AI Freakout Of The Day

 Yglesias does one of his spicyhot contrarian takes about AI. Basically - because everything in his mind is about YIMBY v NIMBY - the backlash to AI is really about data centers. No one wants some behemoth gobbling up their electricity and fresh water to plop down in their neighborhood. 

There is certainly backlash to data centers. To simply dismiss other concerns because some data suggests people are conflicted is typical Yglesias bullshit. 

The fundamental reason to be pessimistic about AI is the general pessimism about social media and also the specific concerns about originality. We now have 20 years of internet penetration into most aspects of our lives. It can be benign. It can be beneficial. It can also be terrible in ways that human cognition hasn't compensated for. We know that tech companies goose our amygdala to keep us engaged. Are we going to add the tremendous capabilities of AI to the existing algorithmic world we live in? 

We are suspicious of tech even as we utilize it more and more. It's not a clear case of "AI is bad" or "AI is awesome." I don't like the way AI short circuits creativity and smooths over the struggle of actual learning and discovery. As a teacher, it scares me what will happen to this generation, because I've seen what social media has done to their older siblings. I still like using AI search features. It's pretty convenient.

We also have to accommodate the very real possibility that AI is massively over-hyped but simultaneously accommodate the very real possibility that it could wreck devastation on sectors of the economy. The speed at which this is happening is, in and of itself, scary.

Humans don't really like uncertainty. AI both promises and threatens changes on a scale that has people freaking out. The idea that there isn't a backlash is overdetermined from Yglesias' pre-existing obsessions. 

UPDATE: This seems pretty fucking awful. If you are an educator, that would seem to be a really bright red line.

Unitary Politics

 Krugman wonders why people are so sour on the economy when it's "meh" as opposed to "bad." It's the whole "Vibes" thing again, in some ways. However, I think Marshall's point that all politics is unitary is important. Prices ARE a problem for many people. There AREN'T a lot of job openings. It's not 2008-9, but things are kind of shitty.

However, I think the whole "Focus on affordability" tactic espoused by political strategists misses this point of unitary politics. As Morris notes, people aren't thrilled with ICE and deportations. Americans aren't monsters and generally like their immigrant neighbors. Yeah, MAGA is gonna MAGA, but most people aren't thrilled with what they are seeing out of Minneapolis and elsewhere. They aren't thrilled by the destruction of the East Wing.

What happens is you combine general attitudes about corruption or incompetence or cruelty with a soft economy and you get general backlash. I might be most outraged by the attacks on liberal democracy or the Russophilic foreign policy, but that will also show up as being upset about the economy. Biden faced this, too.

Aside from both Biden and Trump facing this conglomerated unease, they both struggled to turn the narrative around. Biden is a bad speaker, and he has gotten worse as he got older. He is not senile,  but he cannot command the bully pulpit. Trump is a bad speaker, and he has gotten worse as he has gotten older. With Trump, it is the raging narcissism that cannot allow defeat or retreat, that locks him into rhetorical boxes. I mean there were some naïfs saying that he could use the SOTU to bring the country together. C'mon!

Trump threw red meat to MAGA and the GOP last night. Polls that say people were happy with the speech only demonstrate that most people didn't watch, only partisans who were favorably disposed to him in the first place. His lies about prices are not going to change perceptions about him. 

Democracy works, not because it's efficient (it's not), but because it can correct course - or you lose the next election. Trump's continual doubling down on unpopular actions hopefully holds the seeds of his destruction.  

Epstein And Indiscriminate Allegations

 Martin Longman writes about the allegations against Trump that we know of in the Epstein Files that have actually been released. 

He makes a good point that these allegations or even simply contact between Epstein and other elites - broadly defined - tend to erode our judicial system's requirements of the presumption of innocence. Some of the people being dragged or fired seem to have been in Epstein's orbit in some manner and that alone is enough to cost them a job. The arrests in Britain actually deal with sharing classified information with Epstein, not his more lurid crimes. Andrew Windsor-Mountbatten almost certainly raped minors. He's apparently a world class scumbag.

That's the thing, though. One of the legacies of #MeToo was that men who treat women badly, tend to treat WOMEN badly. If they sexually harass one woman, they harass multiple women. Few men rape ONE woman. The crime of rape is not fundamentally about lust but about power and violence. 

Donald Trump's presence in one specific incident - the Bitten Penis, if you will - represents that power and violence. So does the Access Hollywood tape. So does the E. Jean Carroll case. So does the testimony of Stormy Daniels, where she acquiesced to sex rather than risk violence. So does the allegation of abuse by Ivanka Trump. 

Sometimes, women invent accusations of sexual assault. That happens. Rarely...never to my knowledge...do multiple women invent accusations about the same man. Deshaun Watson was a sex pest, harassing masseuses with great regularity. It wasn't just a one time misunderstanding. We have ample, ample evidence that Trump sees women as sexual hosts not romantic partners. 

We keep waiting for some final smoking gun to be discovered that definitively links Trump to raping someone. I don't think we are ever really going to have that moment of clarity. I would also argue that we don't need it. It is precisely the multitude of credible - if not always proven - allegations against him that should allow us to pass judgment on this fucking monster.  

The Coming Lunacy

 Tonight. Hair Furor will deliver what is sure to be a bizarro rant, where he cycles through the accumulated grievances of his rally screeds. Ostensibly the Constitutionally mandated State of the Union address, I would wager it will feel more like one of his Truth Social rants. 

Richardson runs down what a catastrophic few days this have been for Trump. As he weakens, his old threats seem less daunting. Foreign powers are increasingly turning away from the US; the tariff lunacy injects even more uncertainty into the US and global economy; Trump's popularity is close to the lowest that it's ever been (around January 6th). Malignant narcissist that he is, these accumulating wounds eat at him and make an unhinged performance tonight even more likely.

For what few "adults" are left in the room: do they pump him up with amphetamines to give him the energy he needs or sedate him so that he doesn't come off as a crazed lunatic? These are the questions American government officials are asking themselves.

Toxic America

 I heard an argument that as bad as everything seems to be right now, it's not as bad as the 2000s. The logic - and it's sound - is that 9/11 was so traumatic we don't even talk about the anthrax scare. We fought two somewhat pointless wars. We had the 2008 financial crisis. 

Yeah, that's a lot.

There does seem to be an accelerating toxicity to America though. Part of it is just the relentless stupidity of the people in charge. Dubya Bush was pretty thick, but these idiots are just spectacularly dumb. Kash Patel chugging beers with the men's hockey team...I mean what are we doing here?

Something else caught my eye that I think is emblematic of how awful things are. 

HBO released A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, with the last episode airing last night. It's great. It masterfully moves tonally from incredibly funny to moving to tragically sad. It's "small" compared to Game of Thrones, but that's the point. Anyway, the penultimate episode was amazing and was briefly ranked on IMDB as one of the best episodes of TV...ever. OK, it probably wasn't THAT good, but who freaking cares?

Apparently fans of Breaking Bad care, because they began to review bomb IMDB to drive down the rating for that episode to preserve "Ozymandias", an ep of Breaking Bad, as the top episode of all time. When last night's show came out, Breaking Bad fans mobbed IMDB to drive down the score before the episode had concluded. 

This is all very, very silly, stupid and petty. However, it does demonstrate something about America in 2026. I would posit that the rise of the internet has created this, both by democratizing taste and elevating hostility. Democratizing taste isn't terrible, but we've seen fanbases basically revolt because the story artists are telling wasn't the story they wanted to be told. That isn't the point of storytelling. What happens is a relentless whining about the end of Lost or Game of Thrones or The Sopranos or Seinfeld. It's the dynamic of "Your Favorite Band Sucks, Actually" but amplified across a dozen online platforms.

In the end it sucks the joy out of life. It makes the incessant howling of the self-centered the medium of cultural discourse. What's more, AI is coming to force this everywhere. Didn't like the ending of Game of Thrones? You can burn 5 gigawatts and a rainforest's water supply for AI to make you an ending that suits your taste. It will suck for everyone but you, but congrats, you have made a soulless piece of crap to soothe your raging id.

I love the fact that last night I could quickly find an answer to the question "Should you feed your dog leftover pesto?" (The answer is no.) The internet can be a great facilitator of knowledge - once you know how to use it and once you are aware of its limits. The churn of social media, the imperative of the algorithm that prioritizes "engagement" is absolutely toxic, and it has its roots in the Oughts and the chatrooms. It's now everywhere and it sucks. 

Putin's Own Goal

 We are four years into Putin's invasion of Ukraine that was supposed to be days or weeks to completion. The stoutness and adaptability of Ukrainian defenders has held a much larger army, population and economy at bay. Even as Trump has essentially ended aid to Ukraine, Europe has stepped up. This suggests that the longest impact of Trump's childish and short-sighted foreign policy will be the creation of a stronger, more independent Europe. As long as we eventually return to our liberal democratic roots, that's fine. Europe SHOULD stand up.

From Putin's point of view, a unified Europe is a disaster. He could count on Trump and Xi to more or less tolerate whatever he wanted to do, but Europe - especially Eastern Europe - has no illusions about what this fucker wants to do. What's more, the Ukrainian War has demonstrated that the future of warfare is not how much you can bench press, but your ability to leverage technical know-how and financial resources to create robot armies and air forces. The future of warfare is changing in Ukraine, and the US withdrawal from that conflict means we aren't going to be able to learn as quickly or as deeply as we should.

Meanwhile, Russia seems incapable of learning. They continue to demonstrate a lack of creativity, relying on the idea of brute force and brutalizing their troops. It was long assumed that a "frozen conflict" would disadvantage Ukraine, but the way the war has become a drone war seems to benefit Ukraine, who can use their drones to enforce a frontline that Russia can't exploit with their superior numbers.

The impact of this war on the Russian economy is murky, but it is doubtful that it's good. Russia has gotten around many of the sanctions, but not all - and its economy was no great shakes to begin with. 

It is, of course, sad to realize that a President Harris would have likely given more weapons to Ukraine and allowed them, perhaps, to roll back Russian forces. Maybe there is no victory for Ukraine that returns its stolen land. But there can be no question that this conflict has been a disaster for Russia.

Trump's Own Goal

 In the face of the Supreme Court actually upholding the Constitution, Trump had doubled and now tripled down on his tariffs. As Elliott Morris notes, this is deeply unpopular. Despite the economic illiteracy of the median voter who helped re-elect him, people ARE capable of learning. With tariffs front and central in the news since April, people have learned that tariffs are, in fact, inflationary. If they are unhappy about prices (they are) then tariffs piss them off. By a margin of 19 points, people don't like tariffs. The only issues he polls worse on are government funding and health care and prices/inflation. All of this overlaps.

Defying the Supreme Court - even if technically he's using a different statute - is also unpopular. Even 82% of Republicans say he should obey Supreme Court rulings. SCOTUS offered Trump and off-ramp from his tariffs, which were already unpopular. Instead of taking it, he's attacking the Courts and being a whiny, petulant pissant. Only 23% of Americans disapprove of the striking of those tariffs, which is below the floor I projected for Trump. 

As Krugman relates, Trump is turning the laws on their heads - laws designed to reduce barriers to trade - to justify "shit he wants to do because he's the boss." It is always helpful to remember that Trump spent his whole career running a business with about ten employees, because he was doing shady shit and wanted no obstacles to his actions. He had no Board to answer to. The President is supposed to answer to the other branches and to the American people. Trump's latest tantrum shows he's not learned the basic civics lessons we teach middle schoolers. 

A sane politician - someone who was practiced in winning small bore elections - would retreat. Trump has run in three elections that basically functioned as "beauty pageants" based on vibes and latent misogyny and a poor grasp of the actual stakes by many voters. He responded to his only electoral defeat by trying to overturn democracy in America. He is incapable of understanding that he's lost and will continue to lose on this issue.

Government By Toddler

 Trump has now upped the general tariff rate to 15% from 10% and the maximum that he can without immediate Congressional approval. 

The first round of Liberation Day tariffs were almost immediately exposed as a grift and a strongman tactic. He levied high tariffs, affected companies came to him and bent the knee, contributed to his ballroom, gave him solid gold iPhones. He then relented like a magnanimous potentate. It was corrupt, it was the sort of self-dealing that typifies everything this shallow man does.

When SCOTUS (barely) reaffirmed the Constitutional prerogatives of Congress (even if they are too supine to do it themselves), Trump reacted like the whining petulant pissant that he is at the deepest core of his personality. His rambling press conference would have embarrassed any previous holder of the office of Chief Magistrate.

The reason for reinstalling tariffs at all are...not great. They can accomplish nothing, because they will sunset in 150 days. No one is onshoring a factory because of this tariff.

Instead, it only suggest one of two things. 

The first is that he is deeply committed to tariffs and transferring the tax base from income and capital gains taxes that impact the wealthy. He wants to replace them with an excise tax on imports that will affect the average American far more profoundly than they will affect the rich.

The second is that this is a tantrum. Denied his Big Beautiful Tariffs, he's just going to demand that he get MORE tariffs. Are they unpopular? FUCK YOU, I WANT MY TARIFFS. Frankly, it's the emotional logic of a domestic abuser. "Why did you make me hit you?"

It's like Veruca Salt is president.

Corruption Again

 The unraveling of Liberation Day has been replaced by blanket tariffs. These likely expire in 150 days. There is no justification for them beyond we need the revenue, because we refuse to tax actual wealth. A regressive excise tax on imports brings in some money on the backs of consumers - not the Epstein Class.

Meanwhile, we have another example of the corruption at the heart of everything this administration does. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick "handed over" control of his firm Cantor Fitzgerald to his twenty-something son. Cantor Fitzgerald then went around buying the rights to tariff refunds at pennies on the dollar. 

Basically, Firm A is being squeezed by tariffs, but should - I dunno - the Supreme Court rule those tariffs unconstitutional simply because they are, then firms might get refunds of the money that they paid in illegal tariffs. 

Might.

And that's where Cantor Fitzgerald comes. They will buy Firm A's future refund for money NOW versus the potential refund they might get later. In fact, the SCOTUS' decision to let this play out for months after oral argument probably really helped Cantor buy more potential refunds.

(Cantor denies that they are doing this, but lies don't matter anymore.)

Much of this, by the way, is legal. The degree to which Cantor Fitzgerald might have had access to inside information is unknown. Still, you have Trump's insane presser yesterday talking about how essential tariffs are, and Lutnick was right beside him, potentially raking in millions by betting against them.

SCOTUS Kills The Tariffs

 A transparently easy decision, but still three fucking idiots want to make Trump king.

For the moment, three Republican judges still put fealty to Wall Street over fealty to Pennsylvania Avenue.

Yay?

UPDATE: I do find it grimly hilarious that the two most wretched jurists overly the last century were appointed - not by Trump - but by Bush 41 and Bush 43.

UPDATE II: Krugman makes an astute point: while Trump has now just blasted out a 10% tariff under "Section 122", it's global and expires in 150 days, unless Congress approves it. So, many have noted that this puts Congressional Republicans in a bind right before the midterms.

What Krugman notes is that Trump's entire foreign policy was using these bullshit "emergencies" to declare trade wars unless the other side backed down. It was also how he has been shaking down business leaders, by carving out exemptions for them. All of that is no longer available to him.

Are We About To Go To War With Iran?

 Seems like it. But as Cheryl Rofer notes, it's quite difficult to graft rational decision making onto Trump's governance. I have been struck by how out in the open these military plans are. The movement of massive amounts of airpower to the Middle East has not been subtle. Surprise is not apparently the operative word here.

Maybe he is just trying to bully Iran into some form of concession on...something. It certainly seems like his fundamental demand is that Iran no longer be a sovereign power hostile to the United States. As with so much of Trump's blinkered grasp of the world, he seems mired in the '70s and '80s where Iran is this supreme villain that must be squashed, perhaps by Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone. Iran does have a terrible regime, but as with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, that seems insufficient for embarking on a land war in Asia.

Why?

Is it Epstein Distraction 2,853? Maybe.

I do wonder if Trump is so clearly declining that the creatures around him are basically running wild through the Executive Branch like toddlers jacked up on sugar and, for some reason, Red Bull. That particular cadre of retrograde Republican militarists who just like to explode shit and think it's realpolitik are basically free to do what "common sense foreign policy" says they should do: drop a few million dollars worth of bombs and cruise missiles, which will make the Ayatollah abdicate in fear. I think their inspiration was a Twisted Sister video from 1984.

The Iranian military is mostly a decrepit joke at this point, though they might luck into shooting down an American airplane and that won't be bad at all. A ground invasion? Good lord.

A reminder that Very Savvy Journalists felt that Trump was the "Peace Candidate" in 2016.

UPDATE: Looks like we're effectively at war with Cuba, and I didn't even know it. This has Rubio all over it.

UPDATE II: Given that SCOTUS has just show down his tariff bullshit, I would expect him to channel his rage into missile strikes.

Hunh...

I guess in some places, if the president tries to overthrow democracy, they can toss him in jail. 

I guess in some places, if a well connected insider cavorts with Jeffrey Epstein, they can arrest him.

Well done Britain.

Billionaires Are (Mostly) Sociopaths

 Krugman recaps the rise of the "Centi-Billionaires" who dwarf all human wealth from previous eras. He notes that this era compares unfavorably with the Gilded Age in terms of wealth inequality. That's certainly something. This ties into the Citizens United ruling that unlocked the ability of the super-rich to exerts incredible influence on our elections. Would Trump have won had Musk not bought Twitter and turned it into a Nazi echo chamber? What are we to make of Bezos destroying the Post? The Ellisons destroying CBS?

Krugman notes that this is not solely about making money. The utility of spending all that money is not to make marginal gains. Destroying the Post and CBS is NOT good for their bottom lines. It has to be about the deep howling void in the center of their souls. Compare Bezos or even Gates to their ex-wives, who using their divorce riches to actively work to better the world.

When we look at the depredations of Trump and his cronies, it's not simply about getting more loot. Today, I start teaching authoritarianism in Comparative Government and one of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is (the poorly named) phenomenon of rent seeking. Elites use the government to exploit money and other forms of wealth for their own benefit. The make the government buy jets or house them, like Kristi Noem does. They rake in billions in crypto in return for gutting oversight - creating a potential time bomb in the heart of the economy.

When that happens - when Trump makes the IRS pay him $10 billion to settle a meritless lawsuit - the incentive, in fact the prerogative, is to never give up power. You can afford to leave office, because you will lose access to that money and potentially be prosecuted.

For the billionaires who support Trump, they simply cannot accept democratic control of their fortunes. They are self-identified Uber mensch. The rabble cannot touch them or thwart them. For Trump and his ilk, democratic accountability could lead to a reckoning from his many crimes. 

Can they put this into action and end American democracy? We will know in about seven months.

Yes, Corruption

 Richardson is a far better historian than me, researching and cataloguing events in greater detail. She, too, used her post about yesterday to look at corruption and compare it to the restraint that Washington showed during his presidency. 

Some details:

- Trump has filed a trademark for any airport named after him. Palm Beach Airport is currently in the process of being renamed for him, but he wants Dulles. If that happens, he gets all profits from the merchandise and to license his name. This is basically the bulk of his career before entering politics. Trump is a poor businessman when it comes to  building properties and developing products, but he can slap his name from his tabloid driven celebrity onto any old shit and make a quick buck. 

- The Trump Crime Family has made somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 billion because of his presidency. Much of this comes from crypto-laundered bribes, but it also comes from crap like Trump sneakers, bibles and those stupid fucking hats. Because everything is a lie with this asshole, Trump's mouthpieces like to blabber about how he is only putting hard working Americans' needs above his own. This is bullshit, and, yes, that should be the message for Democrats. Everything else works off of that.

- Trump is suing the IRS for $10 billion and sycophantic weasel Scott Bessent will almost certainly cut him a check. If this happens, this has to be the biggest story of the year, even bigger than Minneapolis, and - yes - even bigger than someone's elderly mother being kidnapped. A president who loots the treasury for his own enrichment is so far from any other presidential scandal that we have ever had as to beggar the imagination. Even if - as I predict - he "settles" for $2-3 billion and thus claims he saved billions, this is clear graft. This is a scandal the likes of which are usually reserved for Gilded Age hacks like the Whiskey Ring. Never - and I do mean never - has corruption on this scale reached the Oval Office.

The "Epstein Class" of billionaires is as popular as syphilis right now. Hang that around Trump's neck. Billions for him, no health care for you. Billions for him, no housing for you.

Corruption

 When the Whigs - both American and English - talked about corruption, what they meant was not necessarily outright bribery or quid pro quo relationships, but rather the overall rot at the heart of monarchical politics. I think that's why "corruption" in this archaic sense is really so apt to describe Trump's maladministration. 

When you look at something as facially absurd as actively blocking green energy, you have to balance the supreme idiocy of Cleek's Law (oppose whatever Democrats support) but also the naked financial relationship between hydrocarbon extraction industries and the Republican Party. There is absolutely zero reason to support coal, except to enrich coal mine owners. Solar, wind and battery technology are cheaper and more sustainable, and the lies Trump tells about it are just another example of the rot of corruption in our government.

To be clear, it's not just Trump. If you look at the fall of Marco Rubio or JD Vance from bog standard asshole Republicans to Trumpist creatures actively destroying America's place in the world, you can trace this to Josh Marshall's Authoritarian International. Whether it's the techno-libertarian/post-liberalism of a Peter Thiel or the petrostate autocrats of the Persian Gulf or the cultural revanchists of the post-Soviet world, you are talking about a fundamental corruption and rot at the heart of everything. All of this, by the way, was made possible by the corruption of the Supreme Court and decisions like Rufo and Citizen's United.

Trump is flamboyantly corrupt in so many ways, but when you look at the naked enrichment and entitlement of people like Kristi Noem, it's pretty apparent that Trump is not just the largest practitioner of corruption, but the vessel through which others enrich themselves. 

When a culture becomes corrupt enough, it seems foolish to be honest. 

One of the largest problems Democrats have is trying to focus on one outrage, because Trump commits so many. You can't message against the farrago of horseshit coming from the GOP. As we enter the celebration of our 250 years of independence, we should look to revivify the old Whiggish language of corruption.

It fits to a tee.