We can expect the governing class to adapt pragmatically to the electorate’s collective decline in rational capacity, for example, by retaining the rituals associated with mass democracy, while quietly shifting key policy areas beyond the reach of a capricious and easily manipulated citizenry.
- Mary Harrington "Thinking is Becoming a Luxury Good"
This week's featured post is "Shaping Ourselves", which raises questions about the effect on democracy of a decline in literate culture.
This week everybody was talking about the Mad King's reaction to a bad jobs report
Friday, the July jobs report validated many economists' critiques of Trump's tariff policies. Economists in general don't like tariffs, but Trump's chaotic implementation of them has looked particularly problematic. With so much uncertainty about the future, it seemed, decision-makers would freeze rather than invest in new businesses and new production. The result would be slower growth, if not outright recession.
But until Friday, it was hard to find solid evidence for that prediction. The unemployment rate remained low and GDP numbers looked acceptable. Friday, though, the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- one of those vital-but-boring agencies whose name its workers' mothers probably can't always remember correctly -- put out its monthly jobs report.
Not only was July's job growth anemic -- only 73K jobs, well below expectations -- but the BLS also revised its job-growth estimates for May and June, virtually wiping out all the jobs previously reported. All in all, the total number of jobs was actually 250K less than previously thought. And the turning points were disturbingly close to two events: Trump's election in November and the "liberation day" announcement of his tariff policy in April.
Couple that with recent reports that the inflation rate is climbing again -- slowly maybe, but that's how these things get started -- and the whole Trump economy doesn't look so good.
OK, then, bad news. Administrations get bad news all the time. I'm sure Biden didn't like the inflation reports in 2023. So you send your press secretary out to spin: The numbers don't mean what they appear to mean, you can't read too much into one report, next month will be better, and so on.
But not Donald Trump. He responded by firing the head of the BLS. Don't like the numbers? Fire the top number-cruncher. It's like firing the weatherman because your picnic got rained out. That'll fix it.
More accurately, it's like something Trump did in his first term: Blame rising Covid rates on the availability of tests.
If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.
It's hard to appreciate just how destructive this firing is. All previous administrations, including Trump's first, shared a commitment to independent agencies producing accurate data to the best of their abilities. The rates of inflation and unemployment, the total national debt, current population, crime rates ... they were what they were. Presidential spokespeople might spin those numbers, or critics might grouse about definitions by claiming that the "real" unemployment rate is U-6, rather than the much lower U-3 that gets the headlines.
But the numbers were what they were. Underneath it all was a core assumption that career bureaucrats were trying to get these numbers right. They held their jobs from one administration to the next and they had professional pride. No doubt each of them voted for somebody and had some individual political views, but when they went to the office none of that mattered.
Overall, the United States has benefited tremendously from having an honest and widely respected civil service. Investors, both foreign and domestic, don't have to build an extra risk premium into their decisions to account for their distrust of the government statistics. (When dealing with many other countries -- China, Russia, the third world, etc. -- they do need that extra risk premium.) One reason the world has been content to let the dollar be the fundamental currency of international trade, or to route their own payment systems through our Federal Reserve, is that you could always count on the US to do honest bookkeeping.
Well, Trump threw that all away Friday. The National Association for Business Economics immediately denounced the move:
The National Association for Business Economics (NABE) strongly condemns the baseless removal of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Commissioner Erika McEntarfer and the unfounded accusations leveled against the work of the agency. This unprecedented attack on the U.S. statistical system threatens the long-standing credibility of our economic data infrastructure
Business leaders and policymakers depend on reliable, impartial economic data to guide decisions that affect investment, employment, and the health of the economy. The BLS produces these data using transparent, rigorously documented, and scientifically sound methodologies. U.S. economic statistics are regarded as the gold standard worldwide, setting the benchmark for accuracy, transparency, and independence.
Here was Trump's justification:
In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad. ... We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified.
In other words, the fired BLS head will be replaced by someone who will cook the books for Trump. Paul Krugman has been anticipating this since before the inauguration.
But why assume that the data will, in fact, remain objective? Imagine that we’re heading into an election and inflation numbers are running at, say, 4 or 5 percent. Do you have any doubts that Trump will insist that the inflation is fake news and pressure the B.L.S. to report better numbers?
To a lot of people, these kinds of worries sounded crazy six months ago. But here we are. Krugman sums up:
It’s one more step on our rapid descent into banana republic status.
and Gaza
It's hard to know what to say about Gaza, because while it is one of the most important things happening in the world, the story is the same week after week: People are starving; Israel has the power to save them but chooses not to.
I sympathize with the Israelis who were traumatized by the October 7 attacks and feel that Hamas must be eliminated at all costs. But here's the problem: Hamas isn't a leader, a group of people, or even an organization. Anything bombs can destroy or soldiers can kill is not Hamas.
Fundamentally, Hamas is an idea: the belief that Israel can't be negotiated with, and that no peaceful solution of the Palestine/Israel conflict is possible. As long as that belief persists among Palestinians, Hamas will always be able to rise from the ashes.
Now imagine the generation growing up in Gaza, watching their parents, siblings, and friends starve to death because Israel prevents them from getting food. Will they someday see Israel as a partner in peace, or imagine themselves living side-by-side with Israelis? Or might they think of Israelis the way that the author of Psalm 137 thought of his own oppressors:
Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.
I quote this not to incite violence against Israelis, or Jews in the US or elsewhere, but to point out that this kind of reaction is very human. Jews have felt it in the past and Palestinians no doubt are feeling it now.
The Israeli effort to wipe out Hamas is in fact guaranteeing its survival.
and the Smithsonian
Thursday brought an Orwellian moment, when the Washington Post revealed that the Smithsonian had removed mention of Trump's impeachments from an exhibit about the presidency. A Smithsonian spokesperson explained like this:
In reviewing our legacy content recently, it became clear that the ‘Limits of Presidential Power’ section in The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden exhibition needed to be addressed. Because the other topics in this section had not been updated since 2008, the decision was made to restore the Impeachment case back to its 2008 appearance.
The 2008 version said that only three presidents had faced a serious threat of removal via impeachment: Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton.
The statement makes it sound like Trump had nothing to do with this "review of legacy content", but in fact it is a direct response to an executive order Trump issued in March, which targeted the Smithsonian by name for "replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth".
Saturday, the Smithsonian was saying it would update the exhibit to re-include Trump's impeachments "in the coming weeks". We'll see if they manage to do it without provoking another "off with his head" response.
and the Texas gerrymander
By 2024, we seemed to have reached a national balance in terms of congressional gerrymandering: The GOP won a slight victory in the national popular vote, and got a slight majority of House seats for it.
Trump wants to undo that balance. Knowing that his policies are unpopular, he wants to be able to hang onto the Republican House majority even if the voters want something else. So the Trump-enslaved Republican majority in the Texas legislature is trying to vote on a mid-decade redistricting that will give Republicans five more safe seats.
Democrats have responded by leaving the state, in hopes of denying the legislature the quorum necessary to pass laws. (A quorum is 2/3rds of members.) Governor Abbott is threatening to have absent legislators removed from office, which would certainly have to be decided in court. It's not clear to me how long the Democrats would have to stay away to block the redistricting.
Democratic states like New York and California have threatened to retaliate, but considerable legal hurdles are in the way.
and the those trade deals
The NYT has been buying the claim that "Trump is winning his trade war", but it ought to be more skeptical. Last week I told you about Paul Krugman's analysis of the Japan deal, and said that the deal with the EU was too new to analyze. So let's come back to the EU deal.
Krugman sees the deal as mostly nothing: The EU promised to do things it was doing anyway (invest money in the US, buy US products), and there is no enforcement mechanism to make sure it does. The investment, for example, is supposed to come from private companies, which the EU government has no power to coerce. Similarly,
A commitment to spend $250 billion per year on U.S. energy products would also require Europe to triple their annual American energy imports. “Question one is if they need that much, can afford that much,” [William] Reinsch [former president of the National Foreign Trade Council] said. “Question two is if we can even supply that much.”
What Trump got, though, was a headline: He "won". That seems to be all he wants.
and ICE
Reports continue to mount up of masked ICE agents terrorizing people doing nothing wrong. Here, humanitarian aid workers on the border report being harassed. In this video, people videoing ICE are pushed around.
This video appears to be local police beating up anti-ICE protesters on a bridge connecting Cincinnati to Covington, Kentucky. A more detailed report was on CNN and local WLWT. The protest was against the arrest of a Muslim hospital chaplain who was here legally, but had his asylum revoked.
It's hard not to notice the pro-police news slant: Police "clash" with protesters rather than attack them. I can appreciate why local police would want to clear a bridge and get traffic moving again, but once protesters have been moved to the sidewalk, the emergency is over. And continuing to punch people who have already been wrestled to the ground is assault, not law enforcement.
and you also might be interested in ...
People are starting to notice how much damage MAGA Christians are doing to Christianity.
Why don't examples of Trump's loss of mental acuity get covered as intensely as Biden's were?
We begin to see the first fallout from the rescission package Congress passed last week.
First, the direct fallout: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it will shut down after 57 years.
Most CPB staff will be terminated by September’s end, with a small transition team remaining through January 2026 to wind down operations.
The rescission bill zeroed out funding for CPB, which previously had received about a half billion a year, which it distributed mostly to local public TV and radio stations. Most of those individual stations -- especially the ones in big liberal cities like Boston or New York -- will absorb the funding cuts and continue functioning. But CPB has been the main source of funding for many rural stations, which may have to close their doors as well, or sharply curtail their operations.
It's another example of Trump victimizing his own voters.
Rural communities are already hard hit by a lack of community journalism, as one in three US counties do not have a full-time local journalist, according to a July report from Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News.
The second bit of fallout is more subtle: Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is calling for Democrats not to participate in negotiations over the FY 2026 budget until Trump unfreezes money that Congress appropriated for FY2025.
Her demand makes sense, and I hope the rest of the Democratic Party backs her up on this. The budget process is a back-and-forth horse-trading between the two parties, with Democrats generally supplying the last few votes to get bills over the finish line in exchange for protecting programs that they consider important. But if Trump can simply refuse to spend the money, or if congressional Republicans can renege on their deal by passing a rescission on a party-line vote, then the whole process is a charade.
When Elon Musk's DOGE was firing people and closing agencies in the first few months of the Trump administration, two criticisms were obvious:
- Cuts to food and medical aid were hard-hearted and short-sighted, because feeding hungry kids and containing disease outbreaks is not "waste", even if the immediate beneficiaries aren't Americans.
- Making workers suddenly disappear does not in any way promote "efficiency".
The first criticism has gotten a lot of coverage, with estimates that the DOGE cuts will ultimately be responsible for 14 million deaths. But the Trump administration has largely skated around blame for the second.
This week Democrats on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 55-page report that totals up just how much federal money DOGE wasted in its campaign against "waste": around $21.7 billion. Most of the wasted money comes from paying federal workers not to work, including $14.8 billion in the deferred resignation program, which invited federal employees to resign immediately, but get paid through the end of the fiscal year. About 200K feds took that offer. Another $6.1 billion was paid to 100K employees that were put on administrative leave, many of them in agencies like USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Notice that these are just the easily totaled costs. We don't know how much work didn't get done or was done badly because the federal workers who remain were demoralized or terrorized. Some people imagine that fear of getting fired will scare lazy workers into action. But if you've ever worked in any kind of office, you know that very little gets done when everyone is trying to figure out where the ax will fall next.
The next cartoon requires some explanation: former football players who believe they are suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) have been known to commit suicide by shooting themselves in the chest, so that their brains can be studied.
The cartoonist (Bill Bramhall) is suggesting that America's gun laws can only be explained by some kind of national brain damage.
and let's close with something foul-mouthed but tasty
Definitely NSFW, like most of Samuel L. Jackson's most memorable stuff. Here, he's advertising Windfarm Seaweed Snacks, made from seaweed cultivated at an offshore wind farm.
