“Liberation Day”

  • Trump’s “Liberation Day” of tariffs for virtually every country around the world — except for Russia! — might well wreck both America’s, and the world’s, economy;
  • With Paul Krugman’s expose of their “formula”;
  • A reminder from Robert Reich, from 2018, about how Trump is dumb is virtually everything except in political conning;
  • Daily Kos about that formula;
  • I recall some comments from Facebook, about a new Canadian alliance and the idea of conservation, while the MAGA crowd is not conversing, they’re tearing everything down;
  • And how Trump’s tariffs target uninhabited islands, and Lesotho.
– – –

The MAGA cultists and their elected idiot-in-chief are wrecking the nation, and maybe the world. Basically it boils down to: the world is changing, and conservative tribalists want to change it back, and will wreck the nation if they can’t. And they call it “Liberation Day.”

NY Times, 3 Apr 2025: Live Updates: Tariffs Send Wall Street Tumbling to Worst Day Since Pandemic

The S&P 500 fell almost 5 percent on Thursday, its worst drop since June 2020, as allies and adversaries alike criticized President Trump’s action and weighed their responses.

Currently pinned:

A new, sweeping round of tariffs sent a shock through Wall Street on Thursday, as upended economic forecasts and intensified worries about global growth sent stock markets tumbling to their worst day since the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

The S&P 500 fell almost 5 percent on Thursday, its worst showing since June 2020. Thursday’s decline came after the S&P 500 had already fallen for five of the last six weeks, amid intensifying economic concerns pressured by tariff talk. But the effects won’t be limited to the financial markets, experts said.

Thursday’s sell-off was an extraordinary moment in markets that, despite being prone to big swings, rarely suffer such a dramatic reaction to an American president’s rollout of an economic policy.

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Paul Krugman, 3 Apr 2025: Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy?, subtitled “Trump’s tariffs are a disaster. His policy process is worse.”

America created the modern world trading system. The rules governing tariffs and the negotiating process that brought those tariffs down over time grew out of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, devised by FDR in 1934. The growth in international trade under that system had some negative aspects but was on balance very good for America and the world. It was, in fact, one of our greatest policy achievements.

Yesterday Donald Trump burned it all down.

You might be tempted to dismiss complaints about the policy process as elitist snobbery. But credibility is a crucial part of policymaking. Businesses can’t plan if they have no idea what to expect next. Foreign governments won’t make policies that help America if they don’t expect us to respond rationally.

So what do we know about how the Trumpists arrived at their tariff plan? Trump claimed that the tariff rates imposed on different countries reflected their policies, but James Surowiecki soon noted that the tariffs applied to each country appeared to be derived from a crude formula based on the U.S. trade deficit with that country. Trump officials denied this, while at the same time the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a note confirming Surowiecki’s guess. Here’s their explanation:

Ignore the Greek letters, which cancel each other out. This says that the assumed level of a country’s protectionism is equal to its trade surplus with America divided by its exports to America.

Trump also set minimum tariffs of 10 percent on everyone, which means among other things imposing tariffs on uninhabited islands.

There’s so much wrong with this approach that it’s hard to know where to start. But one easy thing to point out is that the Trump calculation only considers trade in goods, while ignoring trade in services. This is a big omission.

And so on. Trump is extremely simple-minded. In fact, it might be worth revisiting this 2018 post by Robert Reich, which has been floating around on Facebook today.

Salon, Robert Reich, 9 Jan 2018: Robert Reich: Seriously, how dumb is Trump?, subtitled “His staffers think he’s an idiot. But at least in one area, he’s a genius”

Political conning is Trump’s genius. This genius — combined with his utter stupidity in every other dimension of his being — poses a clear and present danger to America and the world.

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More about the formula.

Daily Kos, 3 Apr 2025: The dumb insidious formula for trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs

The reciprocal tariff rate is simply half the trade deficit divided by the total imports from the country, rounded up, with a minimum of 10%. It has no relationship with the actual tariff rates charged by the country on U.S. goods.

    Reciprocal tariff rate = max(trade_deficit / imports * 50%, 10%)

E.g., for Vietnam: $123.5b trade deficit, $136.6b imports by U.S.; reciprocal tariff = 123.5 / 136.6 / 2 = 46%.

A few countries are exempt from tariffs, notably Russia, Belarus and N. Korea.

Note that Russia is exempt from tariffs! (Because Trump so wants to be like dictator Putin.)

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Meanwhile, I saw an item on Facebook about how the new Canadian president is setting up a trade alliance with European nations that will exclude the US. I’ll find a link tomorrow.

And another comment on Facebook, about how conservatives supposedly want to conserve things. These people in charge of the current government are not conserving things, they are tearing things down. How far does this go before even the cultists rebel?

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Several sources have noted the incoherency of this tariff plan, established in typical Trump form without much thought.

The Guardian, 2 Apr 2025 (via JMG): ‘Nowhere on Earth is safe’: Trump imposes tariffs on uninhabited islands near Antarctica

And

NBC News, 3 Apr 2025: Trump’s highest tariff will kill tiny African kingdom of Lesotho, economist says, subtitled “Ridiculed for imposing trade tariffs on frozen islands largely inhabited by penguins, Trump’s formula for calculating levies has a serious side: it is also hitting some of the world’s poorest nations hardest.”

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Trump is a James Bond villain. Well, no; James Bond villains were smart.

Posted in Human Nature, Lunacy, Politics | Leave a comment

This is how these things happen

  • NYT’s M. Gessen on how the police state has arrived;
  • A WaPo reporter goes looking for the “corrosive ideology” Trump thinks is in the Smithsonian;
  • The next Project 2025 goal is to restore the ideal heterosexual family, and diminish everyone else;
  • CDC is ordered *not* to release a measles report; Josh Hawley too is obsessed by “spiritual oppression”; what Trump’s “liberation” actually means; how our era echoes McCarthyism; and how moving fast and breaking things is about knowing their time is limited.
– – –

Even if most people don’t notice in their daily lives.

NY Times, M. Gessen, 2 Apr 2025: Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived. [gift link]

“It’s the unmarked cars,” a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship said. He had watched the video of the Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction. In the video, which Khalil’s wife recorded, she asks for the names of the men in plainclothes who handcuffed her husband.

“We don’t give our name,” one responds. “Can you please specify what agency is taking him?” she pleads. No response. We know now that Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.

Then a series of paragraphs:

It’s the forced mass transports of immigrants. These are not even deportations, in the way we typically think of them. Rather than being sent to their country of origin, Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador, where they are being imprisoned, indefinitely, without due process. …

It’s the growing irrelevance of the law and the helplessness of judges and lawyers. A federal judge ordered flights carrying the Venezuelan men to be turned around and demanded information about the abductees. … [others] The executive branch apparently ignored these rulings.

It’s the chilling stories that come by word of mouth. ICE is checking documents on the subway. ICE is outside New York public libraries that hold English-as-a-second-language classes. ICE agents handcuffed a U.S. citizen who tried to intervene in a detention in Harlem. ICE vehicles are parked outside Columbia. ICE is coming to your workplace, your street, your building. …

It’s the invisible hand of the authorities. The media outlet Zeteo reports that Homeland Security employees are revoking foreign students’ status in the database that’s usually maintained by universities. …

It’s the shifting goal posts. They are taking not only people who are in the United States without legal status but also those who are here on a visitor’s visa and then also legal permanent residents. They are targeting not only people who have criminal convictions but also those whom they say they suspect of belonging to a gang and also those who participated in or supported campus protests and then also someone, like Ozturk, who merely wrote, with three other people, an opinion essay in a student newspaper. …

It’s the way we dig down for the details of these stories to reassure ourselves that this won’t happen to us, or that there is some logic to these arrests. [examples] …

And, as the historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out, if due process is routinely denied to noncitizens, it will be denied to citizens too, simply because it is often impossible for people to prove that they are citizens. This has happened before, …

It’s the lists. More than anything else, in fact, it’s the lists. A private company has launched an app called ICERAID, billed as a “protocol that delegates intelligence-gathering tasks to citizens that would otherwise be undertaken by law enforcement agencies.” …
The app, in other words, combines two time-tested secret-police techniques: incentivizing some people to denounce their neighbors and inducing others to add themselves to registries.

It’s the denunciations by concerned citizens. Before there was ICERAID, there were several groups compiling lists of people they consider antisemitic, especially university students and faculty. [examples] … When Rubio was asked if the State Department is using lists fed to it by these private groups, he said, “We’re not going to talk about the process by which we’re identifying it because obviously we’re looking for more people.”

… [concluding:]

But while we are still capable of looking, we have to say what we see: The United States has become a secret-police state. Trust me, I’ve seen it before.

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What does she find?

Washington Post, Monica Hesse, 2 Apr 2025: What exactly does Trump think is in the Smithsonian?, subtitled “Following his most recent executive order, I went in search of some ‘corrosive ideology.'”

It takes her a while. She begins with the sculpture shown in the photo above.

A few days ago, I spent 14 minutes standing in front of a single piece of artwork, a 1998 installation called “Las Twines.” Life-size, hyperrealistic sculptures of two little girls — the twins — sharing a swing. They were dressed identically in communion dresses and wore boxing gloves featuring Puerto Rican flags, but one had blonde hair and light skin and the other was dark-skinned with dark hair. They stared placidly ahead, while museum visitors like me were left to stare back and ponder how the world might treat these two girls with shared DNA and different complexions. It was uncanny, it was thought-provoking, it was beautiful and sad. I wasn’t sure whether I liked it, I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to. It’s art, after all.

She goes through many more examples of things targeted by Trump’s EO [I can’t imagine he wrote the order himself]:

The president had declared that federally run museums such as the Smithsonian were promoting a “corrosive ideology” that needed to be course-corrected. “Under this historical revision,” the order read, “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”

[[ More conservative simplistic good/bad thinking, in which no flaws in American history can be acknowledged. ]]

She reflects:

Our nation’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness” — for who? Whose happiness did we advance? Whose happiness did we overlook? Who got to have individual rights and who was coded as property in legal and official documents for centuries of our great nation’s history?

She visits the famous portrait of George Washington.

On my way to visit the corrosive art that I cannot imagine Trump has actually seen, I dropped in on a school tour where the guide plopped down a bunch of sixth-graders in front of a magnificent portrait of George Washington — the most famous one, the one by Gilbert Stuart — and there she revealed that there are actually multiple versions of this portrait in existence. They’re drafts. Some are just sketches; some contain just his face. They’re all just rough drafts that got closer and closer to the real thing, as the artist tried his best to capture this complicated man, this founder of our country, this enslaver, this hero. And that is how history is made. Rough drafts, again and again.

And at the end, she concludes:

If you are looking for something to be shocked by, you can probably find it. But no more so than anywhere else in the museum. No more so than anywhere else in our history. America is a shocking place — shockingly beautiful and shockingly violent. And the people in it will make you weep with every emotion that can prompt tears. Jubilant, sad, ridiculous, sublime. It’s America, after all.

You cannot love America without hating it a little bit. But you cannot hate it without loving it so, so much. Wanting it to be better. Wanting it to be what we all deserve.

As I stood with the tour groups and the lunch crowd and the tired families pushing strollers and doling out juice boxes — as I stood in this completely free institution that exists for no other reason than to help America learn something about itself, that was the most shocking realization of all: The Smithsonian is not filled with hatred toward our busted, struggling, awesome country; it is filled with the deepest love, and that is what I learned at the museum.

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The Atlantic, David A. Graham, 1 Apr 2025: The Top Goal of Project 2025 Is Still to Come, subtitled “The now-famous white paper has proved to be a good road map for what the administration has done so far, and what may yet be on the way.”

And what would this top goal be? Why, the one of prioritizing expansion of the tribe, via the ideal family, over all else.

“Freedom is a fragile thing, and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction,” Ronald Reagan said in 1967, in his inaugural address as governor of California. Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, approvingly quotes the speech in his foreword to Project 2025, the conservative think tank’s blueprint for the Trump administration. Roberts writes that the plan has four goals for protecting its vision of freedom: restoring the family “as the centerpiece of American life”; dismantling the federal bureaucracy; defending U.S. “sovereignty, borders, and bounty”; and securing “our God-given individual rights to live freely.”

Project 2025 has proved to be a good road map for understanding the first months of Donald Trump’s second term, but most of the focus has been on efforts to dismantle the federal government as we know it. The effort to restore traditional families has been less prominent so far, but it could reshape the everyday lives of all Americans in fundamental ways. Its place atop the list of priorities is no accident—it reflects the most deeply held views of many of the contributors—though the destruction of the administrative state might end up imperiling the Trump team’s ability to actually carry out the changes the authors want.

A focus on heterosexual, married, procreating couples is everywhere in Project 2025. “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-­ordered nation and healthy society,” writes Roger Severino… He argues that the federal government should bolster organizations that “maintain a biblically based, social-­science-reinforced definition of marriage and family,” saying that other forms are less stable. The goal is not only moral; he and other authors see this as a path to financial stability and perhaps even greater prosperity for families.

The piece goes on to discuss how they intend to bring this goal about.

The point: they say it’s about “individual rights to live freely” but they don’t mean it; it’s about restricting your rights to live freely if you’re not part of a heterosexual family with children. If you’re not, you don’t count, and should be diminished. Thus the focus on *defining* two genders. [[ Is this truly what we need, in an era of expanding population leading to climate change that might threaten the survival of the species? Of course this question is beyond the range of tribalistic thinking. ]]

With this irony:

Turning these ideas into reality would require substantial engagement from the federal bureaucracy. Yet Trump and Elon Musk have spent the first months of the presidency haphazardly demolishing large swaths of the workforce at just the departments that would be necessary to make these things happen.

And concluding:

With a little imagination, we can glimpse the America that Project 2025 proposes. It is an avowedly Christian nation, but following a very specific, narrow strain of Christianity. In many ways, it resembles the 1950s. While fathers work, mothers stay at home with larger families. At school, students learn old-­fashioned values and lessons. Abortion is illegal, vaccines are voluntary, and the state is minimally involved in health care. The government is slow to police racial discrimination in all but its most blatant expressions. Trans and LGBTQ people exist—­they always have—­but are encouraged to remain closeted. It is a vision that suggests Reagan was right: Freedom ­really is a fragile thing.

This is MAGA. The rest of the world will move on.

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Shorter items.

JMG, 31 Mar 2025, from ProPublica: CDC Ordered Staff Not To Release Measles Warning.

Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica.

Isn’t this, like, an abnegation of their duties? How are these people different from foreign invaders bent on destroying the country?

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This aligns with the item yesterday about Karoline Leavitt and spiritual warfare. These people live in a fantasy world of absolute good and evil. In which they’re on the side of good, of course.

Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 31 Mar 2025: Sen. Josh Hawley Says The U.S. Is Being Destroyed By Secular ‘Spiritual Oppression’

He hasn’t read the Bible thoroughly enough, is my take; or he’s cherry-picking.

“Every civilization is founded on a set of religious convictions and the United States of America, I firmly believe, is the greatest nation in the history of the world because our spiritual convictions are the convictions of the Bible,” Hawley declared. “They are the convictions of the truth of the word of God, but the forces of secularism seek to cut us off from that truth. It seeks to destroy it and in so doing, to oppress our nation.”

Actually, the US was founded on decidedly *non*religious principles, and either he’s dumb not to understand that, or is lying.

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This talk of liberation is more Orwellian speak.

LA Times, Jonah Goldberg, 31 Mar 2025: What will Trump’s tariffs ‘liberate’ us from?

I am writing this from the last days of our captivity.

Indeed, by the time some of you read this, we will be free. If all goes according to the White House’s plan, April 2 will go down in history as America’s “Liberation Day.”

Steve Bannon, a prominent unofficial Trump advisor, is so confident about its success, he’s already talking about making Liberation Day a federal holiday next year.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. From what will we be liberated on Liberation Day?

Details.

White House trade advisor Peter Navarro expects these tariffs to raise $600 billion annually. Nearly every serious economist across the ideological spectrum understands that American consumers would pay the bulk of that. Thus, if “successful,” Trump would be imposing the largest, most regressive tax increase in history.

He echoes the last item in yesterday’s post.

The wellspring of this geyser of asininity is the simple fact that Trump doesn’t understand how trade works.

Every time you get a haircut, you have a trade deficit with the barber. Are you being ripped off?

Trump’s obsession with Canada illustrates his confusion. We have a trade deficit with Canada, under a trade agreement he crafted in his first term. Hence, Trump claims we “subsidize” Canada $200 billion a year (a made-up number, but that’s beside the point). The only reason we have a trade deficit with Canada is that they sell us oil at a price below global market rates. If we stopped buying their cheaper oil, we’d be worse off. Gas prices would go up and American jobs dedicated to refining that oil and exporting it would vanish. But the metric Trump cares about would improve.

Hold on here. Stuff we need would have become more scarce and expensive. Americans would be worse off. And that’s a win because … why?

During the years of our supposed economic captivity, the American economy became the “envy of the world.” That’s what Trump seems bent on liberating us from.

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That he is on Musk’s side completely discredits him, to me.

JMG, 1 Apr 2025: Franklin Graham: Pray For Jesus To Protect Elon Musk

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This has happened before. Our institutions are good, they were well-intentioned, but are not strong enough to keep this happening, over and over.

LA Times, Catherine Fisk, 31 Mar 2025: Echoing McCarthyism, federal firings will inflict generations of trauma

Today, as in the Red Scare, we should lament the damage that arbitrary firings do to scientific research, medical care, government services and academic freedom. The media have reported all this. But those who are fired are not faceless bureaucrats, as the government says. They are people who have devoted themselves to public service and have expertise that will be hard to use in the private sector. Many have families dependent on their income.

I teach and write on employment law, so I know that each case of a fired employee is a story of dashed hopes, anger and pain. When, as during the McCarthy era and now, government inflicts that pain on a mass scale, it magnifies the trauma to families and communities. Perhaps history will remember these mass firings as a tragic mistake the way so many of the Red Scare firings are now remembered. But the harms cannot be undone and will ripple through America for decades to come.

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I’ve thought about this before. There’s a hidden agenda behind “move fast and break things.”

LGBTQNation, John Gallagher, 31 Mar 2025: Trump & Musk are moving fast because they know their time is limited, subtitled “The administration’s destructive policies are already taking a toll in polling, but the damage is already done.”

Trump—or, more properly, the people who are advising him—has three goals. One is to solidify presidential power. The other is to do as much damage to the government now as possible, recognizing that most of the damage can never be undone. The third goal is to pass tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of safety-net programs like Medicaid.

Does Trump not realize, as he speculates serving a third term, how unlikely it is he will survive his second?

Posted in Art, authoritarianism, Economics, Politics | Leave a comment

A Post-Pandemic Malaise?

  • Thoughts about whether the pandemic has led to autocracy around the world;
  • How that, and inequality, have left Americans in a sour economic mood;
  • A graphic illustrating how those who want to privatize everything think everything is about making money;
  • The administration’s latest “administrative error” sends an innocent man to a Salvadoran prison;
  • How Karoline Leavitt is obsessed by spiritual warfare;
  • An economics professor explains why Trump’s ideas about tariffs make no sense.
– – –

Similar idea encountered twice today.

First,on KQED’s Forum radio interview program.

This morning hosted Alexis Madrigal, with guests Anne Applebaum and Steven Levitsky.

KQED Forum, 1 Apr 2025: How Countries Fall Into Autocracy

Alas there’s no transcript (at least not yet) but the point that struck in passing was how, *as a result of the pandemic*, people around the world are generally discontent, to the point where they keep voting incumbents out of office, via regular votes or recalls. (Rather than being guided by any overall philosophical or political goals.)

(And in fact, there has been a rash of recalls in the SF Bay Area in the past few years. Whenever everything isn’t perfect, many people seem to think, it’s the fault of whoever is in charge, so get ’em out of office asap.)

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Then this, on the front page.

NY Times, Talmon Joseph Smith, 31 Mar 2025: America Has Never Been Wealthier. Here’s Why It Doesn’t Feel That Way., subtitled “A surge in U.S. wealth has been driven by stock and home values. But the gains are concentrated at the top, leaving others in a sour economic mood.”

Is this the same or a parallel issue? Like, maybe inequality driven by Republican tax policies that favor the wealthy?

America is more prosperous than ever.

U.S. household net worth reached a new peak at the end of 2024. The unemployment rate has levitated just above record lows for three years. The overall debt that households are carrying compared with the assets they own is also near a record low.

But even a land of plenty has its shortcomings, influencing both perceptions and realities of how Americans are doing.

The U.S. economy remains deeply unequal, with vast gaps in wealth and financial security persisting even as inflation has ebbed and incomes have risen. And data designed to capture the overall population may be obscuring challenges experienced by a broad range of Americans, especially those in the bottom half of the wealth or income spectrum.

Consider this:

This seems to be a separate issue, but not entirely.

Despite the growth in overall wealth, economic confidence among American households has not returned to where it was before the pandemic. That was the case even before consumer sentiment readings — along with the stock market — were dampened by the prospect of an inflationary global trade war from President Trump’s tariff campaign. But what is also striking in the data is the increasing gap in perceptions along income lines.

Over the past four years, the University of Michigan’s monthly survey of consumer sentiment has shown those in the bottom two-thirds of income to be deeply pessimistic about the economy — with rock-bottom ratings more common during periods of deep recession, including the 2008 financial crisis.

In contrast, sentiment among the top third of earners recently rebounded after falling from prepandemic levels.

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This graphic showed up in my Facebook feed again. It’s been around for a while. Why conservatives want to privatize everything.

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The Trump administration scandal of the week is sending an innocent man to a harsh prison in El Salvador. It was an “administrative error.”

The Atlantic, Nick Miroff, 31 Mar 2025: An ‘Administrative Error’ Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison, subtitled “The Trump administration says that it mistakenly deported an immigrant with protected status but that courts are powerless to order his return.”

And they don’t care.

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.

The case appears to be the first time the Trump administration has admitted to errors when it sent three planeloads of Salvadoran and Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador’s grim “Terrorism Confinement Center” on March 15. Attorneys for several Venezuelan deportees have said that the Trump administration falsely labeled their clients as gang members because of their tattoos. Trump officials have disputed those claims.

While others in the administration keep insisting the man had terrorist ties. Karoline Leavitt:

Yahoo! News, from The New Republic, 1 Apr 2025: Karoline Leavitt Pulls a 180 After ICE Admits It Deported Wrong Guy

The Trump administration is continuing to lie about the Venezuelan nationals they deported on claims they were all Tren de Aragua gang members.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked on Tuesday about the case of Kilmer Armado Abrego Garcia, the Maryland-based Salvadoran national who was deported to El Salvador earlier this month based on a “clerical error.”

Clearly, this administration is looking for any excuse at all to deport people who are not white.

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And… Karoline Leavitt is a sterling example of black and white, good vs. evil, thinking. Conservative thinking.

Boing Boing, Jason Weisberger, 1 Apr 2025: Gilead is here: Karoline Leavitt thinks every day is a holy war

God saved Trump, prayer meetings before press conferences, and a certainty that THE LORD is on their side are just a few of the ideas keeping the notoriously dishonest Karoline Leavitt fighting Democracy.

In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, Convicted Felon #47’s mouthpiece, Karoline Leavitt, described the “spiritual warfare” she is engaged in. There are “evil forces” out there trying to stop Trump, and only the grace of God has spared them. Their Lord also helps Leavitt articulate her words.

Childish thinking.

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Clear thinking about tariffs. And why Trump thinks every country in the world is ripping off the US.

NY Times, opinion guest essay by Jason Furman, 31 Mar 2025: Trump Is About to Bet the Economy on a Theory That Makes No Sense

My local bookstore has been taking advantage of me for years. I have run a trade deficit, giving it money with nothing but books in return. At the same time I have been taking advantage of my employer, running a trade surplus with it as it gives me a salary with nothing but educational services in exchange.

Thinking that way about the kinds of exchanges we all engage in is obviously absurd. But that’s precisely the reasoning behind the “reciprocal tariffs” President Trump is expected to announce this week. The details have not yet come into view, but if he does follow through, it’s clear the plan would add to what are already the nation’s highest tariffs since the 1940s. Their effect will be lower economic growth, higher inflation, higher unemployment, the destruction of wealth and a tax increase on American families. It will deal a blow to the rules underlying the global trading system and further empower China.

Mr. Trump has cycled through numerous rationales for tariffs: They will raise revenues, with foreigners footing the bill. They will help American manufacturers and national security. They will provide leverage against Mexican fentanyl and Canadian sovereignty. In all of these cases there is a bit of truth and a lot of falsehood.

But the one argument Mr. Trump has returned to again and again is that other countries are taking advantage of the United States. He measures the degree to which they are doing so by the magnitude of our trade deficit with them — that is, how much more money we spend on another country’s goods and services than we get from selling it our goods and services.

In this reckoning, the reason those deficits arise is that other countries erect tariffs and other trade barriers against the United States. It follows from this analysis that the solution is to reciprocate by erecting our own tariffs, which will either protect the United States or else get other countries to lower their barriers, either way reducing or eliminating the trade deficits.

Every step in this chain of reasoning is wrong.

The writer goes on to explain why.

Posted in Economics, Human Nature, Politics | Leave a comment

What Is the Venn Diagram Between Whitewashing and White Supremacy?

  • Signalgate and white mediocrity;
  • How we are seeing tribal impulses eroding the high ideals designed to overcome them;
  • How the Trump administration is indifferent to refugees… except for whites from South Africa;
  • Jill Lawrence at The Bulwark about Trump’s bid to whitewash American history;
  • Short items about RFK, National Review, and Paul Krugman about how MAGA is bad for business.
– – –

I’m mentioned white supremacy a couple times. It’s seemed to me that the goal of DOGE is to reinstate white supremacy, that DEI is bad because it treats the entire nation’s population as worthy of consideration, while Trump and MAGA care only about whites, and everyone else should be disappeared.

Here’s one result.

Salon, Rann Miller, 31 Mar 2025: Signalgate is a consequence of anti-DEI hysteria, subtitled “White mediocrity has become a national security risk”

Beginning with a prominent example, which most people have probably forgotten about.

Lloyd Austin, the former defense secretary and a four-star general with 40 years of military experience, was nonetheless labeled a DEI hire of the Biden administration. Pete Hegseth, the current secretary of defense, lacks adequate expertise and experience, on top of the fact that he’s had allegations of sexual assault and is known as an excessive drinker. A former National Security Council member and a Senate member deemed Hegseth unqualified for the position. However, according to Donald Trump, Hegseth had a tremendous track record that qualified him for the position.

The MAGA crowd called for Austin to resign because he failed to share that he had an emergency medical procedure, yet they explain away Hegseth’s failure to keep the details of a war plan confidential. Clearly, the ability to keep a secret wasn’t a qualification for Hegseth to get the job as defense secretary. What Signalgate, the recent scandal involving the Trump administration discussing war plans in a text thread with a journalist mistakenly added to the conversation, made abundantly clear is that the only qualification for Hegseth is that he was what Mishel Williams calls WEI: white, entitled and incompetent.

WEI: white, entitled, and incompetent. This is where we are.

One more bit, with a famous line from LBJ.

What this scandal shows is that the practice of hiring unqualified and mediocre white people — and calling it making America great — can, and has, compromised national security. And yet, many white people are so convinced that Black people and other people of color are wholly unqualified to lead, specifically those who don’t think like or act like them.

Donald Trump has reinforced that belief, proving Lyndon B. Johnson right when Johnson said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” I guess you can call Donald Trump the pick-pocketing pied piper… say that three times fast.

Once again, this isn’t about America and MAGA and white supremacy per se so much as it’s an illustration of how tribal impulses can erode the high ideals designed to overcome them. It can happen, and has happened, anytime and everywhere. It’s part of human nature. This seems to be a fundamental limitation of our species.

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Trump’s US is indifferent to refugees, except for the white ones.

NY Times, 31 Mar 2025: ‘Mission South Africa’: How Trump Is Offering White Afrikaners Refugee Status, subtitled “The United States has banned most refugees, including 20,000 people who were already ready to travel to the United States before President Trump took office. But Mr. Trump is making one exception.” [Gift link via JMG]

The Trump administration has thrown open the doors to white Afrikaners from South Africa, establishing a program called “Mission South Africa” to help them come to the United States as refugees, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

The administration’s focus on white Afrikaners comes as it effectively bans the entry of other refugees — including about 20,000 people from countries like Afghanistan, Congo and Syria who were ready to travel to the United States before Mr. Trump took office. In court filings about those other refugees, the administration has argued that core functions of the refugee program had been “terminated” after the president’s ban, so it did not have the resources to take in any more people.

“There’s no subtext and nothing subtle about the way this administration’s immigration and refugee policy has obvious racial and racist overtones,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of America’s Voice. “While they seek to single out Afrikaners for special treatment, they simultaneously want us to think mostly Black and brown vetted newcomers are dangerous despite their background checks and all evidence to the contrary.”

So… is this not the implementation of white supremacy by MAGA?

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What, I wonder, is the Venn Diagram overlap between white supremacy and whitewashing?

The Bulwark, Jill Lawrence, 30 Mar 2025: Trump’s Latest Bid to Rewrite Reality, subtitled “From the Smithsonian to statues, he wants to whitewash America’s past.”

… I’ve been fuming over Donald Trump’s March 27 executive order to disappear from our “national attic” all evidence of “woke,” mistakes, and regret, and restore monuments that honor people and events on the wrong side of history’s moral line.

This one short document hyperfocused on the Smithsonian Institution is just 1,150 words, but it is towering in its Stalinesque ambition to walk back history and whitewash America’s past.

So, with thanks to my high school English teachers for having shown me the importance of unpacking language, here’s a close reading of this order.

Let’s start with the title, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” As with most things Trump and MAGA, including another recent pronouncement about “preserving and protecting the integrity of American elections,” it says exactly the opposite of what it means. In both cases, the goal is to mute or silence voices Trump disagrees with.

A lengthy piece, as she reads her way through the order. One more bit.

The most glaring error in this passage, the one that reveals it to be garbage, is the word “irredeemably.” America is anything but irredeemable. Time and again, we have confronted, corrected, and even transcended our tragic errors. That is how we have achieved our advances in “liberty, individual rights, and human happiness.”

The irony here is that Trump—along with Elon Musk, Russell Vought, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and many others in his administration—is right now doing tremendous damage to liberty, individual rights, and human happiness. Abducting immigrants and throwing them into foreign prisons? Thoughtlessly firing government experts? Kicking patriotic transgender service members out of the armed forces? Gutting government grants on science? It’s not our historians and museum curators who are weaving that tale of woe and misery.

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Shorter items, with comments but not quotes. Ok, one quote.

  • JMG from WSJ: WSJ: “Our Worst Fears About RFK Are Coming True”
  • Even National Review, the most conservative of the major magazines, has issues with Trump. Jeffrey Blehar, 31 Mar 2025: Where Do You Draw the Line?, subtitled “While I concede the legality of the administration’s move against Rumeysa Öztürk, I reject its morality and prudence.” Comment: this is about the woman abducted in broad daylight…
  • Paul Krugman, 31 Mar 2025: MAGA is Bad for Business, subtitled “And business owners were deluded to believe otherwise” OK, I will quote a key fact that most people don’t know, or deny.

    One odd feature of U.S. politics is that businesspeople, especially small business owners, always seems to believe that they will do better under Republicans, even though history shows that business does better under Democrats. Small business owners supported Trump in the last election, despite ample evidence that he would be very bad for business.

I have more, but I’ll save them…

Posted in conservatives, Morality, Politics | Leave a comment

I read the news today, oh boy.

  • How mold is taken as a miracle, another example in an endless series throughout history;
  • Short items about Trump, tariffs, and auto prices; lying about American history; how “make America healthy again” means the opposite; how a vaccine expert has been fired from the FDA; and how DOGE wants to privatize everything.

And in the news today, more lies, more reversals, from the Trump administration. He’s changed his mind. He doesn’t remember what he said. “Witch hunt” is one of his favorite terms, from his limited vocabulary, to dismiss any accusation against his band of incompetents. I suspect he was no idea what the actual witch hunts were about. It’s exhausting to try to keep up. We’re living in an upside-down, Alice in Wonderland world. And yet still he has fans.

Let me post this. It’s more significant that it might seem at first glance.

Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 29 Mar 2025: It’s mold, not a miracle: The Catholic Church’s latest eucharistic blunder, subtitled “Another viral Catholic miracle turns out to be just bacteria and wishful thinking”

Once again, after suggesting a miracle had occurred and there was tangible proof, an investigation has discovered… that there was a perfectly sensible, scientific, non-miraculous explanation for it.

About a month ago, an X/Twitter account posted a story involving a “Eucharistic Miracle” at St. Anthony of Padua in Morris, Indiana. The account relayed a story a woman had just sent to her family, explaining that a consecrated communion wafer had accidentally been dropped on the floor. Instead of throwing it away, a priest put it in water and “left it in the tabernacle to dissolve.” He did the same thing to a second wafer that dropped later.

When a staffer went to check on those wafers the next day to see if they had dissolved, there were “spots of blood!” The woman added: “When I saw it today it looked like a very very thin piece of skin with blood on it.”

To those of us who’ve been around the block, so to speak, this is just another in an endless history of gullible people seeing things they want to believe. Perceiving things they don’t understand and mapping them into the limited fantasy world they’ve been taught to believe in from childhood.

In this case, it’s about mold. And similar explanations, we’re sure, explain all the so-called “miracles” from throughout history. Get a grip. Get real. But it won’t ever happen. Humans can’t bear much reality

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I’ll reduce some other items to headlines.

Posted in Human Nature, Psychology, Religion | Leave a comment

Adolescence of Boys, and of the Species

For once we happened to watch a much-discussed current show only a week after it debuted (instead of months later or years later). This is the Netflix show Adolescence (Wikipedia link).

It’s four hour-long episodes, about a 13-year-old boy in an English village who is accused of killing, with a knife, a girl classmate. Each episode is shot in one continuous take, and the episodes are sequential but not continuous. Continue reading

Posted in Evolution, Human Nature, Psychology | Leave a comment

The Reality of the World Will Fight Back

  • How the current administration deals in “alternative facts”;
  • With a reminder of some central themes of this blog;
  • Now the Smithsonian Institution is targeted for “improper ideology,” which seems to mean that the prejudices and stereotypes of decades ago are to be restored;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on the administration’s definition of “the Left”;
  • Hillary Clinton on the current administration’s hijinks: “It’s not the hypocrisy; it’s the stupidity”;
  • Short items on even WSJ being accused to fake news; whether Trump believes in the fee market or not (as he orders car companies not to raise prices in response to his tariffs); ending laws against child labor; now they’re abducting people in broad daylight; business leaders compare Trump to a mob boss; Christians are now plotting to overturn Obergefell (as predicted); how Pam Bondi thinks judges have no authority to overrule the president.
– – –

First, a reminder of the current situation.

The Bulwark, Mona Charen, 28 Mar 2025: What Happens When the Government Starts Reporting ‘Alternative Facts’?, subtitled “The truth is the last weapon of the opposition.”

Continue reading

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Human Nature, Politics | Leave a comment

Of Course We Knew, or Should Have Known, This Was Coming

  • Frank Bruni on the fiasco of Trump’s cabinet;
  • The Guardian’s Emma Brockes calls them “a bunch of pathetic sleazebags”;
  • And the stunning hypocrisy of this scandal compared to Hillary Clinton’s emails;
  • Short items on the new Lavender Scare, how a GOP rep thinks NPR and PBS “hate our Lord” (dadgum!); and how scientists mull leaving the US.
    – – –

    Frank Bruni nails it.

    NY Times, Frank Bruni, 27 Mar 2025: Trump’s Crackerjack Cabinet Is a Fiasco Foretold [gift link]

    It’s been pointed out time and again that Trump’s choices for his cabinet were among the least qualified people to hold those positions, ever.

    Continue reading

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Fewer and Fewer Are Mincing Words

  • Tom Nichols on the recent crisis;
  • Paul Krugman concludes Trump’s people are both incompetent and evil;
  • Even Fox News blames incompetence;
  • Europe reacts to insults;
  • Children with measles are getting sick from overdoses of Vitamin D, per JFK Jr.’s advice;
  • The Trump administration is cancelling medical research;
  • And MTG identifies migrants with rapists.
– – –

On the major story this week, let’s look at Tom Nichols’ take.

The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 26 Mar 2025: The Trump Team’s Denials Are Laughable, subtitled “The president’s officials must know that what they did in the Signal group chat was wrong—and dangerous.”

Continue reading

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on Fewer and Fewer Are Mincing Words

OK For Me But Not For Thee

  • Reactions to yesterday’s story;
  • A comment about how perhaps Americans are actually not very good people;
  • Robert Reich recalls the four pillars of civil society: universities, science, the media, and the law; all the ones the current administration is trying to tear down.
– – –

Following up on yesterday’s story. They’re minimizing or even denying that the incident happened, and it’s triggered Trump’s reflex to insult anyone who impugns him or his administration in any way. (Yet again, he’s always concerned about ratings and accuses publications he doesn’t like of “failing.”)

AlterNet, Alex Henderson, 25 Mar 2025: ‘Hire clowns, expect a circus’: Leaked chat exposes ‘stupidity and recklessness’

Continue reading

Posted in Morality, Politics, Social Progress | Comments Off on OK For Me But Not For Thee