- Frank Bruni on why Trump keeps attacking Biden;
- Paul Krugman, via Adam Tooze, on how Trump has prejudices rather than ideas;
- Heather Cox Richardson recalls how Republicans have tried to create their own reality;
- Why MAGA voters want their opponents to suffer, and why Trump voters love him despite everything.
It’s not enough for Trump to win; his enemies must be excoriated as well. The attitudes of a zero-sum tribalist.
NY Times, Frank Bruni, 20 Mar 2025: Why Trump Can’t Quit Biden [gift link]
For President Trump and many of his closest aides and allies, every day is a great day to beat up on Joe Biden. They treat bashing the previous occupant of the White House as proper political hygiene, best repeated and ritualized, the autocrat’s equivalent of flossing your teeth.
Even so, Trump outdid himself last weekend. Apparently unsated by his ludicrous insistence that Biden saddled him with a broken economy, bored with histrionic rants about “the Biden crime family” and convinced that “worst president in American history” doesn’t do justice to Biden’s wretchedness, Trump identified Biden’s frequent use of an automated writing instrument as some kind of smoking gun — or at least smoldering pen.
It proved Biden’s utter incapacitation. It revealed him as a puppet of unelected operatives. It was manipulation, deception and corruption all in a swirl of letters and a stream of ink.
Thank heavens for Trump. He’s difficult but not drooling.
That’s the message. The ploy. Trump attends to nothing more energetically than creating comparisons, excuses and distractions that prevent voters who aren’t already done with him from straying.
Trump has always been obsessed with the “greatest thing ever” or “the best thing you’ve ever seen” (and TV ratings) but do those mean *anything* to anyone who’s not a cultist? To most people they indicate that Trump is a childish con man’s tendency toward hyperbole.
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Because, perhaps, he doesn’t have anything substantial to talk about.
Paul Krugman, 20 Mar 2025: The Emperor’s New Philosophy, subtitled “Of drunkards, lampposts and economic doctrines”
Krugman responds to a post by Adam Tooze, whom I’m not familiar with. What struck me was this passage. I’ll bold.
Everything we know about the Trumpists’ approach to economic policy, or policy in general, suggests both that Trump himself has no understanding of economics — that he has prejudices rather than ideas — and that he surrounds himself with people who cater to his prejudices, that as Tooze puts it, the policy visions we’re getting from Trumpland have more in common with
a facelift pandering to the ignorant vanity of an old man than with economic policy as we have hitherto known it.
With this admission (and confession about main-stream-media):
Look, I understand that it’s more fun to write an article about the supposed emergence of a new economic philosophy than to write yet another article about how ignorant men are, once again, saying stupid things. And I guess some journalists are uncomfortable at the thought that people with great power to shape policy have no idea (or rather nothing but false ideas) what they’re doing.
But trying to put an intellectual gloss on Trumpist international economic policy is sanewashing that misinforms readers rather than helping their understanding.
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I’ve mentioned more than once that conservatives think they can reset reality simply by passing a law, or making a declaration.
Heather Cox Richardson, 21 Mar 2025: March 21, 2025
Even back in 2004, Republicans claimed to create their own reality.
These days, I keep coming back to the quotation recorded by journalist Ron Suskind in a New York Times Magazine article in 2004. A senior advisor to President George W. Bush told Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community”: they believed people could find solutions based on their observations and careful study of discernible reality. But, the aide continued, such a worldview was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore…. We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
In 2004 that quotation seemed a reflection on how members of an administration hoped to shape the globe and public perceptions of their actions. Twenty-one years later, it seems we are seeing what happens when members of an administration believe they can shape not just perceptions but reality itself, and discover that reality is stubborn.
As I’ve also mentioned before, reality is *real* and has a way of striking back on those who pretend that reality is something different. That conservatives think they can *define* reality means, ironically, that they really do live in some kind of alternate reality.
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Once again, it’s not about promoting policy goals; it’s about attacking the other side. (Pure tribalistic politics.)
AlterNet, Alex Henderson, 21 Mar 2025: ‘Raw animosity’: 4 conservatives explain why MAGA voters ‘want their opponents to suffer’
This is a gloss on this NY Times piece: Trump Voters Love Him More Than Before. Four Conservative Columnists Pinpoint Why. I’ll quote Henderson’s take. He’s referring to David Brooks and David French.
Brooks cited “brokenism” as a key reason for their support. The columnist describes “brokenism” as “the idea that everything is broken and we just need to burn it all down.”
French, who is a scathing critic of Trump but also has major complaints about the left, interjected, “In addition to the brokenism that David talks about, there’s a strong undercurrent of raw animosity in our politics. Republicans and Democrats have very negative views of each other, and many Republicans, sadly, want their opponents to suffer. They’re actually happy to see people lose their jobs or to see nonprofits lose funding if those people are perceived as part of the ‘deep state’ or RINOs. So, yes, Republicans want a disruptive president, but who’s being disrupted really matters — and if it’s the government or institutions that many Republicans believe are hostile to them, then Republicans are just fine with the pain.”
My comment: For all that traditional religious conservatives accuse scientists, and therefore liberals, of denying eternal verities and thus being nihilists, it seems they are the actual nihilists, who believe that nothing works unless it’s not aligned with their religion.
