A Fox News host for Secretary of Defense. Stephen Miller. Matt Gaetz for…. anything. We shouldn’t be surprised.
- Evidence that Russia is playing Trump;
- Trump’s picks for his cabinet are surprising even many Republicans;
- Why does it take two guys to run a department of efficiency?
- Elon Musk makes promises without having any idea of what he’s doing;
- How Trump’s indifference might save the Department of Education;
- Paul Krugman anticipates the Trump administration cooking the books on inflation;
- And Peter Wehner on the importance of truth.
Remember how Trump said he was going to end the war in Ukraine on Day One?
Slate, Fred Kaplan, 13 Nov 2024: Trump Thinks Putin Is His Friend. The Russians Just Issued a Humiliating Statement to the Contrary., subtitled “The psychological warfare has begun.”
With some background. Then:
The final twist of this saga came on Monday when Russia’s intelligence chief, Nikolai Patrushev, made the following comment in an interview with the Moscow newspaper Kommersant:
The election campaign is over. To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.
This is a mind-blowing bit of psychological warfare! The Russians are basically telling Trump: We put you in office. Now it’s time for you to pay us back.
(Once again, it’s not that Trump and his team actively colluded with Russia — my take is that they’re not smart enough to have been able to do that — but that doesn’t mean Russia hasn’t preferred him in office over a Democrat, and did something to influence the election anyway. Most likely via misinformation bots on social media.)
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If they’re so concerned about efficiency, why does it take two of them?
NY Times, 12 Nov 2024: Trump Taps Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to Slash Government, subtitled “The two wealthy entrepreneurs will lead what the president-elect called the Department of Government Efficiency, which he said would seek ‘drastic change.’ But the announcement left a lot unanswered.”
I suppose cronyism like this goes on all the time, but rarely so nakedly as with Trump. The answer is: because they supported him, and this is their reward. (And maybe to avoid assigning them to anything else.)
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On the other hand, Musk’s promises are absurd. As with most people Trump appoints to high positions, he has no qualifications, and no idea what he’s doing. Here’s George F. Will (still around after all these years!).
Washington Post, George F. Will, 13 Nov 2024: Opinion | The world’s richest person is about to receive a free public education, subtitled “Elon Musk vows to cut more than $2 trillion from federal spending. Wait till he runs into Washington.”
The point isn’t that there’s a bureaucracy waiting to get in his way; the point is that Musk has no idea how complex the government is. Will does some basic arithmetic.
Musk says he can cut “at least” $2 trillion from federal spending — say, one dollar in three. (Fiscal 2024 spending: $6.75 trillion.) Well.
Debt service (13.1 percent of fiscal 2024 spending) is not optional and is larger than defense (12.9 percent), which Trump wants to increase. Entitlements (principally Social Security and Medicare) are 34.6 percent and by Trumpian fiat are sacrosanct. So, Musk’s promise is to cut about 30 percent of the total budget from a roughly 40 percent portion of the budget, politics be damned.
With examples of how political forces (i.e. vested interests) derailed earlier attempts at cutting the Federal budget.
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- CNN: Trump stirs the pot with shock Cabinet picks
- The Daily Beast: Ex-Fox Host Flames Former Colleague Pete Hegseth After Trump’s Pentagon Nod
- Media Matters: Pete Hegseth’s book includes complaints about “Muslims’ birth rates,” praise for “crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes”, subtitled “Trump’s potential Defense secretary: ‘Just like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century, American Crusaders will need to muster the same courage against Islamists today.'”
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At the same time, perhaps the inexperience and incompetence of Trump’s picks, and his own disinterest in actual policy, can be seen as a virtue.
NY Times, Jessica Gross opinion, 13 Nov 2024: Trump Doesn’t Care Enough About K-12 Education to Break It
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This is linked from JMG because of a specific point.
The New Republic, The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent, 13 Nov 2024: Transcript: Paul Krugman on How Badly Trump Voters Have Been Scammed, subtitled “An interview with the New York Times columnist about the likelihood that Trump’s policies will spike inflation—and why his voters will soon be shocked at how badly he misled them.”
After some discussion about the impact of deporting illegal immigrants on food prices, we get to this. Note the last line.
The last time around, back during the Obama years, when there was a lot of inflation truthers claiming that the inflation numbers were being manipulated to make it look like there was less inflation than there was. Such accusations are always projections—it’s what they would do, not what was actually happening. We turned to various kinds of private sector independent measures of inflation, many of which were originally developed by economists in places like Argentina, where manipulation of the data was standard so they developed their own ways to measure. We’re going to be having to do that. My guess is by sometime next year, we’re going to be having to look at proxies for what’s actually happening to the economy, possibly for what’s actually happening to crime, because the official numbers are going to be corrupted.
So a prediction: the Trump administration will fudge numbers on inflation, based on proxy measurements of the economy.
Much else very interesting in this piece.
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And to conclude for today.
The Atlantic, Peter Wehner, 13 Nov 2024: Don’t Give Up on the Truth, subtitled “Striking out against injustice is always right; it always matters.”
So much of MAGA world thrives on conflict, on feeling aggrieved, on seeking vengeance. Most of the rest of us do not. Why continue to fight against what he stands for? If Trump is the man Americans chose to be their president, if his values and his conduct are ones they’re willing to tolerate or even embrace, so be it.
…
So how should those who oppose Trump, especially those of us who have been fierce critics of Trump—and I was among the earliest and the most relentless—think about this moment?
First, we must remind ourselves of the importance of truth telling, of bearing moral witness, of calling out lies. Countless people, famous and unknown, have told the truth in circumstances far more arduous and dangerous than ours. One of them is the Russian author and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “To stand up for truth is nothing,” he wrote. “For truth, you must sit in jail. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The simple step a courageous individual must take is to decline to take part in the lie, he said. “One word of truth outweighs the world.” A word of truth can sustain others by encouraging them, by reminding them that they’re not alone and that honor is always better than dishonor.
Second, we need to guard our souls. …
Third, the Democratic Party, which for the time being is the only alternative to the Trump-led, authoritarian-leaning GOP, needs to learn from its loss. The intraparty recriminations among Democrats, stunned at the results of the election, are ferocious. …
Fourth, Trump critics need to keep this moment in context. The former and future president is sui generis; he is, as the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jon Meacham put it, “a unique threat to constitutional government.” He is also bent on revenge. But America has survived horrific moments, such as the Civil War, and endured periods of horrific injustice, including the eras of slavery, Redemption, and segregation. The American story is an uneven one.
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Fifth, all of us need to cultivate hope, rightly understood.
Much more, but I shouldn’t quote the entire piece.
