- How Trump doesn’t want to govern, and rejects the idea of American government as a collaboration;
- How the idea of consumer choice led to the idea of being gay;
- Trump and covid.gov rewrite the history, as authoritarians do;
- How Trump has severed America from the world in 100 days;
- Another item about JFK Jr.’s upside-down understanding of science;
- Guardian’s Simon Tisdall on how Trump will destroy himself;
- How MAGA Glam is, it seems to me, tribal warpaint;
- And how MAGA supporters claim divine intervention to save Trump from assassination;
- And my take on such claims, and the idea of a father-figure god.
No doubt there’s a hierarchy of systems of government, that fairly obviously would align with the political spectrum in the US, with (as it seems) Republicans on one end, and Democracy at the other. For example.
NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 26 Apr 2025: Trump Doesn’t Want to Govern
I think it’s obvious that neither President Trump nor his coterie of agents and apparatchiks has any practical interest in governing the nation. It’s one reason (among many) they are so eager to destroy the federal bureaucracy; in their minds, you don’t have to worry about something, like monitoring the nation’s dairy supply for disease and infection, if the capacity for doing so no longer exists.
But there is another, less obvious way in which this observation is true. American governance is a collaborative venture. At minimum, to successfully govern the United States, a president must work with Congress, heed the courts and respect the authority of the states, whose Constitutions are also imbued with the sovereignty of the people. And in this arrangement, the president can’t claim rank. He’s not the boss of Congress or the courts or the states; he’s an equal.
The president is also not the boss of the American people. He cannot order them to embrace his priorities, nor is he supposed to punish them for disagreement with him. His powers are largely rhetorical, and even the most skilled presidents cannot shape an unwilling public.
Trump rejects all of this. He rejects the equal status of Congress and the courts. He rejects the authority of the states. He does not see himself as a representative working with others to lead the nation; he sees himself as a boss, whose will ought to be law. And in turn, he sees the American people as employees, each of us obligated to obey his commands.
Trump is not interested in governing a republic of equal citizens. To the extent that he’s even dimly aware of the traditions of American democracy, he holds them in contempt. What Trump wants is to lord over a country whose people have no choice but to show fealty and pledge allegiance not to the nation but to him.
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Here’s a review of a book that I’m sure would be interesting on its own terms, but is noted here for a more abstract reason than the book’s primary subject.
Slate, Laura Miller, 27 Apr 2025: The Agony and the Ecstasy, subtitled “An endlessly fascinating new book shows just how intertwined sex and the church have been for 2,000 years.”
Who knew that agricultural advances in 18th-century England and the Netherlands played a crucial role in creating homosexuality as we know it today? Diarmaid MacCulloch did, for one. Perhaps the foremost living historian of Christianity, MacCulloch writes in his new book, Lower Than the Angels, that while same-sex desires and acts have been around forever, the particular conditions of Northern European life in the 1700s fostered the notion that those desires could constitute a fundamental part of the self. For the first time there was “food to spare” for more than just the upper echelons of society, and therefore money to spend on non-necessities. Even quite poor people experienced what was once a luxury: consumer choice. While we in the 21st century enjoy the even greater luxury of grousing about consumerism, for the people of that time, MacCulloch observes, this change “awakened a wider psychological awareness of making choices, ultimately about one’s own personal identity,” such as the identity we now call “gay.” As a result, “a much wider social range of individuals began to decide how to live and who they wanted to be,” and some of them included women as well as gay men; the 18th century also saw the birth of modern feminism. This posed a problem for the religious authorities who were used to telling everyone what to do.
There’s a crucial insight here. It’s been noted many times that, until the past century or so, most people who ever lived never traveled more than a day’s walk from where they grew up. They had no direct experience of anything beyond their local circumstances; there were not even many books until the past couple hundred years, and most people didn’t read them. (And before books, history was passed down orally, suffering from “telephone game” distortions over generations and centuries. Thus religion.)
In the 21st century we suffer from an excess of “consumer choice,” and this applies even to choices people hadn’t realized they could make: the very idea of being “gay,” for example, though “same-sex desires and acts have been around forever.”
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Rewriting history: this is what authoritarians do.
Washington Post, Monica Hesse, 23 Apr 2025: Scroll through Trump’s new covid website — and have your mind blown, subtitled “Scrolling through Trump’s latest foray into history-washing.”
Now visitors to covid.gov are properly oriented. We all understand that we have been hoodwinked by a massive government conspiracy, and only the 47th president — who had nothing to do with anything covid-related — can save us.
Scroll to: a Google Earth map of Wuhan, China, which has been doctored to have some kind of shaky, smoky effect, showing visitors that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is just 7.5 miles from the Huanan Seafood Market.
Has that sunk in yet? If so, get ready to have your mind further blown. The National Institutes of Health is about 7.5 miles from the Smithsonian National Zoo. My neighborhood is about 7.5 miles from the White House. The Trump National Golf Club at Bedminster, New Jersey, is about 7.5 miles from the Wendy’s in Branchburg, New Jersey. Do you see what we’re talking about here? (If you do, could you explain it to me?)
With predictable trashing of Anthony Fauci. The writer ends:
Like many of you, I have been watching with fear to see what the Trump administration might do to America’s future — the executive orders and court appointments and tariffs and division-sowing.
But all of that can be undone. What he does to our future can be undone. And so I worry more about what he is trying to do to our past. Via attempting to take over the way the Smithsonian tells the story of America. Via ordering that references to race and gender be removed from government websites depicting historic events and initiatives. Via taking a nationally traumatic event — one in which more than 1 million Americans died, and in which almost everyone was doing the best they could — and turning it into another plot at the hands of the evil liberals.
Taking over the past is a point of no return. It’s not that we can’t get back to who we once were. It’s that we won’t even remember it.
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Once again: we’re living in history, and the historians will not be kind in assessing our era. Yet many are unaware, or even approving, of what is going on right now.
NY Times, guest essay by Ben Rhodes, 27 Apr 2025: 100 Days. That’s All It Took to Sever America From the World.
This recalls an earlier age of American isolationism, as many of us learned back in high school history classes — the American reluctance to support European allies in the two world wars.
In 1941, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt marshaled support for the fight against fascism, his chief antagonists were isolationists at home. “What I seek to convey,” he said at the beginning of an address to Congress, “is the historic truth that the United States as a nation has at all times maintained clear, definite opposition to any attempt to lock us in behind an ancient Chinese wall while the procession of civilization went past.” Roosevelt prevailed, and that victory expanded America’s relationship with the world in ways that remade both.
Eighty-four years later, President Trump is systematically severing America from the globe. This is not simply a shift in foreign policy. It is a divorce so comprehensive that it makes Britain’s exit from the European Union look modest by comparison.
With examples at the links, for those not paying attention.
Consider the breadth of this effort. Allies have been treated like adversaries. The United States has withdrawn from international agreements on fundamental issues like health and climate change. A “nation of immigrants” now deports people without due process, bans refugees and is trying to end birthright citizenship. Mr. Trump’s tariffs have upended the system of international trade, throwing up new barriers to doing business with every country on Earth. Foreign assistance has largely been terminated. So has support for democracy abroad. Research cuts have rolled back global scientific research and cooperation. The State Department is downsizing. Exchange programs are on the chopping block. Global research institutions like the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Wilson Center have been effectively shut down. And, of course, the United States is building a wall along its southern border.
The United States has become a frightened tribe closing itself off from the rest of the world. And retreating from the leadership role it once held.
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One more time: this is not how science is done. This is not how the scientific discoveries that have enabled our modern world were found. The title here is the gist.
NY Times, opinion by Ross Douthat, Jessica Grose and David Wallace-Wells, 27 Apr 2025: ‘He’s Often Working Backward From a Conclusion’: Three Opinion Writers on Kennedy
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How will Trump fall? My take would be: because conservative policies always run up against the reality of the world.
The Guardian, Simon Tisdall, 27 Apr 2025: Tyrants like Trump always fall – and we can already predict how he will be dethroned, subtitled “The US constitution protects incompetence. But don’t underestimate the self-destructive power of the president’s own hubris”
Tyrants come to a sticky end, or so history suggests. Richard III and Coriolanus made bloody exits. More recently, Saddam Hussein went to the gallows, Slobodan Milosevic went to jail, Bashar al-Assad went into exile. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was run to ground in a sewer. Tyranny, from the Greek túrannos (“absolute ruler”), is typically fuelled by hubris and leads ineluctably to nemesis. Tyrants are for toppling. Their downfall is a saving grace.
Tyranny, in its many forms, is back in vogue, and everyone knows who’s to blame. To be fair, to suggest similarities between the aforementioned abominable individuals and Donald Trump would be utterly wrong. In key respects, he’s worse. Measured by willingness and capacity to harm the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, wreak global economic mayhem and threaten nuclear annihilation, Trump is uniquely dangerous – and ever more so by the day.
(Again, some of us have read about these previous tyrannies in the history books. Without realizing that one is happening to us right now. Which is how they happened before.)
Skip to the end: how will Trump fail? The writer reviews the record — many items from two posts above — and then concludes:
All this points to one conclusion: as a tyrant, let alone as president, Trump is actually pretty useless – and as his failures, frustrations and fantasies multiply, he will grow ever more dangerously unstable. Trump’s biggest enemy is Trump. Those who would save the US and themselves – at home and abroad – must employ all democratic means to contain, deter, defang and depose him. But right now, the best, brightest hope is that, drowning in hubris, Trump will destroy himself.
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Short items.
Vox, Sean Collins, 27 Apr 2025: MAGA glam isn’t about beauty — it’s about politics, subtitled “Examining what’s underneath the ‘Republican makeup’ look.”
My take: this is about tribal warpaint. Analogous to uniforms in battle so that combatants can tell which side everyone is on.
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JMG, from Fox News, 26 Apr 2025: Fox Poll: 70% Of MAGA Supporters Say They Believe God Intervened To Save Trump From Assassination
One-third believe divine intervention helped secure Trump’s return to the White House. Thirty-two percent feel he was saved from two assassination attempts because God wanted him to be president again, including majorities of White evangelical Christians (56%), Republicans (60%), 2024 Trump supporters (62%) and MAGA supporters (70%)
My take: base human nature interprets the world mystically, projecting human values onto an inanimate universe, thinking that everything must happen for a reason, and that the reason is connected to a father-figure god who picks and chooses which events to intervene in. That’s why you should <i>pray</i>. Yet the results look much like chance.
Look: if there’s a father-figure god running the universe, why aren’t his interventions consistent, rather than being so arbitrary they look like chance? If there’s a father-figure god running the universe, why is the vast, vast majority of the universe that humanity has been able to perceive so utterly uninhabitable? Not just the vast regions of space, but even most of the planet Earth? Think about this. OK, never mind, your tribe’s religion has the truth about the meaning of life and immorality. Good for you.
