- Heather Cox Richardson explains why the right to vote, not the Second Amendment, is the key to maintaining our rights;
- Robert Reich wonders where the lawlessness of the Trump regime will end;
- Paul Krugman sees the end of Pax Americana;
- Connie Willis on the best cartoon of the day, and the funniest thing of the day (from the Borowitz Report);
- Short items;
- Katherine Stewart at NYT asks, Now Will You Believe What Is Happening Right in Front of Us?
- MSN’s Lindsay Beyerstein explores delusion as the key mental state of Trump’s supporters;
- And my thoughts about how all of this is about human nature, in the ancient world and in the modern world.
What are the pundits saying?
Heather Cox Richardson, February 9, 2025
On Friday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “protecting Second Amendment rights.” The order calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine all gun regulations in the U.S. to make sure they don’t infringe on any citizen’s right to bear arms. The executive order says that the Second Amendment “is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.”
In fact, it is the right to vote for the lawmakers who make up our government that is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.
The claim in the executive order implies that it is only at gunpoint that any other rights are maintained. A very primitive, frontier-justice notion; a concern for force, not principle. Heather counters at length.
Given the unilateral actions of Musk, apparently at Trump’s behest, she concludes they know they don’t have principles, or votes, on their side.
Musk and Trump appear to be concentrating the extraordinary wealth of the American people, along with the power that wealth brings, into their own hands, for their own ends. Trump has championed further tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, while Musk seems to want to make sure his companies, especially SpaceX, win as many government contracts as possible to fund his plan to colonize Mars.
But the mission of the United States of America is not, and has never been, to return huge profits to a few leaders.
The mission of the United States of America is stated in the Constitution. It is a government designed by “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Far from being designed to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a single man, it was formed to do the opposite: spread wealth and power throughout the country’s citizenry and enable them to protect their rights by voting for those who would represent them in Congress and the presidency, then holding them accountable at the ballot box.
The people who think that bearing arms is central to maintaining American rights are the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election by storming the United States Capitol because they do not command the votes to put their policies in place through the exercise of law outlined in the U.S. Constitution.
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Robert Reich, 10 Feb 2025: The end of law?, subtitled “The Trump regime is refusing to be bound by the federal courts. Where will this end?”
He is the most lawless president in American history.
He’s allowed Musk’s rats unfettered access to the Treasury’s payments system. Banned birthright citizenship. Refused to spend money appropriated by Congress. Closed U.S. AID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, independent agencies, without Congress’s approval. Substituted political loyalists for civil servants. Unleashed the military on civilians. And on it goes.
Republican lawmakers won’t restrain him. In one of the most shameful apologia for dictatorship I’ve ever heard coming from a public official, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina admits that much of what Trump is doing “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, Tillis adds, “nobody should bellyache about that.”
We shouldn’t bellyache about Trump’s torching the Constitution?
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Paul Krugman, 10 Feb 2025: Sabotaging the Pax Americana, subtitled “Trump and Musk are making us distrusted, friendless and weak”
Elon Musk — with Donald Trump’s acquiescence, but clearly Musk was calling the shots — has effectively destroyed USAID, the aid agency that was, aside from its humanitarian role, a major pillar of US foreign policy. This move was clearly illegal, and a court has already put a hold on some of Musk’s actions.
But it may already be too late. The destruction of USAID is a prime example of what Dan Drezner calls Humpty Dumpty foreign policy, as in, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put him back together again. By furloughing the agency’s employees, ordering those working abroad to come home and canceling crucial programs and grants, the Musk/Trump administration undermined decades’ worth of relationship-building. Even if the courts eventually order everything the wreckers did reversed, it will be hard if not impossible to put the structure back together again.
USAID is just the most extreme example of how the Musk/Trump administration is sabotaging the American Empire. For yes, America is or was an imperial power, although in a different way from most past empires — less reliant on force, more reliant on good will and trust. What Musk and Trump have done is to destroy much of the basis for U.S. influence, leaving America far weaker than it was just a few weeks ago.
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Connie Willis, 9 Feb 2025: Everything Trump Touches Dies–Including the Super Bowl
She summarizes Trump’s visit to the Super Bowl (making it all about him), discusses the latest from Musk and his “kids,” and ends with two bits:
Best Cartoon of the Day: The GOP as football players in a huddle, saying “Here’s the play–we start offsides, pardon our own penalties, appoint our own refs, deport their linebackers, sack anyone who played for Biden, and claim we won the 2020 Super Bowl.”
Funniest thing of the day, from the Borowitz Report: “Donald J. Trump tightened his grip on the American arts scene on Monday by naming himself principal ballerina of the Kennedy Center Ballet…He said he was disgusted to discover that all of the company’s current ballerinas were women, a state of affairs he blamed on DEI. Trump’s takeover…has surprised millions of Americans, who previously thought that the worst thing that could happen to the Kennedy brand was JFK’s nephew strapping a dismembered whale’s head to his minivan.”
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How much more of this do we need? Hasn’t the point been made? Well no, you can’t look away, you can’t give up, or they will win.
Washington Post, opinion by Philip Bump, 10 Feb 2025: The right-wing bubble absorbs D.C., subtitled “During Trump’s first term, misinformation was not nearly as rampant as it is today.”
JMG, from Bloomberg News, 10 Feb 2025: How The End Of Banking Oversight Benefits Musk’s X
(Well of course it does; Musk especially is going after very specific targets.)
Another Facebook quip
MAGA: Why do we need USAID? We should be helping people here in America.
Democrats: Okay, let’s help people here in America.
MAGA: No, that’s Socialism!
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NY Times, guest essay by Katherine Stewart, 7 Feb 2025: Now Will We Believe What Is Happening Right in Front of Us? [gift link]
They told us they would smash the institutions that safeguard our democracy. And that is exactly what they are doing.
Many Americans chose not to believe what they were saying. Will we now believe what we are seeing?
To be clear, “they” are not just Donald Trump and his billionaire co-pilot. Over the past half-century, an anti-democratic movement has coalesced in the United States. It draws on super-wealthy funders, ideologues of the new right, purveyors of disinformation and Christian nationalist activists. Though it pretends to revere the founders and the Constitution, it fundamentally rejects the idea of America as a modern pluralistic democracy.
The last sentence is the key point.
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Because…?
MSN, opinion by Lindsay Beyerstein, 7 Feb 2025: Delusion: The mental state that drives Trump’s hardcore supporters with scary accuracy
Donald Trump campaigned against consensual reality and won. Every plank of his platform – from the economy to immigration to abortion – was based on easily provable lies.
Despite Trump’s bombastic assertions to the contrary, inflation is down, growth is up, illegal border crossings are down, crime is down, and vaccines work great. Tariffs are taxes on imports and American companies say they’re planning to raise prices.
None of that mattered at the polls because Trump created a conspiracist permission structure to ignore the facts and focus on hate.
Delusion strongly predicted a vote for Trump. An Ipsos poll in the final weeks of the campaign found that voters who falsely believed that we are living through a record-breaking violent crime wave favored Trump by 26 points, while those who knew the truth broke for Harris by 65 points. Those who knew that the inflation rate is back to the historic average favored Harris by 53 points. Respondents who knew that illegal border crossings are down favored Harris by 59 points.
Good piece that summarizes many essential points. Note these:
CBS correspondent Leslie Stahl once asked Donald Trump why he constantly attacked the press. “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you,” Trump replied.
Trump also discredits the government as a source of information. When the latest statistics showed that crime was down, Trump accused the FBI of making them up. When the jobs report was revised, Trump accused Harris of faking it.
So Trump knows exactly what he’s doing. The piece goes on to discuss the link between conspiracism and totalitarianism.
If everything you don’t like becomes evidence of your opponent’s plot to destroy you, you can’t discuss anything rationally.
…
When scientists or the government or journalists come forward with evidence that vaccines save millions of lives and prevent untold suffering, the conspiracist answer is: Well, that’s what conspirators to kill our children would say.There’s a much-needed movement afoot to fix our media ecosystem, but we can’t do that until we address the conspiracist mindset that predisposes people to believe Trump’s lies.
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I think the big picture entails something even pieces like this don’t explore. There’s no addressing the conspiracist mindset (except perhaps through education, which conservatives resist). It’s a fundamental aspect of human nature, but for a species to survive indefinitely in a global culture, it’s a flaw. It wasn’t a flaw as long as we lived in isolated tribes on the African Savannah, for hundreds of thousands of years, when understanding reality didn’t matter, as long as you survived; and the perception of conspiracy theories was sometimes right, and if they were wrong most of the time, it didn’t matter. Times have changed, and humans haven’t. And now it does matter.
