More Adventures In Dunning-Kruger

 One of the failures of DOGE was that it was a living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, whereby people who are competent in one area presume they are competent across the board. Musk thinks that, because he took a large amount of his inheritance and got into Pay Pal and batteries early, he is a savant across all sorts of fields, including government, which of course he has no idea at all how it works. Hell, you could say the same for Trump, in that he was highly successful at hyping and selling a fundamentally worthless brand and has governed that way, to poor effect. Josh Marshall relates how Jeff Bezos has destroyed the Washington Post, because he is thinking like a Tech Bro and not a journalist.

Paul Krugman has one of his long weekend discussions with Henry Farrell that eventually turns to discusses the right ward dash of Silicon Valley. I do question whether "Silicon Valley" has really moved rightwards, so much as they had serous qualms about Biden's anti-trust agenda. Still, losing those campaign funds must not have been fun.

The real insight from the dialogue is how many Silicon Valley Bros have developed their worldviews from reading science fiction. What's more, there is a particular fallacy at play here. There is a gestalt in these circles that the world of states and the entire current order is going to collapse, and that they will reign over the new tech utopia that arises from this collapse.

This is why the failure to steep people in the Humanities is so dangerous.

Here's what's going to happen if the current order collapses. Warlords. That's it. That's what happens when states fail. And those warlords are not impressed by the fact that you successfully leveraged you IPO earnings to fund another start-up that you blah blah blah.

The root of Dunning-Kruger is a narcissism that posits that you are a very special boy indeed, because you succeeded - in this case - in making money. However, as Obama said, "You didn't build that." Economic success occurs in America because up until last January, consistent rules and laws are applied equally. Once those rules and order collapses, you discover that you are not the heroic figure that you thought you were in your special little genius boy cocoon. You're just meat. What's more, you're an appealing target because of all that shit you have.

Peter Thiel and his ilk are simply delusional, if they think that their business acumen will mean jackshit if society collapses around them. When things like that happens, it takes decades, sometimes centuries, to return to equilibrium. 

Growing Unease

 Krugman notes that the recent "deal" with Japan is actually really bad news for the economy. One thing that struck me was a common thread I've heard from various media sources. Because TACO, most businesses have assumed that Trump will bluster a bit on tariffs, get some symbolic concession and then return to lower if not low tariffs. Instead, we have bizarre tariffs that actually seem to make things like Japanese cars more affordable than American cars, because of the way the steel and aluminum tariffs work.

While many expected to see empty shelves by now, we haven't seen even a massive inflationary shock. What's happened is that American retailers - operating on the TACO principle - assume that they can carry losses in the short run rather than lose market share.

What Krugman doesn't say, but worries me, is that American companies are eating through cash reserves and lowering profits to smooth the jagged edges off Trump's tariffs. Why this worries me is that a recession seems inevitable at some point. There are just a lot of blinking yellow lights. Plus, fraud is almost always a bad business practice and the Trump regime is riddled with fraud. At some point, the ability of the fraudulent to keep spinning plates ends and it all comes crashing down.

What happens if and when that happens and large numbers of corporations are cash poor? How will they be able to cushion the blow, especially since we've gutted the social safety net?

Enshittification And AI

 Paul Krugman has been writing about Cory Doctorow's thesis of "Enshittification." Basically, the model is that tech companies create a platform that creates "network effects" - the more people who use it, the better it is. The early days of Facebook, when it was so awesome to reconnect with people you hadn't seen in years or decades, is a great example of network effects.

Once you get enough users, you "enshittify" by exploiting your captured customer base - higher fees, more ads, more and more ads, worse customer service and experience. The general pissed off-edness of America in 2025 is at least in part a product of people being drawn together and then hating the platforms and experiences that bring them together. This backlash, posits Krugman, has led to the backlash against Big Tech.

Now, I don't think every Big Tech executive has become Elon Musk or Peter Thiel. There's an interesting read by an actual scientist about the delusions of tech billionaires. Basically, the ecosystem of Silicon Valley is geared towards the Start Up, whereby you hype some new platform or tech and get your IPO millions and then coast on to your next project. The problem is, according to Adam Becker, is that most of their ideas (especially Musk's and those like him) are just laughable, derived from adolescent infatuation with science fiction. 

Silicon Valley is not about science, it's about venture capitalism. Elon Musk is not a scientist, inventor or engineer, he's a VC guy with just enough scientific knowledge to create shit like the Cyber Truck.

Which brings me to AI.

AI is a great example of the Silicon Valley hype machine. Becker:

There’s also no particular reason to believe that the kinds of machines that we are building now and calling “AI” are sufficiently similar to the human brain to be able to do what humans do. Calling the systems that we have now “AI” is a kind of marketing tool. You can see that if you think about the deflation in the term that’s occurred just in the last 30 years. When I was a kid, calling something “AI” meant Commander Data from Star Trek, something that can do what humans do. Now, AI is, like, really good autocomplete. 

That’s not to say that it would never be possible to build an artificial machine that does what humans do, but there’s no reason to think that these can and a lot of reason to think that they can’t. And the self-improvement thing is kind of silly, right? It’s like saying, “Oh, you can become an infinitely good brain surgeon by doing brain surgery on the brain surgery part of your brain.” 

As as educator, I find AI deeply troubling. As a high powered search engine...OK. There is something nice about searching for something like "How to grow strawberries" and getting a decent summary of the conventional wisdom about how to make a wee strawberry patch. 

However, AI is pretty much just a hyper-powered predictive text machine. Right now, I could ask it to write an essay on a given prompt - By 1876, who had won the argument about the future of America, Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton - and I could get a B+ essay.

Sam Altman and other AI acolytes suggest that AI will be far more impactful. As Becker summarizes:

 (Altman)said something like, “Oh, global warming is a really serious problem, but if we have a super-intelligent AI, then we can ask it, ‘Hey, how do you build a lot of renewable energy? And hey, how do you build a lot of carbon capture systems? And hey, how do we build them at scale cheaply and quickly?’ And then it would solve global warming.” What Sam Altman is saying is that his plan for solving global warming is to build a machine that nobody knows how to build and can’t even define and then ask it for three wishes.

You can see the toxic tech positivity at work there. Then you get a combination of Groupthink and financial FOMO, where everyone jumps on the hype-train.

Meanwhile, in the real world, students are using AI to cheat and short circuit their learning and consuming massive amounts of energy to do so.

What will happen, if enshittification continues, is that people will become more and more reliant on AI for basic tasks that might have required them to acquire real-life skills (academic or otherwise) and then once companies have captured people into AI dependency, they will exploit them for profit.

The only reason to believe that is because it's what they have always done before.

The Danger In Trump's Weakness

 As I mentioned yesterday, Trump has seen a substantial drop in support. One poll had him at 50-50 support among white people. Those are dire numbers for a Republican. 

The problem is that when authoritarians are weak, they tend to lash out and try to sew discord and crisis. The fundamental rationale for a strong man is to counteract chaos and lawlessness. 

Enter the Epstein scandal. 

You already have a president who's seeing his approval crater over his tariffs and deportation cruelty. Now, every action he takes seems to scream that he is at the center of even more and more damaging revelations about his links to Epstein and the rape of children. All of this makes him extremely dangerous, as his constant desire to increase division and outrage has been his go-to tactic when faced with scandal.

His release of the FBI MLK files is just...bonkers. The House going on recess so that they won't have to vote on measures to release the "Epstein files" is...laughable. Listening to Trump is like listening to someone decompress in real time.

“We caught Hillary Clinton,” Trump said. ”We caught Barack Hussein Obama. They're the ones, and then you have many, many people under them…. And it's the most unbelievable thing I think I've ever read. So you ought to take a look at that and stop talking about nonsense, because this is big stuff, never has a thing like this happened in the history of our country. And by the way, it morphed into the 2020 race, and the 2020 race was rigged, and it was, it was a rigged election. And because it was rigged, we have millions of people in our country, we have—we had inflation, we solved the inflation problem. But millions and millions of people came into our country because of that, and people that shouldn't have been, people from gangs and from jails and from mental institutions.”

Trump continued: "This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody's ever even imagined, even in other countries.”

How can you listen to that insane drivel and not be convinced that he's in charge of his faculties?

Krugman notes that Trump and his Gestapo are likely to launch an attack on New York similar to the one he launched on LA. He seems to think that - because everyone in MAGA thinks NYC is a hellscape - that images of ICE attacking immigrant neighborhoods will redound to his political benefit. It will give him an excuse to nationalize the Guard again and militarize American streets. 

The problem with this is that his efforts in LA made him distinctly less popular on the very issue of deportations and immigration in general. Trump knows about five musical notes on the Wingnut Wurlitzer and he will keep pounding on them in a discordant cacophony like a meth-addled chimp, because in the end that's the only tune he knows.

Maybe if armored cars show up in the streets of NY, Jake Tapper can stop flogging his "Biden is old" book and pay attention to what's actually happening now.

The Good News Hidden In The Bad News

 Josh Marshall points out the two very different dynamics we are seeing this summer. Trump's authoritarianism is very much on the march through the institutions. The various defunding and concentrating the power of the purse at the wrong end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The apparent creation of a secret police within ICE. The attacks on political opponents and "blue" areas of the country. Some of the batshit insane "content" emanating from the White House is a failed attempt to distract from Epstein, but still, he's leaning into some very alarming behaviors that extend beyond his usual rhetoric.

But - as Marshall notes - this is all pretty damned unpopular! If you burrow into his actual policies, they are ALL underwater, including his "strong" issues on immigration and deportation and the economy. His approval ratings are in the low 40s and falling. There is 23 point negative spread on prices and inflation; it's 17 points on jobs and the economy; it's 14 points negative on deportations.

Marshall's thesis - and I think it's accurate - is that you cannot turn America into Hungary if you're incredibly unpopular. Orban was popular. When Putin dismantled the poorly institutionalized Russian democracy, he was really popular. Populism isn't synonymous with popularity, but sometimes it is largely popular. 

Trump isn't. 

As the Epstein issue continues to plague him, he will act more and more outlandish in an effort to chum up the waters. Much of those efforts will likely make him MORE unpopular.

Middle Path On Israel

 Like, I think, the majority of Americans, I believe that Israel has a right to exist. I believe that there should be a Palestinian state. I believe Hamas committed war crimes on October 7th, and that they have continued to do so. I believe that the IDF has committed war crimes in Gaza, and that they have continued to do so.

I also believe that Netanyahu has made the Likud party in particular and the Israeli Right in general a political ally of the GOP.

Yglesias actually has a proposal that makes sense for whenever Democrats are allowed to govern again. It's unlikely to satisfy extreme partisans on either side of the issue, but it does makes broad political sense. He suggests that we should simply stop giving Israel aid.

Americans have a warped sense of foreign aid. They think it's a massive part of the budget, when it's actually pennies. This makes aid unpopular, and it's why Trump and Musk attacked it first. As with any large program, there were aspects of aid that were weird or problematic, but on the whole, foreign aid is incredibly effective.

However, sending aid to Israel only made sense when Israel was surrounded by enemies intent on its destruction. Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon are largely at peace with Israel. There is at least a possibility that Syria may make peace. That pretty much leaves a diminished Hamas and other Iranian proxies like the Houthi as the only belligerent forces arrayed against a much, much more potent Israeli military.

So, the rationale for giving billions in aid to Israel no longer applies. What's more, the ethical questions of being involved on either side are likely too thorny to untangle in a way that makes sense and satisfies various veto points. Simply withdrawing aid from Israel would divorce us from the entire mess and satisfy those who oppose foreign aid. 

Now, if this is going to happen, it would probably be best if President Shapiro or President Ossoff were to take the lead, but I don't see why that should be a problem. No aid for Israel as long as the Israeli government stands in the way of a two state solution.

Six Months

 We are one-eighth of the way through Trump's second Reign of Error and Terror. Hopefully at the halfway point, we will have control of one or both houses of Congress and can more effectively fight back. 

What is clear is that Trump's chaos and criminality are beginning to sink in with even the casually engaged American electorate. Here are some numbers via Simon Rosenberg:

Trump has become remarkably unpopular. In the new CBS poll Trump has dropped from 53%-47% (+6) in early February to 42%-58% (-16) today. That’s a 22 point drop!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Most major independent polls show a similar crash:

• 41% - 54% (-13) Quinnipiac

• 41% - 54% (-13) Ipsos/Reuters

• 41% - 55% (-14) Civiqs

• 41% - 55% (-14) Econ/YouGov

• 42%- 58% (-16) CNN

• 42%- 58% (-16) CBS

• 40%- 58% (-18) AP/NORC

There remains this assumption that Trump is immune to the basic thermostatic swings in American politics or that nothing every really touches the guy. That just seems obviously wrong. 

Trump motivates a specific type of voter, usually of lower educational attainment and not terribly plugged into the nuances of the political process. For them, the system is broken and Trump has told them "he alone can fix it." Trump is therefore part of the broad populist revolt against the trends of the 21st century, where experts are held in contempt and only a "strongman" can fix things.

One reason the Epstein thing is so threatening to him, is because the basic narrative about Epstein is that it is a prime example of elite impunity. His crimes were discovered in 2008 and he got a sweet plea deal. It was only subsequent reporting that brought his second arrest in 2019. Preying on young women is considered in the QAnon and QAnon-adjacent spaces to be a telltale trait of the "elite." 

Trump's base has nowhere to go if they finally realize that their chosen savior is, in fact, part of the problem. My guess is that they will simply stay home, disillusioned by having been duped by a career con artist. JD Vance is not motivating these voters.

The damage that Trump is doing to America and the world is real, but I don't want to overstate its permanence. Much of what Trump is trying to return us to is a world we left behind in the '60s and '70s. Few people actually want that. They wanted inflation to go down, they were gullible about Trump's business acumen and ascribed to him credit for the economy of 2017-19 that he didn't really deserve. 

There is damage still to be done. Putting a fascist good like Emil Bove on the Federal bench is one example, the gutting of American education is another, the economic hit from crushing immigration is a third. 

It's been bad. It will get worse, especially if the lights on the economy go from blinking yellow to flashing red (which I think they will). Stupid, evil people have their hands on the levers of power and if we have a real crisis, then we are really screwed.

It's a grim landmark, but it's behind us. We have more storms ahead.

Trump v Murdoch

 The Wall Street Journal has always been a contradictory institution. Its' editorial page is incredibly right wing, but its' reporting is top notch. So, the fact that the WSJ reported on Trump's deeply creepy birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein is just ten types of fascinating. 

First, we can be incredibly sure that the WSJ sourced the hell out of that letter. It's real, both because Trump will sue and because the WSJ brings receipts. The assumption is that they have more stuff, but are waiting to see what happens with this story.

The obvious question is whether they ran this by Rupert Murdoch before running it. We have CBS firing Colbert, but letting him stay on the air for almost a full year, now News Corps leveling a devastating broadside into the SS Trump.

As Patrick Choanec points out, it's not a million different stories about Trump's outrageousness; it's one story with many parts. Epstein is increasingly being seen by even staid media as a legitimate story, and it's being seen that way in large part because Trump is forcing them to do so. There is also the growing perspective among the more leftward media figures that Epstein represents not only his own horrific crimes, but the broad elite impunity that rich men enjoy, that Trump has enjoyed.

Epstein avoided jail for a long time and Trump has also avoided jail time, despite being convicted of 34 felonies. The fact that Murdoch's Journal is the conduit for even more damaging evidence of the criminal (as opposed to symbolic) connection between these two is really, really remarkable.

Does CBS Matter?

 There was a time when CBS - especially CBS News - was the premier network: "The Tiffany Network." Recently, CBS has kowtowed to Trump by settling a baseless lawsuit, gutting 60 Minutes and now firing Stephen Colbert who has consistently derided Trump. (It is interesting that Colbert will stay on the air for months, now free to say whatever the hell he feels.)

As disturbing as this truly is about how elite media sees itself in Trumpistan, I do wonder if this even matters. The problem with controlling CBS or the Washington Post or other venues is that media has become so diffuse that shutting down Colbert will only free him to migrate online. Conan O'Brien has been phenomenally successful after he was fired for no good reason, except making the suits uncomfortable.

The fracturing of media has been bad for our sense of shared national narrative. There is no Walter Cronkite to arbitrate the news for us. However, that fracturing also places it largely outside the control of a malevolent force like MAGA.

At least, I hope so.

When All You Know Is Lies...

 The Lying Liar for The Liar In Chief just admitted that Trump's noticeably swelling ankles is because of a condition called Chronic Venous Insufficiency. They explained away the odd coloration of his hand as being bruising from excessive hand shaking.

Maybe.

There are two problems with believing this.

The first is that Trump released his physical a few months back that was laughably laudatory. Basically, the only reason that Trump isn't competing in the 2028 Olympics is because of all the presidenting and America greatening that he's doing. Yet he has this condition - one that isn't exactly quick onset and one that has been noticeable for years - that didn't show up on his amazing physical.

The second is that because of all the lying, including that mentioned above, it's really hard to believe them this time. Maybe it's benign, maybe he has advanced heart or kidney disease. We cannot possibly trust what comes from the White House.

Is this a bid to attract sympathy because of Epstein? That doesn't seem like Trump's style.

Anyway, the actuarial table always win.

The Coming Chaos

 It is worth noting that we are only now coming up to the six month mark of Trump's second term. He has been rampaging through our institutions like rapid gorilla and done real damage to all sorts of democratic institutions. He has also made efforts to destroy basic competency. Again, I defer to Richardson.

Among the outrages to good government that are occurring this week:

- The immolation of 500 metric tons of famine relief foodstuffs.
- The incoherent and often contradictory policy towards Ukraine.
- Epstein.

With regards to destroying food enough to feed 1.5 million children, that's obviously wasteful in ways that defy calculation. Anytime some fucking Republican talks about "waste and fraud" this needs to be thrown in their face. Republicans do not care about "waste and fraud" they just want to hurt poor people.

The Ukraine issue was that the Trump White House is so fundamentally dysfunctional that some undersecretary basically cancelled military aid to Ukraine because Pete Hegseth is too busy making videos for Faux News and Marco Rubio is both an empty suit AND has too many jobs. There is no policy direction from the West Wing. It's just MAGA lunatics freelancing.

As for Epstein...who knows where this will go. Perhaps the slow rise in inflation that Krugman explains here is beginning to have an impact. What's notable - really notable - is that polling has Trump underwater on every single issue, even ones like immigration and "the economy" that have been his and Republican strong suits. When you're riding high, scandals don't bruise you as easily. Ask Bill Clinton. When people actually are angry with other stuff, then things like Epstein become shorthand for the general gestalt. Specifically with Epstein, it becomes "I didn't vote for this!" (You, in fact, voted for this.)

Again, we aren't six months in. Inflation is burbling up as markets try and figure out what will actually happen with tariffs. In Krugman's explanation, the combination of TACO and wholesalers stockpiling goods before "Liberation Day" has buffered prices from steep inclines. Sellers can eat a little profit to keep prices low, if they think the tariffs are going to go away. 

However, the real crisis is likely still to come. A government and economy increasingly built on fraud and incompetence will both create a crisis and be unable to cope with it. Texas' embrace of terrible governance both created the conditions of the Kerr County tragedy and then was unable to respond quickly to save anyone. That sort of tragedy is the collapse of institutions. It took five years for Bush to gut things like FEMA. Trump has done it in five months.

Stay safe out there. No one is coming to save you.

The Department Of Miseducation

 I have no response to the current Supreme Court's decision to allow the Executive Branch to unilaterally gut the Department of Education. It's obviously part of the Project 2025 Playbook that was so unpopular when it was leaked a year ago, that Trump disavowed it, only to make it his operating software in January.

The idea that a president can unilaterally fire civil servants with the express intent of ending a cabinet level department that was created and funded by Congress is basically tyranny. It is executive power unconstrained by law. What's more, we know full well that if President Ossoff fires 90% of ICE agents in January of 2029, the Supreme Court will rule that illegal. 

Or - perhaps more likely - the current ruling is a placeholder. They removed the stay, they did not rule the firings were OK. They will let Trump and his minions terrorize the Federal workforce, fire a bunch of people and then rule that he couldn't actually do that in late 2028. At that point, good people intent on public service will have zero desire to sign up to work for a capricious and senile old man intent on, you know, terrorizing the Federal workforce. The Departments that Trump targets will be gutted and hollow shells, but the Court will eventually rule, "Hey, you couldn't actually do that!" once there is the threat of a Democratic president.

To this point, the only institutions offering up even a modicum of resistance to Trump are the lower courts. As servants of the law, these judges - appointed by presidents of both parties - have been aghast at the nihilistic lawlessness of this presidency. As Richardson notes in the piece linked above, two thirds of the lawyers whose job it is to defend the administration have quit, either because what they are being asked to do is illegal, nonsensical or more likely both. 

Trump will increasingly be represented in District and Circuit courts by idiots like Alina Habba and Jeanine Pirro, and the administration will lose on the merits, only to have the Supreme Court stay any remedy until 2028-29.

Whomever assumes power after Trump - and I'm still going to assume that there will be actual elections in the future - is going to have to unwind a LOT of shit. The Supreme Court, however, could be the hardest institution to unfuck. 

Postures, Not Solutions

 Richardson has a nice run down of the history of immigration law and reform, stretching back to the Emergency Quota Act of 1922. Immigration laws have always been tied and constrained by racism and xenophobia, again, this period in American history is really not that new, it's just remarkably undemocratic. 

America has long wrestled with the tension between wanting and as often as not needing more workers and fears both of "others" and depressed wages. Right now, the main opposition to Trump/Miller's deportation scheme is the inhumanity of it, the indiscriminate cruelty. However, it seems fairly likely that this will create long term inflation, especially in agricultural goods. Other areas like construction and certain service areas - restaurants and hotels - could also see price increases.

Now, I and other thought we would be seeing inflationary effects from Trump's tariffs. There was widespread talk of the collapse of container shipping in the Pacific Ocean, for instance. That hasn't happened. Yet. It could be that suppliers had stocked up in anticipation of the tariffs or perhaps slowing overall demand has mitigated the effect of tariffs. Most likely both, but at the moment, MAGA is crowing about the fact that there aren't empty shelves at Target and Walmart.

Still, macroeconomics tends to have the last word. For instance, Good Yglesias showed up today to write about Javier Milei's early success in Argentina. It's a good, balanced take, in that it looks both at what Milei has done and more importantly hasn't done, while noting that Argentina has had false springs before. Basically, Milei ran as a right wing, chainsaw wielding populist, but he's largely governed as a neoliberal austerity guy who's getting help from the IMF. He did NOT do the crazy populist stuff, like abandoning the Argentine peso and replacing it with the US dollar. Instead, he just did what the textbook says and slash government spending (which does immiserate the poor) which - along with IMF help - has stabilized the peso in ways that allow for some business investment (which dried up in the face of runaway inflation).

What's more, Argentina has cycled through good periods and bad periods since it embarked on a series of disastrous macroeconomic policies under Peron. Left and right wing governments oscillate back and forth, occasionally seeing stability and then falling off a cliff. Argentina had nothing to do with causing 2008, but it was crippled nevertheless and has really struggled to recover (then Covid).

So, it's not like Milei is governing the way he campaigned, because he's an economist and "gets it." Meanwhile, Trump IS governing from the Project 2025 playbook - which was his platform, even if he tried to run away from it. In fact, the media's collective shrug when Trump said he wasn't running on the platform that he was actually running on was probably as big a reason we have a Trump presidency as any. 

Populism is best understood as a form of politics AND a portfolio of policies. Milei was a populist politician, but so far has not been a purely populist president. Trump, meanwhile, has taken decades of Republican demagoguery on immigration and placed it at the heart of his governing agenda. Sure, there's the Project 2025 war on basic science, but the beating heart of Trump's populism is hatred of immigration and globalization. (Although apparently the central nervous system consists of QAnon type conspiracy theories.)

For whatever reason, we have not seen quite the inflationary pressures from the combination of Trump's tariffs and his mass deportations of otherwise law abiding immigrants - legal or undocumented. It could be that inflation isn't as bad as predicted because we are already entering a reduction in consumer demand that usually presages a recession. One thing we can be confident of, is that whatever Trump winds up doing, it will not be because he is listening to what mainstream economists think. The contempt for elites and elite-created knowledge is very, very real.

Turn That Dial

 As Krugman notes, Trump's (Stephen  Miller's) mass deportation program is becoming less and less popular by the day. He suggests that images of paramilitary raids on Home Depot parking lots repels many Americans and I think that's true.

But - as with the Epstein stuff - the problem with MAGA and even "normie" Republicans is that what they believe is just utter bullshit. There is no army of MS-13 members terrorizing American cities.

You can't achieve a goal based on fantasy.

Epstein, Part II

 At least for the moment, the Epstein furor has not died down. At least in part, this is because Trump himself is screaming for everyone to stop talking about Epstein. MAGA remains furious, because they are so marinated in conspiratorial thinking that Epstein became a tentpole of their belief system. Trump's voluble defense of Attorney General Pam Bondi has only enraged people more. First of all, Bondi is transparently doing Trump's bidding. Secondly, goons like Dan Bongino have created entire personalities around Epstein/QAnon and they can't let it go that easily.

Again, my feeling is that there is not an "Epstein List" because there is zero chance that it would have remained secret all this time. Trump is all over those flight manifests, but if there really was a "list" I would wager that it would have been leaked during the recent presidential campaign. 

Here's the thing I don't get, though. Trump and Bondi are serial liars. I'm kind of shocked that they simply haven't fabricated a list. I'm hardly going to credit their deep faith in evidentiary integrity. So, maybe there is some smoking gun out there, and if they release a fake "list" then the sword of Damocles falls. 

Maybe. 

As Richardson notes, "Epstein" has managed to overshadow the impact of cuts to FEMA right in the middle if the response to the Kerr County floods and the declining popularity of Trump's immigration gestapo. The inevitable chaos of a Trump Administration unmoored to "adult" Republicans has produced a cascading series of scandals, problems and even tragedies. Most Americans are woefully uninformed about the daily goings on in their world, but the constant drumbeat of problems is merging with the salacious nature of "Epstein".

The hope for American democracy really has been that either the Right shatters along the fault lines of its' internal contradictions or that Trump screws up so bad, that his cultists simply drop out of the political process. "Epstein" has the potential to do both: creating a schism within the MAGA ranks while also prompting others to simply walk away in disgust (as Bongino seems to be doing).

Anyway, do you like butter on your popcorn? Or maybe flavored salt?

UPDATE: Cheryl Rofer accurately describes it as not fantasy breaking against reality, but fantasy against fantasy. Maybe that was the key all along? You can't dissuade members of a cult through reason and evidence, but through the disintegration of their fantasy.