Tag Archives: Trump

L’Etat, Ce Moi

“L’etat, ce moi”–meaning,  “the state, it is me– is a French phrase attributed to King Louis XIV, who probably never said it. Nevertheless, it represents the foundational concept of absolute monarchy, a regime in which the king has total authority over the state. 

I am confident that Donald Trump, the least educated President in history, never encountered the phrase, but its meaning clearly animates his conception of the Presidency. Law–in Trump’s limited and inaccurate view–is whatever he says it is. It certainly doesn’t exist as a separate framework.

In recent articles, the New York Times has outlined how this wholly unAmerican approach to the Presidency is undermining the rule of law, as our would-be monarch decides what rules should be ignored in the corrupt interests of his pocketbook and those of his plutocratic cohorts. 

 The most vicious and far-reaching attempts to thwart the laws of the land have come as part of Trump’s racist efforts to root out D.E.I. and other measures aiming to ameliorate discrimination.  Trump has ordered government offices to simply stop enforcing numerous civil rights provisions. According to a Times  newsletter (link unavailable), the Labor Department will no longer investigate employers who allegedly underpaid women or awarded promotions based on race. The administration has  abandoned hundreds of pending cases under the fair housing law–abandoning efforts to prosecute landlords who keep out gay people or owners who refuse to sell to people of a different faith. Trump has also instructed the government to nix the “disparate-impact” test, which looked at whether minority groups were affected differently by criminal background checks, credit checks, zoning regulations and other facially neutral laws.

And recognizing that direct orders are not the only way to stymie the enforcement of laws on the books, Trump has slashed budgets and head counts, which has a similar effect. As the Times accurately noted, laws work only if people are there to enforce them. So the EPA has been eviscerated under this administration; its ability to enforce environmental measures crippled. Employment at the IRS has been cut, severely limiting the ability of that agency to pursue tax cheats (like the President himself). Etc.

Mainstream media sources routinely describe measures taken by the Trump administration as “authoritarian.” That is, of course, accurate–but it tends to obscure the effects of the measures described above (and the many similar ones)–tends to make the very real harms seem somewhat abstract. (Theoretically, after all, an authoritarian leader could impose measures that advanced the public good–authoritarianism is the process, not the consequence.)

The same problem arises when pundits and bloggers like yours truly bemoan the daily assaults on the rule of law. Rule of law, too, is an abstraction. What isn’t abstract is when ICE thugs ignore the constitutional rights of those they are intimidating and snatching off the streets, or when the administration refuses to comply with the terms of its prior research grants.

A significant body of research confirms that a troubling percentage of the American public actually wants an authoritarian government–a ruler who relieves them of the burden of exercising thoughtful and responsible citizenship. Whether that desire to be ruled rather than governed is a result of inadequate civic education or personal intellectual/emotional deficit is unknown; it is also unknown whether those who prefer a monarchy to a democracy approve of the way the current Mad King and his Congressional enablers/courtiers are conducting–or refusing to conduct– the affairs of state. 

That Times newsletter did readers a favor by discarding the abstractions and pointing out the specifics of an authoritarianism that manifests its contempt for fundamental fairness and the rule of law every day.

MAGA cult members are likely to be surprised when their chosen authoritarian’s “policies” further enrich the plutocrats while tanking the economy, instituting stagflation, closing rural hospitals and throwing grandma off Medicaid. That’s the problem with allowing someone–anyone, but especially this bloated, ignorant and embarrassing buffoon–to believe that he is “the state.”

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Calling It What it Is

When Trump won a first term in 2016, virtually all pundits and traditional media outlets bent over backwards to give his voters the benefit of the doubt. They mostly attributed his support to economic anxiety, despite the fact that a significant majority of poorer Americans had voted for Hillary Clinton. 

Research in the wake of that election pointed to a very different motive for those votes: racism. Over the intervening years, it has become abundantly clear that what scholars delicately refer to as “racial resentment” is the glue holding MAGA together–and yet, the legacy media still seems reluctant  to call it what it is.

Non-“legacy” sources, however, increasingly point to the elephant in the room. (Pun intended.)

Heather Cox Richardson recently took on Trump’s efforts to cow museums into an alternate view of history, writing

When Trump says that our history focuses too much on how bad slavery was, he is not simply downplaying the realities of human enslavement: he is advocating a world in which Black people, people of color, poor people, and women should let elite white men lead, and be grateful for that paternalism. It is the same argument elite enslavers made before the Civil War to defend their destruction of the idea of democracy to create an oligarchy. When Trump urges Republicans to slash voting rights to stop socialism and keep him in power, he makes the same argument former Confederates made after the war to keep those who would use the government for the public good from voting.

Talking Points Memo has been equally blunt. In a recent Morning Memo titled “Trump Pushes White Nationalist Agenda Across Multiple Fronts,” Josh Marshall wrote that Trump’s anti-immigrant animus is

fundamentally a story about racism, xenophobia, and othering. It’s about preying on our fears, differences, and prejudices to create a villainous foe whom he can easily vanquish in repeated set-pieces. It’s about letting loose the worst of our impulses to heighten and sustain divisions among us.

The mass deportation agenda is just one part of a larger agenda in which white Americans are fronted as the real America and everyone else is second-class, unless they individually demonstrate in lavish ways a high enough degree of fealty to Donald Trump.

And at Lincoln Square, Stuart Stevens was even more direct, writing that Trump is a racist and that fact needs to be called out.

After decades of evidence — the dog whistles, the calls for innocent black men to be executed, the bizarre fixation on the Confederacy, his alliance with known Nazis and White Christian Nationalists — saying these things, that Donald Trump is a fascist, that he is a racist, should be the least controversial thing to say about him….

For seven months, he’s rounded up brown people for deportation, imprisonment, or total disappearance. He’s attempting to convince his base that slavery wasn’t so bad, after all. Some in his orbit are echoing this sentiment, going so far as to claim we shouldn’t actually blame white people for slavery.

He doesn’t like Black or brown people. Nearly every action is motivated by that dislike. Every breath he takes is flush with a fear and hatred of people who are not white.

What would you call that?

Ever since 2016, Americans of goodwill have tied ourselves in knots trying to understand why any sentient person would vote for Donald Trump–an ignorant buffoon with a limited intellect and unlimited self-regard. The answer to that question has always been obvious, despite a well-meaning desire that it not be so. 

James Carville was wrong. It isn’t “the economy, stupid.” It’s the racism, stupid! As my youngest son observed, way back in 2016, only two kinds of people voted for Donald Trump: those who shared his racism, and those for whom it wasn’t disqualifying.

The civil war really never ended. It just morphed.

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When Data Can’t Be Trusted

In the wake of the last report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics–a report reflecting the effect of Trump’s insane approach to economic matters–the Mad King responded by firing the chief labor statistician, Erika McEntarfer, a highly respected expert.

Trump has now nominated one EJ Antoni to be the chief labor statistician for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Robert Hubbell reports that Antoni would be leaving his job at the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation, “where he specialized in generating economic propaganda that had only a passing acquaintance with economic reality. In other words, he is a perfect candidate to create fake reports about the imaginary performance of the US economy.” As Hubbell notes, although it’s rare for members of a profession to criticize one another publicly, Antoni has been an exception; he’s drawn withering criticism from numerous respected members of the economic community. 

Should average Americans care who heads up the Bureau of Labor Statistics? Or for that matter, which government pooh-ba is put in charge of determining whether government should fund development of a vaccine against, say, bird flu? How much are our everyday lives affected by obscure government agencies that are charged with determining the outlines of our shared reality? 

That seemed like a good question to ask Chatgpt, so I did. The AI pinpointed a number of consequences, including misguided monetary policy, with the Fed raising or lowering interest rates inappropriately, risking recession or runaway inflation.
Also, in normal times, Congress and the White House rely on BLS data to design stimulus programs, tax changes or spending cuts. (These, of course, are not normal times. Bad numbers lead to bad decisions, and we can expect some terrifyingly bad decisions as a result of this latest attack on facts and real-world evidence.)

The AI also noted that it isn’t just government that relies on the data generated; private companies use BLS data to forecast demand for their products, to set wages and to make hiring and location decisions. 

There was a lot more, but the bottom line was that “inaccurate BLS data can ripple from policy boardrooms to factory floors, from Wall Street to Main Street, and from short-term market moves to long-term structural harm. Even though BLS regularly revises its data to correct errors, the damage from bad initial reports—especially in fast-moving markets or politics—can’t always be undone.” In other words, even good-faith efforts by competent analysts will sometimes generate inaccurate results, and those errors can damage the economy. How much more damage can fanciful numbers manufactured for political reasons do? (Don’t look now, but we’re about to find out…)

Trump’s assault on the Bureau of Labor Statistics is consistent with MAGA’s other frantic efforts to ignore and reject much of contemporary reality. Unfortunately for these angry, unhappy people, replacing accurate economic data with propaganda will not magically usher in a more robust economy, just as jettisoning sound science will not make Americans healthier, and rewriting American history will not return White “Christian” men to social dominance.

It will simply destroy the American experiment.

If I decide that gravity is just a “theory” and jump off a tall building, my rejection of that “theory” won’t save me. Fudging the numbers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics won’t help Americans find jobs or afford groceries. No matter how desperately MAGA folks want to bend reality to their will, it just doesn’t work that way.
 
 
 

 

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The War On Science

A couple of things before I’m unable to continue sitting:

First, thank you all for the “get well” messages. MUCH appreciated.

Second, the outlines of the MAGA/Trump war are becoming clearer every day. It isn’t just an assault on democracy and the constitution–it’s an assault on modernity: on human knowledge and especially science. All science, not just medical science.

As the New York Times (among others) reported yesterday,

In Game-Changing Climate Rollback, E.P.A. Aims to Kill a Bedrock Scientific Finding
The proposal is President Trump’s most consequential step yet to derail federal climate efforts and appears to represent a shift toward outright denial of the scientific consensus.

We’re fighting a war for civilization and a habitable planet.

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Epstein

The central mystery of MAGA’s devotion to Donald Trump has always been–at least to me–one incomprehensible question: how can any minimally reasonable person look at this man– an adjudicated felon and sex offender, a thin-skinned buffoon and bully constantly lashing out at any criticism with kindergarten-level insults and a third-grade vocabulary–and think, “yep, that’s the guy I want to entrust with the nuclear codes.” How can anyone who can read or watch news videos ignore the increasingly psychotic behaviors?

It’s understandable that people who don’t follow the news, or who get their “news” from Fox, et al, might have missed the copious evidence of his greed, and his use of the Presidency to enrich himself–although the most recent evidence (Paramount Plus’ payment of a bribe to get the government to approve a merger that will make its owner billions) has been very widely publicized.

Evidently, none of this matters to the MAGA cult: not the stupidity, not the ignorance, not the greed. Not the enormous damage he is doing to the country. Cult leaders can do no wrong.

So what explains the evident defection of so many MAGA cultists over the Epstein cover-up? Why of all things has the increasing likelihood that he participated in the rape of numerous young girls penetrated (no pun intended) MAGA’s “see no evil” devotion? After all, they were happy to ignore all the evidence of his predatory sexual behavior against adult women–E. Jean Carroll’s successful lawsuit, the 26 women who’ve claimed they were subjects of groping and other inappropriate assaults, his own taped admission that, being a “star” (at least in his wildly inflated opinion) he could grab women by the you-know-what.

Sane Americans are cheered by recent polling that shows Trump’s precipitous decline, but according to Gallup there are still 37% of Americans who approve of his performance as President. Thirty-seven percent of us look at this pathetic, criminal ignoramus and say “looks good to me.”

Psychologists tell us that one of the most important aspects of a cult–one of the most attractive attributes to members–is the reduction of the individual’s autonomy, the ceding of control over large areas of one’s life to someone else.  As one article I read put it, the cult controls people’s thinking and behaviour, their choices about who to associate with, what jobs to do, who to marry or have relationships with, what to believe, and depending upon how extreme, when to eat and sleep and even in some notorious cases when to die.

In addition to relieving the burden of thinking for oneself, in the case of MAGA, mountains of research have affirmed the central role played by racism. As American society has changed in ways that most of us would consider positive, White “Christian” men have experienced those changes as assaults on their status. How dare those uppity women take management positions? When did those Black and Brown people get the idea that they were entitled to equality? Gay people are getting married! There were plenty of straight White males who experienced the progress of others as an assault–as deprivation of their god-given right to dominance. Trump validated their anger and bitterness at a world that was failing to accord them the status they believe is their due. He made it okay to voice their racism, homophobia and misogyny.

Most of all, he provided them with stories to tell themselves. One of the most pervasive of those stories was that of the Deep State. Government was filled with horrible Democrats who sexually abused (and even ate) helpless children. Cult members were the good guys who were going to root out these terrible people and return control of the country to the good guys who deserve to control it. It was an article of faith, a part of the cult identity.

What happens when this article of faith encounters the reality that Trump–the man with whom they identified themselves in this holy war against evil– is one of the bad guys, one of the Deep State pedophiles? I think we’re about to find out.

Some of the faithful will simply reject the evidence, but as we are seeing, others will experience disillusion.

I don’t know what the outcome will be, but thus far, Trump’s usual tactics–lie, call out “fake news,” blame Obama and Hillary Clinton, manufacture distractions–haven’t worked. There are several possible outcomes: MAGA may burrow more deeply into denial and cognitive dissonance. They may double down. Or they may defect.

We shall see…

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