Or: The Anti-America Americans.
Latest about the coup:
- Today Trump has suspended the tariffs he’d said would go into effect *today* on Mexico and Canada. Familiar pattern? He’s flailing.
- Musk and his gang of college kids have compromised the financial records of everyone in America, as Musk is unilaterally deciding which government programs no longer need funding.
- And probably something else I missed.
Today’s items.
- Some of them say it out loud: white men should be in charge;
- Conservative Wall Street Journal calls the tariffs (now postponed!) “the dumbest trade war in history”;
- How Trump and his current acolytes only learn how things work by breaking them; aligned with Elon Musk’s misconceptions about government spending;
- How Trump’s Gitmo detention center would be bigger than history’s worst concentration camps;
- And Franklin Foer on how Trump is enacting the long-standing conservative goal of dismantling the federal government.
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They really say it out loud. (Realize that Boing Boing can be a bit sarcastic.)
Boing Boing, Ellsworth Toohey, 3 Feb 2025: New pick for high-level State Department job: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”
Rolling Stone reports that on January 6, while other MAGA patriots were smearing their doo doo on the wall to prove their superiority, Beattie was busy telling Black people to “learn their place” and “bend the knee to MAGA.” Nothing says “I’m definitely not racist” like telling Ibram X. Kendi to “learn his proper role in our society.”
This walking Dunning-Kruger graph actually claimed that working-class white men have it worse than Uyghurs in China. Yes, the genocide-experiencing Uyghurs. Beattie has it worse than them. Poor guy! Not sure how he got so fat and sleek on a starvation diet, but I guess his white guy superpowers are extra special at calorie conservation.
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This may be moot by now, but this is from the conservative Wall Street Journal. (Without a subscription you can only see the first few paras.)
Wall Street Journal, The Editorial Board, 31 Jan 2025: The Dumbest Trade War in History, subtitled “Trump will impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico for no good reason.”
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As with terrorists, conservatives find it easier to break things than to build them.
Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley, 31 Jan 2025: The Second Trump Presidency Will Be a Golden Age of Involuntary Civics Education, subtitled “Look on the bright side! You only really learn how something works after it breaks.”
One benefit of getting older and having a family and a house to take care of is that you learn a little bit about How Things Work. Usually this is because a basic Thing you had taken for granted stops working, like the washing machine spin cycle, or the boiler that heats the house during the winter, or the combination of shingles and wood that is supposed to prevent rain from traveling directly from the sky to the ceiling of your daughters’ bedroom and creating multiple enormous patches of discoloration that look like something from the poster for The Ring. In the panic that results, you are forced to learn basic facts about plumbing, electricity, or home construction in order to guide the process of getting your life out of the 19th century.
Apparently, this is what the United States has voted to do for the next four years, but at the level of society as a whole. It’s been 11 days since Donald Trump was sworn into office, and the list of usually taken-for-granted things that have been broken, or are in the process of being broken, is already long—as is the resulting file of “Huh, didn’t know that’s how they did that.”
With examples of Medicaid portal, Meals on Wheels, air traffic controllers, and so on.
And examples of Elon Musk’s misconceptions about government spending:
NY Times, 19 Dec 2024: Assessing Elon Musk’s Criticisms of the Government Spending Deal, subtitled “The world’s richest man posted or amplified inaccurate claims about the bill’s provisions for congressional salaries, a football stadium and biological research.”
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Just saying.
Slate, Pedro Gerson, 2 Feb 2025: Trump’s Gitmo Detention Center Would Be Bigger Than History’s Worst Concentration Camps
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This resonates with Heather Cox Richardson’s post that I quoted yesterday.
The Atlantic, Franklin Foer, 2 Feb 2025: Trump’s Campaign to Dismantle the Government, subtitled “The president is pursuing the long-standing conservative goal of neutralizing the federal bureaucracy.”
Over the decades, the American right has deployed violent imagery to describe its highest ideological goal: drown government in a bathtub, starve the beast, slash and burn. In less than two weeks of organized chaos, the Trump administration has realized these fantasies, but by deploying tactics both more subtle and more sinister than the movement’s old guard ever imagined.
Rather than eliminating departments wholesale or depleting the budgets of agencies, it has relied on menacing gestures. By arbitrarily placing civil servants on probation, reclassifying bureaucratic positions as political appointments, freezing grant spending, floating a “deferred resignation” offer by mass email, and firing high-profile federal prosecutors and inspectors general, the administration has created the impression that it is making preparations for a mass purge of the government.
A nice essay, but I can’t quote all of it. The theme of its opening is very familiar: it’s the traditional American dream of the frontier, the little house on the prairie, of living off the land, and wanting the government to leave you alone. It’s not the dream of the Constitution, which conservatives say they venerate, without apparently understanding it, or following it.
Foer ends:
Nobody would invent government institutions as they currently exist, but that’s their strength. Their culture emerges from the long histories of organizations, developed organically over time, prodded by moments of legislative reform, largely resistant to the fads of the moment. This is not something that returns with an orientation session or even the next change of administration.
The wrecking ball should inspire humility. In an afternoon, timeless fixtures of a landscape can be reduced to scrap and dust. What’s destroyed in a flash of ideological fervor, at the behest of a president who abhors dissent, can’t be so easily replaced, if at all.
