The Corrosion of America

So let’s see if I’m caught up. Trump has invited virtually everyone in the Federal government (including air traffic controllers) to resign, in a kind of buyout, or risk being fired if they don’t agree to Trump’s New Order. The FAA head already resigned on January 20th at the behest of Musk, who resented safety standards being applied to his rocket company. This week a passenger plane and a military helicopter collided over the Potomac River in Washington DC and Trump, along with his toadies, blamed Democrats and DEI, not so subtly implying that only straight white men are competent. After releasing all the January 6th rioters from prison, now Trump is firing the investigators who got them put away. The criminals and incompetents whom Trump nominated for cabinet positions are getting confirmed, one by one; Republicans have no low too low, apparently. What else? Let me check. Trump is moving forward with his tariffs, and threatening more, no matter how often real economists point out they will raise prices that ordinary Americans pay. He tried to freeze government spending on Monday, then reversed the decision on Wednesday, a sure sign he doesn’t understand the consequences of what he’s doing, or is simply flailing.

What will be left when all this is done? Anything?

Yes, we survived the first Trump administration, but this time it seems like we’re living through a hostile dismantling of American government, and a return to the morality of 150 years ago, when women could not vote and numerous groups of non-white-men were simply not allowed, or even seen, in civil society. That what they mean by making America great again, apparently.

Connie Willis on Trump and the plane crash: He Is a Monster

When Trump was asked by reporters whether he intended to visit the rescue workers who worked tirelessly all night in the freezing water to try to find survivors, he said no. He said, “I will be meeting with some people that were very badly injured.” (There are no very badly injured people, you moron! They’re all dead!) and THEN he said the thing that sent me into a towering rage: “I have a plan to visit, not the site,” he said, and then, sarcastically, “Because you tell me, what’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?”

Heather Cox Richardson on the plane crash and Trump’s reaction. January 30, 2025

Trump’s impulse to blame other people for the tragedy even before anything was known about its causes reflects his rejection of the concept of the American government in favor of the idea that the world is simply a collection of individuals.

Robert Reich on the same: Say No to Bigotry

What is America to make of this? That the underlying cause of last night’s tragedy was that not enough white people were in charge? That “competent” people — the “best and the brightest” — “the best people” — are not Black or Latino?

Is it now open season on such racist bullshit?

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Paul Krugman on the tariffs.

The End of North America, subtitled “Trump pulls the trigger on tariffs”

As I wrote the other day, in the three decades since NAFTA went into effect, North American manufacturing has evolved into a highly integrated system whose products — autos in particular, but manufactured goods more broadly — typically contain components from all three members of the pact, which may be shipped across the borders multiple times. Manufacturers developed this system not just because tariffs were low or zero, but because they thought they had a guarantee that tariffs would stay low.

One way of saying this is that until just the other day there was really no such thing as U.S. manufacturing, Canadian manufacturing or Mexican manufacturing, just North American manufacturing — a highly efficient, mutually beneficial system that sprawled across the three nations’ borders.

But now we have a U.S. president saying that a duly negotiated and signed trade pact isn’t worth the paper it was printed on — that he can impose high tariffs on the other signatories whenever he feels like it. And even if the tariffs go away, the private sector will know that they can always come back; the credibility of this trade agreement, or any future trade agreement, will be lost. So North American manufacturing will disintegrate — that is, dis-integrate — reverting to inefficient, fragmented national industries.

Hence my title, “The end of North America.”

And to think that many people imagined that Trump would be good for business.

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The irony of their chatter about merit over DEI is Trump’s line-up of cabinet appointments. Such as Kash Patel.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 31 Jan 2025: MAGA’s revenge of the mediocre: Trump’s war on federal workers targets the meritorious

Instead of actually showing up for his hearing before the Judiciary Committee, Kash Patel should have propped up a TV playing the video of  “It Wasn’t Me” on a loop for six hours. Donald Trump’s nominee to head the FBI has a long, well-documented history of being the looniest sort of conspiracy theorist. Still, when confronted with his own words by Senate Democrats, he denied it all with the insincerity of the cheating narrator of Shaggy and RikRok’s 2000 hit song. Democrats were visibly frustrated by Patel’s gaslighting, but one has to feel even sorrier for the nearly 40,000 FBI employees who will likely soon be working for this sorry man. Trump obviously picked him as a direct insult to them, especially as lurid lies about FBI agents are a favorite mode of conspiracy content for Patel. This hearing comes on the tail of two weeks of Trump waging all-out war on the largely anonymous staff at the FBI and larger Justice Department, from pardoning over 1,500 Capitol rioters to mass firing prosecutors who investigated Trump’s attempted coup.

And.

The hatred of federal workers is part of the larger MAGA antagonism towards scientists, academics, artists, journalists, or anyone who has developed expertise in any field but con artistry. Many federal jobs, especially the bureaucratic offices most heavily targeted by the would-be purge, are filled by people who have spent years becoming experts at what they do. In contrast, Trump’s political appointments are a celebration of the slacker and the intellectually incurious.

Such as Hegseth and Kennedy and Duffy.

Fortunately there’s some push back.

The good news is that the peevishness seems to be backfiring, at least in some cases.

Anonymous posters on a Reddit board for federal employees have been coaching each other to stay put and not give in to the childish bullying. “I’m going to keep doing my job until someone drags me out of me POD,” one poster wrote. “You can tell President Trump that if he needs me, I’LL BE IN MY OFFICE!!!!!” wrote another. “It took me 10 years of applying and 20 years experience in my field to get here,” one woman added. “I will not be pushed out by two billionaire trust fund babies,” presumably speaking about Musk and Trump, both who were raised by wealthy fathers.

But Trump and his MAGA supporters seem to think that anyone who works for the government is just as dispensable as all those immigrants they’re so eager to deport.

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Stepping back. This piece is good because it takes the big picture, something conservatives do not understand, or selfishly ignore.

NY Times, Opinion by Lydia Polgreen, 31 Jan 2025: Something Extraordinary Is Happening All Over the World

We are living in an age of mass migration.

Millions of people from the poor world are trying to cross seas, forests, valleys and rivers, in search of safety, work and some kind of better future. About 281 million people now live outside the country in which they were born, a new peak of 3.6 percent of the global population according to the International Organization for Migration, and the number of people forced to leave their country because of conflict and disaster is at about 50 million — an all-time high. In the past decade alone, the number of refugees has tripled and the number of asylum seekers has more than quadrupled. Taken together, it is an extraordinary tide of human movement.

Conservatives have no interest in why this might be. They are uninterested in evidence.

The surge of people trying to reach Europe, the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia has set off a broad panic, reshaping the political landscape. All across the rich world, citizens have concluded — with no small prompting by right-wing populists — that there is too much immigration. Migration has become the critical fault line of politics. Donald Trump owes his triumphant return to the White House in no small part to persuading Americans, whose country was built on migration, that migrants are now the prime source of its ills.

While the countries that malign immigrants are actually in need of new people, to sustain their standards of living.

The right’s response to this problem is fantastical: expel the migrants and reproduce the natives. Any short-term economic pain, they contend, must be borne for the sake of safeguarding national identity in the face of the oncoming horde — a version of the racist “great replacement” theory that was once beyond the pale but has become commonplace. But we can see how this approach is playing out, in a laboratory favored by Trump and his ilk.

The article goes on with many examples. And this pause to take the big picture.

The panic about migration, it strikes me, is really a panic about the future — and about progress. Migrants are individuals making a profound, risky bet that by undertaking the rare and difficult decision to leave home, they can build something new. Behind opposition to migration is often the reverse: a belief that the only way to protect the future is to make it more like the mythic past, to build something old. But this approach, as we will see, has never been a formula for human flourishing.