Tag: Donald Trump

Wednesday, 3/12/25

Trump-related

As is my wavering intent, I have moved my more vitriolic criticisms of Trump 2.0 to another blog. What remains is relatively temperate.

As the twig is bent …

“Dennis Burnham, who lived next door, was a toddler when his mother briefly put him in a playpen in their garden. She returned a few minutes later to find the current U.S. president, then aged five or six, standing at his fence throwing rocks at the little boy. Another neighbor, Steven Nachtigall, now a 66-year-old doctor, said he never forgot Trump … once jumping off his bike and beating up another boy: ‘It was so unusual and terrifying at that age,’” – Trump Revealed.

“When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” – Donald J Trump.

Andrew Sullivan

Tripping over a very low bar

It doesn’t take much to persuade me that some new development in this Administration is really bad. But it takes more than this:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s appointment today of his personal lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, as a Navy commander in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps reflects not just the norm-breaking approach that Hegseth is bringing to the job, but an odious philosophy of warfare. Like his new boss at the Pentagon, Parlatore has a pattern of providing support to soldiers accused of grave misconduct, even war crimes. He notably represented Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL court-martialed on charges including the murder of a captured fighter (though he was found guilty only of one, lesser charge), along with a second SEAL accused of serious sexual offenses. Elevating a lawyer with this record does not bode well for the armed services Hegseth hopes to build.

Jason Dempsey at the Atlantic.

If we really believe that every criminal defendant deserves competent legal counsel, we must stop insinuating that lawyers who have represented criminals are complicit in their crime and therefore evil. But we’ve done so (albeit selectively, sorted by tribe) all my adult life, and it has always bugged me — even before I was a lawyer.

Dare I think this nasty habit reflects what we really believe:

  1. We should have kangaroo courts or even summary executions without trial — except for members of our respective tribes.
  2. Anyone who facilitates real courts and frustrates summary executions is a money-grubbing lowlife.

For my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law

For all of Trump’s talk about rooting out “anti-Christian bias” from the United States, one of his administration’s first executive actions violated the free speech and religious freedom rights of several Christian congregations. It turns out that Trump wants to protect only his Christian allies from government reprisals. Dissenting believers will face his wrath, and the wrath of the state.

David French, who has the receipts.

This is one of the reasons I don’t buy Aaron Renn’s positive world/neutral world/negative world chronology of Christianity’s status in the US. True and consistent Christianity has never been viewed positively, and the negativity has come from the right as well as the left, albeit for different reasons.

The Plight of the Never-Trump Pundit

I woke up excited to write about the day’s most important political news—before remembering that I said most of what I wanted to say on the subject a few weeks ago.

Never Trumpers who work in media will face that problem every day for the next four years. Good luck finding something new and interesting to say as the president vindicates your arguments against him again and again and again.

Nick Catoggio

The Trumposcene is a great time not to be a professional pundit. Yes, I opine, but I don’t have to do it on a schedule, whether or not I’m feelin’ it.

And I mostly borrow.

Not Trump-related

Resurrecting de Gaulle

[T]he American right should consciously support a stronger France. It should encourage a special relationship between the two republics, support French primacy on the continent, treat Paris rather than Brussels as the European capital and the French military as the keystone of Europe’s security.

In effect, we should revisit Charles de Gaulle’s bid to maintain more French independence within the Western alliance, which made him a thorn in the American side during the Cold War, and recognize that he was right. It was not actually in America’s long-term interests to make Europe our full dependent, because vassaldom encourages weakness, and weakness reduces the value of the alliance in a world that America can no longer simply bestride alone.

…

The French military is limited but still “indisputably the most capable in Western Europe,” as Michael Shurkin noted in a 2023 analysis for War on the Rocks, with a resilient capacity for expeditionary action. Its nuclear-energy strategy has granted it a degree of energy independence that contrasts sharply with the reckless folly of German “green” de-industralization. Its pro-natal policies have given it a sustained demographic advantage; it is aging, but its fertility isn’t collapsing in the style of Italy, Spain or now Poland.

Then, psychologically, France lacks the crippling sense of historical guilt that still pervades Germany, and the junior-partner complex that has made Britain an unsuccessful adjunct of recent American foreign policy mistakes. It embodies two distinct forms of universalism, Roman Catholic and republican, that have more historical appeal across Europe than the Anglo-American style of empire. And the rapid renovation of Notre-Dame de Paris joined to the recent “gentle revival” of Catholic practice amid secularized conditions suggest stronger possibilities for spiritual renewal as well.

This last point is crucial for American conservatives. The current European establishment, secular and socially liberal even in its “conservative” forms, often feels like a natural ally not of the United States in full but of American progressivism alone. So the American right should wish to see a more substantial European conservatism re-emerge — more ambitious than today’s populist factions, and capable, as the right-wing Frenchman Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry put it this week, of affirming Europe’s “Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian” roots in contrast to Anglo-American progressivism.

Ross Douthat

ACB

After Justice Amy Coney Barrett voted against the Administration on one of the many Trump 2.0 “Emergency Docket” cases, she has been attacked I’m told, by the kinds of trolls who trot out canards like “DEI hire” in place of “treacherous bitch.” (I’m not referring to Prof. Josh Blackman, who criticizes the decision on more defensible grounds.)

Kevin D. Williamson is having none of it:

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined with the chief justice to rule against Trump in the matter of his attempt to unilaterally freeze certain federal spending, is a great loyalist—but not the kind of loyalist Donald Trump’s ghastly little sycophants demand that she be. Justice Barrett is loyal to her oath of office, to the law, to the Constitution, to certain principles governing her view of the judge’s role in American life—all of which amounts to approximately squat in the Trumpist mind, which demands only—exclusively—that she be loyal to Trump, and that she practice that loyalty by giving him what he wants in court, the statute books—and the Constitution—be damned. 

The usual dopes demand that she give Trump what he wants because he is “the man who put her on the Supreme Court.” Mike Davis of the Article III Project (not the author of Late Victorian Holocausts; his organization works to recruit Trump-friendly judges) sneers that the justice is “weak and timid” and, because he is a right-wing public intellectual in 2025, that “she is a rattled law professor with her head up her ass.” Davis, a former clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch, presumably is not as titanically stupid as he sounds, but there is a reason Justice Barrett is on the Supreme Court and he is a right-wing media gadfly who describes his job as “punching back at the left’s attacks.”

There is a word for men such as Davis et al.: subjects.

Kevin D. Williamson

Debasing education

Even though I am certainly angry at those students who choose to cheat, the fact is that I also care about them and feel a certain degree of compassion for them. I don’t want them to miss out on the opportunity to become educated, not even as the result of their own poor choices. It’s a bit of a Catch-22. How can we expect them to make good choices, about their studies or anything else, if they have not yet been given the tools to think critically? How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more? Or, worse, to see it as bearing no value at all, as if it were a kind of confidence trick, an elaborate sham?

Troy Jollimore via Alan Jacobs

Moral clarity

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher, Something Demonic Is In The Air, 1/13/2021

I don’t think Rod’s vision is as clear now as it was then.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Sledgehammers and Death Threats

I think these go beyond saying, explicitly or implicitly, that someone on the internet really, really don’t like Donald Trump. The common theme may be “retribution,” the campaign promise Trump and his goons are most zestfully fulfilling, and so they seem worth sharing.

It’s happening

When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism.

Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book “How Democracies Die,” via the New York Times.

More:

  • One prominent first-term critic of Mr. Trump said in a recent interview that not only would he not comment on the record, he did not want to be mentioned in this article at all. Every time his name appears in public, he said, the threats against him from the far right increase.
  • University presidents are largely silent because they are protecting their institutions, said Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education. “Don’t wrestle with a pig,” he said. “You’ll just get muddy and annoy the pig.”
  • [T]hat business leader thinks that chief executives see the way that Mr. Musk is going about slashing the federal work force as “totally crazy” — but would say so only on the condition of anonymity, fearing retribution.
  • Representative Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat and a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, said the real fear among Republicans in the House who might otherwise voice criticism of the administration on some issues was violence against their families.
  • Senator Todd Young, Republican of Indiana, was called a “deep state puppet” by Elon Musk after he asked tough questions about Mr. Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence.

(I must note the Folksy Failure by Ted Mitchell. The canonical folk form is “Never wrestle with a pig. You get all muddy and the pig loves it.”)

The SOTU that wasn’t

I’m told that Tuesday’s speech by the Chaos Monkey In Chief was not a State of the Union address, but it came across as one from what I’ve seen of the reporting.

David Brooks has thoughts:

Healy: David, it’s so important to underscore that with speeches like this, a lot of Americans aren’t sitting there with a scorecard, rating and fact-checking and assessing policies. It is about how these speeches make people feel.

That moment that you touched on about the young boy who wanted to be a cop. That is the moment when my phone blew up from both Republicans and Democrats. People who I hear from in politics. Trump made people feel something with moments like that. And again, it’s not that people in America are sitting around doing a fact-check on these speeches. They’re looking to feel the impact of them.

Brooks: Well, take a couple other examples. He talked about all the people allegedly getting Social Security benefits, even though they’re 160 years old. Now, people like us, we’re media obsessed, so we know that was all disproved, that there really are no 320-year-old people getting Social Security benefits. There are no 160-year-olds getting those benefits. That has been shot down by Trump’s own Social Security administrator. But when you’re sitting there reading and you’re just a normal person who pays normal attention to politics, you think: “Wow, that’s ridiculous. I’m glad he’s getting rid of this stuff.”

Healy: Yep.

…

Brooks: I would advise Democrats to take some time off. They’re not in control. They don’t have power. But mostly a lot of the categories Democrats have used to understand reality don’t describe actual reality.

I don’t think Democrats have coped with the fact that they’re more the party of the elites now than the party of the working class. I don’t think they expected so many Black and brown voters to go for Donald Trump, and it just takes an intellectual revolution to adjust.

And they have to make some fundamental decisions. Do they want to work really hard to once again become the party of the working class? Is that even possible? Joe Biden tried with good economic policies — a large percentage of his policies helped working-class voters. It did him no political good because you can’t solve with economics a problem that’s fundamentally about culture and respect.

Or, maybe they should accept the fact that they’re the party of the college educated and urban classes, and that’s who they are, and they’re going to represent those people and hopefully build some majorities around those people.

Going back to the 19th century, Andrew Jackson — who’s the closest politician we’ve ever had to Donald Trump. He was a narcissist, he was power hungry, and didn’t fundamentally know what he was doing to screw up. And lo and behold, Andrew Jackson made a terrible decision to close the Second Bank of the United States and the end result was, basically, a decadelong depression.

So Democrats right now have to wait for Donald Trump to screw up. I think the tariffs may be that screw-up. The policy toward Ukraine may be that screw-up. I’m assuming that a guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing will make some major errors and then the Democrats will see some opportunities.

…

As for the faux populism, I’ve been around these people all my life. I graduated from college in 1983, I worked in National Review in 1984, and my first encounter with Trumpians was way back then, though we didn’t know it at the time. There was a group at Dartmouth, called the Dartmouth Review. Famous people have emerged from there — Laura Ingraham, Dinesh D’Souza — but they were very different from us. We were earnest. We read Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. They were like, “Let’s take on the left.”

And the classic Dartmouth Review action took place in 1986. A group of progressive students had erected a shanty on the quad at Dartmouth to protest apartheid, a thing very much worth opposing. And the Dartmouth Review guys, in the middle of the night, used sledgehammers and broke it all down. And I remember thinking that’s appalling. First, apartheid really is terrible. We should not be defending it. But also, coming in with sledgehammers, that’s more Gestapo than Edmund Burke.

And yet, that kind of person who’s in the elite universities, but who is a dissenter in the elite universities, who’s fed up with the progressive orthodoxy that dominates those universities — you get Elon Musk who went to Penn, Vivek Ramaswamy who went to Harvard and Yale, Stephen Miller went to Duke — these are elite dissenters from the university culture. They are not populists.

As a result, when they come to power, they don’t really do all that much to help the working class. I would love it if the Trump administration would take on the health disparities, the education disparities, the family disparities that make it hard to be working class right now. But they don’t do that. They go after N.I.H. They go after the Department of Education. They go after U.S.A.I.D. They go after the places where they think elite liberals live.

David Brooks with Patrick Healy (shared link)

The only thing I have to add is that some recent personal reading in history stunned me with the parallels between Trump and Andrew Jackson.

A third rate, schoolboy version of magnanimity

It seems this is a David Brooks day, as Brooks dissects Trump’s “third rate, schoolboy version of magnanimity.” (shared link)

Why there will be no recession despite Trump’s antics

If critics point out that Canada and Mexico have done nothing to warrant the imposition of these punishing penalties, this will be irrelevant. Trump will simply lie about his reasons, accusing these rival nations of some imaginary transgression, which many Republican voters will believe is true. Along the way, as Trump lowers and raises these penalties at will, domestic companies will seek exemptions in return for favors (financial and otherwise), which Trump will gladly grant and accept. Meanwhile, senior members of his administration will be free to enrich themselves by shorting the stock market just before the announcement of an increase in tariffs (which often produces a drop in prices). If these trading partners retaliate in a way that harms the United States, Trump will use this retroactively to justify his protectionist moves. See? It’s us against them, as I always said.

But what about economic reality? Won’t the data show that Trump’s policies are hurting the economy? The answer is: Only if the government continues to put out trustworthy and accurate economic data. Earlier this week, The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last suggested that the Trump administration could well be planning to stop doing that.

[Trump] doesn’t care about the numbers because he’s planning to have his government monkey with the economic data. There won’t be a recession because Trump’s government is never going to release data showing a recession. He’s planning on doing to economic data what he tried to do with COVID case numbers and testing. And he thinks that he’ll be able to sell the “data” his government produces to voters.

Later the same day Last published these words, a member of the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC) announced that the committee was “terminated abruptly,” with “all upcoming meetings … also canceled.” The committee has existed for 25 years and met twice a year to advise the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Census Bureau, and the Department of Commerce “on matters related to federal economic statistics.” The very next day, the Secretary of Commerce likewise disbanded the 2030 Census Advisory Committee, claiming its purpose had been fulfilled.

Damon Linker (emphasis added)

I’m starting to think that Trumps crazy careening around is his way of soliciting bribes to leave the briber alone.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Can this be happening here?

Denial at its most alluring

My Experience of Trump 2.0 so far

Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently (“This shouldn’t be happening!”), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process.

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

See also On Minding What Happens (Or Not)

Phase-shift

I realized suddenly on Wednesday morning that I could not bear listening to Trump — not even short sound clips from his address to Congress as part of a critical story.

Every other word Trump utters is a lie, and the words come in Tsunami waves. Some people apparently don’t care about the lies because letting those waves roll over them feels good.

They don’t make me feel good, and I don’t have the bandwidth or patience to filter out the lies. Hate-listening is spiritually sick even outside of Lent, so better not to listen at all.

It can’t be happening here

The extent to which the United States is embroiled in a major political crisis would be obvious and apparent if these events were unfolding in another country. Unfortunately, the sheer depth of American exceptionalism is such that this country’s political, media and economic elites have a difficult time believing that anything can fundamentally change for the worse. But that, in fact, is what’s happening right now.

Jamelle Bouie, There Is No Going Back

Antichrist

It’s typical political rhetoric to say you “stand with Israel” or that you “stand with Jewish Americans against antisemitism.” Trump offers a different claim: If you fail to support him, you hate your own religion. Trump wants to judge religion in light of his political interest, but detests a religious judgment on him or his politics. Politicians have long appealed to religious voters, but Trump wants religious voters to appeal to and accommodate him.

Have you noticed that the term “values voters” is essentially absent from national political discourse since Trump solidified his hold on the GOP? It’s not because the media is more progressive or antagonistic toward social conservatives now than they were pre-Trump. It’s because Trump’s case was not based on shared values. George W. Bush said at a presidential debate that his favorite philosopher was Jesus Christ. Donald Trump told a crowd of Christian conservatives that he does not need God’s forgiveness. He rejected Jesus’ teaching to love your enemies at the National Prayer Breakfast. He does and says these things all while insisting on his audience’s religious obligation to support him. In so doing, Trump fundamentally disrupted the typical understanding of what large, influential swaths of religious voters were looking for in a politician, and how a politician must approach them. It’s hard to sustain the moniker “values voters” when the candidate receiving the support of those voters regularly disregards, or even flagrantly undermines, those values.

… It took an extra four years, but with Trump’s second administration underway, the leader of GOP—the party that has been viewed as more “friendly to religion”—is casting aspersions on the very idea of religious organizations receiving federal money, and openly attacking the credibility and sincerity of the Catholic Church regarding work it has done for centuries.

…

Not even the pope provokes magnanimity or respect from Trump and his White House. When asked about Pope Francis’ letter to American bishops regarding God’s care for migrants and the dignity of the human person, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, responded: “I got harsh words for the pope: the pope ought to fix the Catholic Church … and focus on his work, and leave border enforcement to us.”

…

Trump’s new paradigm doesn’t have to be what replaces the old one. The paradigm Trump offers requires a set of circumstances, real and perceived, that make it plausible. To seek a protector, you must feel you need—and therefore prioritize—protection. To cut a deal, you must feel sufficient anxiety about the future without one. To seek refuge with someone who will make light of what you believe, you must feel that discomfort to be more desirable than the alternatives on offer.

What Trump promises is a future for Christianity, while claiming that the future he is promising is the only one on offer. Eric Trump claimed his father “literally saved Christianity.” During the last presidential campaign, Donald Trump told a gathering of Christians that “in four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

Michael Reneau and Michael Wear, The New Era of Religion and Politics

To borrow from Josh Barro (about the Democrat base, below), “These people don’t have good intentions; they have a worldview that is wrong, and they need to be stopped.” I’m feeling very affirmed in rejecting both major parties in the last three election cycles. And I’m blessed not to be in a cult that cheerfully votes en masse for an Antichrist.

TDS is dead (because it’s now totally rational)

Trump 2.0 is what you get when you take Trump 1.0 and subtract nearly every element of accountability. Since his first term in office, the president has gained a considerable degree of legal impunity from the Supreme Court, almost limitless political impunity from his supporters and the cowards in Congress who represent them, absolute administrative impunity from the slavish cronies with whom he’s staffed his government, and electoral impunity from the fact that, one way or another, he’ll never face voters again.

…

If there ever were such a thing as irrational “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” it died in the Oval Office on Friday.

Nick Catoggio

Sometimes Buttegieg is spot-on

At the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting

…

Yet Buttigieg pulled his punches, emphasizing the good “intentions” of the people who have led Democrats down this road of being off-putting and unpopular.

These people don’t have good intentions; they have a worldview that is wrong, and they need to be stopped.

Josh Barro, Democrats Need to Clean House

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

An auspicious birthday

Today is my son’s 49th birthday. Such a thing is impossible. I can’t have a son that old.

I recall watching M.A.S.H. in my wife’s room as she labored into the evening. The next day, I ran into my ex-fianceés husband at a Pizza Hut, I being 70 miles from home (a town of 4,000 with no OB/GYNs, and it was a tricky pregnancy) and he being several hundred miles from home leading a high school band in something-or-other.

The rest of it’s kind of a blur.

The rest of this post is pretty political. Summary: I’m unhappy with our course, but I’d have been unhappy with the alternative, too.

We need friends in the world

After the Cold War Ukraine agreed to relinquish the nuclear weapons housed there for a promise the U.S. would always have its back. They trusted us. Must American presidents honor the honestly made vows of their predecessors? In this case surely yes, at pain of announcing to every friend we have, “You’re on your own, Uncle Sam has left the building.” Trump supporters think they want that message sent. It is a careless and destructive one.

…

The future will be a hard place. All the unfortunate aspects of man’s nature will be sped up and made more fateful by technology such as artificial intelligence. In that world we will need old friends. There is a speech by St. Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws . . . and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?” Replace “law” with “friend.”

Peggy Noonan

Less uncomprehending

The book’s emotional climax is Mr. Rauch’s endorsement of Joe Biden’s characterization of Mr. Trump as “semifascist.” Mr. Rauch generously concedes that MAGA partisans aren’t sending their opponents to death camps, but he insists there are similarities between Mr. Trump and Hitler. “Rejection of elections? Check. Contempt for law? Check. Corrupt use of government power? Check.” And so on for two pages. The possibility that these criticisms might apply as much to Mr. Trump’s opponents, or more so, doesn’t occur to Mr. Rauch.

Barton Swaim, Wall Street Journal (emphasis added), reviewing Jonathan Rauch’s latest book.

I haven’t voted for a Democrat for President since 1972, and I haven’t voted for a Republican for President since 2012.

Swaim’s last sentence alludes, though, to the bipartisan rot that made me less uncomprehending of Trump voters late in the 2024 election season than I had been in 2016 and 2020.

So we elected Trump and Babylon USA is now falling in a Trumpian manner than a Democrat manner.

History rhyming again

The politics of the backcountry consisted mainly of charismatic leaders and personal followings, cemented by strong and forceful acts such as Jackson’s behavior at Jonesboro. The rhetoric that these leaders used sometimes sounded democratic, but it was easily misunderstood by those who were not part of this folk culture. The Jacksonian movement was a case in point. To easterners, Andrew Jackson looked and sounded like a Democrat. But in his own culture, his rhetoric had a very different function. Historian Thomas Abernethy observes that Andrew Jackson never championed the cause of the people; he merely invited the people to champion him. This was a style of politics which placed a heavy premium upon personal loyalty. In the American backcountry, as on the British borders, loyalty was the most powerful cement of political relationships. Disloyalty was the primary political sin.

David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed

I really have been astonished at the Jackson/Trump parallels Fischer brings out implicitly (because the book came out in 1989 — long before Mafia Don descended the golden escalator).

Liberation — for satyrs

…men have created the social structures that determine how our culture dispenses money and creates fame. For women, this is almost always tied to the sexual exploitation of their bodies — most often to make corporations lots and lots of money.

Charles C. Camosy, Beyond the Abortion Wars

Ubiquitous terms that tell us almost nothing

Far right [is]one of those labels around whose use we could do with having some hygiene. I’ve only ever been called ‘far-right’ by Islamists and far-leftists who want to try to stigmatize me like I’m a totally unreasonable head-banger. It is a smear, designed to shut down debate.

Douglas Murray

Pudwhacking throne-sniffers

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is not a department, it is really only quasi-government at most, and its aim is not efficiency. It is the right-wing mirror image of those “diversity” offices whose aim is the enforcement of homogeneity and conformity. George Orwell (I hope he is pleasantly surprised by his position in the afterlife) is somewhere laughing his immortal ass off.

…

It is obvious that Musk and his disreputable little gaggle of pudwhacking throne-sniffers simply do not know what they are doing: For example, they ordered the dismissal of a bunch of federal employees who were “on probation” because they seem to have thought that this probationary condition was disciplinary rather than a formality related to those employees being new hires. Employees with stellar evaluations were fired in emails that cited their supposed performance problems.

Kevin D. Williamson.

Loving “disreputable little gaggle of pudwhacking throne-sniffers” so much probably makes me a bad person. But it’s closer to the literal truth than mass firings of probationary employees for “performance problems.”

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Musings, 2/21/25

Can there be a lawful order to act unethically?

I’m struggling with the agreement between Sarah Isgur and David French on the Advisory Opinions podcast that the orders from the Trump Department of Justice to dismiss the charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams was a lawful order, even if compliance by federal prosecutors would have been unethical. I’d like to think that an order to a professional to do something unethical is ipso facto not a lawful order.

If nothing else, this confirms the wisdom of not allowing non-lawyers to own a law firm (e.g., Model Rules of Professional Conduct 1.17(b)) lest this kind of thing pervade the legal profession rather than remaining an application of the unitary executive theory to the Department of Justice.

This is why we can’t have nice things

Speaking of unitary executive theory, I have more or less been persuaded to become a “soft unitarian.” But the test case that Donald Trump has set up by firing the head of the Special Counsel’s office is straining my recently-acquired conviction.

Mafia Don has fired Hampton Dellinger, current head of the Office of Special Counsel, without invoking “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office” as required by statute. A federal District Court has ordered that he be reinstated. A federal Court of Appeals has rejected Trump’s appeal on technical grounds (the District Court decision is only preliminary, not final). He now seeks review by the US Supreme Court.

I shudder because unitary executive theory makes the substance of his appeal plausible.

So here’s the deal on the Constitutional issues.

The Constitution establishes three branches of the federal government: Congress (Article I), the Executive (Article II), and the Judiciary (Article III). The opening words of Article II are “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.“

So what is the status of supposedly “independent” agencies, created by Congress, like the Office of Special Council? Are they a fourth branch of government, hiding in the shadows of the constitution, or are they simply unconstitutional because all executive power is vested in the presidency? If the latter (which is substantially the position of President after President since the Office was created, but nobody before The Don cared so little about chaos to provoke a fight over it), then what checks the power of the Presidency? Are we doomed to live under a kakistocracy if the President goes haywire?

The conventional answer is that Congress’s impeachment power checks the power of the presidency. If you are satisfied that this Congress has the cojones to impeach this president, you are living in a different reality than I am.

As I sit here in my easy chair, six years retired and 43 years out of law school, the best response I can come up with for SCOTUS is (1) refuse to hear the case because the District Court decision is only preliminary or (2) take the case and rule that independent agencies are not exercising executive power, but rather are serving as a check on executive power, and thus really are “hiding in the shadows” of the Constitution.

I think this would be a satisfactory ground to uphold the District Court. But I remember how conservatives derided Justice Harry Blackmun’s finding a right to abortion in the “emanations of the penumbrae” of the constitution?

The electorate having decided that Mafia Don was the lesser evil (a perception I gradually came to find defensible within the 5 or 6 months preceding January 20) has thrust us into the Constitutional crisis of an utterly corrupt President who will never be impeached because not only can he suborn and fund primary candidates against those who would impeach him, but he can with winks, nods, and stochastically violent rhetoric unleash fanatics that make Congressmen literally fear for their families if they cross him.

A decision either way from the Supreme Court will deepen the crisis.

First, they came for the radical liberal communists …

Pundit tribalism

That issue—how intellectuals are supposed to comport themselves in their political engagements—is one that matters a lot to me. On top of the policy disagreements, what drove me away from the intellectual right two decades ago was the expectation, as an editor for First Things magazine, that I defend a political line in public. I wasn’t allowed to write a conservative case for not invading Iraq, for example, because that would risk making myself and the magazine appear “unreliable.” There was simply too much at stake, my boss told me, to risk a dissent from the conservative movement and its presidential champion. The War on Terror had to be won—and even more fundamentally, George W. Bush needed to have a successful presidency. We couldn’t risk contributing to its failure by directing criticisms its way.

Damon Linker

I’m very sympathetic to Linker about this kind of tribalism.

Our local rag used to have a very lively letters to the editor section (they don’t even have an opinion page anymore). When my religious Right co-belligerents expressed particularly idiotic opinions or called for perverse boycotts (example omitted because it was so idiotic you wouldn’t believe me), I tended to refute them vigorously, and at least once received an anonymous phone call implying that I was a Judas (no threat, just bile).

Why can’t the world be unanimously sane and moderate, just like Damon Linker and me?

Our four-party system

I enjoyed Ezra Klein’s little essay the other day as a partial explanation of how polarization got worse:

The two-party system of the 20th century was really a four-party system. The Democrats were split between the liberals we know today and the Dixiecrats, whose primary goal was upholding segregation. The Republicans were split between conservatives and Northern liberals. It is astonishing from our vantage point, but it was true for much of the 20th century: To say you were a Republican or a Democrat didn’t reveal whether you were a liberal or a conservative. As a senator, Joe Biden opposed the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. President Richard Nixon proposed a universal health care bill and created the Environmental Protection Agency. George Wallace started out as a Democrat. Politics was different then.

Parties that contained so many different places and ideologies could not act in lock step, and so bipartisanship was common. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was pushed by a Democratic president, but congressional Republicans were crucial to its passage. When Watergate began coming to light, Congress acted as a collective. Only four House Republicans voted against opening the impeachment inquiry into Nixon, and a delegation of congressional Republicans ultimately persuaded him to resign.

And it wasn’t just impeachment. When Nixon refused to spend the money Congress had appropriated — a policy known as impoundment — Congress acted to protect its power: The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 passed the House with only six “no” votes; it passed the Senate without a single vote in opposition.

(Emphasis added) I remember guys like Scoop Jackson, Dick Gephart, Mark Hatfield, Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsey. Joe Manchin proves there’s no room for that kind any more. There’s just two tribes, each controlled from the wings, not the center.

Clamoring aboard the ARC

A Jordan Peterson-adjacent, Christian-coded “Alliance for Responsible Citizenship” recently convened. Two Orthodox Christian friends have diverging thoughts:

As I wrote yesterday, it is strange that it has taken a non-believing clown like Donald Trump to be the Great Disrupter. We do not have to agree with everything he does …, but I believe people like me can work with people like him in ways we simply could not do with those who were in power before.

Rod Dreher, whose “responsible citizen” culture-warring is a bone of contention between him and his friend Kingsnorth:

Jesus didn’t come to Earth to teach us how to be ‘responsible citizens’, of any political stripe. Responsible citizens don’t leave their own fathers unburied. They don’t hate their own mother and father, or give away all of their wealth, or compare the religious authorities to whitewashed tombs full of rotting flesh. And they don’t usually end up being crucified.

Paul Kingsnorth commenting in advance.

My sympathies lie almost completely with Kingsnorth, but I understand Dreher’s point — though I would rephrase it as “Unlike the Democrats, Trump is not actively and operationally hostile toward America’s motley array of ‘conservative’ Christians.”

Back in the days when I blogged longer-form original material more than curating other folks’ stuff, I declared myself a “Conscientious Objector to the Culture Wars” (a status that’s hard to maintain consistently) in a long-form blog that holds up well as a description of why I disengaged. This was about 80% Kingsnorthian a decade before I’d heard of the guy. It’s a posture that has spared me the ignominy of ever hallucinating that “we can work with” Trump 2.0 toward any truly edifying end.

(By the way: my shift from longer-form original material toward curation is, I think, a recognition that I’ve blogged most of my idées fixes in long-form and to my personal satisfaction; there’s no need to inflict them on others constantly, though I’m toying with a blogroll of my landmark posts.)

Just because …

… I thought this image was beautiful.

Jozef Pankiewicz, Market Square of Warsaw by Night, 1892 (Wikimedia Commons)

O Lord of hosts be with us, for we have none other help in times of sorrow but Thee. O Lord of hosts, have mercy on us.

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

More taking stock

I don’t claim to understand what’s going on with Trump 2.0, but these are among the things that seem to contain glimmers of insight.

Vance’s “true self”

Normal people puzzling over which version of Vance is his “true self” should consider the possibility that, for politicians of extreme ambition, there is no “true self” as the concept is commonly understood. They are what they need to be to get ahead, period, irrespective of moral or civic considerations. They’re less “converts” than reptiles, a distinct species.

Jonah Goldberg

This was written last July and has aged very well.

Flag worship

President Trump responded with horror: “There are other things you can protest, but not our Great American Flag—NO KNEELING!” For Trump, kneeling before the flag was enough potentially to disqualify one from membership in the nation: “You have to stand proudly for the national anthem or you shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”

William T. Cavanaugh, Nationalism as Religion, in The Uses of Idolatry

USAID

The role of the president is merely to enforce the laws made by Congress in institutions created and funded by the legislature. If Congress has funded a government agency for certain reasons, for example, only the Congress can defund it. So a huge amount of Elon Musk’s manic destruction of the administrative state is thereby illegal on its face. Which means it almost certainly cannot last.

This is not to say that Musk hasn’t exposed predictable waste. Why are we surprised that our enlightened elites would use USAID for their pet ideological projects: $3.9 million to promote critical gender and queer theory in — checks notes — the western Balkans; $2.1 million to help the BBC “value the diversity of Libyan society” (is the British government funding insufficient?); $8.3 million for “USAID Education: Equity and Inclusion,” and $7.9 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid “binary-gendered language.” Exposing this is fantastic — and could lead to real reform; but instantly shutting down whole agencies, freezing funding for others, laying off thousands and thousands, without any congressional approval, is the path to nowhere.

Andrew Sullivan

Rod Flunks the Marshmallow Test

[I]t feels so, so good that we don’t have to pretend anymore that all the crazy-ass nonsense imposed on us all over the past decade is good or normal. That makes me happier than if the Tigers had shut out the Crimson Tide. I know I’m dumb about this, but it feels like the first day of spring after a long and miserable winter, and that feels great.

…

I was having pints with a fellow American expatriate conservative at a pub near Paddington on Saturday, and we were both on a big high about how Trump and his team are wrecking wokeness and all its pomps and works. Yet my friend said that he has this nagging feeling that this might not end well. “It feels like the way I felt leading up to the Iraq War,” he said, and I got what he meant. Conservatives like him and me, we felt this surge of heroic destiny for America. It was clear who we were as a country, and what we had to do. It felt great! And it ended in disaster.

Rod Dreher

Zero-sum

I don’t believe there’s anything more morally corrupting than an utterly single-minded focus on defeating your political enemies, even when those political enemies really deserve to be defeated. To think only in terms of Winning and Losing is dehumanizing, both to your enemies and to yourself. It’s virtually animalistic, and it makes you forget a lot of things you need to remember.

Alan Jacobs

Don’t hold your breath

A lot of conservatives, myself included, appreciate some of Trump’s Executive Orders on Culture War issues, but we need to get a grip.

If you are waiting for the media to stop calling surgical mutilation of young people “gender-affirming care,” don’t hold your breath.

The reasons why these lunacies persist have to do less with politics than with profound shifts in how we think about right and wrong, life and death, truth and falsehood — about God and man, men and women, adults and children – and about the nature of our bonds with each other.

These shifts have been going on for a long, long time, and the dirty secret is this: Milder versions of the lunacies of which progressives are so fond are widely accepted among conservatives too. They want to embrace lunatic premises, without coming to lunatic conclusions. They want the poison apple, without the worm.

J Budziszewski

This was written last July and has aged very well.

Government’s chief adversary

Donald Trump’s election has created real opportunities for advancing needed change. But the new administration seems intent on squandering those opportunities because it does not see itself as responsible for the federal government. Eager to demonstrate how corrupt our institutions have become rather than to facilitate their improvement, it is opting for lawless and performative iconoclasm over the more mundane but potentially transformative work of governance.

Yuval Levin

Kennedy Center

The VSG (Very Stable Genius) has indicated that he is planning on (and may perhaps have already begun?) firing the members of the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees (including chairman David Rubinstein), replacing them with his own appointees, and naming himself as Chairman of the Board.

… This is a guy who, as far as we know, has never, with all his millions and billions of dollars tucked away in some hedge fund somewhere, given $25.00 to any cultural or artistic institution of any kind. Not a nickel, as far as I can tell (and I’ve looked).

He’s not, of course, much given to philanthropy in support of anything; it’s as though he’s taken the “Reverse Giving Pledge” in which he promises to keep most of his money rather than giving it away to try to make the world a better place.

It is, I candidly admit, one of the things I dislike most about him.

David Post, The Kennedy Center? Really?

Government’s chief adversary

Donald Trump’s election has created real opportunities for advancing needed change. But the new administration seems intent on squandering those opportunities because it does not see itself as responsible for the federal government. Eager to demonstrate how corrupt our institutions have become rather than to facilitate their improvement, it is opting for lawless and performative iconoclasm over the more mundane but potentially transformative work of governance.

Yuval Levin

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Forest and Tree

Forest and trees revisited

[I’ve already quoted a very pungent Nick Catoggio distillation, but I keep returning to it.]

Insofar as I thought Trump marked mostly a populist realignment of partisan political boundaries, I think I was wrong — or at least that Trump 2.0 is a bigger deal than Trump 1.0. I think he’s now leading us into a post-liberal/illiberal world (that may be inevitable).

Nick Catoggio nails my feelings:

2015 me would have gazed around at the first nine days of Trump’s term, taking each policy in isolation, and concluded that the individual trees look pretty good. 2025 me stares around at the forest Trump is planting and shudders.

Many are freaking out about this.

The post-liberal/illiberal world is ominous for a lot of reasons:

  1. Liberal democracy has been very good materially to me, and mine, and most of the U.S. (But some have been left behind relatively because they didn’t register as Important People.)
  2. There’s a decent case to be made that liberal democracy represents our best chance to live together peacefully despite deep differences. Trump’s zero-sum mentality requires winners, losers and chaos, not co-existence.
  3. Postliberalism/Illiberalism in America feels alien, and how tolerably it’s implemented will depend on those implementing it. Trump, a toxic narcissist with authoritarian impulses and a taste for lethal retribution, is a terrible person to implement it. I’d be more comfortable with an Orbán than with Trump, but I cannot identify any American Orbán.
  4. Donald Trump has millions or tens of millions of supporters for who lethal retribution is a feature, not a bug, and they’ll turn on anyone he turns on. He’s an antichrist heading a new toxic religious cult, and since the failed assassination attempt, he may actually believe that he’s anointed (in contrast to his former cynicism toward his Christian enthusiasts).

Bottom line: it’s probably the end of a world, but not the end of the world. And I can’t do much about it except, possibly, take personal and familial protective measures. Some of those are in place; others we’ve ruled out as a matter of principle.

Good People

[I]t is impossible to overstate the conformist power among elites of being seen as a Good Person. This is why no Republican leader ever pushed back against this stuff prior to Trump. They were terrified of being seen as a Bad Person by the media and other elites. Trump is the Honey Badger of politics: he doesn’t care. (That’s a link to the megaviral Randall video from some years back; he drops some profanity in it, so be aware.)

Rod Dreher

Niall Ferguson on the bipartisan assault on the rule of law

Let me add two more big drops of rain on the Promenade parade. Since Adam Smith, economists have mostly seen free trade and the rule of law as beneficial for growth. Not only have we now entered a period of extreme uncertainty about the future path of U.S. trade policy (does Trump really mean to jack up tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China on February 1, or are the threats just a negotiating tactic?), but we also appear to have jettisoned the rule of law in the euphoria of the monarchical moment.

It is not just Trump’s executive order suspending a law to ban TikTok that was passed by Congress, signed by his predecessor, and upheld by the Supreme Court. Trump has also issued a blanket pardon to all those convicted of crimes—including assaults on police officers—committed on January 6, 2021. And he has issued an executive order overturning the birthright citizenship most people had long assumed was enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment.

But the truly disturbing thing to my eyes is that the assault on the rule of law has been bipartisan. And it is at least arguable that the Democrats began the process. It all started with their hounding of Trump in the courts, at least some of which was politically motivated, and continued in the final days of Biden’s presidency with his preemptive pardons of family members and political figures (they’re all here, including the one for his son Hunter), and a wild attempt to declare a constitutional amendment ratified (the Equal Rights Amendment) that hadn’t been.

“I believe in the rule of law, and I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics,” Biden said in a statement justifying his actions. “But . . . ” You can stop reading right there. Because if you believe in the rule of law, “but,” then you don’t believe in the rule of law at all. It’s the same as those people who say they believe in free speech, but . . .

To be clear, I begin to fear we may be living through the death of the republic—the transition to empire that historical experience has led us to expect—but it’s not all Trump. It’s a truly bipartisan effort.

I am just fine with a vibe shift that gets us away from ESG, DEI, and the strangling regulation and ideologically motivated incompetence that lies behind the Los Angeles inferno, not to mention Chicago’s less spectacular descent into insolvency and criminality. If Davos Man needed Trump’s reelection to point out that if Europe went woke, it would go broke, then fine.

But trashing the rule of law is another matter.

And note how perfectly the phenomena coincide: the erosion of the laws and the imperial aspirations—Greenland; the Panama Canal; Canada (just kidding); the “Gulf of America;” and Mount McKinley ….

Niall Ferguson, Always Bet Against the Davos Man

Fascism?

Take the word fascism, properly applied to Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy, and to some extent beyond. The fasces were the bundles of rods carried by Roman lictors: symbols of punishment and magisterial authority, but in modern times also of a tightly unified society controlled from above, and organized in corporate form. The desire of totalitarians everywhere is to achieve harmonization, with all of society marching in military cadence under the guidance of an omnipresent government.

But the Trump administration is more interested in blowing up the state than in extending its power. Its ideologues, such as they are, are reacting to what they think of as government overreach. They will abuse executive power to do it, but they want to eliminate bureaucracy, not grow it.

Trump himself is not Mussolini, or Hitler, or Orbán—two of them soldiers with creditable war records, the third an activist against a dying Communist regime. Trump was a draft dodger by choice and a grifter by trade, and more important, he does not read. Unlike others in his orbit, he does not have ideas so much as impulses, whims, and resentments. He is, to be sure, cruel and malicious, but unlike the others, has no real governing vision.

Eliot A. Cohen, America Needs a Mirror, Not a Window

Too much

My simple thought: that in our politics now we consistently go too far and ask too much. It has become a major dynamic in the past 20 years or so. It manifests in a kind of ideological maximalism. You must get everything you want and grant your foe nothing. In terms of the issue above, you don’t ask society to give you something you deserve—good and just treatment of all transgender folk. Instead you insist that others see reality exactly as you do—that if a man experiences himself as a woman, then you must agree that he is a woman, and this new insight must be incorporated into all human activity, such as sports.

Reaction to the Trump executive order from those who disagree with it has been curiously absent. The reason is that they know they went too far.

The biggest and most politically consequential example of going too far, in the past generation, has been the Democratic Party and illegal immigration. Everyone knows this so I’ll say it quickly. If you deliberately allow many millions to cross the southern border illegally, thus deliberately provoking those who came here legally or were born here, Americans will become a people comfortable with—supportive of—their forced removal, certainly of those who are criminals.

…

Jump to what has been going on the past few weeks in Washington, with the unelected Elon Musk reorganizing, if that’s the word, the federal agencies. Here I pick on him, in part to show fairness. He is surely a genius, a visionary, a titan, but there is something childish and primitive about him. He has wild confidence in his ability to engineer desired outcomes, but unstable elements have a way of exploding in the beaker, and like everyone else from Silicon Valley he lacks a sense of the tragic. They think human life can be rationally shaped and perfected, that every problem just needs the right wrench, and in any case they all think they’re God.

My fear, here we switch metaphors, is that Mr. Musk and his young staffers and acolytes are mad doctors who’ll put 30 chemo ports in the sick body. They’ll not only kill the cancer, they’ll kill the patient.

But they are up against, or trying to reform, a government whose agencies themselves were often maximalist and went too far.

Of all the agencies being batted about the one we will remember first when we recall this period in history is the U.S. Agency for International Development, so much of whose line-item spending was devoted to cultural imperialism. You have seen the lists. USAID produced a DEI musical in Ireland, funded LGBT activism in Guatemala. It spent $426,000 to help Indonesian coffee companies become more climate- and gender-friendly, $447,000 to promote the expansion of atheism in Nepal, and on and on.

When you look at what they were pushing on the world you think: They’re not fighting anti-American feeling, they are causing anti-American feeling.

Who is defending these USAID programs? Nobody. Obviously not Republicans, but not Democrats either. Everyone knows the agency went too far.

Peggy Noonan

Journalism’s horrible bind

[O]n Wednesday afternoon, when I visited the essential Live Updates feed at The New York Times to check in on the latest barrage of Trump administration hyperactivity, I found literally the entire feed devoted to Trump’s bullshit “plan” for the U.S. takeover of Gaza. Breaking news stories. Reactions from around the world. Chin-scratching analysis from experts. All taking the suggestion, which Trump’s own senior staff hadn’t been expecting prior to its announcement during his press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with utmost seriousness. As if it was a real proposal that could conceivably become a reality.

I admit, this made me want to throw my laptop at the wall. Can’t you see he just fucking with us? But that’s unfair to the hardworking journalists at the Times. The American president’s words matter. They have to cover it as if it’s real. Which, of course, takes attention away from the things happening that are real. That illustrates quite vividly the horrible bind in which journalists, reporters, and news organizations find themselves at this maximally harrowing moment.

Damon Linker, Three Observations from the Midst of the Maelstrom

Starting your seventh-string QB

Thank god for James Carville: While the entire Dem establishment seems committed to losing at every opportunity they have, one James Carville is screaming into the void. “We ran a presidential election. If we were playing the Super Bowl, we started our seventh-string quarterback. . . . You can’t address a problem unless you’re honest about a problem.”

When the glowing orb of Carville pops up on the TV, you know you’re about to be yelled at. You know there’ll be spit on that table. Carville said people would be shocked to know that there are Dem candidates that “can actually complete a sentence, that actually know how to frame a message, that actually have a sense of accomplishment, of doing something.” Where are they hiding? Maybe in Governor Phil Murphy’s attic. Maybe somewhere in South Bend. But it’s time, guys: We need a complete-your-sentence–level politician, and we need one ba (sic)

Nellie Bowles

Born Against

Source, which is very worth reading.

Offshore politics

Obviously, there’s a lot going on, but I have limited my political comments in this post. Here are still more from my least-filtered blog:

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Bishops, cynics, and sundries

Fearing for their lives?

Andrew Sullivan nails it:

As for Bishop Budde, she said:

There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and Independent families, some who fear for their lives.

But why should any gay, lesbian, or trans child be afraid for their lives? Who is trying to kill them? No one. The only reason some kids are scared is because the adults who have been brainwashing them in critical gender theory are scaring them, and Budde is joining in. If anything, a pause on medical experiments on children should be a cause for relief, not fear. And fear-mongering, in any case, is not a Christian message.

The spirit of Voltaire lives!

Voltaire, according to whom “the people is between man and beast,” wrote that “I want my attorney, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, and I think that I shall then be robbed and cuckolded less often.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Political sundries

  • Here is House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries this week with a Braveheart cry for DEI initiatives: “Diversity, equity, and inclusion are American values. . . . Never surrender.” Right. Never surrender. Technically, you didn’t surrender, you just lost every major election and the popular vote. But I guess we can blame Liz Cheney, which, fair.
  • Meanwhile, the Lincoln Project guys are still just going on about January 6: “What happened to the Republicans? They once stood for law and order. But today, the party has taken their position: standing with violent insurrectionists over the people who keep us safe from them.” Please, I beg you, move on from January 6. It’s been done! Democrats see themselves as the January 6 Remembrance Party. And I’m telling you, that’s cool, but it can’t be the whole thing. You have to have one other thing! Many people (me) want to be proud Dems. Just give us one policy. Do one infrastructure bill. And no, it cannot be January 6–related.
  • New York mag crops out all the black MAGA folks: New York magazine covered MAGA inauguration parties and mentioned more than once that almost everyone at the party was white. And I’m sure that’s true-ish, truth-adjacent. But to get that to be Fully True, the magazine cropped out all the black attendees from their own picture of one of the parties, and the magazine neglected to mention the host of the party was black. There’s certainly a neo-racist, neo-Nazi scene coming up on the right, but when you’re trying to say an event was a white supremacy rally, well, you gotta shoot to kill.

Nellie Bowles

Sundry sundries

  • We try in vain to teach our children love of the true, the good and the beautiful if our actions reward bullshit, transgression and power.
  • Weird things: the little homily before protestant baptisms explaining to people that baptism doesn’t actually do anything.
  • Political fundamentals: don’t run on boutique issues in a Walmart nation
  • Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. (Allan Watts)
  • What if they gave a war and nobody came? (A favorite bumper sticker from my youth.)
  • The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits. (Mis-attributed to Albert Einstein; probably from a French equivalent by Alexandre Dumas)
  • It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. (James Baldwin)
  • The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions. (Susan Sontag via The Economist)
  • You truly possess only what you cannot lose in a shipwreck.(Sufi saying via Pico Iyer)
  • The Episcopal Church used to be “the Republican Party at Prayer.” Now it’s NPR at Prayer.
  • The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it. (George Orwell)
  • Ridicule is the only honourable weapon we have left. (Muriel Spark via the Economist)

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Not yet eleven days

Political

Trump

Top-line summary

David Post, One-Man Rule. And that one man is a honey badger.

Not leadership

In The Rutland Herald, of Vermont, an unsigned editorial summarized our new president’s fusillade of executive orders: “Donald Trump just decided to slam the nation up against the locker and demand that we all play his game — or else. That’s not leadership. That’s a shakedown.”

Via Frank Bruni

Forest and Trees

2015 me would have gazed around at the first nine days of Trump’s term, taking each policy in isolation, and concluded that the individual trees look pretty good. 2025 me stares around at the forest Trump is planting and shudders.

“What we are witnessing is nothing short of a revolution inside the U.S. government,” Politico announced on Tuesday in response to Trump’s latest personnel purges. That’s the right word.

Only two presidents in my lifetime have been truly visionary, I wrote a few weeks before the election. One is Ronald Reagan, the other is Trump. But while both treated the federal government as a beast to be broken, their goals in subduing it were all but directly opposed. Reagan believed that a weaker government would mean greater individual liberty for Americans. Trump believes that a weaker government will be less able to prevent him from consolidating power and dominating American life.

Policy by policy, he’s trying to bring about a postliberal revolution in which all meaningful federal authority ultimately rests with him. If you’re judging his daily executive actions in isolation, without regard to that fact, you’re missing the forest for the trees.

Nick Catoggio.

I usually read Catoggio for laughs. This time, he’s spot-on about a matter of vital national interest. Like Catoggio, I see a lot of nice trees; my list of them is up to seven so far. But the forest is “Mafia Don.”

Of all the links in this post, this one is the one I most hope you’ll follow, devour, and digest.

The Softest of Targets

One of the problems with Donald Trump is that he doesn’t … know stuff.

My own theory of the case, following Sherlock Holmes’ advice—“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”—is that Trump is exactly what he appears to be: an ignorant buffoon who has been carried to the presidency twice on the winds of resentment, romanticism, and nihilism. Trump is a weird combination of Chauncey Gardiner and the Bizarro World version of Pope Celestine V, the naïve hermit who was dragged out of his hole in the ground and plunked down in the Chair of St. Peter when exasperated cardinals decided that what the sclerotic papacy needed was a political outsider … who could be easily manipulated by insiders.

…

[T]hreatening to take away Putin’s access to U.S. markets is like threatening to take away Donald Trump’s library card—it’s not like he’s using it a whole heck of a lot.

… I’ve been to Ukraine and seen some of the damage done. On July 8 of last year, Putin’s forces bombed a children’s hospital in Kyiv. Putin knows a soft target when he sees it, and there are few targets in the geopolitical theater right now softer than Donald Trump.

Kevin D. Williamson

Male and Female he Executive Ordered them

Trump 47 signed an Executive Order on sex that I appreciated for its refusal to pussy-foot around. There has been some pushback (maybe a lot of pushback) that much prefers pussy-footing. Jesse Singal is on it:

What’s going on here, as usual, is that left-of-center thinkers are trying to squeeze a scientific argument into the clothes of a moral one. They have foolishly accepted the framing that we should only treat trans people with dignity and grant them certain rights if they are really the sex they say they are.

(Bold added) Isn’t that really what’s going on with the pushback?

If I only treated people with dignity and as rights-bearers when I agreed with all their delusional ideas, I’d have suffered a lot more broken bones and black eyes in my life.

Abusing the Courts

Donald Trump has sued election pollster J. Ann Selzer for “consumer fraud” and “election interference” for incorrectly projecting Kamala Harris to win Iowa by 3 points:

Efforts to prohibit purportedly false statements in politics are as old as the republic. Indeed, our First Amendment tradition originated from colonial officials’ early attempts to use libel laws against the press.

America rejected this censorship after officials used the Sedition Act of 1798 to jail newspaper editors for publishing “false” and “malicious” criticisms of President John Adams. After Thomas Jefferson defeated Adams in the election of 1800, he pardoned and remitted the fines of those convicted, writing that he considered the act “to be a nullity, as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.”

Trump’s allegations against Selzer are so baseless that you’d be forgiven for wondering why he even bothered. That is, until you realize that these claims are filed not because they have any merit or stand any chance of success, but in order to impose punishing litigation costs on his perceived opponents. The lawsuit is the punishment.

In fact, Trump has a habit of doing this. He once sued an architecture columnist for calling a proposed Trump building “one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city.” The suit was dismissed. He also sued author Timothy L. O’Brien, business reporter at the New York Times and author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald, for writing that Trump’s net worth was much lower than he had publicly claimed. The suit was also dismissed.

But winning those lawsuits wasn’t the point, and Trump himself said so. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more,” he said. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.” Back in 2015, he even threatened to sue John Kasich, then-governor of Ohio and a fellow Republican candidate for president, “just for fun” because of his attack ads.

This tactic is called a “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” or SLAPP for short, and it’s a tried-and-true way for wealthy and powerful people to punish their perceived enemies for their protected speech. It’s also a serious threat to open discourse and a violation of our First Amendment freedoms.

Lawsuits are costly, time-consuming, and often disastrous to people’s personal lives and reputations. If you have the threat of legal action hanging over you for what you’re about to say, you will think twice before saying it—and that’s the point.

Greg Lukianoff of FIRE, which is doing the free speech work that no longer interests the pathetic ACLU since it discovered LGBTetc. issues. (Bold added)

I’m going to say what is said too rarely: the lawyers who file these suits for Trump are acting unethically and should be personally sanctioned.

Other

America now hates Democrats

10. Aaron Blake:

A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday had this stunning finding: While Americans were about evenly split in their views of the Republican Party (43 percent favorable to 45 percent unfavorable), negative views of the Democratic Party outpaced positive ones by 26 points — 31 percent favorable to 57 percent unfavorable.

That’s not only a huge imbalance but also an unprecedented one.

In fact, Democrats’ 57 percent unfavorable rating is their highest ever in Quinnipiac’s polling, dating back to 2008, while the GOP’s 43 percent favorable rating is its highest ever. (Sources: washingtonpost.com, poll.qu.edu)

From John Ellis’ News Items

And why does America hate Democrats?

[A]s the teens drew to close, punctuated by the COVID pandemic and the George Floyd summer of 2020, the left was both larger than it had been in a long time and very different from earlier iterations. This was a left that believed America was a white supremacist society, fully bought into climate catastrophism, prized “equity” above social order, good governance and equal opportunity and thought “no human being is illegal” was a good approach to immigration policy. And they were perfectly willing to shout you down if you didn’t believe all this stuff or even if you didn’t use the right language when referring to these issues. Not coincidentally this was also a left with almost no connection to the working class, in stark contrast to the 20th century left’s origin story.

Ruy Teixera, The Liberal Patriot

Elon schools the AfD on guilt

I generally read Nick Catoggio for a few chuckles, but this seems deadly serious:

[O]n the eve of the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, [Elon] Musk beamed into a meeting of Germany’s right-wing, populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party to urge them to stop feeling guilty about the Holocaust, I wondered if building a “doomsday machine” might not be in his future after all.

“There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents,” Musk said, seeming to reference the country’s history when the Nazis rose to power.

“You should be optimistic and excited about a future for Germany,” said Musk, as the crowd applauded.

Elon Musk is correct, of course, that one generation should not be deemed guilty of the sins of another. No one should want to see German Chancellor Olaf Scholz hauled off to the Hague to answer for the crimes of the S.S.

But no one does want to see that, as far as I know. It’s a red herring. In his address to the German far right, Musk conflated personal responsibility with cultural responsibility. 

Personal responsibility says “you, personally, committed this sin and should pay for it.” Cultural responsibility says “you are capable of committing this sin, as you belong to a culture in which it was once widely and flagrantly committed, and that fact should inform your understanding of your culture and yourself.”

German children should not be made to feel responsible for the Holocaust. But they should be keenly aware of the fact that their culture, within living memory, barfed up a government of degenerates so depraved that it literally industrialized murder.

We all know the Santayana quote about remembering the past and being condemned to repeat it. Musk would do well to think on it a while. If your condition for feeling “optimistic and excited” about Germany’s future is everyone “moving beyond” Auschwitz, you’re not ready to move beyond Auschwitz.

I am not prepared to wave away Musk’s alleged Nazi salute. I don’t really do social media, and I don’t follow Musk on X (pronounced “shitter”), but I have reliable reports of him repeatedly boosting truly extreme and racist tweets of others. That’s some of the context for what Catoggio calls “spaz.”

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Whew! What a week!

Politics

A key question for the quadrennium

What is the honorable way to oppose while hoping for the best, to oppose while being as quick to recognize progress as to see failure, to oppose while appreciating any outcomes that are healthy for and helpful to the United States of America? And without forgetting why you oppose? We’ll find out. This is our goal. History is long and our moment within it short. Play it straight and say what you see.

…

He is going to utterly dominate our brainspace. He is a neurological imperialist, he storms in and stays. In his public self, Joe Biden asked nothing and gave nothing. Mr. Trump demands and dominates: Attention must be paid. It was said years ago that Fox News viewers were so loyal that they never changed the channel and the Fox logo burned itself into the screens. Donald Trump won’t be happy until he’s burned himself into the nation’s corneas.

… let me tell you what happens when you pardon virtually everyone who did Jan. 6: You get more Jan. 6ths. When people who commit crimes see that their punishment will be minimal they are encouraged. It was a wicked act. Conservatives are tough on crime because of the pain and disorder it causes. In that case it pained an entire nation. Jan. 6 too shamed us in the eyes of the world. This pardon was not a patriotic act.

Peggy Noonan on Trump 2.0.

Our building-on-precedent President

The effect — and I believe purpose — of these pardons is to encourage vigilantes and militias loyal to the president, but unaccountable to the government. Illiberal democracies and outright dictatorships often rely on such militia groups, whose organization and seriousness can range widely, from the vigilantes who enforce Iran’s hijab dress code to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia that have killed government opponents.

Here in America, lynch mobs and the Ku Klux Klan bolstered a racial caste system with violence that state governments, for the most part, were unwilling to commit themselves. But for decades, we had little reason to fear that vigilantes or militias would enforce the will of the state.

Former Federal Prosecutor Brendan Ballou

The Biden administration enlisted the “whole of society” to suppress supposed misinformation on social media. In practice, that meant screaming, cussing and threatening social media owners to do what the government itself is not allowed to do.

Mafia Don, by pardoning or commuting the sentences of violent felons who support him, says “hold my beer.”

I fear we’re in for vigilante justice.

Moral equivalency? Not if you think threats of violence and death are worse than threats of regulatory harassment. But it’s not unprecedented.

The day I became politically homeless

Monday, inauguration day, was the 20th Anniversary of my declaring an end of my loyalty to the GOP.

George W. Bush, for whom I’d voted in 2000 because of his promise of a humbler foreign policy, announced a 180-degree reversal:

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

(Italics added) He immediately added “This is not primarily the task of arms,” but I knew that the policy was delusional and that arms would be required in the folly.

I was right.

I wish I could say I quit because I foresaw something like Donald Trump as the eventuality of, say, the GOP’s “southern strategy,” but that would be a big ole lie.

MAGA Granny repents

One of the January 6 rioters doesn’t want a pardon:

Ms. Hemphill, 71, who was called “MAGA Granny” in some news headlines, has said that she no longer supports Mr. Trump or believes his lie that the 2020 election was stolen. She said that a therapist had helped change her view of the attack by telling her she was “not a victim of Jan. 6; I was a volunteer.”

“I lost my critical thinking,” she said on Wednesday, reflecting on her involvement in the riot and the “Stop the Steal” movement. “Now I know it was a cult, and I was in a cult.”

Would that this were not a man-bites-dog story! Would that most of the rioters had come to their senses!

Over-interpreting

Episcopal Bishop Mariann E. Budde pointedly challenged President Trump from the pulpit this week:

So, she took a breath, and spoke.

President Trump, seated seven feet below and some 40 feet to her right, made eye contact. One representation of American Christianity began speaking to another, and the most powerful man in the world was arrested by the words of a silver-haired female bishop in the pulpit. Until he turned away.

…

“Let me make one final plea, Mr. President: Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives. And the people, the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they — they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here, Mr. President.” …

For everyone watching, the vastness of Washington National Cathedral compressed, in one stunning moment, into a sudden intimacy. And with it, all the existential fights not simply of politics, but of morality itself. In a flash, the war over spiritual authority in America burst into a rare public showdown.

The Canterbury Pulpit confronted the bully pulpit on the greatest possible stage.

For nearly a decade, American Christianity has been torn apart in every possible way. Christians have fought over whether women should be allowed to preach. Over the place of gay people. The definition of marriage. The separation of church and state. Black Lives Matter. And at the heart of much of it has been Mr. Trump’s rise as the de facto head of the modern American church, and the rise of right-wing Christian power declaring itself the one true voice of God.

Elizabeth Dias, New York Times (Emphasis added)

I deny that Donald Trump is any representative of American Christianity; I don’t even think his Christianish supporters any longer claim that he is a Christian of any sort. I deny that he is “the de facto head of the modern American church.” This is highly tendentious reporting, notwithstanding the author’s credentials.

I remain scandalized that Trump gets so much enthusiastic Christianish support, but I have come to understand, at least a little bit, why voters, Christianish or not, preferred him to the senile, corrupt, manipulative, gaslighting and extremist alternative.

Honey Badger

A fairly short paragraph that packs a big claim. Speaking of a panel at Davos:

[O]ne of the panelists said she has been talking to CEOs there, and they all promise that they are not going to roll back DEI, despite the criticism. I believe she’s telling the truth. Whether those CEOs were just telling her that to calm her down, or whether they really believe it — only time will tell. I would bet that most of them really believe it, because DEI is held to with religious fervor by that elite class. As I’ve written here before, it is impossible to overstate the conformist power among elites of being seen as a Good Person. This is why no Republican leader ever pushed back against this stuff prior to Trump. They were terrified of being seen as a Bad Person by the media and other elites. Trump is the Honey Badger of politics: he doesn’t care. (That’s a link to the megaviral Randall video from some years back; he drops some profanity in it, so be aware.)

Rod Dreher

Greatness

Literary greatness

Of life in the Soviet Union for writers:

the lesson I have learned from the writers of my father’s generation is that those who resisted the life of doublethink then are the one who keep influencing us now.

Natan Sharansky, The Doublethinkers

Musical greatness

Garth Hudson, the last surviving member of The Band, has died at age 87. Alan Jacobs mourns, and in doing so points out what was so special about The Band:

Robbie Robertson once said that — when they were all living in and around the house in West Saugerties, New York they called Big Pink — Dylan would play them songs he was working on and they couldn’t tell whether he had just written them or found them under a rock. The Band’s best music is like that: it feels old, time-worn and seasoned, and yet is also a brand new thing.

Yeah, that’s how it felt.

Healthy Society, Sickly Society

The quality that sets the true elites apart—that bestows authority on their actions and expressions—isn’t power, or wealth, or education, or even persuasiveness. It’s integrity in life and work. A healthy society is one in which such exemplary types draw the public toward them purely by the force of their example. Without compulsion, ordinary persons aspire to resemble the extraordinary, not superficially but fundamentally, because they wish to partake of superior models of being or doing. The good society, Ortega concluded, was an “engine of perfection.”

In a sickly society, the force of exemplarity is reversed. Elites seek to flatter and imitate the public. They make a display of popular tastes and attitudes, even as they retreat behind barricades of bodyguards and metal-detecting machines. This, of course, is what I meant by distance: a moral alienation felt even more keenly than the structural divide.

Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.