- Tech-bros don’t care about the price of eggs;
- David Brooks on why Trump will fail;
- Dan Milbank on his astounding ignorance;
- Evangelicals have abandoned Jesus for Trump;
- Get ‘em while they’re young, said Hitler, says the Church.
Well Mr. Trump? What about the price of those eggs? You were going to fix that, right?
Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 24 Jan 2025: Trumponomics is back: Tech-bros are delighted, but the price of eggs is soaring, subtitled “Trump thinks he won by talking about the economy — and now he gets to wreck it and enrich his billionaire pals”
But he never really explained how he intended to bring down costs. Tariffs were his No. 1 go-to answer for every economic question, followed by “drill, baby, drill” as the solution to inflation and “growth” as the answer to deficits. Those catchphrases were basically his entire economic plan, and in the midst of overwhelming backlash against the post-pandemic inflation of 2022-2023, that seemed to be all most voters needed to hear. Or at least it was enough for the plurality that put him in the White House.
There was a group of enthusiastic Trump backers who knew better, of course. The cyber-barons, CEOs and Wall Street big-money boys understood that the only thing he was bringing to the table was more deregulation and bigger tax cuts, the Holy Grail of the billionaire class.
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Even Fox News now acknowledges the bird flu is the reason for high egg prices, rather than blaming the current president. Funny how that happened, now that Trump is president.
JMG, 24 Jan 2025: Fox Suddenly Decides Bird Flu To Blame For Egg Prices
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Echoing Rauch, perhaps.
NY Times, David Brooks, 23 Jan 2025: How Trump Will Fail
Trump admires McKinley, and his 19th century worldview, when…
We were a boisterous, arriviste nation back then, bursting with energy, bombast and new money. … It was a time when the national character was being forged not among the establishment circles in Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia but out on the frontier, by the wild ones, the uncouth ones. It was the rugged experience of westward expansion, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared in 1893, that had given America its vitality, its egalitarianism, its lack of interest in high culture and polite manners. The West was settled by a rising tide of hucksterism — the spirit of the circus master P.T. Barnum more than that of the aristocratic novelist Henry James.
And so on. Thus his appeal to those who feel left behind by “the losers of the information age.”
The problem with populism and the whole 19th-century governmental framework is that it didn’t work. Between 1825 and 1901 we had 20 presidencies. We had a bunch of one-term presidents; voters kept throwing the incumbents out because they were not happy with the way government was performing. The last three decades of that century saw a string of brutalizing recessions and depressions that profoundly shook the country. The light-footprint government was unable to cope with the process of industrialization.
…
Here’s how America recovered: Populist indignation finally got professionalized. In the 20th century, members of the progressive movement took the problems the populists were rightly angry about and built the institutions that were required to address them effectively — like the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve. Populists had trouble thinking institutionally; the progressives, who were well trained, morally upright, self-disciplined, disgusted by corruption, intellectually rigorous (and sometimes priggish and arrogant) did not have that problem.
Those are the institutions Rauch spoke of (see my review), and the same ones Trump would happily dismantle.
The history of the world since at least the French Revolution is that rapid disruption makes governments cataclysmically worse. Trump, the anti-institutionalist, is creating an electoral monarchy, a system in which all power is personalized and held in his hands. That’s a recipe for distorted information flows, corruption, instability and administrative impotence. As we’ve seen over and over again down the centuries, there’s a big difference between people who operate in the spirit of disruption and those who operate in the spirit of reform.
If I were running the Democratic Party (God help them), I would tell the American people that Donald Trump is right about a lot of things. He’s accurately identified problems on issues like inflation, the border and the fallout from cultural condescension that members of the educated class have been too insular to anticipate. But when it comes to building structures to address those problems — well, the man is just hapless and incompetent.
And that’s why he’ll fail.
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Also this:
Washington Post, Dana Milbank, 24 Jan 2025: Trump returns — and so does his astounding ignorance
The evidence that Donald Trump was truly, madly and deeply confused was worrisome when he was a candidate. It’s all the more so now that he is wielding the mighty apparatus of the U.S. government to pursue his fantasies. This is a classic case of garbage in, garbage out — but now he is making the country a landfill for his nonsensical policies.
…
The most unwelcome feature of Trump’s return this week, more than any individual action, is his abiding ignorance, even after all these years. This is what allows unscrupulous figures such as Stephen Miller to run amok. It’s also the source of the constant chaos that is Trump’s trademark.
This week alone, Trump botched — either out of ignorance or mendacity — claims about World Health Organization funding, the trade deficit, opioid deaths, inflation, birthright citizenship, Biden’s pardons, illegal immigration, the Jan. 6 committee and more. In a typical pronouncement, Trump alleged that no president imposed tariffs on China “until I came along.” George Washington would beg to differ.
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The evangelicals’ devotion to religion is driven by something deeper than theology or faith, I’d say.
The Atlantic, Peter Wehner, 24 Jan 2025: Evangelicals Made a Bad Trade, subtitled “Hitching the evangelical wagon to Donald Trump has meant unhitching it from the life and teachings of Jesus.”
One of the first acts of God’s newly anointed president was to issue pardons or commute the sentences of the nearly 1,600 people charged in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Trump issued pardons to most of the defendants and commuted the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militias, most of whom had been convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Axios reported that the pardons were “a last-minute, rip-the-bandage-off decision to try to move past the issue quickly.” As Trump’s team wrestled with the issue, “Trump just said: ‘Fuck it! Release ’em all,’” an adviser familiar with the discussions told Axios’s Marc Caputo.
More than 150 police officers were injured during the assault on the Capitol. They were hit with baseball bats, flagpoles, and pipes. Aquilino Gonell, a former Capitol Police sergeant who retired because of the injuries he suffered as a result of the assault, was infuriated by Trump’s pardons and commutations. “It’s a miscarriage of justice, a betrayal, a mockery, and a desecration of the men and women that risked their lives defending our democracy,” Gonell told The New York Times’s Luke Broadwater.
And so:
THE IRONY IS HARD TO MISS: The movement that for the past half century was loudest in warning about the dangers of cultural decadence is most responsible for electing a president who personifies cultural decadence. (Trump won more than 80 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2024.) Not a single area of Trump’s life is untouched by corruption.
The piece ends by noting that not all evangelicals are Trump supporters. (There was a time in the world, when I was growing up perhaps, when churches were regarded as institutions who were trying to do good in the world, never mind their supernatural beliefs. This has changed.)
This needs to be said too: Many evangelical churches, the pastors who lead them, and the people who comprise them are doing enormously good work. I have witnessed this with my own eyes, and been the recipient of those who are dispensers of grace. Faith, not politics, is their priority, and many of them have tried in good conscience to align their politics with their faith. When it works, as it did with the abolitionist movement, the global AIDS initiative, refugee resettlement, and protecting religious liberty around the world, it has advanced justice and healing.
But
But something is amiss. Today the evangelical movement is an essential part of a much larger, and largely destructive, political and cultural movement. Evangelicalism has in many instances become more tribal, unforgiving, and cruel. The world is noticing.
As I’ve been saying.
“As a general rule,” the Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor has said, “I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.”
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A lot of culture works like this. Believe, don’t learn. Thus the bias of children to believe their parents. Honor thy father and mother. It works well in childhood. But it can be misused.
AlterNet, Carl Gibson, 24 Jan 2025: ‘Get them while they are young’: Tennessee GOP group quotes Hitler in promoting reading list
The Catholic Church knows this, and has even defined an Age of reason. Beyond which they are much more difficult to persuade.
