Tag Archives: Trump

Political Anguish

For the length of my 83 years, I have been proud of being an American Jew.

My deep devotion to this country has been based upon its commitment to what I call “The American Idea,” the philosophy that permeates our foundational documents. The principles set out in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights undergird creation of an open society–a society in which individuals have the right to live in accordance with their beliefs, so long as they do not harm others. In such a system, minorities thrive. Granted, slavery and various bigotries have challenged that goal of civic equality over our history, but the U.S. was the first country to aspire to a system where government power flows from the people rather than the other way around, and is structured to protect individual liberty.

And even though I’m an atheist, I am a very Jewish atheist, adhering to the values of a Jewish culture that admonishes us “Justice, justice shall thou pursue,” and counsels that–while we aren’t expected to perfect the world in one generation–we aren’t free not to try. The Jewish commitment to community has produced citizens who believe in social justice for everyone, not just the “elect” or chosen, and who feel an obligation to help achieve it.

Everyone who reads this blog knows what is occurring in today’s “Trumpified” America. And most know how far Netanyahu has deviated from the founding beliefs and Jewish values of the State of Israel.

Ezra Klein recently had a lengthy–and excellent–essay in the New York Times, in which he made two important points: many American Jews believe that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, and opposition by non-Jews to Israel’s actions is not anti-Semitism. (Granted, many anti-Semites have gleefully latched on to anti-Zionism, but the opinion that Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza are genocidal has been voiced by Israelis, including Jewish scholars of genocide.)

Klein notes that the American Jewish community is split, largely but not entirely on generational lines, with younger Jews more critical of Israel. I can certainly understand that. I still remember my mother crying as she read the Black Book–a compendium of Nazi atrocities. Like most Jewish families, we had a blue box where pennies and nickels were collected to plant trees in Israel, which was seen as the only place in the world where Jews could be safe. Older American Jews retain their devotion to the “Promised land,” and have enormous difficulty believing that it is behaving in a manner entirely contrary to the most central values of the Jewish religion.

Where do these twin disasters–the disintegration of American governmental structures and norms, and the unbelievable deviation of the Jewish state from the values on which it was founded– leave people who (like yours truly) have made allegiance to those norms and values central to their lives and behaviors?

I practiced law for several years. I spent six years as the Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU. I spent two decades teaching students public policy through a constitutional lens, emphasizing the various ways in which our governmental structure and the protections of the Bill of Rights enable what Aristotle called “human flourishing.” (Not that it was perfect, nor all of its provisions adequate for all time.) Watching the destruction of the rule of law, and the cowardly obedience of what was once my political party to a demented manchild, has been agonizing.

Like most Jews, I felt a special kinship to Israel as it operated as a haven for my co-religionists all over the world. I took pride in the ability of its original settlers to create a vibrant and vital state from the desert, although I did disagree with certain aspects of its governance–especially the settlements policy. (Despite anti-Semetic slurs, that kinship was nothing like “dual loyalty,” any more than my Irish friends’ special fondness for Ireland constitutes dual loyalty.)

I encourage those of you reading this to click through and read Klein’s essay in its entirety; he captures the angst of both  Israel’s defenders and those of us who simply cannot see any honest way to justify what is occuring.

The two main pillars of my philosophical/intellectual life are being erased. I feel the way my friends who are real Christians feel as they watch their faith being appropriated by very unChristian Christian Nationalists.

To define this situation as “unpleasant” would be a gross understatement.

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A Timely Reminder

There’s a tendency to lose focus on past Trumpian insanities while fixating on the most recent ones–and insanities come daily from our mad would-be king. But as we approach the next arbitrarily-set date for the institution of his further, higher tariffs, it’s probably a good time to revisit the impacts of one of his biggest and most damaging misconceptions. In a recent column, Michael Hicks patiently explains why we citizens will pay for that misconception, and why the costs Americans will have to absorb due to Trump’s tariffs are worse than additional costs attributable to inflation.

As Hicks writes, “the average American family will pay about $2,500 more this year because of tariffs. But unlike inflation, your wages won’t rise to compensate. That’s because tariffs work differently than inflation.”

Inflation is a decline in the value of currency over time. It happens because there is too much currency in circulation. That extra money can enter the economy through a growing deficit, as happened after the 2020 CARES Act, the 2021 American Rescue Plan and—the most inflationary of these—President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. 

When certain tax and spending policies meet monetary growth ( a result of miscalculations by the Federal Reserve), the result is inflation. Inflation affects all goods and services, including wages. (During the last inflationary bout, wages actually grew more than prices for the average private sector worker.) Not so with tariffs.

Tariffs work very differently. Tariffs are taxes on imports and range from 10% to 55%, depending on the country of origin, the product in question and the president’s hormone level.

Hicks reminds readers that American consumers pay tariffs–not the countries producing the goods, despite Trump’s insistence that tariffs are a fiscal punishment for the countries exporting the merchandise. 

Thus far, consumers haven’t really seen the higher prices that Trump’s tariffs will produce. That’s because, as Hicks explains, imports spiked in February, March and April as American businesses bought nearly five extra months’ worth of goods. That was in order to beat the tariff deadlines and avoid the extra tax. The surge meant that “many of the goods now on store shelves and being assembled into cars, computers and washing machines were bought before the tariffs, keeping price increases relatively low.”

The consumer price index—the main measure of inflation—rose 0.3% in the latest reading. That’s modest, but it came as the Federal Reserve was successfully reducing inflation. Prices have stopped falling and are rising again.

These higher prices are solely due to Trump tariffs. They are poised to worsen substantially as the stockpile of pre-tariff goods are sold by retailers or put onto cars, RVs and other American-made products. The cost of goods sold later this summer, and until tariffs are eliminated, will continue to rise.

This increase in prices and the consumer price index will look, feel and taste just like inflation. Journalists and even economists will call it inflation, but it’s not inflation. If it was inflation, we’d eventually see wages rising as well. But higher tariff costs don’t lead to higher wages; in fact, the opposite may occur.

The tariffs took the U.S. from 2.4% growth in the fourth quarter of 2024 to -0.5% in the first quarter this year. The economy continues contracting, which will reduce wage growth and maybe even reverse it. So, as prices go up, wages will decline for the average worker.

Trump keeps insisting that his tariffs will cause businesses to increase domestic production–to build factories in the U.S. There are a number of false assumptions underlying that prediction, and we are already seeing a drop, not an increase, in factory employment. Hicks notes that the two months of data that became available since Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs were announced show that the U.S. lost 14,000 factory jobs.

As he also points out, the slowdown in the economy this year follows a pattern that virtually all economists have identified as an outcome of tariffs–one reason for the global decline in their incidence. He also tells us that price increases due to the imposition of tariffs is not–at least technically–inflation. 

The technical name for rising prices during a weak economy is stagflation. And Hicks reminds us that stagflation is “what made the 1970s so miserable.”

Despite MAGA world’s constant dishonest attacks on Joe Biden, he presided over America’s robust economic recovery; he left Trump an economy that was globally envied. But then, Biden had assets Trump lacks–decency, a working brain, and a firm connection to reality. 

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That Pesky Thing Called Reality

There’s an old adage that counsels us to be careful what we wish for.

Before our mad king’s ascension to a second term, lots of Americans held negative views of immigrants. Political pundits attributed a good deal of Trump’s support to his promise to rid the country of these terrible people, the majority of whom (he asserted) were criminals and rapists.

That’s one promise the Trump administration is trying to keep, unlike its promises to curb inflation and cut out government “waste and fraud.” ICE has sent masked, armed enforcers after those nefarious lawbreakers–well, really, after everyone who “looks” undocumented (basically, engaging in racial profiling, yet another Trump administration unconstitutional practice).

So, how much has the keeping of that promise– the delivery of a result that MAGA folks ardently wished for–increased support for the administration? Strangely enough, it turns out that reality has punctured the always dishonest portrayals of America’s undocumented immigrants.

Gallup polling has charted that unanticipated turnaround:

Just months after President Donald Trump returned to office amid a wave of anti-immigration sentiment, the share of U.S. adults saying immigration is a “good thing” for the country has jumped substantially — including among Republicans, according to new Gallup polling.

About 8 in 10 Americans, 79%, say immigration is “a good thing” for the country today, an increase from 64% a year ago and a high point in the nearly 25-year trend. Only about 2 in 10 U.S. adults say immigration is a bad thing right now, down from 32% last year.

What has caused the shift? 

Well, first of all, despite Trump’s dishonest descriptions of an “invasion” of undocumented criminals, it turns out that there really aren’t many criminals out there. Experts have calculated that there may be–at most– only around 78,000 undocumented immigrants with any sort of  criminal record, and of that number, only 14,000 have been convicted of violent crimes. Given Stephen Miller’s demand that ICE arrest 3,000 people a day, ICE has turned its attention to farm workers and day laborers.

For example, multiple media sources have confirmed that the great majority of detainees held at Alligator Alcatraz, the immigration detention center (concentration camp) built in the Florida Everglades, do not have criminal records or charges pending against them in the U.S. — despite Donald Trump claiming the facility would hold “the most vicious people on the planet.”

For that matter, in the case of immigrants who do have records, most of those records are for immigration violations, which are technically civil offenses.

Business owners–especially landscape companies, construction companies and restaurant/hotel owners–have lost significant segments of their workforces, as ICE has rounded up workers who may have been undocumented but who were anything but dangerous criminals. Grocers (and their customers) are dealing with increased prices, as farmers have lost numerous undocumented workers who picked their crops.

And as ICE has moved to deport their friends and neighbors, many more Americans have come to recognize the indiscriminate cruelty of these sweeps. It turns out that abstract promises about ridding the country of undocumented criminals is conflicting with the reality of these roundups.

Masked ICE agents have refused to show ID as they continue to engage in a variety of offensive and unconstitutional behaviors, sparking outrage.

Not only have ICE “enforcers” engaged in racial profiling, “immigration enforcement” is increasingly being used as a barely-veiled cover for efforts to chill the exercise of free speech. Columbia University student, Mahmoud Khalil, was detained by ICE, his student visa revoked, and he was threatened with deportation– not for criminal activity, but for involvement in pro-Palestinian protests. His arrest was widely–and accurately– seen as a part of Trump administration efforts to crack down on student activism. Another widely reported example was the arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk, a 30-year-old Tufts University student. She was taken off the street by masked ICE agents near her home. A court subsequently determined that her arrest had been prompted by her co-authorship of an article about the ongoing war in Gaza. 

There’s much more.

The bottom line is that there is a difference between fantasy and reality. When political promises are based on “alternate realities,” the effort to fulfill them can become an (unintentional) educational exercise. 

It turns out that the American economy is heavily dependant on immigrants, both documented and “illegal.” It turns out that constitutional guarantees for everyone are weakened when an administration decides that some people aren’t entitled to them.

It turns out that immigration enforcement is “more complicated than that,” and that pesky realities are significantly different from the racist fantasies that spawned them.

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The Guy In The Mirror

Welcome to what seems like a very bad dream…

Congressional Republicans have passed a spending bill that contradicts every principle that party has endorsed over the years.  Furthermore, it’s a measure that will disproportionately hurt their own voters–and we know that they are aware of that fact, because they carefully timed some of the bill’s most egregious elements, like the draconian cuts to Medicaid, to take effect after the midterms.

Those GOP “defenders of liberty” who sport “don’t tread on me” t-shirts and insist that the government lacked even the authority to require masks during a pandemic are nevertheless cool with providing massive new funding for ICE, whose masked thugs display a terrifying similarity to Germany’s SS.

The Republicans in Congress passed this monstrosity because they are in thrall to an ignorant buffoon with tacky taste and the vocabulary, intellect and emotional control of a developmently-delayed five-year-old.

It has become increasingly clear that on the ground, the MAGA movement is the reappearance of the old Confederacy. The voters who continue to support Trump are motivated by fear–fear of losing their status as the “real Americans,” fear that those “others” will actually manage to attain civic equality. But what can we say about the Senators and Representatives those voters sent to Washington? Some–like Indiana’s Jim Banks–are as ignorant and bigoted as those who voted for them, but it’s obvious that many others actually know better, actually realize that their submission to Trump is cowardly, and that they are rewarding the votes of their constituents by robbing them of the little security they have.

What explains those Senators and Representatives–those presumably “traditional” Republicans who talked endlessly about fiscal discipline and limited government, but who obediently bend the knee to a would-be autocrat who routinely trashes those principles?

A recent article by Jonathan Last in the Bulwark took a stab at answering that question. 

A sizable portion of elected Republicans hold on to a residual image of themselves as avatars of a green-eyeshade, business-first party that no longer exists. They’re like a middle-aged man standing in front of a mirror, sucking in his gut and smiling, imagining that he still looks pretty close to his college days.

It’s a lie they tell themselves.

The article raised an interesting question: why didn’t the Republicans just choose to have it both ways–extend the tax cuts for their deep-pocketed donors, but keep Medicaid funded, and just push the debt even higher. After all, they were willing to add over three trillion to that debt–why not just add another 930 billion, and avoid sticking it to their own voters?

This, finally, is the root of the problem. Some Republicans still view themselves as the good guys in the movie. They need to imagine that they’re on the side of the angels. That they are something other than what they’ve become. It’s the guy in the mirror, again.

Trump has no illusions. That is his strength. Some congressional Republicans are reluctant to embrace their roles as kleptocrats and pillagers. That is their weakness. And it’s why they haven’t said, “Fuck it. Let’s just spend all the money.”

Last reminds us that when things go wrong in a cult, no one blames the cult leader. (He points to an example, a MAGA-supporting man in detention due to Trump’s hardline immigration policies, who nevertheless blames the Biden administration for his arrest.)

When millions of Trump voters lose their Medicaid, they aren’t going to blame Trump, either. They’ll blame Congress.

And what does Donald Trump care if a bunch of Republican losers get tossed out of Congress? He has no use for congressional Republicans. He is an aspiring autocrat who rules by fiat. Passing legislation is not anywhere near his list of priorities. Whether or not the House and Senate are controlled by Republicans is of little importance to him.

All of which is why Trump’s party is about to stab millions of Trump-loving Republican voters in the back instead of just throwing more money at the problem.

Trump knows who he is, what he wants, and how to get it. His party, on the other hand, is a bunch of delusional sad sacks. Which is why he will win and they will lose. Again.

At least we can take some satisfaction from the prospect of those “delusional sad-sacks” looking in their mirrors and seeing a greying and flabby reality looking back.

I wonder if any of them will regret providing the Kool-Aid to the cult members who elected them…

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The Rhyming Of History

So much of what Trump and the GOP are doing right now defies logic, although it’s probably consistent with their twisted version of what would make America “great”–a country filled with people who are White, fundamentalist, and receptive to propaganda. The list of insanities is long, but today I just want to focus on the administration’s war on higher education. (Not that today’s Republicans don’t have contempt for education at all levels; they clearly do.)

In the decades following WWII, the best universities in the United States have been considered the best in the world, and that reputation, that prominence, has generated a wide array of economic, cultural, scientific, and geopolitical benefits.

For one thing, our universities generate a significant share of the world’s basic research. Federal funding supporting that research–funding that Trump has threatened to withhold– has given us everything from the internet to mRNA vaccines.

American universities attract and train a highly-skilled workforce. They anchor local economies. They promote economic growth through partnerships with industry. And universities have played a major role in research supporting military innovation, cybersecurity, and intelligence–something you’d think the GOP, with its military obsessions, would appreciate.

Of course, America’s universities also serve to promulgate “liberal” values like academic freedom, intellectual inquiry, democracy and human rights, so MAGA is willing to dispense with the other benefits in order to minimize the chances of creating an informed and thinking citizenry.

This assault on academia isn’t as obvious or remarked-upon as the other–frighteningly numerous– parallels to Germany in the 1930s, but those parallels are there. My friend Morton Marcus recently sent me a copy of an article titled How Universities Die. It began with a history that feels chillingly similar to the Trumpian effort to turn America’s universities into obedient organs of an autocratic, White Christian state.

In 1910, German universities were the envy of the world. They were the world’s center of scientific research, not only in the natural sciences but also in the study of history, politics, philosophy, and literature. Our modern scholarly disciplines were all first defined in Germany. The University of Berlin, founded a century earlier, was the Harvard of its day. Every serious American university, from Hopkins to Chicago, to Harvard and Berkeley, was made or reformed according to the “Berlin model.” Why else is Stanford’s motto (“Die Luft der Freiheit weht” — “The winds of freedom are blowing”) in German? Original research was prized over the mere transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. Faculty and students would learn together in seminars and laboratories. Professors would have “Lehrfreiheit,” or the freedom to teach, while students would enjoy “Lernfreiheit,” the freedom to learn, across multiple disciplines. Although supported entirely by the state, universities themselves would decide who would teach and what would be taught. If university rankings had existed in 1910, eight of the top 10 in the world probably would have been German — with only Oxford and Cambridge joining them in that elite circle.

As late as 1932, the University of Berlin remained the most famous of the world’s universities. By 1934, it had been destroyed from without and within.

Germany’s descent from a nation of “poets and thinkers” (“Dichter und Denker”) to one of “judges and hangmen” (“Richter und Henker”) ended its leadership in higher education.

When the Nazi regime came into power, it purged universities of non-Aryan students, faculty and political dissidents. Trump is trying to prevent foreign students from enrolling at Harvard, and ejecting foreign students enrolled elsewhere who dare to speak or write in support of Palestinians. International students have noticed; between March 2024 to March 2025, U.S. international student counts declined 11.3%.

The article tells us that leading scholars left Berlin in large numbers, beginning what would be a historic migration of brilliant thinkers to the United States and elsewhere. German universities were divested of capacity for self-government. Scholarship in search of truth was replaced by scholarship in service of the “Volk.” Faculties were purged of non-compliant members. (In Florida, Governor DeSantis has dutifully followed the Nazi model, and Florida has seen a similar migration of professors.)

German universities never regained their status or importance.

The Trump administration is intent upon destroying one of the few fields– higher education– in which this country is still the global leader. The intensifying assault on immigrants had already reduced applications from international students. Coupled with the escalating attacks on universities and DEI, the administration is crippling America’s capacity to recruit talent from all shores. We will decline.

History tells us that when universities die, nations decay.

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