Busy day. Will refine this post tomorrow morning.
- Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.
- Historian Heather Cox Richardson dismantles claims of Trump’s “mandate”;
- Short items about MTG and NPR; Fox News personalities becoming America’s scientists and doctors; revenge of the Covid contrarians; and how RFK Jr’s response to measles in Samoa led to 80 deaths;
- How Trump’s budget cutters illustrate rote conservative principles — reduce government, cut taxes, more money for the military — without any kind of background rationales;
- Paul Krugman on how exceptions to Trump’s tariffs will result in crony capitalism;
- How how Jesus supports whatever his believers support.
Scientific American, Robert Jay Lifton, 25 Nov 2024: When a Nation Embraces a False Reality, subtitled “A renowned psychiatrist and activist compares Trump’s election to other pivotal historical moments in which the ultimate victim was truth itself”
Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” That’s a simple, profound and true statement.
Moynihan’s words have particular relevance for our country and society after Donald’s Trump’s shocking 2024 election victory. To put things directly, Trump was able to win because he and his followers convinced most of the country to believe in his falsification of factual truth.
An ongoing theme.
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Historian Heather Cox Richardson dismantles those claims of a “mandate”: November 24, 2024.
Since the night of the November 5, election, Trump and his allies have insisted that he won what Trump called “an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” But as the numbers have continued to come in, it’s clear that such a declaration is both an attempt to encourage donations— fundraising emails refer to Trump’s “LANDSLIDE VICTORY”—and an attempt to create the illusion of power to push his agenda.
The reality is that Trump’s margin over Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris will likely end up around 1.5 points. According to James M. Lindsay, writing for the Council of Foreign Relations, it is the fifth smallest since 1900, which covers 32 presidential races.
… Trump’s allies are indeed setting out to do big things, and they are big things that are unpopular.
Namely Project 2025, $2 trillion cuts in the US government, and so on. But what is he really up to?
That Trump and his team are trying desperately to portray a marginal victory as a landslide in order to put an extremist unpopular agenda into place suggests another dynamic at work.
…
In this moment, Trump’s people are working hard to convince Americans that they have gathered up all the power in Washington, D.C., but that power is actually still sloshing around. Trump is trying to force through the Senate a number of unqualified and dangerous nominees for high-level positions, threatening Republican senators that if they don’t bow to him, Elon Musk will fund primary challengers, or suggesting he will push them into recess so he can appoint his nominees without their constitutionally-mandated advice and consent.
But Trump and his people do not, in fact, have a mandate. Trump is old and weak, and power is up for grabs. It is possible that MAGA Republicans will, in the end, force Republican senators into their camp, permitting Trump and his cronies to do whatever they wish.
It is also possible that Republican senators will themselves take back for Congress the power that has lately concentrated in presidents, check the most dangerous and unpopular of Trump’s plans, and begin the process of restoring the balance of the three branches of government.
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- LA Times, 24 Nov 2024: “Democrat propaganda”: Marjorie Taylor Greene plans to team up with Musk to defund NPR, subtitled “She accused the public radio network of doing ‘nothing for the American people.'” (Which American people? And she apparently thinks the government funds all of NPR.)
- Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 25 Nov 2024: Trump’s brain drain: Fox News personalities tapped to become America’s next top scientists, doctors, subtitled “Donald Trump is out for COVID revenge” (A cabinet of clowns.)
- And again. The Atlantic, Benjamin Mazer, 25 Nov 2024: Revenge of the COVID Contrarians, subtitled “They’re angry at the public-health establishment. Now they’re in control of it.” (Reality bit; now they want to burn modern medicine down.)
- NY Times, Brian Deer, 25 Nov 2024: I’ll Never Forget What Kennedy Did During Samoa’s Measles Outbreak (He wrote a letter to Samoa implicating the measles *vaccine* resulting in vaccine hesitancy and 80 people dead, mostly children.)
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LA Times, Jackie Calmes, 24 Nov 2024: Column: Trump’s budget cutters have set themselves up to fail
President-elect Donald Trump’s designated debt-busters, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, last week wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal providing the fullest accounting yet of their plans to cut “waste, fraud and abuse” — that most well-worn and oft-broken of political promises.
Indeed, an omission from the dynamic duo’s piece suggests that they — and Trump — may have already trimmed their ambitions: Musk and Ramaswamy made no mention of Musk’s previous boasts that he’d slash “at least” $2 trillion in a single year from the federal budget.
She then reviews the numbers, as others have done.
What strikes me about this obsession with cutting government is not the goal of $2 trillion, it’s that this goal is a reflexive one among conservatives. Just as cutting taxes, and spending more on the military, are. There’s never any rationale for, say, how much military is needed, or how much tax revenue is needed to pay for current expenses. How how there could possibly be $2 trillion of waste and fraud in the American government. Like all small-government conservatives who think small government is better, they have no idea what the actual government does, and will criticize what the government stops doing once those cuts are enacted.
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We’re hearing more and more about how certain industries will apply for exemptions to Trump’s tariffs, lest those tariffs drive them out of business. How will this work? Predictably.
NY Times, Paul Krugman, 25 Nov 2024: Crony Capitalism Is Coming to America [gift link]
Trump imposed significant tariffs during his first term, and many businesses applied for exemptions. Who got them? A recently published statistical analysis found that companies with Republican ties, as measured by their 2016 campaign contributions, were significantly more likely (and those with Democratic ties less likely) to have their applications approved.
But that was only a small-scale rehearsal for what could be coming. While we don’t have specifics yet, the tariff proposals Trump floated during the campaign were far wider in scope and, in the case of China, far higher than anything we saw the first time around; the potential for political favoritism will be an order of magnitude greater.
As I understand it, the term “crony capitalism” was invented to describe how things worked in the Philippines under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled from 1965 to 1986. It describes an economy in which business success depends less on good management than on having the right connections — often purchased by doing political or financial favors for those in power. In Viktor Orban’s Hungary, for example, Transparency International estimates that more than a quarter of the economy is controlled by businesses with close ties to the ruling party.
Now it’s very likely that crony capitalism is coming to America.
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Obviously Jesus would do exactly what I want to do. How religious people think.
JMG, 25 Nov 2024: Johnson: Jesus Supports Anti-Trans Bathroom Bans
“We have to speak with clarity and with compassion. And I think we can do both those things. I ask myself every day, ‘What would Jesus do?’
“I mean, in this situation, what would Jesus do? I think he would hold, obviously, to the principles that we believe in, but he would also have compassion for those involved.
“There’s a lot of people who need that right now. We’re trying to do both at the same time.” – House Speaker Mike Johnson, speaking on […] Tony Perkins’ podcast.
