In a recent newsletter, Paul Krugman succinctly described what Trump has done to the economy. Granted, his economic ignorance is only a part of the current devastation–there are also the daily assaults on the constitution and individual liberties, and the continuing restoration of the Confederacy and its out-and-proud racism and misogyny…
But a lot of people who don’t care about the American Idea or fundamental fairness do care about their bottom lines. So Krugman’s summary ought to matter. Here’s that summary:
He has imposed high tariffs, undoing the effects of 90 years of trade negotiations. His deportation policies are already creating labor shortages and supply disruptions in multiple sectors of the economy. His Big Beautiful Budget Bill, aside from being cruel, is fiscally irresponsible. Deportations will undermine Social Security and Medicare. His drastic cuts to scientific research will undermine U.S. technology, and hence long-run economic growth.
That recap was an intoduction to Krugman’s analysis of why the stock market hasn’t tanked (yet), which he attributes to faith in the promise of AI. (My jury is out on the question of whether that “promise” is really a threat…) He also points out that the market has historically been a poor predictor of longer-term economic trends.
Whatever the market’s performance means–or doesn’t–it’s impossible to read that quoted paragraph without recognizing the enormity and inevitability of decline in American prosperity unless the mindlessness and madness aren’t reversed.
I wonder whether Trump voters will find the restoration of Confederate statuary and philosophy worth the economic costs…
A long time ago, when I was serving as Corporation Counsel in the Hudnut Administration, I had a conversation with an active Republican friend that I’ve long remembered. I don’t recall the issue, but at one point she offered an observation that has proved all too true: The problem with too many of our elected officials is that they are representative.
The clown car that is the Trump administration wouldn’t be possible but for the 40% of Americans who–polling tells us–approve of our would-be king and his demented court.
That figure absolutely terrifies me. How is it possible that some forty percent of our fellow citizens look at the daily disasters–the assault on reason, on education, on accurate history, on science–and disregard the effects of monumental ignorance and incompetence on their own daily lives? How do they look at nutjobs like RFK, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard and so many others and say, yep, those are our guys?
Far-right extremist Laura Loomer says that she is now working with the federal government to identify individuals within the Department of Defense who are leaking information to the press.
Speaking with CNN in an interview published Monday, Loomer claimed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had personally turned to her for help quieting down the noise coming from his department. The self-appointed “loyalty enforcer” has had enormous success influencing the Trump administration from the outside: An analysis by The Daily Beast found that at least 16 individuals were fired from the federal government after Loomer singled them out.
And who did he replace them with? According to the article, Hegseth trusts only his wife and a small inner circle. (America feels safer already…)
Talking Points Memo has highlighted another “qualified” appointment.
It’s almost hard to be shocked anymore by the characters Trump has tapped for top positions in federal agencies, but at Puck News, this Julia Ioffe profile of Lew Olowski, who is running human resources for the State Department, is a stunning cascade of bizarre revelations.
Once a member of the legal team for convicted Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadžić, Olowski had been a first-tour foreign service officer since 2017 when Marco Rubio summoned him to Washington from an overseas assignment in January. He alarmed department veterans by giving weird speeches about God, prayer, the Bible, and dolphins.
“He quickly made a name for himself at Foggy Bottom by marching into the office of the ombuds and telling everyone that they were being put on administrative leave, and that their office was being dissolved,” Ioffe writes. “The office’s employees later discovered that they had been transferred to the Office of Civil Rights, whose chief counsel was Heather Olowski, Lew’s wife, and the minister of a church that the couple runs.” From there, Olowski set about rooting out all supposed DEI “by changing the way the State Department recruits and promotes people, including by introducing the concept of ‘fidelity’ as an attribute that diplomats should be graded on.” Fidelity to Trump, that is.
These examples bring me back to my unanswerable question: how did we get to the point where forty percent of Americans are satisfied with the appointments of these ignorant and deranged individuals–perfectly happy to place the prospects of this country in the hands of people lacking any expertise or qualifications?
I’m pretty sure that most of them are Fox viewers blissfully unaware of the situation, but that simply raises a somewhat different question: what explains the gullibility and the chosen ignorance of so many of our fellow citizens? Is the obvious answer–the virulent racism– that widespread?
As I was scrolling through my past posts (admittedly, looking for something I could cannibalize during my recovery), I came across the “Last Lecture” I gave ten years ago. The Last Lecture is an annual address to the faculty by a member who is tasked with explaining the life experiences that shaped that member’s philosophy and perspective.
It occurred to me that readers of my daily rants are also entitled to understand how I’ve come to the conclusions I share each day.
This speech from ten years ago is long, and probably irrelevant to many of you, so feel free to skip the full linked version, but here are a couple of introductory paragraphs that help explain my development into the crotchety blogger you’ve come to know…
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I think I have always been a “political” person, in the sense that the question that has always fascinated me is: how should people live together? What sort of social and political arrangements are most likely to nourish our humanity and promote—in Aristotle’s term—human flourishing? If the old African proverb is right, if it “takes a village to raise a child,” what should that village look like, and how should its inhabitants behave? How do we build that kind of village? Is the human community headed in the right direction, or are we on the wrong road? My conclusions have been shaped by my life experiences as much as by my scholarship, and for the last several years, some of them have been keeping me up at night.
Let me begin with an important caveat: unlike so many of you in this room, I am not a scholar in the traditional sense; in fact, I have been a lifelong dilettante. (I do prefer the term “generalist,” but as Popeye said, “I yam what I yam”…) I’ve done a lot of different things over the past 50+ years, and the result is that I know a little about a lot of things, but depth isn’t my strong suit. Over the years, however—probably as a defense mechanism—I’ve convinced myself that there is value in casting one’s intellectual net rather widely. In my case, at least, it has allowed me to connect some seemingly unconnected dots, even when my own mastery of the subjects involved is tenuous or superficial.
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What struck me as I scrolled through this ten-year-old speech was the extent to which our current dysfunctions were already emerging–the rejection of reason and science that was already laying the groundwork for today’s disasters. For those of you willing to slog through the whole speech, I’ll be interested in your comments…..
A quick status report: I am improving each day, but my guess is that this site will continue to experience glitches, probably attributable to my medicated status. Yesterday, the emails failed to send at the scheduled time–fortunately, my techie son intervened and was able to fix the issue. Every day, it seems, there’s something. (The day after my brief hospital stay, an uninsured driver t-boned our daughter’s car; fortunately, she and our granddaugher were just bruised, but the car was totalled. The next day, my husband pulled out a kitchen drawer and it–and he– collapsed. Again, fortunately, he’s fine, but I’m getting a bit leery.)
I really appreciate all the kind words, and your willingness to hang in there with me! This too will pass–and if we’re lucky, MAGA will pass too…
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Today’s will be a “quickie,” because I’m focusing on something you all already know (and I still can’t sit at the computer for long periods of time.)
This week’s job report was weak–shockingly weak. That wasn’t a surprise to anyone who passed Econ 101 (or to pretty much anyone who can read); we are just beginning to see the effects of Trump’s idiotic tariffs. But of course, the Mad King responded to the unfavorable data as is his wont: with anger and denial. How dare reality deviate from his imagined brilliance? So he fired the person in charge of analyzing and publishing the data.
As the folks at Lincoln Square noted,
One basic character of the politicization necessary to create an authoritarian regime is that public employees are reluctant to share information that displeases their political bosses. When those bosses can fire them, the incentives to suppress uncongenial information, or provide false information, become overwhelming.
Over time, life in these countries become bifurcated. Statistics become propaganda. There is an official reality, which many proclaim but few believe, and actual reality. And at some point actual reality catches up with the fantasy.
Reality, of course, is a place Trump has yet to visit.
Ever since Trump assumed office, civil servants have been reluctant to contradict the various moronic eruptions emanating from the Oval Office and from the assortment of clowns comprising what passes for a cabinet. So Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-science beliefs about vaccines are rapidly degrading public health, and the fossil fuel tools at the EPA are pretending that there’s no such thing as climate change. Etc.
People who are unwilling to “go along to get along” are fired.
Those who survive will keep telling us that the Emperor’s new clothes are magnificent, and what’s left of America’s credibility will continue to tank.
Every day, we Americans awake to another assault on the foundations of our governing system. As we attend to each day’s news, each day’s effort to deconstruct constitutional government, we are in danger of losing the big picture, the scope of the losses we’re suffering.
I don’t know whether this “firehose” approach is a conscious strategy; Trump’s already substandard intellect and mental health are declining at such a rapid rate that restraints on his impulsiveness–never strong–are similarly declining. Intentional or not, however, it’s working to distract us.
We simply cannot allow the rapidity with which MAGA is dismantling American government to obscure the big picture, the overall damage. Recently, Heather Cox Richardson included that overview in one of her essential “Letters,” and her description is worth citing:
Six months into the second Trump administration, on the sixtieth anniversary of the law that symbolized the modern American state by establishing Medicare and Medicaid, it’s clear we are indeed in a revolution designed to destroy the government we have known in favor of the radical right-wing government envisioned by those who wrote Project 2025.
From the beginning, the administration declared war on the words that protected equal rights for all Americans, fired women and racial minorities from leadership positions, and attacked transgender Americans. It worked to replace civil servants with loyalists who embraced the tenets of Project 2025, putting people like former Fox News host Pete Hegseth at the head of government agencies. Yesterday Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that in a break with past practices, Hegseth, now secretary of defense, is requiring nominees for four-star general positions in the U.S. military to meet personally with Trump.
It worked to dismantle the government by refusing to release the money Congress had appropriated to fund the existing government. Thanks to billionaire Elon Musk at the “Department of Government Efficiency” and Russell Vought—another author of Project 2025—at the Office of Management and Budget, the administration illegally impounded funds, slashing through funding for foreign aid, cancer research, veterans’ benefits, air traffic control staffing, and so on, claiming to be eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” That fight is ongoing.
Richardson proceeded to enumerate the extent to which MAGA is implementing Project 2025–shrinking or abolishing government programs that serve ordinary people while further enriching the wealthy. The party of “limited government” is dramatically expanding government’s power.
The administration set out to purge the country of what extremists claimed was “leftist” influence in law firms, media, and universities. It illegally blocked lawyers from law firms that represented Democrats from access to federal buildings, making it impossible for them to represent their clients. It sued media outlets for alleged bias, and it withheld congressionally appropriated funds for universities.
There’s much more, as we all know– that daily firehose of assaults on the government of We the People, assaults aimed at replacing the America we thought we knew. substituting cronies for civil servants so that “royal court” can invite bribery and engage in open corruption with impunity.
We the People need to keep that big picture in mind. We need to ignore the self-engrossed pundits mucking around in the weeds, criticising various Democrats and focusing on perceived past errors. We have one job. ONE JOB. We need to take Congress back from the GOP invertebrates who will go down in history either as complicit fascists or disgraceful quislings.
