. But this week the administration announced deals with both Japan (Wednesday) and the EU (yesterday).

The administration made upbeat claims for both deals, but the actual provisions may be disappointing in practice. It's too soon to grasp what's in the EU deal, but Paul Krugman has had time to look at the Japan deal and find quite a bit less than Trump has claimed.

But why are U.S. manufacturers so upset with the Japan deal? Because in combination with Trump’s other tariffs this deal actually leaves many U.S. manufacturers worse off than they were before Trump began his trade war.

This is clearest in the case of automobiles and automotive products. Trump has imposed a 25 percent tariff on all automotive imports, supposedly on national security grounds. This includes imports from Canada and Mexico. And here’s the thing: Canadian and Mexican auto products generally have substantial U.S. “content” — that is, they contain parts made in America. Japanese cars generally don’t.

But now cars from Japan will pay only a 15 percent tariff, that is, less than cars from Canada and Mexico.

OK, it’s not quite that straightforward, because imports from Canada and Mexico receive a partial exemption based on the share of their value that comes from the United States. Yes, it’s getting complicated. But we may nonetheless now be in a situation where cars whose production doesn’t create U.S. manufacturing jobs will pay a lower tariff rate than cars whose production does.

OK, this is an algebra problem, but not a very hard one: Any car imported from Canada or Mexico with less than 40% US content will face a higher tariff than a Japanese car with no US content. Example: Suppose a Canadian car is 1/5th US parts. That knocks its tariff down by 1/5th, from 25% to 20%. That's higher than the 15% tariff on a Japanese car.

Wait, there’s more. Trump has also imposed 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, which are of course important parts of the cost of a car. Japanese manufacturers don’t pay those tariffs.

Overall, the interaction between this Japan deal and Trump’s other tariffs probably tilts the playing field between U.S. and Japanese producers of cars, and perhaps other products, in Japan’s favor.

And remember reports of a $550 billion investment fund where Japan would supply the money but the US would get 90% of the profits? Not exactly.

and I can't believe the Epstein story still hasn't died

OK, I do have to mention it.

The individual pieces of this story are still getting plenty of coverage, so I won't belabor them. But the big news is that the House of Representatives recessed early so that Republicans in Congress won't have to vote on measures to demand the release of the Justice Department's Epstein files. Individual Republicans are caught between Trump (who apparently has something to hide) and members of their base who have spent years focused on Epstein conspiracy theories.

The creators of the cartoon South Park appear not to be intimidated by Trump. The opening episode of the new season shows him sleeping with Satan, having a tiny penis, and it visits various other indignities on him. Jesus warns the population of South Park that if they don't stop protesting against Trump, they're all going to be cancelled like Colbert.

South Park represents a different comic audience than comedians like Jon Stewart or Seth Meyers. This is more the burn-it-all-down crowd that includes a number of 2024 Trump voters.

The most interesting article I read about the Epstein controversy this week was by Josh Marshall, in a members-only section of TPM. He addressed the question of why pedophilia is special to MAGA. Why do they care so much about bringing Jeffrey Epstein's pedophile friends to justice, when they care not at all about the women Trump has abused, or just about any other victim of a sex crime? His answer is that it is

MAGA’s hyper-focus on pedophilia and sex trafficking conspiracy theories which needs to be emphasized. Because at a basic level, that obsession has nothing to do with pedophilia as a thing in itself — not as most of us might understand it.

The obsession isn't about justice for the victims of pedophilia. In MAGA-world the victims figure barely at all. What matters is the perpetrators, who in the various theories are the elite conspirators running the world and indulging their every whim without consequence.

In the MAGA world, pedophilia isn’t a crime or abuse that needs to be stopped. It is more a legitimating tool which provides a license for cleansing acts of retributive violence and revenge. This is what’s at the end of the story in every far-right/MAGA conspiracy: a wave of eliminationist, cleansing violence led by someone like Trump in which the bad guys, the liberals, the Democrats, the globalist elites, etc etc are wiped out.

... Because pedophilia summons a level of disgust, anger and revulsion that makes the perpetrators seem uniquely inhuman, less than human, people against whom total violence is acceptable and necessary. In other words, these conspiracy theories are systems of thought that provide sanction and legitimation for what you want to do to your enemies. They’re about the enemies. The role of pedophilia in these stories is just a means to an end, making what you want to do with your enemies okay.

and Gaza

Yesterday the WHO reported:

Malnutrition is on a dangerous trajectory in the Gaza Strip, marked by a spike in deaths in July.

Of 74 malnutrition-related deaths in 2025, 63 occurred in July – including 24 children under five, a child over five, and 38 adults. Most of these people were declared dead on arrival at health facilities or died shortly after, their bodies showing clear signs of severe wasting.

The crisis remains entirely preventable. Deliberate blocking and delay of large-scale food, health, and humanitarian aid has cost many lives.

Meanwhile,

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it would implement a humanitarian pause in several population centers across the Gaza Strip beginning Sunday morning and repeating each day until further notice. On Saturday night, the Israeli Air Force conducted air drops of food into Gaza. Jordan and the United Arab Emirates began air drops on Sunday, with more expected in the coming days.

100 aid trucks are reported to have entered Gaza Sunday. But CNN describes this as a "trickle" that is not adequate to resolve the food crisis.

I keep seeing arguments that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. The NYT's Bret Stephens quotes the UN Convention on Genocide's definition, and basically argues that if Israel intended to kill all the Palestinians, they'd be doing a much better job of it.

I want to point this much out to anybody thinking of making a similar case: When you start consulting the exact definition, you've lost the moral high ground. Let me make an analogy: Suppose you just got back from a business trip that also included some attractive colleague. Your spouse accuses you of being unfaithful, and you respond "Define unfaithful."

You're not helping yourself by making that case.

and you also might be interested in ...

How far away does Trump have to go to run away from his troubles? Scotland wasn't far enough.

Nashville is having its 27th straight day of 90-degree temperatures, with heat index predictions as high as 110 on Tuesday and Wednesday. But carry on; nothing to see here; global warming is a hoax.

During the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles,

The justice department has charged at least 26 people with “assaulting” and “impeding” federal officers and other crimes during the protests over immigration raids. Prosecutors, however, have since been forced to dismiss at least eight of those felonies, many of them which relied on officers’ inaccurate reports, court records show.

The justice department has also dismissed at least three felony assault cases it brought against Angelenos accused of interfering with arrests during recent immigration raids, the documents show.

The problem seems to be that federal officers lied in their official reports.

One DHS agent accused a protester of shoving an officer, when footage appeared to show the opposite: the officer forcefully pushed the protester.

Here's another example of that. But maybe the point of these arrests isn't to get convictions.

“It seems this is a way to detain people, hold them in custody, instill fear and discourage people from exercising their first amendment rights,” [former state prosecutor Cristine Soto] DeBerry said.

and let's close with something satirical

The great satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer died Saturday at the age of 97. Here's a video of him performing in Norway, probably sometime in the 1960s.

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Monday, July 21, 2025

Fear Itself

There is a terrifying amount of hate in our country, yes. But there is far more fear. Hate is the end of a conversation. Fear isn’t always. I’ve been on the lookout for moments when an honest and respectful conversation might reach the root of someone else’s fear.

- Andrea Gibson "Post-Election Letter to a Friend"

This week's featured post is "Yes, he does think you're stupid".

This week everybody was still talking about Jeffrey Epstein

The featured post discusses how to take advantage of the strife in MAGA World.

The Onion had two articles that lampooned what's been happening these last two weeks:

"MAGA Voter Drills Hole Into Skull To Relieve Sudden Doubts About Trump".

And "Elderly Woman Keeps Mind Active Justifying Trump’s Actions".

“I’m developing new neural pathways each time I shrug off Trump’s clear violations of the Constitution and his total contempt for our system of checks and balances. You know, I have some friends who didn’t spend time rationalizing Trump’s actions, and they ended up in nursing homes.”

Meanwhile, Some Trump pronouncements are so detached from reality they seem like Onion articles even when they're legit. Like this Truth Social post:

The Washington “Whatever’s” should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them.

which was quickly followed by a threat:

My statement on the Washington Redskins has totally blown up, but only in a very positive way. I may put a restriction on them that if they don’t change the name back to the original “Washington Redskins,” and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, “Washington Commanders,” I won’t make a deal for them to build a Stadium in Washington.

That's delusional world he lives in: Native Americans were honored by the Redskins and Indians. Those teams should change their names back out of respect.

Oh, and the Indians being "one of the six original baseball teams" is another delusion.

The concept of an “original six” does not exist in baseball, though it does in ice hockey. The Cleveland MLB team currently known as the Guardians began play in the late 1800s in a league with eight teams, before becoming one of the eight charter members of the modern American League in 1901. Like most baseball teams, the franchise has undergone numerous moves and moniker changes. Since arriving in Cleveland in 1900, the team was known as the Lakeshores (for one year), Bluebirds (in 1901), Broncos (in 1902), Naps (from 1903-1914), and Indians (from 1915-2021).

and the rescission vote

Congress passed a rescission package to take back $9 billion it had already appropriated. The bill defunds NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It also OKs foreign aid cuts Trump was already making. The bill passed with zero Democratic votes. But with only two Republican defectors in each house, it had enough support to get through.

This bill is bad on two levels: Taken as a unique event, it cuts stuff that ought to be funded. But viewed from a higher perspective, it also creates a precedent that will make the next government shutdown much harder to avoid.

Let's start with public broadcasting, which loses $1.1 billion. This is another example of congressional Republicans abusing their own voters. People like me, who live near a big blue city like Boston, will barely notice. WGBH and WBUR get a lot of contributions from their listeners as well as grants from local foundations. They'll be inconvenienced by the loss of federal money, but they'll get by. Ditto for WNYC in New York, WHYY in Philadelphia, and KQED in San Francisco.

But if you live in Trump Country -- rural Kansas, say -- you're going to see a real difference.

Public media advocates say it is these local stations, particularly the ones in rural areas like Smoky Hills PBS, that will bear the brunt of the federal funding cuts. Aside from the potential job losses, they say it would also mean less information distributed to an already-underserved population, less coverage of popular local events such as high school wrestling and less attention to day-to-day life in rural America.

Then there's foreign aid. The rescission package zeroes out USAID, which had already had its appropriation blocked by DOGE. Politico reports:

Nearly 800,000 mpox vaccine doses the U.S. government had promised to donate to African countries experiencing an outbreak of the rash-causing disease cannot be shipped because they’re expiring in less than six months, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

And The Atlantic adds:

Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it. Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations. Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash.

The Economist draws the obvious conclusion: These cuts are "a gift for China as it vies with America for soft-power supremacy".

As you consider all this, remember that the Big Beautiful Bill set aside $170 billion to support Trump's mass deportation policy, including $45 billion to build concentration camps. Republicans justified their vote for the rescissions by describing the $9 billion of cuts as "a small but important step toward fiscal sanity that we all should be able to agree is long overdue".

When we're saving lives or making sure kids can see Sesame Street or competing with China for influence in Africa, we have a spending problem. But there's always plenty of money for cruelty.

Now we come to the broader perspective. The appropriations being rolled back are part of the bipartisan deal that prevented a government shutdown in March. With majorities in Congress being as narrow as they've been in recent years, we have these kinds of deals every year or two.

Now, how can the Democrats ever do a deal like this again? A bipartisan spending bill typically contains some provisions that either party doesn't like; you allow spending you don't want here in order to get the spending you do want there. But now imagine that Republicans can take that deal, and then pass a rescission package to roll back every plum Democrats got in exchange for their votes. There is no deal that the minority party can make the majority uphold.

The next fiscal year starts on October 1. Expect to see some chickens come home to roost.

and Stephen Colbert

CBS announced that when Stephen Colbert's contract ends next May, that will be the end not just of Colbert's role at CBS, but of The Late Show, which David Letterman established in 1993.

"This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night,” read the statement. “It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.

No one is buying that. Yes, it's true that late-night TV in general has seen its ratings decline in recent years. But Colbert's Late Show still leads the competition by a wide margin. Some kind of reorganization might be warranted, and maybe Colbert's next contract shouldn't be as lucrative is the current one. But finances dictated the end of the show? Not believable.

Vox explains the background:

Paramount Global is currently attempting to merge with Skydance Media, and company leadership has been acting as though they are concerned that President Donald Trump might try to block the merger. Earlier this month, CBS and 60 minutes announced a $16 million settlement in its lawsuit with Trump over the editing of a segment about former Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris — an extraordinary concession for a media company in a case that experts agree CBS would have likely won in court.

The apparent legal settlement, in other words, was actually a bribery/extortion situation. Colbert said as much on the air:

I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles: It's "big fat bribe".

Two days later, Colbert was told his show was cancelled.

On Truth Social, Trump took a victory lap.

I absolutely love that Colbert’ got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show.

(Greg Gutfeld hosts Fox News' pathetic attempt at news-related comedy. The "moron on NBC" is Jimmy Fallon. When Trump criticized Kimmel's hosting of the 2024 Oscars on Truth Social, Kimmel famously read the tweet on-air and responded: "Isn't it past your jail time?")

Trump isn't the only one who sees this event as the first of many. Mother Jones writes:

[T]he end of Colbert signals a dark new chapter in Trump’s authoritarian slide. Though his second term has already produced a string of stunning capitulations by some of the most powerful forces in the country, one could argue that Trump’s attacks had yet to take down our actual culture. I’m talking about the literal content we consume—the television, art, movies, literature, music—no matter how much Trump complained. That it remained protected and free-willed, a rare area of control for a public that otherwise feels powerless to take action. Clearly, that was magical thinking. If this can happen to Colbert and a storied franchise, this can happen to anyone.

but I want to talk about Andrea Gibson

After my wife's memorial service in January, the comment I heard most often -- practically from everybody -- was: "I never appreciated what an interesting person she was." In a self-centered way, I was gratified to hear those words, because I had designed the service to evoke precisely that response. I had recruited speakers from every corner of her life, and not even I knew what all of them would say.

But on the other hand, that comment made me sad. Because it's such a waste that even our close friends know us so poorly, and often we don't really meet someone until we gather together to mark their death.

Well, this week I experienced that sorrow from the other side: I had never heard of Andrea Gibson until she died Monday, which started her poems bouncing around social media.

Rummaging through Andrea's substack "Things That Don't Suck", I was struck by how well her "Post-Election Letter to a Friend" holds up nine months later.

I understand why so many people are sharing what they think we should be feeling right now. Though there is love at the heart of that demand, there is no such thing as a moral emotion. No one owes the world their misery. What we owe is our active participation in finding creative and compassionate paths forward. Every activist I have ever known who believed they owed the world their unhappiness has burned out. If we consciously fuel our joy, if we put our attention on the world’s beauty, we will have far more strength and stamina to show up to the world’s pain. 

We need stamina. The 73 million people who voted for Trump appear to be more energized than ever. And it’s clear to me that the narrative that every Trump voter is “ignorant and hateful” is hurting our movements. 95% of our marginalized friends have at least one family member they deeply trust who voted for Trump this year. Most people, regardless of how they are voting, believe they are voting for a better world. There is a terrifying amount of hate in our country, yes. But there is far more fear. Hate is the end of a conversation. Fear isn’t always. I’ve been on the lookout for moments when an honest and respectful conversation might reach the root of someone else’s fear.

I will try to hold that in mind as I run into Trumpists. Maybe trying to figure out what they're afraid of is a more productive path than meeting anger with anger and hate with hate.

That quote reminded of this one from the Sufi poet Hafiz.

Dear ones,
Beware of the tiny gods frightened men
Create
To bring an anesthetic relief
To their sad
Days.

Trump is exactly that: a tiny god made from his followers' fear of the world that is coming to be. The pervasive cruelty of his movement is fear dressed up to deny fear: "We can't be afraid, because we have made other people fear us."

The masked ICE agent is the perfect symbol of MAGA: afraid to show his face, but trying to strike fear into others. They have the guns, the body armor, and sometimes the Marines to back them up, but no courage of their own.

And then there's this, from Gibson's poem "My Dog Knew I had Cancer Before I Did":

“lifespan” is a word I no longer use to measure length––but width. “How wide can my heart open to this life, to this world, and to everyone in it?” feels like a far more important question now than, “How long will I live?”

More than one of my friends is dying right now. I don't think I can do anything to lengthen their lives, but maybe I can still widen them a little.

and you also might be interested in ...

Trump seems to have an uncanny knack for finding the wrong side of every issue.

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro used to be president, and was sometimes described as Brazil's Trump. He had a similar disdain for democracy, and when Brazilians voted him out in 2022 (just as Americans voted Trump out in 2020), his supporters stormed the seat of government, much as Trump supporters did on January 6.

Unlike the US, Brazil is holding Bolsonaro to account. He is currently on trial for his role in the coup attempt.

Recently, Trump has been trying to interfere with that trial. He threatened Brazil with 50% tariffs if they didn't end Bolsonaro's trial. This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio withdrew US visas from judges in Bolsonaro's trial.

Writing on X, Rubio said he had ordered visa revocations for the judge leading the investigation into Bolsonaro, Alexandre de Moraes, as well as “his allies on the court” and their family members.

So that's where we are: We're trying to interfere in the legal processes of the second-biggest democracy in the Western hemisphere, to the point of threatening sanctions against the family members of judges.

ProPublica analyzed hospital-discharge data from Texas.

After Texas made performing abortions a felony in August 2022, ProPublica found, the number of blood transfusions during emergency room visits for first-trimester miscarriage shot up by 54%. The number of emergency room visits for early miscarriage also rose, by 25%, compared with the three years before the COVID-19 pandemic — a sign that women who didn’t receive D&Cs initially may be returning to hospitals in worse condition, more than a dozen experts told ProPublica.

The problem: A dilation and curettage procedure (D&C) is the safest way to clear the uterus of a woman who has had an early miscarriage. But a miscarriage followed by a D&C looks a lot like an abortion, and doctors don't want to be exposed to prosecution under the new law.

The data mirrors a sharp rise in cases of sepsis — a life-threatening reaction to infection — ProPublica previously identified during second-trimester miscarriage in Texas.

Blood loss is expected during early miscarriage, which usually ends without complication. Some cases, however, can turn deadly very quickly. [Dr. Elliott] Main [a hemorrhage expert and former medical director for the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative] said ProPublica’s analysis suggested to him that “physicians are sitting on nonviable pregnancies longer and longer before they’re doing a D&C — until patients are really bleeding.”

ProPublica also examined RFK Jr.'s latest avenue to attack vaccines. Back in the 1980s, Congress established the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. It's a no-fault insurance program that covers the rare injuries caused by vaccines, and it's funded by a 75-cent tax on each disease a shot is supposed to protect against. It compensates victims quickly without going through the ordinary system of lawsuits, and it shields vaccine manufacturers from more costly awards in court.

Kennedy is overhauling the system, and may do so in ways that break it. For example, if he adds autism to the list of automatically covered injuries, the trust fund that pays compensation will quickly go bankrupt. Kennedy keeps saying that vaccines cause autism, despite the fact that this theory has been studied exhaustively and has been refuted every time.

If the fund goes bankrupt and cases go back to the regular tort system, vaccine manufacturers may simply pull out of the US market. That was the problem the VICP was designed to solve.

Paul Krugman:

Democrats have indeed moved a bit to the left on economic issues in recent years. But they’re hardly extremists. They’re basically a lot like a European Social Democratic party. Republicans, however, are extremists. The whole party has raced to the right into what amounts to full-on fascism.

If that last statement has you reaching for the smelling salts, ask yourself, what more evidence do you need? Do we have to wait until a Republican administration creates a masked secret police force that snatches people off the streets and starts building concentration camps? Wait, that has already happened.

and let's close with a moment of schadenfreude

It's hard to explain what's so satisfying about this incident: The CEO and HR manager of the software company Astronomer were cuddling at a Coldplay concert in Boston's Gillette Stadium when the kiss-cam put them on the big screen. They didn't notice immediately, but when they did, the HR manager covered her face with her hands and the married-to-somebody-else CEO tried to sink into the ground. As so often happens, the cover-up is worse than the crime: Their horrified reaction to being caught together made the video go viral. Anybody who wasn't supposed to see it has certainly seen it by now.

Reportedly, Astronomer had a policy against employees dating, which the HR manager should have been familiar with. The CEO has subsequently resigned.

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Monday, July 14, 2025

Leverage

Probably for the first time since he announced his candidacy in 2015, Trump has found himself on The Elites side of the divide against The People. Instead of leveraging the power of conspiratorial thinking, for at least a moment, he is seeing it being used against him.

- Philip Bump

This week's featured post is: "Is Epstein what will finally break through?"

This week everybody was talking about Jeffrey Epstein

That's the subject of the featured post. After posting it, I noticed that Matt Stoller had a slightly different take on the same subject.

Trump could have done many things about the Epstein files. He’s a reality show genius, he knows how to keep the plot going. But he just said that the mystery to be revealed, the one driving the whole Trump show - yeah, that doesn’t exist. He chose to do the single worst thing for the MAGA movement, he tried to take away their ability to believe in a moral universe in which they were the heroic army fighting for truth and justice. He also chose to embarrass the podcasting and MAGA influencers who built their businesses on elaborate stories around Jeff Epstein and the Deep State. You can’t just tell them to stop. Too much money and too much belief is riding on it.

and birthright citizenship

In Trump v CASA, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration a win without ruling on the underlying issues of the case. CASA is a case challenging Trump's executive order eliminating birthright citizenship. The order is blatantly unconstitutional, since birthright citizenship is clearly stated in the 14th Amendment. If you want to eliminate birthright citizenship, you need to pass a new constitutional amendment repealing that part of the 14th amendment.

But the Trump administration didn't seek the Court's opinion on the core issue of the case, but only on the nationwide injunctions that judges had granted that stopped the Trump administration from taking any action on his executive order. And they won: The Court sharply restricted the circumstances under which a judge could issue a nationwide injunction. The immediate impact of the Court's decision was that the administration could begin denying the benefits of citizenship to people who were born in states that weren't part of the suit challenging the order.

So if you were born in Missouri to undocumented parents, the administration might refuse to issue you a passport. But it would have to issue one to your brother, who was born in Illinois.

This week, a lower court issued a ruling that avoided that kind of chaos. Slate summarizes:

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante blocked Donald Trump’s assault on birthright citizenship in a ruling that applies nationwide. Despite its scope, Laplante’s order is not the kind of “universal injunction” that the Supreme Court prohibited in June’s Trump v. CASA. Rather, the judge certified a class of plaintiffs that includes everyone who would be affected by Trump’s policy and issued an injunction to protect their fundamental rights. This class action seeks to fill the gap that the Supreme Court created when it limited judges’ power to halt unconstitutional executive actions last month.

Slate's Mark Stern and Dahlia Lithwick discuss the details.

and the trade war

So Trump announced his "liberation day" tariffs on April 2. Global markets crashed, and he backed off, putting a 90-delay on everything, so that countries could negotiate trade deals that got them lower rates.

Sadly, hardly any country did. And can you blame them? What deal can you strike with Donald Trump that he can be counted on to keep?

So the 90 days ran out last week. Since then, Trump has been announcing new tariff rates that go into effect August 1. The markets have barely reacted at all, possibly because they still believe the TACO theory: that Trump will chicken out before the rates actually go into effect.

but this is the best thing I read this week

USA Today columnist Rex Huppke used the Supreme Court's logic to reach a very different conclusion. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court voted 6-3 along ideological lines to require a Maryland school district to let parents opt their kids out of lessons involving LGBTQ themes. The Court recognized that

parents have a right ‘to direct the religious upbringing of their children’ and that this right can be infringed by laws that pose ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and practices that parents wish to instill in their children. ...

As Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his opinion regarding the use of LGBTQ+ books in schools, some “Americans wish to present a different moral message to their children. And their ability to present that message is undermined when the exact opposite message is positively reinforced in the public school classroom at a very young age.”

Huppke wants to invoke this precedent to protect his own right to present a moral message to his children.

I have a deeply held religious conviction that, by divine precept, lying, bullying and paying $130,000 in hush money to an adult film star are all immoral acts.

He lists many other Trump behaviors that he does not want validated by public schools, and so:

Attempts to teach my children anything about Donald Trump, including the unfortunate fact that he is president of the United States, place an unconstitutional burden on my First Amendment right to freely exercise my religion. ... So any attempt to teach my children that Trump exists and is president might suggest such behavior is acceptable, and that would infringe on my right to raise my children under the moral tenets of my faith. (My faith, in this case, has a relatively simple core belief that being a complete jerk virtually all the time is bad.)

Huppke is obviously using humor here, but there is a serious point underneath: The reasoning that judges like Samuel Alito use in their rulings is intended to be applied only by certain people for certain purposes. Some people have a right to opt their children out of lessons that contradict their moral values, and some do not. Left-wing plaintiffs can't expect to get the same consideration from this Court that right-wing plaintiffs do.

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Another story of Trump administration lawlessness: The border patrol held an 18-year-old American citizen for 23 days. They would not allow him to shower or call his mother, who had the birth certificate proving he was born in Dallas. He lost 26 pounds during his ordeal.

Galicia, his brother and friends were on their way to a soccer scouting event at Ranger College when they were stopped by CBP. He was hoping to earn a scholarship. "We're supposed to graduate from high school next year, and we wanted to do something to secure our education," he said.

His brother was born in Mexico, so he signed self-deportation documents to get himself out of the inhumane conditions. Galicia told the Dallas Morning News: "It got to the point where I was ready to sign a deportation paper just to not be suffering there anymore. I just needed to get out of there."

CIA Director John Ratcliffe is performing for an audience of one: He's not trying to protect the United States from its foreign enemies, he's trying to make Donald Trump happy.

In this case, he is making statements about Russian interference in the 2016 election that are simply false, and that are not supported by the CIA report that he says supports them. The facts, which have been found again and again by investigations headed by members of either major party, are that Russia did try to interfere in the 2016 election and that it did so with the intention of helping Trump.

and let's close with something bookish

Tom Gauld is a cartoonist with a focus on libraries and books. Here, he presents a solution to a common problem. If it only it were that simple.

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Monday, July 7, 2025

Colonization

It’s tempting to think that we are living in a new era of lawlessness, but that would fail to capture the change staring us in the face. This is not about the lack of law. It’s about the remaking of the law. What Trump and leaders like him seek is not so much to destroy the law as to colonize it, to possess the law by determining its parameters to serve their interests. For them, the law exists to bend to their will, to destroy their adversaries, and to provide an alibi for behavior which, in a better version of our world, would be punished as criminal.

- Moustafa Bayoumi
"The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world"

This week's featured post is "Trump only has ICE for you".

This week everybody was talking about Trump's bill

The featured post covers how the massive $170 billion appropriation for immigration enforcement could lead to ICE becoming Trump's Gestapo and immigrant detention centers turning into concentration camps. I understand how alarmist that sounds, but I'm drawing on some pretty reliable folks: Timothy Snyder, Theda Skocpol, and others.

That leaves coverage of the rest of the bill here. Ignoring the implications for democracy, the big thing to know about the bill is that it robs from the poor to give to the rich.

One snarky meme I saw Friday hoped that "Big Beautiful Bill" will be the nickname of Trump's cellmate some day. I suspect the poster has more faith in God's justice than I do.

But anyway, the Republicans got it done, without a single Democratic vote in either house of Congress. Up until a few weeks ago, I honestly thought they wouldn't. The bill hurts so many Republican voters (see the note below on Frontier County, Nebraska) and the GOP's margins in Congress are so small. I thought that a few more Republicans would vote against a bill they obviously knew was wrong for the country and for their constituents.

Back in May, for example, Josh Hawley wrote an op-ed describing in detail what was wrong with cutting Medicaid. He blamed the GOP's "Wall Street wing" for a bill that was "both morally wrong and politically suicidal".

If Congress cuts funding for Medicaid benefits, Missouri workers and their children will lose their health care. And hospitals will close. It’s that simple. And that pattern will replicate in states across the country.

But he voted for the bill, morality be damned.

Research backs up the point he was making. The University of Pennsylvania's health economics institute calculated that the bill would lead to 51,000 preventable deaths annually. The idea that Americans die for lack of health insurance has long been denied on the Right, going back to 2012 when presidential candidate Rick Santorum rejected "completely ... that people die in America because of lack of health insurance."

Santorum and others often point to rules that require emergency rooms to care for people regardless of their ability to pay. So no, you won't die from a car accident because you aren't insured. But you may skip a regular check-up that would have saved you from a heart attack, or go without the blood-pressure meds that prevent a stroke. Spread over a nation, those cases add up.

It's hard to know what to do with people like Hawley. They don't need to be convinced; they know. They just don't care enough or have the courage to do anything about it. After she provided the deciding vote that got the bill through the Senate, Lisa Murkowski wrote:

But, let’s not kid ourselves. This has been an awful process—a frantic rush to meet an artificial deadline that has tested every limit of this institution. While we have worked to improve the present bill for Alaska, it is not good enough for the rest of our nation—and we all know it.   My sincere hope is that this is not the final product. This bill needs more work across chambers and is not ready for the President’s desk.

But of course the House passed it without amendment and the President signed it, so the bill Murkowski voted for is now law. As so often happens -- remember Mitch McConnell, after voting to acquit Trump in his second impeachment, saying that Trump hadn't gotten away with anything "yet" -- Murkowski hoped somebody else would save the country from Trump, when she had the power to do it and would not.

Lots of last-minute horse-trading happened, including a bunch of Alaska exemptions to nail down Murkowski's vote, so what does the final bill actually do?

What I believe is the only hospital in Frontier County, Nebraska will close down in response to "anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid".

These are Trump voters. In the 2024 presidential election, Trump beat Harris 1213-185 in Frontier County. (On the map, Frontier County is the third county from the left in the second row from the bottom.) Frontier County's congressman and both Nebraska senators voted for the Big Beautiful Bill.

They did it to themselves.

The fig leaf Republicans are wearing is that Medicaid and food stamps will only be denied to able-bodied people who won't work. However, when states have instituted a work-requirement with a similar explanation, the resulting savings have come mainly from kicking out eligible people who get behind on their paperwork. (Implementing a work requirement means monthly forms verifying that you are working. The working poor tend to have very little free time for filling out forms. Many are poorly educated and have trouble understanding the rules or following the instructions.)

Paul Krugman provides a very well-constructed graphic about Medicaid recipients.

Finally, let's think about the 3% of recipients who are of working age but don't work. Let's assume the worst about them, as Mike Johnson does: They're lazy bums who sit around playing video games all day.

Do I approve of their lifestyle? No. Do I think that if they get sick they should be left to die? Also no.

Taking away people's health insurance is not an appropriate form of discipline.

and trade

After Trump's extreme "Liberation Day" tariff announcements on April 2 panicked global markets, he retreated by announcing a 90-day pause on the tariffs so that trade deals could be negotiated, promising "90 deals in 90 days".

In fact, no deals have been completed. The administration has made much of "frameworks" of trade deals with China and the UK and Vietnam, but in trade agreements the devil is in the details, which are still being worked out. Georgetown Professor Mark Busch says:

These aren’t real trade deals. These are cessations of hostility. These are purchasing agreements that may or may not appease Trump for maybe a little while, thrown in with some aspirational stuff.

Well, the 90 days run on out Wednesday. But now officials are talking about August 1 as the real deadline. Will TACO Trump chicken out again, or will we see another stock market collapse? Stay tuned.

and the flash floods in Texas

Storms have been unpredictable since the days of Zeus and Thor, so it's always hard to know exactly where to place the blame for a weather disaster. But Friday's flash flood of Texas' Guadalupe River (which so far has resulted in 82 dead, including 28 children, with ten girls from a Christian summer camp still missing) has at least two fingers pointing back towards the Trump administration.

The first finger, of course, is climate change, which raises the likelihood of any sort of extreme weather event.

Rainfall intensity in central Texas has been trending upward for decades, and this week’s rains were enhanced by the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry, which made landfall in northern Mexico last week. Barry’s circulation pulled record amounts of atmospheric moisture up to central Texas from the near-record warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

The mix of Barry’s circulation and climate warming helped create conditions of record-high atmospheric moisture content over central Texas – in line with the trend towards increasing atmospheric moisture content globally as the world warms and the air can hold more water vapor.

Trump has consistently played down climate change, occasionally referring to it as a "hoax". His first administration emphasized "drill, baby, drill", i.e. producing and burning more of the fossil fuels that cause climate change. In his second administration, he has rolled back nearly every effort President Biden made to set us on the path to a more sustainable economy. The League of Conservation Voters referred to the "big beautiful bill" he signed Friday as "the most anti-environmental bill of all time", which "will do extreme harm to our communities, our families, our climate, and our public lands."

Would a full-bore government focus on climate change since 2017, combined with putting the full pressure of the United States on other nations to phase out fossil fuel dependence, have prevented, or at least mitigated, the Guadalupe flood? As with any individual weather event, it's impossible to say for sure.

But then we get to the second finger. If extreme weather events are going to be more and more frequent -- and they are -- common sense would lead us to invest more heavily in weather prediction, so that we see these events coming and have more time to get summer-campers out of harm's way.

But Trump has been doing exactly the opposite. Tuesday -- three days before the flood -- The Guardian lamented:

As the weather has worsened, there have been fewer federal scientists to alert the public of it. Cuts to the weather service by Trump and the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) have left NWS local forecast offices critically understaffed throughout this year’s heightened severe weather. In April, an internal document reportedly described how cuts could create a situation of “degraded” operations – shutting down core services one by one until it reaches an equilibrium that doesn’t overtax its remaining employees.

Did NWS drop the ball here? Local officials claim they did, predicting 4-8 inches of rain rather than the 12 that actually fell. But maybe mistakes on that scale are inevitable and the local officials are just deflecting blame. Again, who can say?

The point is that this kind of thing is bound to keep happening: As our country's policies work to increase bad weather events while cutting back on our ability to predict them, more and more often disaster is going to take us by surprise. And sometimes girls at summer camp will pay the price.

and the Fourth of July

Trump hasn't been in office half a year yet, with 3 1/2 to go. But he has already done so much damage to American democracy that July 4 had a melancholy edge this year. Is the United States still worth celebrating in its current form? And if so, for how much longer?

Jay Kuo tries to reach past his patriotic sorrow:

While the lighthouse shining the way is admittedly hard to make out through the cruel fog that envelopes us, it is out there, sturdy upon the shore, and still blazing brightly. We must trust that we will rediscover its guiding power and, together, steer this ship safely home. We’ll do it together, and in our strong and welcome company we will find the courage and conviction we need.

Jennifer Rubin notes that the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence seem particularly relevant this year.

The signers railed about exclusionary immigration policies that hurt the colonies (“He has endeavored 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”). They inveighed against barriers to trade (“cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world”). And they condemned imposing “Taxes on us without our Consent,” which, if we remember that unilaterally imposed tariffs are a consumer tax, also sounds familiar. Tyrants, then and now, seek to dominate and micromanage commerce to the detriment of ordinary people seeking a better life.

And notice the common problem, then and now, when a tyrant attempts to corrupt the rule of law by seeking to intimidate and threaten members of the judiciary (“He has obstructed the Administration of Justice…. He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices”); seeks to impair due process (“depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury”); and even ships people out of the country for punishment (“Transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”). The tyrant playbook has not changed much in nearly 250 years.

Using the military improperly has always been a go-to move for tyrants. “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures” (or in our case, the governor of California) and tried to make “the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power” (by, among other things, threatening to deploy them to silence protests). “Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us” is still going on in Los Angeles. And “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us …”—or in Donald Trump’s case, incited violence, called it an insurrection and then used it as a pretext to send in the military.

and you also might be interested in ...

The most thought-provoking thing I read this week was "The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world" by Moustafa Bayoumi, which is the source of this week's top-of-the-page quote. The "world" Bayoumi is talking about is the post-World-War-II rules-based order, and he sees it breaking on multiple levels. International rules against genocide or using starvation as a weapon of war somehow don't apply to what Israel is doing in Gaza. Similarly, US laws against supplying weapons to countries that block US humanitarian aid don't apply to Israel. American principles of free speech don't apply to people who protest for Palestinian rights.

Along the same lines: Peter Beinart notes how fast the conventional wisdom about Israel in American politics is changing.

The more Democratic elites continue their near-unconditional support for Israel despite overwhelming public opposition, the more vulnerable they will be to a Mamdani-style political insurgency in the next presidential primary.

He warns that Israel/Palestine could become a "moral consistency" issue that holds symbolic value even for many who feel no strong connection to either Israel or Palestine.

But unquestioned support for Israel has become, for many, a symbol of the timidity and inauthenticity of party elites — and that leaves them vulnerable to political insurgents who don’t compromise the values of equality and anti-discrimination.

A depressing read is last Monday's article in the NYT about the energy strategies of China and the United States: China is leading the world in clean energy development, while the US is pushing fossil fuels. China is building for the future, while the US is trying to hang onto the past.

Tuesday, the federal government was supposed to release $7 billion in money Congress appropriated to fund summer and after-school programs.

But in an email on Monday, the Education Department notified state education agencies that the money would not be available.

The move is probably illegal, but the administration should be able to stall action in the courts until the programs would have ended anyway.

In his members-only editor's blog, Josh Marshall calls attention to the pro-Trump advertising that is paid for by your tax dollars. Reproducing part of a report from AdImpact, he observes that "The top advertiser in this political cycle so far is the Department of Homeland Security running political ads with taxpayer dollars on behalf of Donald Trump." The total: $34 million.

Meanwhile, the Social Security Administration sent out an email praising (and lying about) Trump's Big Beautiful Bill. (I received it myself.) "Social Security Applauds Passage of Legislation Providing Historic Tax Relief for Seniors" was the subject line. This claim in particular is just blatantly false:

The bill ensures that nearly 90% of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits, providing meaningful and immediate relief to seniors who have spent a lifetime contributing to our nation’s economy.

Actually:

the legislation provides a temporary tax deduction of up to $6,000 for people aged 65 and older, and $12,000 for married seniors. These benefits will start to phase out for those with incomes of more than $75,000 and married couples of more than $150,000 a year.

So if your monthly Social Security check is more than $1000, you'll pay at least some tax on it. The average benefit is about double that.

Jeff Nesbit posted on X:

Unbelievable. I was a deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Appointed by President Biden. The agency has never issued such a blatant political statement. The fact that Trump and his minion running SSA has done this is unconscionable.

Tesla's sales are falling, which is a weird thing to stay about a company whose stock has a price/earnings ratio of 170. Investors appear to be buying the story that someday Tesla's driverless taxis will be huge money-makers. I think I won't be attending that party.

and let's close with something refreshing and adorable

Feeling too hot this summer? Need more cuteness in your life? The Cincinnati Zoo offers this video of red pandas playing in the snow.

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Monday, June 30, 2025

The Rot Goes Deeper Than Trump

[Due to scheduling problems, I didn't get a weekly summary posted this week. But I did write this featured post.]

Just winning the next set of elections won't fix the underlying problems.

Zohran Mamdani's surprise victory in New York City's mayoral primary, and his probable ascension to the office itself, sent shock waves through the Democratic Party and reopened many longstanding debates. Maybe the word "socialist" isn't as toxic as many think it is. Maybe the party needs younger, newer faces. Maybe a positive vision is at least as important as standing against Trump. Maybe being Muslim or pro-Palestine does not alienate potential Democratic voters. And so on.

Those are all worthwhile points to discuss, but I worry that they all revolve around a goal -- taking power back from Trump and the MAGA congressmen who hold it now -- that is necessary but not sufficient to save American democracy. Too easily, we get lost in the search for a new face or a new slogan or even new policies, but lose sight of the deeper problems that allowed Trump to come to power in the first place.

Remember, we beat Trump soundly in 2020. His ego will never let him admit it, but Trump got his butt kicked by Joe Biden, to the tune of more than 7 million votes. Beating Trump is not an unsolvable problem, and we don't have to convert the MAGA cultists to do it. All we have to do is win back the voters who already voted against Trump in 2020.

But beating Trump did not end the threat then, and it won't do it now either. We need to understand why.

Donald Trump, in my opinion, is not some history-altering mutant, like the Mule in Asimov's Foundation trilogy. I think of him as an opportunist who exploited rifts in American society and weak spots in American culture. He did not create those rifts and weak spots, and if all we do is get rid of Trump, they will still be there waiting for their next exploiter.

I do not have solutions for the problems I'm pointing to, but I think we need to keep them in our sights, even as we look for the next face and slogan and message.

The Rift Between Working and Professional Classes. All through Elon Musk's political ascendancy, I kept wondering: How can working people possibly believe that the richest man in the world is on their side? Similarly, how can people who unload trucks or operate cash registers imagine that Donald Trump, who was born rich and probably never did a day of physical labor in his life, is their voice in government?

The answer to that question is simple: The people who shower after work have gotten so alienated from the people who shower before work that anyone who takes on "the educated elite" seems to be their ally. In the minds of many low-wage workers, the enemy is not the very rich, but rather the merely well-to-do -- people with salaries and benefits and the ability to speak the language of bureaucracy and science.

Actual billionaires like Musk or Trump or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg are so distant that it's hard to feel personally threatened by them. But your brother-in-law the psychologist or your cousin who got an engineering degree -- you know they look down on you. Whenever they deign to discuss national affairs with you at all, it's in that parent-to-child you-don't-really-understand tone of voice. And let's not even mention your daughter who comes home from college with a social justice agenda. Everything you think is wrong, and she can't even explain why without using long words you've never heard before. Somebody with a college degree is telling you what to do every minute of your day, and yet you're supposed to be the one who has "privilege".

The tension has been building for a long time, but it really boiled over for you during the pandemic. You couldn't go to work, your kids couldn't go to school, you couldn't go to football games or even to church -- and why exactly? Because "experts" like Anthony Fauci were "protecting" you from viruses too small to see. (They could see them, but you couldn't. Nothing you could see interested anybody.) Then there were masks you had to wear and shots you had to get, but nobody could explain exactly what they did. Would they keep you from getting the disease or transmitting it to other people? Not exactly. If you questioned why you had to do all this, all they could do was trot out statistics and point to numbers. And if you've learned anything from your lifetime of experience dealing with educated people, it's that they can make numbers say whatever they want. The "experts" speak Math and you don't, so you just have to do what they say.

Here's why this is such a big problem for democracy, and how it turns into a liberal/conservative issue: Ever since the progressive era and the New Deal, the liberal project has been for government to take on issues that are too big and too complex for individuals to handle on their own. When you buy a bag of lettuce at the grocery store, how do you know it isn't full of E coli? Some corporation has a dump somewhere upstream from you, so how can you tell what dangerous chemicals might be leeching into your water supply? How do you know your workplace is won't kill you or your money is safe in a bank? What interest rates and tax/spending policies will keep the economy humming without causing inflation? Stuff like that.

The conservative answer to those questions is to trust corporations to police themselves subject to the discipline of the market. (So if the lettuce producers keep selling E-coli-spreading produce, eventually people will catch on and stop buying from them and they'll go out of business.) Historically, that solution has never worked very well. Corporations are too rich and too clever and too chameleon-like for market discipline to keep them in line. But we've had regulations for over a century now, so most of the bad-example history happened a long time ago. (We wouldn't have OSHA today without the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.) The only people who still remember it are themselves experts of some sort.

The liberal alternative is to have what has come to be called an "administrative state". The government runs a bunch of three-letter agencies -- FDA, EPA, SEC, CDC, FCC, and so on, with an occasional four-letter agency like OSHA or FDIC thrown in. These agencies keep track of things no individual has the resources to keep track of, and they hire experts who spend their lives studying things most of us only think about once in a while, like food safety or how much cash banks should keep on hand to avoid runs or what kind of resources need to be stockpiled to deal with hurricanes.

And the liberal administrative state works like a charm as long as two conditions hold:

  • The experts are trustworthy.
  • The public trusts them.

It's not hard to see that there are problems with both of those propositions. In his 2012 book The Twilight of the Elites, Chris Hayes outlined the ways that the expert class has become self-serving. In theory, the expert class is comprised of winners in a competitive meritocracy. But in practice, educated professionals have found ways to tip the balance in their children's favor. Also, the experts did not do a good job running the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, and they failed to foresee the economic crisis of 2008. When they did notice it, they responded badly: Bankers got bailed out while many ordinary people lost their homes.

And then there's the challenge of globalism: It was supposed to benefit everybody, but in practice, working-class people lost good jobs while professional-class people got cheap products made overseas.

On the public-trust side, people have been too willing to believe conspiracy theories about perfectly legitimate things like the Covid vaccine. Trump's slashing of funding for science and research is a long-term disaster for America, and his war against top universities like Harvard and Columbia destroys one of the major advantages the US has on the rest of the world. But many cheer when revenge is taken on the so-called experts they think look down on them.

In a series of books, most recently End Times, Peter Turchin describes two conditions that historically have led to social unrest, revolution, or civil war: popular immiseration and elite overproduction. In other words: Ordinary people see their fortunes declining, and the elite classes expand beyond the number of elite roles for them to fill. (Think about how hard it is for recent college graduates to find jobs.) So there are mobs to lead, and dissatisfied members of the would-be ruling class trained and ready to lead them.

"Remember objective truth?"

Truth Decay. Democracy is supposed to work through what is sometimes called "the marketplace of ideas". Different interest groups have their own self-interested spin, but when people with a variety of viewpoints look at the facts, truth is supposed to win out.

If you are younger than, say, 40, you may be surprised to realize how recently that actually worked. There have always been fringe groups and conspiracy theorists, but there were also powerful institutions dedicated to sorting out what really happened and how things really happen. The two most important of those institutions were the press and the scientific community.

Those two institutions still exist, and (with some exceptions) still pursue capital-T Truth. But they have lost their reality-defining power. (Part of the problem is that journalists and scientists are part of the expert class that working people no longer trust.) No current news anchor would dare end a broadcast with "And that's the way it is", as Walter Cronkite did every day for decades. And no scientific study, no matter how large it is or where it was done, can settle the questions our society endlessly debates.

So: Is global warming really happening, and do we cause it by burning fossil fuels? The scientific community says yes, and the experts whose livelihoods depend on the answer (like the ones in the insurance industry) accept that judgment. But the general public? Not so much, or at least not enough to commit our country to the kind of changes that need to happen.

Was the Covid vaccine safe, and did it save millions of lives worldwide? Do other vaccines (like the ones that all but wiped out measles and smallpox) bring huge benefits to our society? Again, the scientific community says yes. But that answer is considered sufficiently untrustworthy that a crank like RFK Jr. can get control of our government's health services and put millions of lives at risk.

Did Trump lose in 2020? By the standards of objective journalism, yes he did. He lost soundly, by a wide margin. The diverse institutions of vote-counting, spread through both blue states and red ones like Georgia and (then) Arizona, support that conclusion. Every court case that has hung on the question of voter fraud or computer tampering has come out the same way: There is no evidence to support those claims. Fox News paid Dominion Voting Systems $787 million rather than argue that it could have reasonably believed Dominion's vote-counting machines were rigged. (Not that they were rigged, but that there was any reasonable doubt about their accuracy.)

But none of that matters. No institution -- not even one Trump cultists establish themselves, like the audit of Arizona's votes -- can declare once and for all that Trump lost.

Loss of Depth. Along with the lost of trust in experts and the inability of American society to agree on a basic set of facts, we are plagued by a loss of depth in our public discussions. It's not just that Americans don't know or understand things, it's that they've lost the sense that there are things to know or understand. College professors report that students don't know how to read entire books any more. And we all have run into people who think they are experts on a complex subject (like climate change or MRNA vaccines) because they watched a YouTube video.

Levels of superficiality that once would have gotten someone drummed out of politics -- Marjorie Taylor Greene confusing "gazpacho" with "Gestapo" comes to mind -- are now everyday events.

Empathy is out. Assholery is in. Remember George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism"? The idea in a nutshell was that if conservative policies produced a more prosperous society, the rising tide might lift more people out of poverty than liberal attempts to help people through government programs. Things never actually worked out that way, but the intention behind the phrase was clear: Conservatives didn't want to be seen as selfish or heartless bad guys. They also want a better world, they just have a different vision of how to get there.

Later Republican candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney worked hard to build images as good, decent men, reasonable and courteous to a fault. If the policies they supported might lead to more poverty, more suffering, or even more death, that was lamentable and surely not what they intended.

But in 2018, The Atlantic's Adam Serwer made a shocking observation about the first Trump administration: The Cruelty is the Point. MAGA means never having to say you're sorry. If people you don't like are made poorer, weaker, or sicker -- well, good! Nothing tastes sweeter than liberal tears.

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

In the second Trump administration, this tendency has become even more blatant. Consider:

I could go on. It's hard to look at any list of recent Trump administration actions without concluding that these people are trying to be assholes. It's not an accident. It's not a side effect of something else. The assholery is the point.

You might think this intentional assholery would get Trump in trouble with his Evangelical Christian base, because -- I can't believe I have to write this -- Jesus was not an asshole. Jesus preached compassion and empathy.

But Evangelicals are making this work out by turning their backs on the teachings of Jesus. Recent books like The Sin of Empathy and Toxic Empathy explain how empathy is a bad thing -- precisely because it might cause you to regret the pain that the policies you support inflict on other people.

Where does a recognition of these issues leave us? Don't get me wrong. I would like nothing better than for a Democratic wave to sweep the 2026 midterms and then give us a non-MAGA president in 2028. But that is the beginning of the change we need, not the end.

What America needs runs far deeper than a new set of political leaders. We need some sort of spiritual or cultural reformation, one that rededicates Americans to the pursuit of truth and the responsibility to be trustworthy. It would cause us to care about each other rather than rejoice in each other's pain. It would start us looking for leaders who bring out the best in us rather than the worst.

How do we get that reformation started? I really have no idea. I just see the need.

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