Red State Blues

I don’t know indiana State Representative Chis Campbell, and I had to look up her district (26) but everyone in Indiana ought to understand the contents of her recent newsletter, detailing the losses that Indiana will sustain as a result of the carnage being wreaked by the Trump/Musk administration.

Deep-Red Indiana, where citizens love to hate the federal government, is the state third-most reliant on federal funding. We are behind only Louisiana and Mississippi (a statistic that gives credence to the frequent accusation that Indiana’s terrible legislature wants to turn Indiana into the Mississippi of the north).

According to Representative Campbell, nearly 44% of Indiana’s budget comes from federal agencies and grants.

So what are a few of the biggest impacts Trump’s plans will have on Hoosiers? Rep. Campbell lists them.

First, there’s the projected impact of Trump’s insane tariffs. The Conversation calculates that Indiana will be the third most impacted by those tariffs, losing $4.82 billion (a 1.12% decrease in our GDP), primarily in the auto, manufacturing, and agriculture industries. “The auto industry, one of Indiana’s biggest economic sectors, is expected to lose $28.2 billion because of these tariffs.”  It is projected that a Hoosier family of four will spend an extra $2,836 each year, “equivalent to half a year’s worth of utility payments.”

If Trump is successful in ridding us of the much-maligned Department of Education, Indiana will lose $1.8 billion we now get for K-12 and higher education.

The Division of Family Resources (DFR), which primarily funds schools with a high number of low-income students or students in need of special education, receives a little under $2 billion from the federal government. Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) receives approximately $670,000 in Title III funding. These dollars help students who are learning English as a second language, and they benefit approximately 6,400 students in the IPS system. Additionally, students with disabilities rely on the DOE to enforce the right to an individualized education plan.

Then there’s Medicaid.

Congressional Republicans have proposed $880 billion in federal cuts, which would be impossible to achieve without cutting Medicaid or Medicare. Since roughly 70% of Indiana’s funding for Medicaid comes from the national government, Indiana could be in a serious bind. It’s estimated that close to 484,000 Hoosiers would lose their health care coverage if these federal cuts are passed and Indiana fails to cover the costs.

As Representative Campbell notes, the assault on healthcare isn’t confined to Medicaid. Cuts to the NIH–the National Institutes of Health–will dramatically affect Indiana University and Purdue University, both of which rely heavily on federal funding to conduct on-campus medical research.

Cuts to HUD will worsen Indiana’s challenging housing market. We are already one of the most difficult states in which to rent  (Fort Wayne is ranked the third least renter-friendly city in the U.S.). And since HUD enforces fair housing laws, Trump’s cuts to the agency will join his other efforts to revive Jim Crow.

If Trump was capable of rational decision-making, he would re-think his wildly unconstitutional Executive Orders and his support for Musk’s equally unconstitutional chain-saw “efficiencies,” because the data shows that the mayhem is hitting Red states like Indiana far harder than it is affecting Blue states.

It is unlikely that Trump understands that differential impact, or recognizes the European Union’s very deliberate effort to target its responses to his tariffs to the states inhabited by his supporters.  As the linked article from Fortune reports:

The EU measures will cover goods from the United States worth some 26 billion euros ($28 billion), and not just steel and aluminum products, but also textiles, home appliances and agricultural goods. Motorcycles, bourbon, peanut butter and jeans will be hit, as they were during President Donald Trump’s first term.

The EU duties aim for pressure points in the U.S. while minimizing additional damage to Europe. The tariffs — taxes on imports — primarily target Republican-held states, hitting soybeans in House speaker Mike Johnson’s Louisiana, but also beef and poultry in Kansas and Nebraska. Produce in Alabama, Georgia and Virginia is also on the list.

Unfortunately those of us in Red states who aren’t members of the MAGA cult will suffer along with everyone else. And of course, residents of Blue states won’t escape the effects of the combined madness (Trump, Musk) and cowardice (Republicans in Congress).

As the consequences become increasingly impossible to ignore, the resistance will grow. It is already gathering speed: over 11,000 people turned out to hear Bernie Sanders and AOC in bright-Red Greeley, Colorado, and an amazing 34,000 turned out in Denver.

Even in Red Indiana, Town Halls are packed with Americans who aren’t going down without a fight. And as the cuts to Social Security staffs make access difficult-to-impossible, those crowds are exploding.

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The Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight

When I read the astonishing news, the first thing that came to mind was a 1971 film titled “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.” There’s a reason I frequently refer to Trump’s idiot appointees as clowns or Keystone Cops. 

But of course, it isn’t funny.

By now, you’ve undoubtedly read the media reports about a security breach so ludicrous that it could be the subject of a comic film: intelligence officers used a commercial messaging app (Signal) to discuss and coordinate a military strike against Houthi rebels. In the process, they accidentally included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg in those discussions. (Initially, Goldberg– understandably– thought the messages were part of a hoax. Only after the strike occurred as discussed did he realize the texts he’d received were genuine.)

Robert Hubbell (and many others) noted that the recklessness wasn’t simply stupid; it was criminal. As Hubbell pointed out, a government employee of lower rank who committed the same offense would be behind bars “awaiting trial without the benefit of bail. See, e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 793(f) (“Whoever . . . .through gross negligence permits [national defense information] to be . . . delivered to anyone in violation of his trust” shall be fined or imprisoned for up to ten years.”

Huffpost quoted Mayor Pete’s reaction, including the expletive:

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is calling out President Donald Trump and his cabinet after an “epic fuckup” accidentally gave a journalist access to a group chat detailing a planned airstrike in Yemen.
“It is getting clearer by the day that the people in charge of the American government cannot keep the American people safe,” Buttigieg said in a video posted on social media.

In the New York Times, David French addressed the breach, saying that Hegseth should resign, having “blown his credibility as a military leader.”

I’m a former Army JAG officer (an Army lawyer). I’ve helped investigate numerous allegations of classified information spillages, and I’ve never even heard of anything this egregious — a secretary of defense intentionally using a civilian messaging app to share sensitive war plans without even apparently noticing a journalist was in the chat.

There is not an officer alive whose career would survive a security breach like that. It would normally result in instant consequences (relief from command, for example) followed by a comprehensive investigation and, potentially, criminal charges.

Federal law makes it a crime when a person — through gross negligence — removes information “relating to the national defense” from “its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted or destroyed.”

As French and several others have commented, the incident is an example of public officials using a commercial messaging app so that they could avoid accountability by circumventing the “security infrastructure that protects defense secrets and preserves the official records of communications and decision-making by senior government officers.”

The very use of the app broke several laws. French quotes one: Department of Defense Policy Regarding Use of Unclassified Mobile Applications. Paragraph 10 in Attachment Two of that document states:

Unmanaged ‘messaging apps,’ including any app with a chat feature, regardless of the primary function, are NOT authorized to access, transmit, process non-public DoD information. This includes but is not limited . . . iMessage, WhatsApps, [and] Signal.

The use of a commercial messaging app (presumably on personal cell phones!) endangered US national security. That, in itself, was an appalling and entirely illegal lapse. But as French goes on to argue, the reckless disclosure to Jeffrey Goldberg elevates the offense to a level requiring impeachment and removal from office.

And then, of course, there’s our Madman-in-Chief’s response to this gobsmacking breach of security:

One additional unsettling aspect of the affair is that Trump claimed to know nothing about the inadvertent disclosure to Jeffrey Goldberg—even after a representative of the National Security Advisor admitted that the texts received by Goldberg were authentic. Trump is either clueless, lying, or both. There is no combination of those possibilities that reflects favorably on Trump.

The cabinet officials recruited by Trump and obediently confirmed by Senate Republicans are an embarrassing collection of know-nothings, incompetents and conspiracy theorists, leavened with a sprinkling of Russian assets. (Designations that are not mutually exclusive…)

If we needed any additional proof that the administration’s anti-DEI, anti-“elitist,” anti-woke, anti-education assaults are efforts to ensure continuation of the historic dominance of mediocre (and worse) White men over more competent women and minorities–efforts to turn back the clock to a time before individual merit mattered more than a preferred gender or skin color– the pathetic performance of these individuals should be dispositive.

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Why Research Matters

When I joined the faculty of Indiana University after decidedly non-academic stints as a lawyer, real estate developer and  ACLU executive director, non-university friends would often question the institutional obligation to devote considerable time and effort to research. They questioned the reason so many institutions of higher education pursue a “publish or perish” criterion for  tenure (and a number didn’t understand why we had tenure, either).

I’ll leave my fairly robust defense of tenure for another time, but in the face of Trump’s unprecedented assault on universities, the New York Times recently ran an editorial explaining the critical importance of scholarly research.

The editorial began by explaining that what we are seeing is typical of authoritarianism:

When a political leader wants to move a democracy toward a more authoritarian form of government, he often sets out to undermine independent sources of information and accountability. The leader tries to delegitimize judges, sideline autonomous government agencies and muzzle the media.

One of those “independent sources of information” is, rather obviously, scholarship. As the editorial points out, academic researchers pursue the truth–empirical facts– and that can present a threat to those in authority. Putin and Erdogan have closed universities, Modi’s government has arrested dissident scholars, and Orban has appointed loyal foundations to run universities.

Mr. Trump’s multifaceted campaign against higher education is core to this effort to weaken institutions that do not parrot his version of reality. Above all, he is enacting or considering major cuts to universities’ resources. The Trump administration has announced sharp reductions in the federal payments that cover the overhead costs of scientific research, such as laboratory rent, electricity and hazardous waste disposal. (A federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order against those cuts.) Vice President JD Vance and other Republicans have urged a steep increase of a university endowment tax that Mr. Trump signed during his first term. Together, these two policies could reduce the annual budgets at some research universities by more than 10 percent.

There is public dissatisfaction with the very real problems of America’s universities, and the editorial goes into considerable detail about the current deficiencies and problems of those institutions. But as it also notes, just as with Trump’s approach to trade, government waste, and immigration, the administration’s “solutions” won’t ameliorate or address the real problems. It will make things much worse.

The American higher education system, for all its flaws, is the envy of the world, and it now faces a financial squeeze that threatens its many strengths — strengths that benefit all Americans.

Chief among them is its global leadership in medical care and scientific research. American professors still dominate the Nobel Prizes. When wealthy and powerful people in other countries face a medical crisis, they often use their connections to get an appointment at an American academic hospital. For that matter, some of the same Republicans targeting universities with budget cuts seek out its top medical specialists when they or their relatives are ill.

American leadership in medical and scientific research depends on federal money. Private companies, even large ones, typically do not conduct much of the basic research that leads to breakthroughs because it is too uncertain; even successful experiments may not lead to profitable products for decades. Mr. Trump’s planned funding cuts are large enough to force universities to do less of this research. The list of potential forgone progress is long, including against cancer, heart disease, viruses, obesity, dementia and drug overdoses. And there will be costs beyond the medical sector. There is a reason that Silicon Valley sprang up next to a research university.

The Times is right to say that we need to speak–loudly and publicly– about why universities matter, to point to the many ways in which higher education and research promote public health, economic growth and national security. It’s also important to recognize that universities are the largest employers in some regions. And for many Americans, universities have been “an unmatched, if imperfect, engine of upward mobility that can alter the trajectory of entire families.”

Thus far, too many academic officials have been timid and quiet in the face of this assault. That needs to change.

College presidents do not need to become pundits. But they do need to defend the core mission of their institutions when it is under attack. University leaders would help themselves, and the country, by emerging from their defensive crouches and making a forthright case for inquiry, research, science and knowledge.

This administration is waging war on science and knowledge. It’s a war we cannot let them win.

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Unintended Consequences?

One of the dangers of even thoughtful policymaking is the possibility of unintended consequences; as I used to tell my students, even the best-intended legislative efforts can create unforeseen “spinoffs” that range from unfortunate to truly damaging. That’s why careful attention to policy details, consultation with people having expertise on the subject, and thorough review of available evidence are all so important.

So what happens when people in positions of authority are incapable of thoughtful policymaking and dismissive of evidence and expertise? We are about to face the consequences of policymaking by ignorant egomaniacs, and Paul Krugman has identified some of the most obvious.

Krugman notes that the new PM of Canada has ordered a review of that country’s plan to buy a substantial number of U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets, joining European nations that are similarly reconsidering their dependence on U.S. weapons.

This turn away from military dependence on the U.S. is understandable. America is no longer a reliable ally to the world’s democracies; indeed, between Trump’s turn toward Putin and his talk of annexing Canada and Greenland, we don’t look like an ally at all. Rumors that U.S. jets have a “kill switch” that would allow Trump to disable them at will are probably false, but sophisticated military equipment requires a lot of technical support, so you don’t want to buy it from a country you don’t trust.

He then considered several other emerging responses to the chaos being caused by our mad kings, pointing out that a nation “that can’t be trusted to honor agreements or follow the rule of law has to have monetary as well as political and diplomatic consequences.”

Several of those monetary consequences will be very damaging. Krugman says he’s been exploring the available data, and “U.S. exposure to foreign revulsion looks quite large.”

Military hardware isn’t the only export likely to suffer from our new rogue nation status. Our trade deficit in goods is partly offset by a surplus in services trade, but several of our major service exports will definitely be hurt by America’s turn to the dark side.

One of these is education. Many foreigners come to America to study, attracted by the quality of our colleges and universities. In 2023, the most recent year for which data are available, they spent more than $50 billion. But if you were a foreigner considering study in the U.S. next year, wouldn’t you be worried that you might find yourself arrested and deported for expressing what the current administration considers anti-American views? I would. So we can expect a hit to higher education, which, although we rarely think of it this way, is a major U.S. export.

Personal travel — basically tourism — was even bigger, more than $100 billion. But you can be sure that we’ll be seeing a lot fewer Canadians this year and next. And it won’t just be Canadians reconsidering their plans.

Media is already reporting cratering European tourism.

Krugman admits that he’s much more worried about Trump’s threat to our democracy than his bad economic policies. He also notes that– even in purely economic terms–the self-inflicted damage from tariffs and deportations is likely to outweigh the costs caused by other countries’ loss of trust in the United States. That said, those costs are real.

One way to think about this is to say that Trump is doing to America what Elon Musk is doing to Tesla, destroying a valuable brand through erratic behavior and repulsive ideology. Did I mention that Tesla sales in Europe appear to be cratering?

True, there are differences between a private business and a nation-state. I don’t think people visiting Tesla showrooms are subject to random arrest, or that Musk will kill your car if you say something he doesn’t like (although to be honest I’m not entirely sure on either count, especially since Musk seems to be running much of the government.) On the other hand, Tesla depends a lot more on buyer goodwill than the United States as a whole does.

Still, Trump’s belief that America holds all the cards, that the rest of the world needs access to our markets but we don’t need them, is all wrong. We are rapidly losing the world’s trust, and part of the cost will be financial.

I think it’s unlikely that either of our mad megalomaniacs considers the probable or improbable consequences of their actions. The hard core of MAGA cultists will refuse to acknowledge even the outcomes that negatively affect them (and the data suggests that Red states will likely bear the brunt).

We can only hope that a sufficient number of “softer” Trump supporters will realize that the costs of voting their racism have become too high.

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Can Trump/Musk Take Us Back?

At the base of the Trump/Musk war on American values is the question whether the cultural progress we’ve made really can be rolled back–whether the effort to excise references to women and minorities from government websites and bully corporations and universities into abandoning “woke” DEI efforts can successfully return the country to White Christian male dominance. No matter what other excuses are offered by Trump voters, it is that goal that elected Donald Trump.

Call me Pollyanna, but I don’t think it will be successful.

I don’t want to minimize the significance of Trump’s assault on our government and our Constitution–an assault conducted by a senile, intellectually-limited and very greedy man. (His elevation to an office for which he is manifestly unfit was a result of the MAGA bigotry he very clearly shares, but it facilitated his increasingly overt corruption. Want a favor from this autocrat? Buy enough of his “meme coins” and I’m sure he’ll be favorably disposed….)

I understand that what we face is frightening.

That said, America’s culture really has moved on from the bad old days. I’ve lived through the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement and the sexual revolution, and I can attest to the fact that the social environment we inhabit today (at least in cities…and probably even in most rural precincts) is considerably different than the one I was born into.

I thought about how far those changes have taken us when I went with members of my (mixed religion) family to a St. Patrick’s Day celebration at Indianapolis’ Athenaeum–a magnificent edifice that once served as home for our city’s pro-Nazi German American bund. It was a mob scene of Black, White and Asian folks wearing green, and I couldn’t help thinking how far the Irish have come from the early days of Irish immigration, when native-born “real” Americans criticized Irish immigrants for  their supposed laziness and lack of discipline, their public drinking style, their religion, and their presumed capacity for criminality and violence. (Sound familiar?)

Today, Americans from a wide variety of backgrounds–including our local German establishments– don green clothes and drink green beer to celebrate St. Patrick’s day.

It isn’t just the integration of Irish and German immigrants. Over the past half-century, Blacks and women have become increasingly prominent parts of the workforce and the political world, intermarriages between people of different races and religions have soared, gay folks have come out and married…and while we’re still adjusting our attitudes about people who identify as trans, understanding and acceptance are infinitely higher than they once were.

That cultural progress has produced major changes in both law and public opinion. As the Brookings Institution has noted, it’s not 1968 anymore. “Seventy-six percent of Americans now say that discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities in the United States is a “big problem,” including 57% of conservatives, 71% of whites, and 69% of whites without college degrees. Pew Research has found that  large shares of Americans recognize the existence of discrimination against minorities. “About eight-in-ten see discrimination against Muslims and Jews, as well as against Arab, Black and Hispanic people.” That percentage is considerably higher than those who believe–with MAGA and Donald Trump– that efforts at equity  discriminate against White Christians.

The electoral successes of MAGA Republicans would have been impossible but for the frantic resistance of  White Christian Evangelicals to these cultural changes. While the rest of us have been going about our daily lives, accepting (and often applauding) the changes in the culture, White Christian Nationalists have mounted a determined resistance. They are not a majority of Americans, but the real majority–the rest of us– have large differences in ideology and political identity. The cultish coherence of MAGA’s resentments and anger have allowed them to amass far more power than their raw numbers would entitle them to.

THE question that confronts us now is whether those of us who applaud–or at least accept– America’s social and cultural changes can resist the Trump/MAGA efforts to return us to a much meaner time.

Can those of us in the majority– Black and White, Hispanic and Asian, Jew and Muslim and atheist, the civically active and the politically apathetic– come together and resist the intense rage of the White Christian Nationalists? Can we ignore our very real differences and work together toward the shared goal of protecting the American Idea and restoring constitutional government?

If we can all be Irish on St. Patrick’s day, this Pollyanna thinks we can.

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