We in the USA crossed some kind of rubicon this week, and we’re still digesting. I clipped and saved commentary starting Wednesday that felt banal by Saturday and got deleted. I’ve also picked up interesting tidbits, for sources I think are reliable, but for which I can’t provide specific corraboration in a reasonable amount of time. So buckle in and take some of the political stuff below with a grain of salt (and it’s not all political).
Character is destiny
At some point I suspect Mr. Trump is going to turn on his party. They didn’t deserve him, they let him down, he tried to help them but they wouldn’t let him. It’s going to be real bunker talk. It’s how he was probably always destined to wind up, swiveling around from the desk and telling the audience it’s fired.
We’re thinking of the scene from “A Face in the Crowd,” in which the charming and garrulous Lonesome Rhodes, a great network television star, signs off from his weekly show. The credits roll, and we see him talking in the background, silently. But he’s not sharing folksy wisdom, he’s telling an actor what he thinks of the audience. The sound is secretly switched on in the control room, and America hears it: “Good night, you stupid idiots. Good night, you miserable slobs.”
I suspect that kind of moment is coming. Another betrayal, another reason for Republicans to stand up straight and recover themselves.
Peggy Noonan, Trump is the Author of the Ruin
Voters don’t give a fig about being led by “nice” ethical people
I meant what I said on Wednesday, that this week’s tsunami shouldn’t cause us to reconsider Americans’ tolerance for postliberalism. If the past 21 months had played out the same way except for the Iran war and the gas crisis it caused—the same corruption, the same presidential abuses of power, even the same tariffs—my guess is that only Crowley (and maybe Talarico) would have won among the Democrats I named. Voters don’t give a fig about being led by “nice” ethical people, we discovered two years ago. They care about prosperity, and if they’re convinced that a party led by abject scumbags is more likely to deliver it, that’s the party they’ll choose.
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Off the top of my head, the only major Republican candidate this year who stood out as pleasant, relatable, and nonmalicious, i.e. “normal,” was Iowa’s Ashley Hinson. (Collins too, I suppose, if you want to call a five-term Senate incumbent “relatable.”) By and large, the party of Trump was, well, the party of Trump. From Vivek Ramaswamy’s infamous attack ad to J.D. Vance’s gay-baiting to the all-hands-on-deck demagoguery against El-Sayed to every single thing about Ken Paxton, the GOP campaign was a parade of vicious goblins offering sociopathy in lieu of the prosperity that voters had been promised in 2024.
Digital Doritos
Consider Doritos. What starts out as raw corn is processed into an irresistible snack by industrial machinery that dries, pulverizes, rehydrates, extrudes and deep-fries it — then adds salt, sugar and artificial flavorings and colorings. Most of us know that food products engineered for immediate pleasure rather than long-term nourishment should be no more than an occasional indulgence. But because instinct tells us that fat, sugar and salt mean escaping starvation and death, ultraprocessed foods now account for the majority of calories in the American diet.
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“What is a TikTok video,” he asks, “if not a digital Dorito?”
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It’s not just our food, then, that’s ultraprocessed. Altogether, these developments have warped our environment so significantly that we live in what could be called an “ultraprocessed world.”
Angela Duckworth, These Inventions Were Built to Trick Us
Shorts
- Conflict is Mr. Trump’s jam. The nastier the better. For all his self-aggrandizing talk about building stuff, his true talents lie in combat and destruction. He long ago shattered the spine of the G.O.P., so humiliating its members now is a minor thrill at best. But facing off against Democratic majorities in both chambers still buzzing from their electoral win? Now that is something to live for. (Michelle Cottle)
- … the broader tenor of this administration, which has utterly lacked any public-spirited vision or direction and has allowed itself to be defined by Trump’s own vapid impulsivity and thuggish narcissism, and to descend into shameless personal corruption … at this point, the president just seems to have grown tired of his job, seeking escape from its burdens in ridiculous vanity projects while real problems (often of his own creation) fester. (Yuval Levin)
- 41 data center initiatives were on the ballot on Tuesday, and 40 of them went against AI. (Ted Gioia)
- I have a different experience of what the human body is depending on whether the body is that of a patient, the victim in a crime I am investigating, my aunt, an artist’s model, or my lover. Each calls forth, and expects to receive, a different kind of attention, which governs what, in the end, it is that I experience. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World)
- Progressives did worse in blue states than “normie” Democrats did in red states. (Jonah Goldberg)
Elsewhere in Tipsyworld
- I Repudiated
- The True Celebration of the Semisequicentennial
- Why I prefer The Dispatch and steer clear of The Bulwark
- Mike Johnson
- Guess what red state did not turn blue
- Fasten your seatbelts; the last adult in the room has been expelled
Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark and Donald Trump’s “Fifth Avenue” remark amounted to the two of them saying the same thing about the same pigheaded rubes ….
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
