Monday, November 17, 2025

Obliviousness

Urbana is basically the country club and the ghetto, and neither group has any idea that the other group exists.

- Beth Macy, Paper Girl,
on returning to the Ohio town where she grew up

This week's featured post is "Beth Macy Goes Home Again".

Ongoing stories

  • Trump's assault on American democracy. Post his election disaster, the shutdown, and the growing threat of the Epstein files, Trump's coalition is showing some cracks.
  • Climate change. The COP30 international conference is happening in Brazil, without the US. Everyone is frustrated by the world's slow progress in addressing climate change.
  • Gaza. The UN is voting today on a US-sponsored resolution to establish an international Gaza stabilization force.
  • Ukraine. As the weather gets colder, the drone war moves to center stage. Russia blew up an oil tanker in Odessa; Ukraine hit an oil refinery.

This week's developments

This week everybody was talking about the shutdown aftermath

No one is happy with how the shutdown came out. It lasted a record 43 days, during which a lot of people worked without pay, saw their government services delayed, or perhaps even went hungry. But in the end it turned out to be an almost entirely symbolic fight, as Democrats got no concessions on their central issue: keeping ObamaCare premiums from skyrocketing in 2026.

The question is whether a better deal could have emerged later. Fundamentally, the Democrats' problem is that you can't play chicken with somebody who's not afraid to wreck their car. As much as Americans were suffering, and as much as they were blaming that suffering on Trump, it's not clear that Trump cared.

As Politico notes: SNAP benefits will start again soon, if they haven't already. But meanwhile, millions of Americans will lose their benefits, due to "work requirements" that seemed designed to trap people into disqualifying themselves.

and whether Trump was involved in Epstein's crimes

Last night, Trump flipped on releasing the Epstein files. After unsuccessfully trying to badger Republicans like Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert into removing their names from the discharge petition to bring the Epstein Transparency Act to a vote in the House, and facing an overwhelming defeat when it finally will be voted on later this week, Trump reversed course, announcing that "House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files" because "we have nothing to hide".

Probably this means that he is confident the Senate will block the bill, but we'll see.

I have to confess that when the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking scandal got sucked into Q-Anon's crazy theory of a world-ruling pedophile cabal, I lost what little interest I had. Surely this was just another conspiracy theory, blown way out of proportion by a cult of lunatics. (After all, if Democrats were synthesizing some eternal-youth elixir out of the blood of children, why did Joe Biden and Bill Clinton look so old? This was just one of the many bits of cognitive dissonance even a cursory glance at the theory raised.)

But lo and behold, there's a kernel of truth at the center of all that nonsense. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell either induced or forced hundreds of under-age (or barely above the age of consent) girls into offering sexual services to their friends, who appear to have been some very powerful people. Rather than just internet rumors, there are real victims speaking out publicly, providing evidence strong enough to strip Prince Andrew of his title, send Maxwell to prison for sex trafficking, and get Epstein arrested and held in federal prison, where (the government says) he hung himself before a trial could happen.

In addition to trying to block release of what the Justice Department knows, various other facts make Trump look guilty of something:

There's certainly a lot of smoke there, but whether Trump himself is in the fire has not yet been proved. This week we got even more smoke, as the House Oversight Committee released 20,000 emails it obtained from the Epstein estate. Trump was mentioned thousands of times in the emails -- more than anyone else -- and the emails strongly imply that Trump knew what Epstein was doing but stayed quiet about it. In one, Trump is described as a "dog that hasn't barked".

Epstein victims made a one-minute video pushing to have all the Justice Department's files released.

OK, just for a moment assume the worst: Trump is shown to be an Epstein client; he's abused underage girls. Does it make a difference?

Tim Whitaker argues that for Trump's Evangelical supporters, it won't. His argument has two main points: First, none of Trump's previous sexual scandals (which Whitaker lists) have dented the MAGA/Evangelical alliance.

Despite these realities White Evangelicals overwhelmingly voted for him in 2016, 2020 and 2024 choosing instead to ignore or explain away what is an obvious reality: Trump already IS a sexual abuser. He doesn’t need to be on a client list for that to be demonstrated. His words, actions and court cases prove that he is.

Second, Evangelical churches have tolerated vast amounts of sexual misconduct in their leaders. Even if a big-time preacher loses his position in scandal, before long he's been rehabilitated and is leading somewhere else.

Megan Kelly is already lining up how she'll defend Trump if he turns out to be a participant in Epstein's crimes: Epstein wasn't really that bad.

Kelly went on to allege that she knew "somebody very, very close" to the Epstein case "who is in a position to know virtually everything." She claimed the unidentified individual "told me, from the start years and years ago, that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile."

"He was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realize this is disgusting. I'm definitely not trying to make an excuse for this," she continued. "I'm just giving you facts, that he wasn't into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby."

OK, let's start here: A 15-year-old isn't "barely legal" in most states. At best she's barely illegal. Here in Massachusetts, the age of consent is 16 -- and the only reason it's that low is to avoid criminalizing 16-year-old boys. If somebody wanted to raise the age-of-consenting-to-men-over-25 to 18 or higher, I'd be for it.

Additionally (as I've observed before about Israel and genocide), when you start listing technical distinctions in the definition of a word like "pedophile", you've already gone far astray.

meanwhile, Trump's coalition begins to crack

In the most plausible American-democracy-survives-Trump scenario, a Democratic sweep of the 2025 elections is followed by elected Republicans claiming independence from their president. It's too soon to say that's definitely happening, but there are signs.

One of the biggest factors enabling Trump's rising autocracy in the nation as a whole has been that he had already achieved autocracy in the Republican Party. Combined with narrow Republican control of both houses of Congress, his complete domination of elected Republicans has allowed him to usurp congressional powers and avoid investigations of the most blatant corruption.

Recently, though, cracks have been forming. Trump's cover-up of the Epstein scandal and the Big Beautiful Bill's deep cuts to Medicaid and SNAP have allowed Marjorie Taylor Greene to get between Trump and his base. This week that dissension erupted into outright schism, as Trump withdrew his support of MTG, called her "Wacky" and "a ranting Lunatic", and dangled an endorsement to tempt some Trump-loyal Republican to challenge her in a primary.

Tucker Carlson has also been increasingly critical of the regime lately, most recently claiming that the FBI is hiding something about Thomas Crooks, the gunman who tried to assassinate Trump during the 2024 campaign. Previously, he had denounced the post-Kirk-murder crackdown on free speech as well as the Epstein cover-up and the attack on Iran. (Isolationism is another issue where a Republican can out-MAGA Trump. Look for resistance to Trump's escalating threats to Venezuela.)

When Trump demanded that Senate Republicans end the shutdown by scrapping the filibuster, Majority Leader John Thune calmly said no. Indiana just refused to accede to Trump's redistricting demand. And former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels published an op-ed that appears to be even-handed, but contains some veiled criticism of Trump. He offers this hope for the future:

At some point, the public could tire of playground insults and asinine nicknames, and start asking for a little more substance from those elected to serve them. Interminable stalemate, especially when the country enters a stretch of serious economic or national security difficulty, could trigger a collective demand to “Grow up.”

It's not a revolt yet, but Trump's levers of power are becoming unreliable. A would-be autocrat's most important asset is the belief that his power cannot be resisted, that everyone must either give in or be run over. That's slipping.

Jack Hopkins is always more cynical and speculative than I am. Now he's assessing signs that the powers behind Trump are already choosing their new champion.

and you also might be interested in ...

Following up on last week's featured post: The Washington Post spells out how the Trump administration is allowing junk insurance back into the market.

CBS hasn't been completely MAGAfied yet. Last night 60 Minutes focused on one of Trump's corrupt pardons:

Last month, President Trump granted a pardon to a billionaire felon, after the felon's company enriched a Trump family business. The pardon went to Changpeng Zhao, a Chinese-born businessman, who was accused by the Justice Department of causing, quote, "...significant harm to U.S. national security…" The president says he does not know Zhao. Our reporting shows that Zhao's company supported a Trump family firm at critical moments leading up to the president's pardon.

Trump's feds seem to be pulling out of Chicago. The next American city for them to invade is Charlotte. This is the first swing state Trump has invaded, and I suspect he'll regret it in 2026.

The reason global air temperatures don't go up every year is that some years the oceans soak up more of the extra heat. But that energy doesn't go away. An article in Grist explores what happens when oceans start expelling heat rather than absorbing it.

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops voted overwhelmingly for a statement critical of Trump's immigration policies.

We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people. We pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement. We pray that the Lord may guide the leaders of our nation, and we are grateful for past and present opportunities to dialogue with public and elected officials.

In some previous week, we saw that Kash Patel was using an FBI plane to go to his girl friend's concerts. This week we find out that he has given her an FBI security detail.

Something I wonder about: With all the federal agents doing stuff like this, or trying to find dirt on Trump's enemies, or working on deporting nannies and landscapers, is anybody actually trying to catch criminals any more?

The regime didn't start blowing up boats it claims were smuggling drugs until September, but apparently Emil Bove, who was acting attorney general at the time and has since become a federal appellate judge, was describing the policy back in February.

So far, 20 strikes have killed about 75 people, and the regime has offered no evidence for its claims that the boats were smuggling drugs.

Ignoring the morality of killing people because you suspect them of a crime, the attacks are also bad strategy. When you capture people, you can flip them to get information. You can also capture their phones and other information devices. When you blow the boat up, you can't do any of that.

"All this strategy is doing is killing people and the same amount of drugs is getting into the U.S.," the former senior DOJ official said. "You didn't save anybody or increase the number of people you're saving in the U.S. It's extraordinarily shortsighted and I don't think it gets you the goal you want."

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