- Frank Bruni on the Trump administration’s undercutting of America’s superpower;
- How the current secretary of defense thinks climate change is “crap”;
- Facts about the 19 programs dismissed as “waste”;
- Blast from the past: how Indiana tried to redefine Pi, to simplify reality;
- Thomas L. Friedman on America’s “great unraveling”;
- How zero-sum game Trump is obsessed with America being “ripped-off”;
- How the EPA is now focused on cutting costs (not on public health).
NY Times, Frank Bruni, 13 Mar 2025: America Can’t Be Great if America Is Stupid
Among our most significant competitive advantages are our scientists, our laboratories, our system of higher education. They’re a kind of superpower, their output an engine of our wealth — of frontier-expanding technology, medical breakthroughs and production innovations that enrich companies as they improve lives.
But Trump doesn’t seem to get that. Doesn’t want to get that. Gets only that the wonky and effete denizens of the world of ideas aren’t his people, aren’t guaranteed supporters, don’t lavishly praise him and sometimes dare to disparage him. They need their comeuppance, no matter how much damage it does to everyone else.
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Again: short-term thinking; inability to anticipate long-term threats. Let the next generation deal with the damage. Irresponsible philistines.
The Bulwark, Mark Hertling, 13 Mar 2025: Pete Hegseth’s Climate Change ‘Crap’, subtitled “The secretary of defense chooses to ignore a major national security threat.”
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE PETE HEGSETH said Sunday that the DoD “does not do climate change crap,” implying the department should focus solely on training and war-fighting, and anything else is a distraction. While it may be a pithy soundbite, it reflects a dangerous blind spot—and contradicts a fundamental strategic principle.
For years I’ve noted that there are two institutions very aware of the dangers of climate change: the insurance industry, and the military. Now, not the US military, at least. Simpletons and deniers are running the show.
Climate change is driving instability across the globe. When crops fail or water runs dry, populations move, and crises follow. Climate-driven migration is already destabilizing regions across Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. Commanders at Southern Command and Africa Command have repeatedly testified that environmental degradation is a primary driver of insecurity.
…Facts matter. Running the Department of Defense requires strategic foresight based on critical analysis and force requirement assessments, not uninformed ideology or political soundbites for the base. Sun Tzu’s wisdom holds: We must know the enemy, know ourselves, and know the heaven and the earth. Today’s terrain includes rising seas, melting ice, extreme weather, shifting populations, and new demands on the force. Climate change is not a distant future threat—it’s shaping tomorrow’s battlefields, on land, sea and in the air, right now. To ignore it—or worse, dismiss it as “crap”—is not conservatism. It’s strategic malpractice.
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And this!
The New Republic, via Yahoo News, 12 Mar 2025: Trump’s FBI Moves to Criminally Charge Major Climate Groups
Because climate change is a hoax, right? No worries.
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Covered elsewhere, but summarized here.
PolitiFact, 12 Mar 2025: The facts behind the 19 programs President Donald Trump described as ‘waste’
Condoms, transgender mice, and so on.
If Your Time is short
- President Donald Trump focused on programs from the U.S. Agency for International Development and projects with titles referencing immigration, LGBTQ+ and diversity, equity and inclusion.
- Many of the claims lacked context explaining the purpose of the funding. Money for circumcision, for example, prevents the spread of HIV/AIDS in Mozambique.
- Other claims fudged the numbers and details: he cited a project’s “potential” value rather than its actual value. And in some cases, the items Trump mocked could actually support his policy views, including his campaign promise to curb immigration.
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I think I mentioned recently that conservatives, beholden to ideologies in spite of evidence and reason, think they can change reality just by passing a law. This item is not new; it’s from 1897. But it showed up on Scientific American today.
Scientific American, Jack Murtagh, 13 Mar 2025: Indiana’s House of Representatives Once Voted Unanimously to Change the Value of Pi, subtitled “How an incorrect value of pi almost got codified into law”
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Thomas L. Friedman might be the NYT columnist I’ve followed, or at least been aware of, the longest.
NY Times, opinion by Thomas L. Friedman, 11 Mar 2025: A Great Unraveling Is Underway
You cannot run a country, you cannot be an American ally, you cannot run a business and you cannot be a long-term American trading partner when, in a short period, the U.S. president threatens Ukraine, threatens Russia, withdraws his threat to Russia, threatens huge tariffs on Mexico and Canada and postpones them — again — doubles tariffs on China and threatens to impose even more on Europe and Canada.
Top officials of our oldest allies say privately they fear that we are becoming not just unstable, but actually their enemy. The only person who gets treated with kid gloves is Putin, and America’s traditional friends are in shock.
But here is Trump’s biggest lie of all his big lies: He claims that he inherited an economy in ruins and that’s why he has to do all of these things. Nonsense. Joe Biden got a lot of things wrong, but by the end of his term, with the help of a wise Federal Reserve, the Biden economy was actually in pretty good shape and trending in the right direction. America certainly did not need global tariff shock therapy.
And:
If Trump wants to take America on a 180-degree turn, he owes it to the country to have a coherent plan, based on sound economics and a team that represents the best and the brightest, not the most sycophantic and right-wing woke. And he owes us an explanation of exactly how purging professional staff from key bureaucracies that keep the nation running from administration to administration, whether at the Justice Department or the I.R.S., and appointing fringe ideologues to key positions is good for the country and not just him.
And most of all — most of all — he owes every American, irrespective of party, some basic human decency. The only way any president can remotely succeed in any such radical turn, or even a lesser one, is if he reaches out to his opponents and at least tries to bring them along as much as possible. I get it, they are angry. But Trump is president. He should be bigger than them.
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Trump and team’s motivations are very basic. Very primal.
JMG, 13 Mar 2025: Trump: Tariffs Will Last Until Canada Becomes A State
Why is Trump so obsessed with being “ripped off”?
“Look, we’ve been ripped off for years, and we’re not going to be ripped off anymore. No, I’m not going to bend at all. Or aluminum or steel or cars. We’re not going to bend. We’ve been ripped off as a country for many, many years.
“We’ve been subjected to costs that we shouldn’t be subjected to. In the case of Canada, we’re spending $200 billion a year to subsidize Canada…”
Because he, simplistically, thinks life is a zero-sum game. For any other nation to prosper, it must be at the expense of the US. But in fact, life is not a zero-sum game. Or we would all still be living in caves, or on the Savannah. Trump and his fans are atavisms. How does humanity move beyond this?
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Perverting the intentions. For conservatives, it’s always about money, in the short term.
NY Times, 12 Mar 2025: E.P.A. Targets Dozens of Environmental Rules as It Reframes Its Purpose, subtitled “Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, said the agency’s mission was to make it cheaper to buy cars, heat homes and run businesses.”
In a barrage of pronouncements on Wednesday the Trump administration said it would repeal dozens of the nation’s most significant environmental regulations, including limits on pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks, protections for wetlands, and the legal basis that allows it to regulate the greenhouse gases that are heating the planet.
But beyond that, Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, reframed the purpose of the E.P.A. In a two-minute-and-18-second video posted to X, Mr. Zeldin boasted about the changes and said his agency’s mission is to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.”
“From the campaign trail to Day 1 and beyond, President Trump has delivered on his promise to unleash energy dominance and lower the cost of living,” Mr. Zeldin said. “We at E.P.A. will do our part to power the great American comeback.”
Nowhere in the video did he refer to protecting the environment or public health, twin tenets that have guided the agency since its founding in 1970.
For conservatives, it’s always about money, in the short term. “Lower the cost.” Protecting public health is irrelevant to them.
