Wednesday, May 7, 2025

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The Dunning-Kruger government

One theme I keep coming back to is that, in their destruction of the federal government, Trump and his underlings are breaking things that they don't understand, which will have large and far-reaching effects that the public doesn't presently (and may not ever fully) appreciate. This, basically:

But this is an actual example of the sort of thing I'm talking about:

The poll found that on a weekly basis more than 90% of people use weather forecasts, job market reports, food safety warnings and other information that is based on federal science. But only 10% of respondents are concerned that cuts to federal support for science might impact their access to such information.

Ban on transgender military personnel back on

Two different federal district court judges halted implementation of Trump's ban on transgender persons serving in the military, finding that the ban was likely unconstitutional. Today SCOTUS overruled those two judges and permitted the ban to go into effect while the government appeals its losses. The Court gave no reasoning, and the three liberals dissented. This doesn't mean SCOTUS will ultimately rule for the government, but it could be a sign of that. Regardless, transgender military personnel will now be harmed even if they ultimately win.

DC US Attorney nomination in trouble

I wrote about Ed Martin, Trump's utterly unfit nominee for US Attorney for the District of Columbia here. Looks like his nomination may be dead after a key Republican Senator says he won't support him. To be clear, Martin would so obviously abuse his power that it should be scandalous that nearly 50 Republican Senators support him, but then Congressional Republicans have mostly stopped pretending to care about rule of law or the Constitution.

Tech oligarchs radicalized by private group chats?

Since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, tech industry oligarchs and billionaires have participated in a collection of group chats with assorted mostly right-leaning, reactionary, and right-wing figures, including Tucker Carlson, Richard Hanania, Ben Shapiro, and Chris Rufo. Some of the right-wing figures admit they are trying to use these chats to radicalize these oligarchs and billionaires, and, while it's tough to determine causal direction, some of these oligarchs and billionaires have been increasingly radicalized toward Trump and the political right. Increasingly outspoken, increasingly right-wing, and increasingly unhinged egg-shaped billionaire Marc Andreessen has been one of the moving forces behind the group chats, and he has spent a surprisingly large amount of time texting with these groups.

Papers, please

A security guard at a Boston hotel confronted a woman in the women's bathroom and asked her to produce documentation proving she was in fact female. At least she wasn't asked to display are genitals. Even if there was a real problem with men pretending to be women to access women's bathrooms--there is not--this is what the "solution" looks like.

You weren't serious about that oath, were you?

The news has been awash in stories about how, in a recent interview, Trump said "I don't know" when asked if the President has a duty uphold the Constitution. Of course the President is obligated to uphold the Constitution. It is literally what the President swears to do in the extremely short presidential oath of office.

Part of me thinks news stories about this are overblown: Trump is pretty much certain to say something dumb and outrageous if you ask him questions like that; it's not a considered response; and it doesn't tell us all that much we didn't already know. But another part of me thinks it's a meaningful reminder and illustration of how no prior President has given so little thought to the Constitution and the role of the presidency. The man is just totally unsuited for the role.

Regardless, if you're going to cover it, don't cover on page A13 it like the NYTimes did. Cover it like the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Attempt to steal a North Carolina election derailed

A Trump-appointed federal judge has ordered North Carolina to certify the Democratic candidate as the winner in a close and heavily litigated state supreme court race. The race has implications for North Carolina's heavily gerrymandered congressional districts, among other things. Here is the order. I addressed this previously here.

Insurrectionist payday?

Ashli Babbitt was shot and killed while betraying her country as part of a violent mob that broke into the US Capitol to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power. Despite her death coming in circumstances in which police use of force could hardly be more reasonable, her family sued, and now it seems the Trump administration intends to settle the case.

Writer Spotlight: Jamison Foser

Jamison Foser is a political strategist and writer who has in the past worked for the Democratic Party and Media Matters and whose work I've read for a number of years. I've found him to be among our more insightful critics of the media generally and The New York Times specifically, with each of these editions of his newsletter worth reading. Really: those links do a good job of identifying what I believe is wrong with The New York Times. You can subscribe for free.

The most recent edition of his newsletter makes the case that the 2nd Trump administration is the "the most aggressive and sweeping big-government start to a presidency in modern American history." I think that's correct but not how people typically think of Trump. Here's the gist:

Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and 1984’s Oceania aren’t seen as cautionary tales about the perils of Big Government because they employed a lot of people and spent a lot of money building and maintaining roads and hospitals and schools and ensuring the poor were clothed, the hungry fed, and the sick cared for. Their infamy comes from their oppressive nature; from the their efforts to dictate what their citizens could say and even think, the faith they could practice, the people with whom they could associate, the books they could read. From the fear they instilled and the terror and torture they unleashed upon their own citizens.

He supports that thesis with an impressively extensive catalog of Trump's offenses against liberty, democracy, and the constitutional order. It may not be anything new to you, but it's worth seeing it all laid out in one place:

In just a few months, Donald Trump has referred to himself as “the king,” claimed to be above the law, and repeatedly suggested he might serve an unconstitutional third term.1 He and his regime have threatened a global land grab, including the annexation of Greenland (“one way or another, we’re going to get it”) and Canada and taking control of Gaza and the Panama Canal. They have disappeared a student for writing an op-ed, and moved to deport academics for participating in political protests or merely causing a “ruckus” and issued an executive order to “remove improper ideology” from museums and zoos.2

The Trump regime has purged from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” and Janet Jacobs’ “Memorializing the Holocaust” while retaining Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” (two copies!) and Jean Raspai’s “The Camp of the Saints,” a favorite of white supremacists. It has attempted to re-write American history, purging from government websites information about Harriet Tubman, Jackie Robinson, a Black Medal of Honor recipient, and the Arlington National Cemetery graves of Black service members. It has revoked with no reason the visa of a Nobel Laureate who has criticized Trump and waged war on the legal profession with a “campaign of retaliation against lawyers he dislikes” that “threatens to use government power to punish any law firms that, in his view, unfairly challenge his administration” as “the White House pursues vengeance against the profession he blames for his legal troubles.” They have shaken down some of America’s biggest law firms for nearly a billion dollars in free services.

Trump’s henchmen are “launching a disease registry to monitor Americans with autism” and “amassing private medical records from a number of federal and commercial databases” including records from pharmacies, insurance companies, smartwatches and fitness trackers.

Trump has described the cable news channel MSNBC as a threat to democracy that should not be allowed and blocked the Associated Press from events because it uses the phrase “Gulf of Mexico” to identify the Gulf of Mexico and his administration has hand-picked the journalists allowed to cover him and his FCC chairman has “ordered investigations into several media entities” including CBS News, Comcast (the parent company of NBC), PBS, and NPR, part of “a series of moves … to bring media companies under regulatory scrutiny.”

The Trump regime has deployed the IRS to track down immigrants it wants to deport, though IRS officials previously warned “that doing so could violate federal law,” shut down watchdog agencies responsible for oversight of his attacks on immigrants, sent immigrants to prisons in foreign nations to which they have no connection without due process, and tried to deny U.S.-born children the birthright citizenship guaranteed them by the United States constitution. 

The Trump regime has acknowledged wrongly sending a man who was in America legally to an El Salvadoran prison due to an “administrative error,” defied court orders to return him to America, and declared that if “somehow he comes back” it will again detain him and return him to El Salvadoran prison.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to send American-born citizens to El Salvadorian prisons known for overcrowding, torture, and food deprivation, including a specific threat to send U.S. citizens who vandalize Teslas to El Salvadorian prisons. Trump’s administration has moved to investigate the Senate minority leader for criticizing a judge (during last year’s campaign, Trump repeatedly threatened to fine and imprison people for criticizing judges, an action Trump and his allies routinely engage in.) Just this morning Trump’s FBI arrested a Wisconsin judge for, allegedly, giving a defendant directions out of her courtroom — and then his FBI director offered a false justification for the widely-denounced move.

His regime has moved transgender prisoners into segregated prisons, “greatly restricting their movements and access to amenities given to other prisoners” and moved toward banning trans people from the military and taken steps to restrict health care for trans people and attempted to dictate to schools who is allowed to participate in sporting events. 

He threatened tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, and imposed 25 percent taxes on cars, “a move that is likely to raise prices for American consumers and throw supply chains into disarray” and “could push up car prices significantly when inflation has already made cars and trucks more expensive for American consumers” and said he “couldn’t care less” if his tariffs cause increased car prices — and followed all that up by destabilizing the global economy with massive and arbitrary tariffs. He has threatened to impose taxes on medicine that could “spur rationing and lead to shortages of critical drugs.”

In “the latest step to expand the federal government’s role in the American economy,” Trump has suggested creating a $1 trillion “sovereign wealth fund” — presumably using tax money — to, among other things, buy the social media platform TikTok. He has pressured private companies to change policies he dislikes and moved to seize control of California’s water supply.

Trump’s regime has taken steps towards banning abortion medication. 

His regime has usurped the legislative branch, unilaterally moving to shut down the Department of Education without congressional authorization, stormed the Institute of Peace, a congressionally charted nonprofit that isn’t part of executive branch, “issued an executive order … that seeks greater authority over regulatory agencies that Congress established as independent from direct White House control, part of a broader bid to centralize a president’s power over the government,” and unilaterally ordered the Treasury to stop producing pennies, though Congress, not the president, authorizes coin production.

Taken together, it’s enough to fill a bill of grievances — and it’s the most aggressive and sweeping big-government start to a presidency in modern American history.