A Unified Theory Of Trump

 Tim Kreider wrote this exceptional piece on Donald Trump. I really, really recommend reading it, because it captures the whole media failure of the past decade. 

He starts by talking about the movie Psycho that starts as a crime thriller, and everyone - especially the investigator Arbogast - thinks they are in a crime story. In fact, they are in a horror/monster movie, and that tension is what makes Psycho one of the greatest films of all time.

Anyway.

Kreider's point is that journalists think that they are covering a politician, when in fact, they are covering an idiotic monster. This is the crux of it:

If you’re writing an op-ed or political analysis, or appearing as a guest on a podcast or discussion panel, you feel a professional obligation to try to come up with a novel insight, a “hot take”—ideally, something smarter than whatever all the other smart writers and speakers are saying that day. Something other than the obvious. The problem is, the object of so much of that labored ideation, Donald Trump, is obvious. He is not a complex figure of Nixonian contradictions. There are no depths to plumb; his biographers are going to have to pad out their books with a lot of background information and photo sections. He does not engage in subtle Machiavellian maneuvering; the only moves he knows are the playground rudiments: brag. Deny. Bully. Bribe. There’s nothing there for a smart person to figure out; they’re writing think pieces about a guy who doesn’t. His operating principles, the only rules you need to remember to understand absolutely everything he does, are simple:

1) He is a very stupid person who has never read or learned or ever been really interested in anything that didn't directly benefit him and (not unrelated)

2) He genuinely doesn't give a shit about anything other than himself - not his voters or his party or his allies in Congress or his "friends"/business associates or his own family. I have no doubt he would sell his daughter to a Saudi prince if he could negotiate a good price.

He also does not have what you would call a hidden agenda. His goals are as crude and basic as a flatworm's. He wants:

A) to make as much money as possible any way he can
B) to have everyone pay attention to him all the time
And - increasingly a priority the past few years -
C) to stay out of prison

(His conspicuous cognitive decline complicates all of the above, but it doesn’t alter the fundamental principles at work.)

The fallacy’s derivation notwithstanding, I’m not arguing that Donald Trump is psychotic; he’s not that interesting. He has the conscience of a toddler and the ethics of a tick but he isn’t mentally ill. He’s just a soft, spoiled, weak, mean rich kid who no one’s ever said no to and no one’s ever loved. He inhabits a sterile inner landscape of panicky, fragile vanity and unappeasable, suppurating resentment.

Josh Marshall once talked about Trump's Razor. The idea was based on Occam's Razor that - all evidence being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. With Trump's Razor, the stupidest and most venal explanation is usually the accurate one. 

"Why doesn't Trump try and address Democratic attacks on affordability?" 
Because he's a big dumb donkey.

"Why does he keep screwing up the situation with Iran?"
Because he's a big dumb donkey.

"Why does he harp on his vanity projects in DC as opposed to kitchen table issues?"
Big. Dumb. Donkey.

Weider continues (the format seems to work here):

“Sanewashing” is what critics call the journalistic tendency to try to describe and explain Trump in the language of conventional politics, presuming that it’s a media conspiracy to normalize his pathology and gaslight us all into thinking we’re overreacting. There may be some truth to this, but I think the explanation is more complicated; people who have spent their careers covering politics simply don’t have a vocabulary for what’s happening now; they’re like noir detectives in a slasher film. There’s no real precedent for someone who wields more power than any other individual in human history simply having no idea what he’s doing, or behaving with such naked, shameless self-interest. They can’t not report on what the President said or did that day; but it’s too terrifying, unimaginable, to acknowledge that the guy with access to the nuclear codes knows much less about geopolitics than your fourth-grader, or that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is way lower on his to-do list than building that bigass arch. Two days ago, after Trump dismissed the Iranian leadership, whom he’d earlier called “smart, strong people” as “scum,” I got to listen to a White House correspondent halfheartedly float the notion that the abrupt contradiction might’ve been a bargaining tactic, struggling to avoid the conclusion that nothing the President of the United States says really means anything much at all.

If we ever have a clear understanding of this era, we have to grapple with the fact that Trump is a reasonably stupid person who has one skill - selling "Donald Trump" - and we have tens of millions of Americans who are also dumb enough to believe in what he's selling. That latter point is not one Weider makes, but I think is important. If you're a political junkie, how do you reconcile your years of study and passion with the realization that millions of your fellow countrymen - this bedrock of democracy - are fucking just as stupid as Trump is?

Read the whole thing.

Speaking Of Idiocy

 You really have to read David Roth on the Reflecting Pool fiasco. 

A taste:

Specifically, the water is more or less the color of a sour apple Jolly Rancher now. It looks like they're brewing Yodas in there. It is so uncannily green and visibly slimy that it feels inevitable that video will soon surface of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. splashing around in it with jeans on. It looks like the aftermath of Boston Tea Party-style political action involving matcha. 

And:

Disfiguring public spaces on a whim fits within Trump's program of relentless, reckless literalism. Claiming, as an administration spokesperson did earlier today, that the algae bloom has been "successfully destroyed" when the reflecting pool still looks like someone recently boiled spinach in it, reflects, among other things, how thoroughly he has already moved on. As far as Trump is concerned, the problem was solved when he decided upon a solution; it immediately and irrevocably became everyone else's problem the moment he stopped thinking about it. Other people will be charged with doing the dirty work of cleaning up his mess for some time to come, and life will go on in the stink and shadow of this ruinous and tossed-off fix until then. Not much of a metaphor there, either.

Brilliant

 Read this on Iran. 

It's all just insane.

Global Oligarchy

 Josh Marshall has been running a series of posts on what he's calling the global oligarchy or the Authoritarian International. Here and here. 

Normally, I would dismiss this as somewhat conspiratorial, but at the same time, I do think he's on to something. He ties it, interestingly, to the various petrostates of the Middle East rather than Russia, though Russia is also emblematic of its politics. Basically, the new Axis of Evil is the oil states of the Gulf, Silicon Valley anti-democrats and hedge fund billionaires. 

The basic thread holding them together is the desire to escape democratic accountability, which is at the heart of democracy: the powerful must answer to the people. 

There have been a host of articles this week about the coming apocalypse in white collar jobs from AI. Some of these are coming from people working in AI who are seeing how efficient and fast it is becoming, especially at coding. There is a school of thought that this is all hype to elevate their stock price, but if it's even a little true, I think we need to see AI as part of this Authoritarian International (yes, also AI). The purpose of AI might be to change the world, but the practical impact will be to divorce knowledge skills from scarcity and therefore disempower the broad swath of middle and upper middle class workers. 

If you own a company, why not employ an AI bot rather than three humans? Why not maximize your profits this way? Why answer to the bothersome people that work for you, when you can have a compliant digital workforce? 

Democracies will, at some point, have to address AI and its potential deprivation of livelihoods among important constituencies. If you can destroy democracy, you can prevent that from happening. 

Woof

 Adam Serwer is the indispensable sage of Trumpistan. His axiom, "the cruelty is the point", remains the most cogent summary of Trump's curdled worldview. 

He just published on the situation in Minneapolis. He ends with this:

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

No matter how many more armed men Trump sends to impose his will on the people of Minnesota, all he can do is accentuate their valor. No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors. These agents, and the president who sent them, are no one’s heroes, no one’s saviors—just men with guns who have to hide their faces to shoot a mom in the face, and a nurse in the back.

Yes, Trump Is A Fascist

 I came about to this after resisting it during his first term, but Jonathan Rauch makes a pretty comprehensive case for the term.

Relatedly, in trying to process the execution of Alex Pretti, I realize that the last time I felt like this was January 6th. I feel that same white-hot rage that this is being done to our country, our ideals, our institutions. Rauch's catalog of Trump's fascism is just the academic framework for my anger. I can remember early on election night, when I realized that, no, the American people would re-elect this felon, this open sewer of human foibles. I drove out to the woods and screamed in pain and anger into the darkness. 

This is why.

Cringey liberals were right all along. 

Irreparable Damage

 This piece on the degradation of the FBI under that Klown Kash Patel is sobering reading. You should just read all the ways that they have warped the premier investigation agency in America into a perverse extension of Trump and Miller's bizarre fixation on immigration. 

The thing is, it's a disaster waiting to happen. The monomaniacal focus on immigration is going to leave gaps that "bad actors" can exploit. What's more, the institutional knowledge and experience is going to be lost. The ripples of this one action are going to be felt for years and there are myriad other examples of precisely this sort of fuckery.

The FBI is arguably the most conservative part of the federal bureaucracy, and they are at wit's end with this shit.

UPDATE: The more you read, the more Chuck Grassley - or more likely the staffers who prop up that desiccated husk of a man - is really fucking awful.

Misogyny

 I read this article in The Atlantic, and I was struck by this definition of misogyny:

If sexism is based on the belief that men are inherently superior to women, misogyny, Manne writes, especially targets “unbecoming women—traitors to the cause of gender—bad women, and ‘wayward’ ones.”

What do you do with a disrespectful woman, a wayward one? Punish her, dehumanize her as an example everyone can learn from. What do you do with a woman who seeks authority for herself? Remind her of her place. 

The author never mentions Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris, but that's the immediate example I thought of. I hesitated to use the word misogyny, because I doubt that the white women or many of the men who voted for Trump, then Biden, then Trump would have defined themselves that way.

Donald Trump is the personification of sexism and misogyny. He won his two races against women who "sought authority for herself" and in fact authority over the country. Their unforgivable sin was the ambition to lead, in a country where many people - including some women - don't believe that women should do that.

Donald Trump is unpopular. He was unpopular in 2018, too. I am convinced that if the Democrats had run a man, Trump would have lost. This is an articulation of why.

Alexandra Petri Is A National Treasure

 This is a brilliant, funny and even poignant piece of writing.

An Autocracy Of Dunces

Paul Krugman is a Nobel winning economist, but the man can turn a phrase. 

Interesting Read

 Paul Campos relates an argument about how hippies and evangelicals actually represent a sort of horseshoe theory when it comes to what the author calls "intuitionist" thinking. This is at the root of what passes for populism in 2025. Some people believe in science and reason and some people don't. 

As Campos notes, you can't argue with someone whose beliefs are based in spiritual belief. That means that the entire edifice of Madisonian governmental theory and practice are largely helpless to resolve these issues. 

I'll give an example.

I saw my cousin - deeply religious - post some MAGA shitbird complaining about the No Kings protests and the argument went something like "How dare they complain about 'kings' when they shut down schools and made me wear a mask. They are the real tyrants."

Look, Covid killed around 1,100,000 Americans. For about a year and a half, we had strong distancing measures in place that attempted to mitigate that, but even those measures struggled to work, because freedumb. The idea that public health measures are at all equivalent to ignoring the Constitution, ignoring court orders, militarizing police to attack American citizens...How do you even argue with that?

And if you tried, the retreat into faith and "what I know to be true" would deny you any ground to establish an argument on.

Both sides of the debate are relying on abstractions to order their world, but they are so fundamentally opposed to one another, that I don't see how you reconcile them.

Murphy's Laws

 It took me multiple days to get through Ross Douthat's interview with Chris Murphy. I've been impressed with Murphy since he was our congressman who came and spoke at our school. He's very bright and conceptualizes politics in clear and easy to understand ways.

He makes some interesting arguments. He echoes calls made by Yglesias and others to "grow the coalition" of the Democratic Party, especially in order to win the Senate. I actually like Yglesias' idea of creating something akin to the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party that exists in Minnesota. Yes, we have some independents from Maine and Vermont who are really just cantankerous Democrats, but a Democrat simply can't win in the Dakotas, and having a third party (with no Democrat running) that isn't associated with some of the Democratic Party's cultural stances on guns or other cultural issues would be helpful.

He has been making another argument that is kind of strange to my ears about "church." He's not arguing specifically for religion or religiosity. He's arguing that we've lost that connective communal experience, and that alienation and isolation that we feel is an opening that Trumpist visions of decline exploits. In the abstract I agree with him, but I have no idea what that looks like as a form of political action or a plank in a party platform. In fact, if Trump eviscerates universities and Democrats ever win power again, I almost think you have to attack the tax exempt status of these megachurches.

Where Murphy makes the most sense is in arguing that Democrats do have to return to kitchen table issues. One thing he alludes to and a concern I share is that Kamala Harris did not run on trans rights. Trump rather successfully did make enough voters feel that Harris cared more about trans rights than economic issues. It wasn't HER campaign that botched that, it was Trump's campaign that exploited, perhaps, latent feelings among many voters about a women of color from San Francisco. Her identity was shorthand for her priorities, regardless of what she said. People don't believe politicians - especially in the Age of Trump - so they rely on cultural shorthand. That's why I'm all on board with a male Midwestern governor in 2028.

Douthat pushes Murphy on the basic Democratic rhetoric of Trump's assault on democracy. It obviously did not work for Harris, so why should it work going forward. I agree that the sort of voters who tilted the election to Trump do not have sophisticated understanding of Constitutional Law, democratic norms or abstract principles regarding separation of powers. However, there is a huge and easy to understand opening.

Autocracy is almost always about the corruption. You destroy democratic accountability in order to enrich yourself. Trump's corruption is absolutely off the hook. Just this morning, Trump basically received an emolument from Qatar in the form of a luxury jet. Since the jet will be Trump's after he leaves office (though technically belonging to his presidential library) this is a pretty clear case of a foreign country buying friendship with Trump. The corruption surrounding his crypto is almost impossible to measure.

Finally, we have the many America companies and law firms who are bending the knee and funneling money and services to him.

Once the GOP Budget is finally produced the depths of cuts in the service of reducing taxes on the very rich - combined with the diminished standard of living tariffs should  create will make it easier to paint Trump and the GOP as servants of the very rich.

Some Dem strategist noted that few people know what the word "oligarch" means. I would argue that Democrats should spend the next 18 months drilling that word into everything they talk about: the corruption, the way the game is rigged for the rich, the billionaire boy's club.  

That's Murphy's fundamental argument and I think he's right.

Make America Maoist

 Really insightful piece by Franklin Foer about Trumpist's class warfare against the "Creative Class" or basically people with college degrees who run things in a technocratic manner. If we look at the Cultural Revolution or Pol Pot's killing fields, we can see extreme examples of this, but are we really that far away when it comes to motives? 

Today's horror show in the Oval Office with President Bukele of El Salvador is about one man falsely sent to a Salvadoran prison. It's bigger than that, and I don't mean just the constitutional crisis of Trump defying the Supreme Court. I mean...that's big. Trump no doubt feels that he can defy SCOTUS, because the sort of people who care about things like due process rights are usually from that college educated "Creative Class." We think more abstractly, and can extrapolate from Trump seizing a legal immigrant and sending him to a foreign prison without due process from him doing that to an American citizen. He mused as much during the press assembly.

If you're freaking out about MS-13, then sending a few innocent people to a foreign prison may be the price you are willing to pay for security. You are considering a certain tangible outcome. MS-13 is really awful, but deporting random people is unlikely to solve that problem. Still, you're not really considering someone else's due process rights as being critical to your own. That's not how your brain has been trained, and if you're poor, you might well fear that sort of immediate violence. 

Trump needs to crush the college educated managerial class - whether in the bureaucracy, the universities, law firms or just suburban Wine Moms. I don't know that he can, because successful revolutions usually need the Middle Classes' buy-in, but he can do real and lasting damage as he tries.

As Usual, Listen to Josh Marshall

 This feels like the most comprehensive explanation of why we are suddenly in a trade war.

TL;DR: Coerce countries into making "deals" with us that benefit us (and hurt them). They peg their currency to the dollar, the dollar falls in value, American exports become attractive, America reindustrializes. It's a dumb plan, but it IS a plan.

Then there is the reality that this is Trump we are dealing with here. There can be no mutually beneficial trade deals. America HAS TO WIN. Which means large entities like Europe and East Asia are simply not going to give him what he wants. This isn't stiffing a contractor and threatening to tie him up in lawsuits. These are sovereign nations.

UPDATE: Derek Thompson seems to land in the same spot.

A Million Times This

 I've been saying that Trumpistan is patrimonialism since 2017. Now the Cool Kids are catching on. 

Read it, it's spot on. Plus, you got some Max Weber love.

Here's a taste: 

In its governmental guise, patrimonialism is distinguished by running the state as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business. It can be found in many countries, but its main contemporary exponent—at least until January 20, 2025—has been Vladimir Putin. In the first portion of his rule, he ran the Russian state as a personal racket. State bureaucracies and private companies continued to operate, but the real governing principle was Stay on Vladimir Vladimirovich’s good side … or else.

And Rauch makes an important point:

Patrimonialism’s antithesis is not democracy; it is bureaucracy, or, more precisely, bureaucratic proceduralism. Classic authoritarianism—the sort of system seen in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—is often heavily bureaucratized. When authoritarians take power, they consolidate their rule by creating structures such as secret police, propaganda agencies, special military units, and politburos. They legitimate their power with legal codes and constitutions. Orwell understood the bureaucratic aspect of classic authoritarianism; in 1984, Oceania’s ministries of Truth (propaganda), Peace (war), and Love (state security) are the regime’s most characteristic (and terrifying) features.

Notes On Stupidity

 Please read Paul Campos on our Idiot King for an Idiot Country.

I know this is deeply disrespectful of Real Muricans, but I am out of fucks to give.

Krugman Wonks Out

 Paul Krugman moved from the Times to Substack, and I'm already a fan. The format allows him to include charts and graphs in a very economics professor/popularizer of economics way.

This Is Interesting

 A discussion (about a discussion) about the assassination of the United Health Care executive. It ends with a point about how wealth is both more unequal than it was around the post-war boom and more conspicuous. I remember "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" and it was mostly about the garish taste of celebrities. Now, we have people who are rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and they flaunt that more than ever. The death of this human being is subsumed by those feelings of outrage. 

Fascism

 One of the preeminent scholars of fascism has weighed in on Trump. Like me, he did not originally think Trump rose to the level of fascist, but now does. Worth a read.

The Coddling of the American Mind

 Jonathan Haidt is coming to our school next week, and somehow I landed on his piece the Coddling of the American Mind independently of that visit. I'm generally skeptical of the latest pedagogical fad, because I simply am not that impressed with the sort of scholarship that goes on in education programs. It seems an intensely ideological field with few of the sort of "challenge everything" mindsets you see in other disciplines.

Haidt and Greg Lukianoff are not education professors. Haidt is a social psychologist and Lukianoff a lawyer. They attack the principle that students are so delicate in their feelings that things that might upset them should be avoided. Thus, we get mandates about microaggressions. I remember my microaggression workshop. It was largely helpful in the "don't be as asshole" toolbox that we should all seek to enlarge.

However, we are now being told what language we should not use in written comments. "Suzy appears not to care and has demonstrated little work ethic" is now considered loaded language that contains some sort of "trauma" that we need to shield Suzy from. It might even be considered racist if Suzy is non-White. Suzy's actual engagement with the work is secondary to the need to protect her from language that she might find distressing. 

Last year, when I was gone, the school more or less but a kibosh on discussing the Gazan War. The raw feelings and intensely complicated nature of this conflict has created feelings that many students - here and at universities - simply cannot process effectively. Some of the screaming about this comes from Bad Actors simply looking to leverage their outrage for attention. That's a separate issue. The inability of young people to argue passionately and then when it's over walk away with being traumatized has largely disappeared.

What makes Haidt's argument interesting is that he points out that this approach has NOT led to better mental health outcomes. That, ultimately, is why this sort of "coddling" needs to stop.