- The state of the American economy, vs. conservative dystopian fantasies;
- How conservatives whitewash the events of January 6th, 2021;
- How Meta is obeying in advance by removing fact-checkers, and wondering why conservatives object to fact-checkers (where the answer is obvious);
- How the conservative notion of serving a higher cause excuses, in their minds, blatant lying, as with Mike Johnson’s recitation of a fake “Jefferson prayer”.
The question keeps coming up, does it matter if human perceptions have little do with reality? Is there a problem if humans live by made-up stories even when they’re obviously untrue? At what point does this behavior so collide with reality that it will cause real harm?
First of all, an example, yet again, of how the economy that Biden is leaving behind is not as bad as most conservative voters think. They are either being disingenuous, or short-sighted. From yesterday’s print edition.
NY Times, news analysis by Peter Baker, 5 Jan 2025: Trump Sees the U.S. as a ‘Disaster.’ The Numbers Tell a Different Story., subtitled “President Biden is bequeathing his successor a nation that by many measures is in good shape, even if voters remain unconvinced.” [gift link]
To hear President-elect Donald J. Trump tell it, he is about to take over a nation ravaged by crisis, a desolate hellscape of crime, chaos and economic hardship. “Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!” he declared on social media last week.
But by many traditional metrics, the America that Mr. Trump will inherit from President Biden when he takes the oath for a second time, two weeks from Monday, is actually in better shape than that bequeathed to any newly elected president since George W. Bush came into office in 2001.
For the first time since that transition 24 years ago, there will be no American troops at war overseas on Inauguration Day. New data reported in the past few days indicate that murders are way down, illegal immigration at the southern border has fallen even below where it was when Mr. Trump left office and roaring stock markets finished their best two years in a quarter-century.
Jobs are up, wages are rising and the economy is growing as fast as it did during Mr. Trump’s presidency. Unemployment is as low as it was just before the Covid-19 pandemic and near its historic best. Domestic energy production is higher than it has ever been.
The manufacturing sector has more jobs than under any president since Mr. Bush. Drug overdose deaths have fallen for the first time in years. Even inflation, the scourge of the Biden presidency, has returned closer to normal, although prices remain higher than they were four years ago.
“President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “The U.S. economy is the envy of the rest of the world, as it is the only significant economy that is growing more quickly post-pandemic than prepandemic.”
The people who pay attention to these things, whose jobs are about paying attention to these things, see a very different reality from the dystopian fantasies of the Trump cultists. Per the photo, Trump will fix what?? Not the price of eggs.
\
As always, Heather Cox Richardson states things directly and plainly.
Letters from an American: January 5, 2025
She responds to the screed left by the guy who killed himself and blew up his Tesla Cybertruck in Las Vegas:
He wrote that the U.S. is “headed toward collapse,” and he listed as reasons Americans’ moral failings and boredom, diversity programs, an economy that has permitted the top 1% to leave everyone else behind, and a weak and corrupt government.
His solution was to “[f]ocus on strength and winning. Masculinity is good and men must be leaders,” he wrote. “Strength is a deterrent and fear is the product.” He called for “[w]eed[ing] out those in our government and military who do not idealize” that masculinity and strength, and urged military personnel, veterans, and militias to “move on DC starting now.”
This reflects the ultimate conservative desire: to return to a father-figure, top-down, authoritarian state, as George Lakoff would describe it, in that book that I summarized yesterday. The problem is, it’s paranoid nonsense. Conservatives’ take on reality is…. challenged. She refers to the NYT item linked above.
The vision of the U.S. as a hellscape that can only be fixed by purging the government of Democrats does not reflect reality. As Peter Baker recorded in the New York Times today, the country that President Joe Biden and his Democratic administration will leave behind when they leave office is in the best shape it’s been in since at least 2000.
No U.S. troops are fighting in foreign wars, murders have plummeted, deaths from drug overdoses have dropped sharply, undocumented immigration is below where it was when Trump left office, stocks have just had their best two years since the last century. The economy is growing, real wages are rising, inflation has fallen to close to its normal range, unemployment is at near-historic lows, and energy production is at historic highs. The economy has added more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs among the 16 million total created since 2020.
Baker quoted chief economist of Moody’s Analytics Mark Zandi, who said: “President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets.”
(I need to summarize her book here shortly, since her columns invoke themes and ideas she spells out there.)
\\
Then the big story yesterday, on January 6th, was variations of this.
JMG, 6 Jan 2025: GOP Rep: “On This Day In 2021 Thousands Of Peaceful Grandmothers Took A Self-Guided Tour Of The Capitol”
“On #ThisDayInHistory in 2021, thousands of peaceful grandmothers gathered in Washington, D.C., to take a self-guided, albeit unauthorized, tour of the U.S. Capitol building. Earlier that day, President Trump held a rally, where supporters walked to the Capitol to peacefully protest the certification of the 2020 election. During this time, some individuals entered the Capitol, took photos, and explored the building before leaving.
“Since then, hundreds of peaceful protestors have been hunted down, arrested, held in solitary confinement, and treated unjustly. Countless hours and taxpayer dollars have been spent pursuing innocent grandmothers and raiding President Trump’s home, while terrorists and millions of illegal immigrants continue to cross our nation’s borders, causing havoc in our communities….”
Surely he’s being sarcastic, yes? He can’t be so deluded as to deny what we all saw with our own eyes, on TV? I’m not so sure.
\
The Atlantic, David Frum, 6 Jan 2025: Don’t Mention the Coup!, subtitled “The memory of January 6 vanishes from Trump’s new Washington.”
The president of the United States is the country’s chief law-enforcement officer and the symbol of national authority and unity.
This incoming president faces a battery of criminal charges relating to his abuse of office and to personal frauds. He’s been convicted of some already; more are pending. He is also the author of a conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election and seize power by violence. More than 1,000 of his followers have been convicted and sentenced for their roles in his attempted coup d’état.
These two sets of facts are obviously in considerable tension. How will they be resolved?
A strong desire exists—not only among pro–Donald Trump partisans—to wish away the contradiction. Trump will be president again. Every domestic interest group, every faction in Congress, every foreign government will need to do business with him. It’s unavoidable; the system cannot operate around him as if he were not there.
People in Washington who are there to actually get things done will have to pretend Jan. 6th never happened. But not all of us do business in Washington DC. Frum ends:
The coup makers won. The coup resisters lost. Washington is not a city that spares much sympathy for losers.
“This never happened,” advises Don Draper on the television series Mad Men. “It will shock you how much it never happened.” So it will be with the first attempt by a serving president to overthrow the government he was sworn to protect.
Not all of us, however, have to live in the world of Washington transactions. Some of us need to volunteer to keep talking about the inconvenient things.
Trump really did try by violence to violate the first rule of constitutional democracy: Respect elections. Constitutional democracy matters, whether or not the theme helps Democratic candidates for federal office, whether or not it energizes media consumers, whether or not it advances the lobbying agenda of the National Association of Birdhouse Manufacturers. Those volunteers don’t need to blame those other Washington players for doing what they feel they need to do. The volunteers have only to remain faithful to their purpose: to push back against the Draper doctrine that the unwanted past can be made to disappear. It did happen. It should still shock us how much it did happen.
\\\
Then today, another example of Timothy Snyder’s obeying in advance.
NY Times, 7 Jan 2025: Meta to End Fact-Checking Program in Shift Ahead of Trump Term, subtitled “The social networking giant will stop using third-party fact-checkers on Facebook, Threads and Instagram and instead rely on users to add notes to posts. It is likely to please President-elect Trump and his allies.”
and
Salon, 7 Jan 2025: Mark Zuckerberg tells Fox News that Meta will “get rid of fact checkers” in latest appeal to Trump, subtitled “Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg cast his decision as ‘restoring free expression’ on his platforms”
Another book I just read and will summarize here soon: Bill Adair’s Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy. Adair was a founder of PolitiFact, and among other things the book confirms the obvious impression that Republicans lie far more often and thoroughly than Democrats do. (He goes into reasons why.)
Meanwhile, the eye-rollingly obvious question is: why to conservatives object to fact-checkers? Well, because they want to lie (or promote their “alternative facts”), and don’t want to be called out on it. Conservatives claim fact-checkers have a bias against them. OK then, conservatives, show evidence. Show how the fact-checkers’ checks are wrong; or show how they miss whoppers by Democrats. Do anything but simply make assertions and claim bias. That’s tribalism. And evidence of conservative ideology that considers itself above mere facts, in service of some higher cause.
\\
Example of serving a higher cause.
JMG caught this first: 4 Jan 2025: Mike Johnson Recited Fake Christian Nationalist Prayer
Reciting a prayer that he claimed Jefferson recited every day. Despite the fact that Jefferson did not actually believe in prayer, and created a Jefferson Bible that retained what he felt was Jesus’ wisdom, but cut out all the parts about miracles and the supernatural.
Once again, there’s a David Barton connection.
\
Today:
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 7 Jan 2025: Why Mike Johnson’s fake “Jefferson prayer” matters, subtitled “Replacing facts with phony history is a linchpin of the Christian nationalist movement”
One cannot say for certain that Rep. Mike Johnson was deliberately lying during his acceptance speech to return as Speaker of the House. He read what he claimed was a prayer recited by President Thomas Jefferson “each day of his eight years of the presidency and every day thereafter until his death.” It is always technically possible that the Louisiana Republican is so profoundly ignorant of history that he didn’t know that statement is preposterous on its face. As the Thomas Jefferson Foundation notes on its website, Jefferson doubted “the efficacy of prayer.” They add that “Jefferson rejected the notion of the Trinity and Jesus’ divinity. He rejected Biblical miracles, the resurrection, the atonement, and original sin.” He saw Jesus as a secular philosopher and wasn’t a “Christian” in the way most people understand the term.
How Johnson lies with a smirk. And:
Johnson is tight with David Barton, a Christian nationalist advocate who masquerades as a “historian” and has spent decades passing off lies as “history” to advance his false claim that America was never intended to be a secular nation. Barton’s lies are so egregious that his 2012 book about Jefferson was pulled by his publisher. This did not curtail his enthusiasm for disinformation one bit. He’s also a big believer that “demons” are everywhere, invisibly pulling the strings wherever progressivism or secularism are advanced or protected.
Barton’s main contribution to the Christian right — helping transform it into Christian nationalism — was instilling the idea that facts do not matter, and “history” can be whatever conservatives want it to be.
And this last line ties back to the opening of this post.
\\\
And today, Trump is threatening military force to take Greenland, and the Panama Canal.
