Category Archives: Random Blogging

Data? What Data?

It’s bad enough that a substantial percentage of our fellow Americans reject probative evidence that is inconsistent with their preferred realities. What is arguably worse is the administration’s effort to erase such evidence–its conduct of a war on data that might undercut Trump’s fantasy realities.

The New Republic recently focused on that war.

Trump has always made things up. Remember that he entered politics promoting the hoax that Obama wasn’t born in the United States. But what’s new about Trump’s second presidency is that not only have his lies escalated in dimension and scope, becoming increasingly brazen and weird—London is under sharia law!—but he’s also waging a concerted all-out war on facts that contradict his narrative, which is to say, all reliable sources of data.

As the article notes–and as most academics know–for many years, the government has been one of the best sources of data available; not only has it been an important source of probative, vetted information, it has made that information easily accessible to journalists and citizenry alike.  That informational history is under attack by Trump, who–as the article notes– doesn’t want any facts to get in the way of his made-up stories.

To declare that Trump has been right and the scientists have been wrong about climate change is so counterfactual that it requires a massive suppression of available data. Good thing Trump has thought of that. Through a combination of layoffs and weird directives, his administration has dramatically reduced its ability to collect data on industrial pollution that causes climate change, extreme weather caused by climate change, greenhouse gases contributing to climate change—really any facts related to the climate crisis. To take just one example, an effort launched by the Biden administration to collect emissions data was canceled by Trump on his first day in office. The same could be said about his Tylenol claims; lucky for him he has made significant cuts to autism research.

What about the autism claims unsupported by any credible medical research? Or the wild and dangerous claims from Trump and RFK Jr. about vaccines? As the article points out, those vaccine claims will be insufficiently challenged since he has cut vaccine research by more than half a billion dollars.

It goes on. And on.

Trump’s commitment to falsehood—and to eradicating facts at their roots—is not limited to science and public health. This summer he claimed that his policies were leading America into “another golden age” and that economic growth under his presidency “shatters expectations.” The data said otherwise: Whether you’re talking about job growth, inflation, or just about any other measure, the numbers did not chart in a direction favorable to the president. Here again, Trump is not willing to tolerate the facts: When the Bureau of Labor Statistics last month reported numbers that contradicted his sunny narrative, he fired the head of the agency.

Trump constantly says bizarre and unsupportedd things about crime–at least, in cities run by Democrats. He claims violence is surging although it’s  decreasing, actually, in some places, at historic rates,  He constantly blames immigrants, although relatively little crime is committed by immigrants, and he and MAGA are now trying to blame mass murders on transgender Americans, despite the fact that only 0.1 percent of mass shootings are committed by transgender people—and very few murders of any kind.

Are these and multiple other assertions inconsistent with the data? Well, there’s an easy “fix” to that–stop gathering and reporting the data.

Trump’s Agriculture Department cut its annual food insecurity survey, so Americans won’t know how many people are going hungry as a result of Trump’s cuts to food stamps and his inflationary tariffs.

We also won’t know how children are doing in school after his massive cuts to K-12 education, since the administration gutted the Department of Education’s research offices and the National Center for Education Statistics.

States, universities, and other nonprofits are trying to make up for the loss of the data, but in many cases the information provided by the federal government was irreplaceable.

When every day brings a new assault on our constitution and the rule of law, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that data, research, and facts are dangers to authoritarian regimes. Trump doesn’t know much, but he does understand that “data provides the basis for arguments, and he does not want any arguments. He also understands that facts and knowledge can only be nourished and sustained by institutions and experts, so he is destroying those institutions and pink-slipping those experts.”

If and when we rid ourselves of Trump and the MAGA plague, rebuilding and restoration will take many years…..

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An Interview Worth Your Time

Mark Elias of the Democracy Docket recently interviewed Rick Wilson, the Never Trumper who established the Lincoln Project. The transcript of that interview (linked) is lengthy, but it really is worth your time to read in its entirety. If you haven’t that time, or the inclination, I’ll focus on some highlights.

Wilson defected from the GOP when he realized the party had gaslighted him.

All of us jaded, cynical consultants were actually the guys who really believed everything we said, like the Constitution, the rule of law, personal responsibility, and integrity. The rest of the party was like, whatever comes next that gets us to the next job, we’re going to be with it. And then Trump was that. I just decided I wasn’t going to be a part of it.

He also understands something that far too many progressives do not–that you can’t have a policy debate with a man who is totally uninterested in issues–and you can’t argue policy in a GOP that lives in its own preferred ‘reality.”

I think two things happened to the Republican Party. The first was the emergence of a separate populist conservative subculture. It came out of talk radio, and it came out of right-wing media on Fox and elsewhere. It came out of the rise of social media where people were suddenly able to pick and choose the news they got, pick and choose the world they wanted to have represented to them. Politicians suddenly realized in the Republican party that the incentive structure was to go further out, to be crazier. To raise money, you needed to be the guy who was on Fox. To be on Fox, you had to be the guy who was the crazy guy. And they’re on a hamster wheel of that. So the perverse incentive structure inside the party was the opening act of it.

Wilson notes that most Democrats don’t understand how to debate someone who is not motivated by ideas or policy preferences, and he criticises  Democrats who tend to enter the political debate by saying something like  “Check out page 74 of my climate change plan, and then you’ll be convinced.”

In what may be his most significant observation, Wilson attributes the solidity of the Republican base to the fact that “it’s not a political party anymore. It’s a cultural movement, and it wraps up nationalism, populism, fascist adjacency, white nationalism. It’s a culture, and it’s hard to convince somebody in a culture to change that culture over a policy.

Even though the things that the Republican party has done to working-class voters in the last 12 years has been horrific, and as an ex-Republican, I can tell you that it’s horrific, they still believe that the cultural thing — and that’s God, that’s guns, that’s gay rights stuff — that an awful lot of this country that are not in coastal cities, that are not college graduates, that are not folks who are politically tuned into MSNBC or CNN or Fox every day, they feel like the culture around them is changing in a way they don’t like.

Trump offered them an easy solution: “I’ll be the enemy of your enemy. I’ll hurt the people you want to hurt. I’ll hurt the people you think are hurting you.” And that offer, that deal that he made, was a culture deal. You’re seeing them play it out right now with the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk killing. You’re seeing them play it out in the censorship regime they’re trying to impose because a lot of the things in that culture, they are connected only to the branding of America, not to the reality. They don’t believe in a pluralistic republic based on democratic principles. They believe in a Christian nation. They believe in a nation where authority figures like Trump have power because that will make it easier to hurt the people they don’t like.

The interview also contained some hopeful observations.

Donald Trump is so much weaker than you think. He is right now 26 points underwater on inflation and prices….  right now, the economy is unspinnably bad for a lot of his voters. When you go into the grocery store or Target or Walmart or the gas station, prices are not down, and you can’t spin that away….

His polling numbers right now are so far below where they were in the first term, and they’re so far below where Biden’s numbers were at this time in the beginning of his term, where we had roaring inflation. We’re going to go into 2026, unless there’s some unforeseen economic miracle, with an economy that’s dragging on Donald Trump pretty badly. An economy that is saying, “Okay, we tried your tariff game, it didn’t work.” And all these Republicans who backed Trump on this do not have the immunity that Trump has from reality with his voters…

The laws of political gravity still apply down the ballot. So we’re going to go in with an environment where a change election is in the wind. And a change election means that it’s not going to be, as the DCCC thinks, we’re going to fight it out over six or seven seats… We’re going to fight it out over 25 or 30 seats if Trump’s numbers continue to remain so low… He is an unpopular president, and the Republicans have defined themselves by only one thing: being Trump’s guys. They don’t represent people in a district anymore. They’re just Donald Trump’s representative from the fourth congressional district of Missouri or whatever…

He’s a boat anchor right now in terms of ratings and politics. The big bad bill is having very nasty impacts out there on rural hospitals. People are getting how bad it is. We’re in the middle of a real estate collapse in about seven or eight Sunbelt states right now, which we’re pretending it’s not happening … across the deep south in the Sunbelt, we’re about to have a real estate collapse. That is a very bad political outcome for Trump. A lot of these Republicans are also still trying to sell immigration as a net win, but it’s also destroying our agriculture system around the country and raising food prices. There are all the components here for a Democratic sweep of the House.

You really need to read the whole thing, or you can watch the full interview here.

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Let’s Talk About Anti-Semitism

I think it’s time to address the subject of anti-Semitism–and to distinguish it from opposition to Israeli activities.

It is entirely possible to be horrified by Bibi Netanyahu and the Israeli war in Gaza–to consider what Israel is doing there to be indistinguishable from genocide–and not to be even slightly anti-Semitic. (Indeed, a significant percentage of American Jews fall into that horrified category, including this one.) But that negative opinion slides over into anti-Semitism when people attribute actions taken by Israel to “the Jews.”

A recent book review in the New Yorker began with a reminder of the long history of the anti-Jewish animus we see re-emerging.

Exactly who the Jews are—often a fraught question—has rarely been a mystery to their enemies. Stalin cast them as “rootless cosmopolitans” colluding with “American imperialists” to undermine the Soviet Union. In Hitler’s fevered imagination, they were bacilli infecting the healthy “Aryan” race. They have been denounced as lecherous predators and as omnipotent conspirators, as arch-Bolsheviks and arch-capitalists. Increasingly, these days, “Jew” is conflated with “Zionist,” which, as a term of opprobrium, can mean anything from “settler colonialist” to “fascist” to “racist.” The older sense of Zionism—establishing a Jewish state to shield Jews from persecution—has largely slipped from view.

The article reminded readers why the Trump administration’s pretense that its assault on universities is an effort to eradicate anti-Semitism is so ludicrous: among other things, Trump has dined with outspoken Holocaust deniers, and famously said that neo-Nazi marchers chanting “Jews shall not replace us” included “some very fine people.” As the article noted, claims by a hard-right government full of blood-and-soil nationalists that it is a protector of Jews ought to strike us as very peculiar.

It is important to note that the administration’s own clear anti-Semitism is only one aspect of its increasingly open animus toward anyone and everyone that White Christian Nationalist males consider “other”–Jews, Muslims, Black and Brown folks, women, immigrants. Trump’s MAGA base is primarily composed of those who find living in a multi-ethnic, multi-racial society intolerable. Trump and MAGA intentionally encourage those bigotries, and in the process, blur the lines between acceptable criticism and broad condemnations of whole categories of people.

The New Yorker was reviewing Mark Mazower’s recent and timely book “On Antisemitism,” which it noted is an effort “to restore historical context to a word that has become a generic term of condemnation.” As the article pointed out, labeling all critics of Israel as anti-Semites is no different from the critics who assume that all Jews are Zionists and believe all Zionists are racists.

I think that observation captures the essential anti-Americanism of all bigotries, whether of Left or Right. In our system–aspirational as American philosophy has admittedly been–people are treated as individuals. As I’ve previously written, in the American constitutional perspective, so long as you obey the laws, pay your taxes and refrain from harming others, you are entitled to be considered an equal member of the polity. Your skin color, gender, religion and other group affiliations are legally and civically irrelevant.

Bigotry rejects individuality. It ascribes certain “essential characteristics” to entire groups of people, based upon their identities. So we have the historic slurs of Blacks as lazy, Jews as “sharp,” women as emotional, gay men as sissies, and so forth–as if our human variety doesn’t exist.

I want to reiterate–there is nothing more anti-American than that intellectually-lazy approach to our fellow humans.

Are there greedy Jews? Lazy Black folks? Emotional women? Sure. And there are greedy, lazy, emotional White Christians. There are also wonderful, caring, productive people in every category. There are no traits–positive or negative–that inhere in every member of every human tribe.

One of the aspects of American history that the Trumpers want to obscure is the enormous damage done by these racist tropes–damage that the DEI programs they detest were established to counter.

When people who are being criticised for some behavior or other, it is rarely appropriate to attach their group identities to those criticisms. That crime wasn’t committed by “a Black.” A particular man was responsible. The Twin Towers weren’t attacked by “the Muslims.” They were targeted by a subset of Jihadists. “The Jews” aren’t committing war crimes in Gaza; the government of Israel is–and the broader Jewish community isn’t responsible for the Jews being singled out on social media and in comments to this blog as supporting that government.

In the United States, our rights and responsibilities are individual. Because we are.

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Jimmy Kimmel And The Light At The End Of The Tunnel

In a recent newsletter, Paul Krugman addressed what had been my own somewhat optimistic “take” on Disney’s retreat during the Jimmy Kimmel episode.

Krugman began by acknowledging Trump’s efforts at autocracy–and noted that, as his poll numbers have fallen, he has amped up his efforts to intimidate, secure in the knowledge that “craven congressional Republicans and a complicit Supreme Court” will continue to abet his destruction of democratic safeguards. The administration’s demand that Kimmel be removed from the airwaves was part and parcel of that autocratic ambition.

But as Krugman also points out, thanks to American public opinion, Trump’s efforts to mimic Putin and Orban are failing.

When Putin and Orban were consolidating their autocratics, they were genuinely popular. They were perceived by the public as effective and competent leaders. Just nine months into his presidency, Trump, by contrast, is deeply unpopular. He is increasingly seen as chaotic and inept. As David Frum says, this means that he is in a race against time. Can he consolidate power before he loses his aura of inevitability? Will those who run major institutions – particularly corporate CEOs – understand that we are at a crucial juncture, and that by accommodating Trump they have more to lose than by standing up to him?

To put it bluntly, is the Jimmy Kimmel affair the harbinger of a failed Trumpian putsch?

When Putin and Orban began their respective takeovers, they enjoyed several years of popularity–mostly by improving the economic postures of their countries. Thanks to Trump’s incredible ignorance (and his insane belief in tariffs), he took the robust economy he inherited and is in the process of tanking it. Krugman shared the widely available poll results that document Trump’s unpopularity–he is in deeply negative territory, and the people who strongly dislike him vastly outnumber those who strongly approve of him.

If we had a working Congress, unpopularity at this scale would already have turned Trump into a lame duck, but as Krugman notes, he has instead been able to operate as a quasi-autocrat, thanks to a “party that accommodates his every whim, backed by a corrupt Supreme Court prepared to validate whatever he does.”

As a result, Trump has been able to use the vast power of the federal government to deliver punishments and rewards in a completely unprecedented way. But the fact is that Trump has not yet locked in his autocracy. Timid institutions are failing to understand not only how unpopular Trump is, but also how severe a backlash they are likely to face for surrendering without a fight.

And so we come to Trump’s thin-skinned assault on comedians–most recently, Jimmy Kimmel.

Krugman says the signs were there, but Disney ignored them. There were several such signs: Target’s effort to appease Trump by ending its commitment to DEI–an effort that led to a large decline in sales and a falling stock price; capitulating law firms that lost clients and partners to law firms that didn’t. And of course, Tesla…

And yet,

Disney was evidently completely unprepared for the backlash caused by its decision to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air, a backlash so costly that the company reversed course after just five days — too late to avoid probably irreparable damage to its brand…

It’s important to understand that Trump’s push to destroy democracy depends largely on creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Behind closed doors, business leaders bemoan the destruction that Trump is wreaking on the economy. But they capitulate to his demands because they expect him to consolidate autocratic power — which, given his unpopularity, he can only do if businesses and other institutions continue to capitulate.

If this smoke-and-mirrors juggernaut starts to falter, the perception of inevitability will collapse and Trump’s autocracy putsch may very well fall apart.

So how can we make a Trump implosion more likely? The public can help by doing what Target’s customers and Disney’s audience did — make it clear that they will stop paying money to institutions that lend aid and comfort to the authoritarian project.

Big corporations and fancy law firms may fold. Republican legislators may lack integrity and spines. Supreme Court justices may be unfathomably corrupt. But the effort to silence Kimmel has once again confirmed that We the People have the power to remind all of them that we are Americans who value our liberties more than our access to consumer products or entertainment.

The public response to the Jimmy Kimmel episode may well be the light at the end of our current dark tunnel…..

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Memorize This Paragraph!

A recent paragraph in a Lincoln Square newsletter really–really–struck me. Here’s that paragraph:

The Republican Party in 2025 is locked in a state of sycophantic paralysis. MAGA is not just Trump’s mood swings; it’s a tribal identity. Step out of line, and you get exiled. That’s why even senators with Ivy League résumés suddenly sound like they’re auditioning for a spot on a right-wing podcast — they’re terrified of losing the mob’s loyalty. And here’s the uncomfortable truth Democrats keep sidestepping: a huge chunk of MAGA voters are perfectly willing to suffer. They’ll put up with higher prices, worse health care, collapsing schools, potholes the size of moon craters — and they’ll smile through it — so long as the pain lands harder on someone they hate. Call it recreational spite or political CrossFit: the pain is the point, and the workout “counts” if the libs hurt more. That’s the dynamic behind why they support him.

There’s a substantial body of research confirming that puzzling observation. Illogical as it seems, people who harbor bigotries–people who hate those they label “other”–really are willing to overlook damage they suffer personally if they believe that “those people” are being hurt even more.

Bizarre as that finding is, it explains a lot.

The author quoted Lyndon Johnson, who made the statement as he was signing the Civil Rights Act. Johnson acknowledged that he was signing a measure that would cost Democrats the votes of much of the South (this was back when Southern Democrats were the racists; Democratic support for the Civil Rights Act probably was a factor in the defection of those racists from the party and their migration into today’s White Christian Nationalist cult, aka the GOP.) Johnson quite accurately noted that “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

As the author noted, “MAGA is basically the LBJ theorem in a red hat. The cruelty isn’t the glitch, it’s the subscription plan — the down payment on the fantasy that at least you’re not on the bottom rung.”

Philosophers and theologians, not to mention psychiatrists, can theorize over the deficits in personality and humanity that lead otherwise normal humans to detest those “others” to such a degree that they will accept considerable personal privation if only they can be convinced that those others are suffering more…

The essay referenced the psychological research that explores–but doesn’t explain–this phenomenon.

There’s actual scholarship that explains why this kind of thinking has such a grip. Relative deprivation theory tells us people don’t measure life by absolutes; they measure by comparisons. You’ll tolerate your own struggles as long as your neighbor isn’t doing better; the second you think they’re moving up, resentment flares. Then comes the darker twist. In 2009, Combs and colleagues documented partisan schadenfreude — the perverse pleasure people feel when the “other side” suffers, even if they’re collateral damage themselves. That’s the political equivalent of the Joker in The Dark Knight setting a mountain of his own stolen cash on fire just to watch Gotham panic. Or think of Cartman, South Park’s eternal bully, who will happily wreck his own life if it means making someone else miserable — and still ends up the kid everyone hates. That’s the mindset: voters cheering their own decline as long as someone they despise loses more.

Once I read this, I began to recognize how it works in Trumpland.

Are those tariffs making groceries and everyday items more expensive? Are even immigrants who are in the country legally terrified of the ICE masked bullies who are rounding up anyone with dark skin? Is the war being waged against science–very much including medical science–making it more likely that you will contract a disease, or that a cure for what ails you won’t be forthcoming? Those and other negative consequences of official corruption and stupidity are bearable, because Trump is keeping his promise to go after “those people.” If there has been one through-line in this administration, it has been the unremitting effort to stamp out the progress made by women, people of color and LGBTQ folks, and to elevate White psuedo-Christian males to their former (albeit unearned) social dominance.

File under “pathetic.”

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