Month: May 2025

The Trump-Vance-Miller-Vought vision of “great”

Billy Pilgrim came unstuck in time. Donny MAGA is unstuck in reality.

If yesterday’s post about synthetic people in real-looking AI videos unnerved you, Adam Serwer offers another stiff drink ahead of what Trump II has in store (gift link):

The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.

MAGA Montags may not start burning books. “Book People” may not have to memorize the ones Trump has banished from West Point. But the intended effects of Trump’s freezing of university assets and demands that schools hew to new, Talibanish conservative dogma could be the same: to plunge America “into a new Dark Age.” Erase knowledge, and Big Brother won’t have to watch you.

The Trump administration is erasing or making unavailable databases that make it possible to study problems and solve them. It is voiding grants for studying them. Just as when Trump wanted COVID testing stopped in his first term, his ostrich of a presdidency believes if you can’t measure a problem, it goes away.

“Not being able to study a problem doesn’t mean that the problem doesn’t exist,” one public-health professional (who requested anonymity because they did not want their organization to become a target) told me. “It only means that we don’t know if it exists or not, because we don’t have the relevant data.”

There is a reason Afghanistan looks primitive by western standards: religious zealotry. Trump himself is not be the messiah evangelicals are looking for. But top aides like Stepehen Miller and Russ Vought bring a zealot’s intensity to efforts to purge the U.S. of non-MAGA-conforming attitudes and mores. They want an America that’s Afghanistan without mud villages or electric vehicles, but with a touch of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Chick-fil-A.

The first-order effects of the attack on knowledge will be the diminution of American science and, with it, a decline in the sorts of technological achievements that have improved lives over the past century. Modern agriculture and medicine were built on the foundation of federally funded research. Many of the most prominent advances in information technology were also made with government support, including the internet, GPS, and touch screens.

History, the arts, education, and truth itself must bow. Conservative cultural correctness will replace liberal political correctness if Miller and Vought have their way, as they’re having with Trump right now. Their goal is to condemn America to illiteracy under a burqa.

The reasons for this wholesale destruction are as ideological as they are short-sighted. Conservatives have made no secret of their hostility toward higher education and academia. In 2021, as my colleague Yair Rosenberg recently noted, then-Senator J. D. Vance gave an address in which he quoted Richard Nixon saying, “The professors are the enemy,” and laid out his belief that colleges and universities “make it impossible for conservative ideas to ultimately carry the day.”

Education, travel, exposure to people and cultures not like yours has that effect.

Reigning over the ruins

Serwer’s offering is a long one. I haven’t had time this morning to get through it all. He doesn’t reference Ray Bradury or George Orwell (or burqas), but that’s the idea. Control information, limit access to it, and you control people and stanch opposition.

The book burnings of the past had physical limitations; after all, only the books themselves could be destroyed. The Trumpist attack on knowledge, by contrast, threatens not just accumulated knowledge, but also the ability to collect such knowledge in the future. Any pursuit of forbidden ideas, after all, might foster political opposition. Better for Americans to be as gullible and easily manipulated as the people who buy brain pills from right-wing podcasts, use ivermectin to treat COVID, or believe that vaccines are “weapons of mass destruction.” This purge will dramatically impair the ability to solve problems, prevent disease, design policy, inform the public, and make technological advancements. Like the catastrophic loss of knowledge in Western Europe that followed the fall of Rome, it is a self-inflicted calamity. All that matters to Trumpists is that they can reign unchallenged over the ruins.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

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Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Responding to you-know-who’s big bill

Will he disappear if we say his name three times? Just asking.

I’m not used to considering advice from Susan Del Percio, but we’re clutching at straws here. She suggests Democrats may not be able to stop the Demogorgon’s budget bill in the U.S. Senate, but the fight can be useful for undercutting our GOP antagonists.

Del Percio provides a greatest hits version of the bill’s worst features, then some advice. This is Campaign 101: “In politics, one of the first things you want to do is define your opponent before they define you.”

Then what? “They should hammer the GOP on easy targets. Take, for example, the FAA.” With Memorial Day over, Americans with the nerve “will be taking to the not-so-friendly skies.“

Elon Musk is already damaged goods and effectively sidelined. He’s gone back to Tesla with his tail between his legs. He and DOGE took their chainsaw to public health and safety with Trump’s permission. Trump must own the results:

DOGE’s mission was supposed to be efficiency. So why didn’t it start by fixing the FAA’s antiquated computer equipment? Instead, it moved first to layoff staffers across the embattled agency including specialists in roles related to aviation safety.

Obviously, the FAA’s troubles did not begin with Trump. But Democrats should focus on what’s happening now. This Trump administration is treating people and our air travel safety like a formula on a spreadsheet. With recent polls showing American confidence in air safety is dipping, air safety is a simple and easy talking point.

And yes, that is just one small example. But there are many, many others. If Democrats can’t find a leader right now, they should at least find a message. For my money Michigan’s freshman senator, Elissa Slotkin, has nailed it when talking about her “war plan.” The former CIA analyst says the way to change her party’s “weak and woke” is to go with a “no-bullshit” approach. That’s exactly the energy Democrats need to harness as the humidity descends on the Hill.

If the FAA seems a stretch, find other elements to hammer away at. Recall that Sarah Palin turned “death panels” into a near ubiquitous Republican talking point against the Affordable Care Act through sheer force of wink-wink repetition. That non-feature of the bill was invented from a passage in the bill so obscure that when Jon Stewart asked former New York lieutenant governor, Betsy McCaughey, to flip to it in the copy she brought to the show, she couldn’t.

But just as Frank Luntz turned the estate tax into the “death tax,” Democrats can do the same here. Twist actual harmful features of the bill into caricatures as extreme as Beetlejuice and repeat them three times to the twelfth power (without the winking).

I just wish I had confidence that Democrats on the Hill could muster that level of message discipline.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

No Kings Day, June 14th
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In this absolutely fabulous article by Even Osnos in the New Yorker about Trump’s corruption we finally see the best modern example of Trump style oligarchy. I can’t believe I didn’t see this myself:

The nascent United States had its own share of oligarchs, as voting was reserved for white men who held property. But it was a “civil” oligarchy, in which the wealthiest citizens supported the state, because it protected their interests and because they profited more under the rule of law. If the rule of law collapses, though, a civil oligarchy can become a “sultanistic” oligarchy, in which the ultra-wealthy consent to be ruled by one of their own—an “oligarch-in-chief,” in Winters’s phrase.

A prime example of a sultanistic oligarch is Ferdinand Marcos, the President of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. Marcos was a dogged kleptocrat, estimated to have stolen as much as ten billion dollars during his tenure. On an official salary of $13,500, he secured for his family at least four skyscrapers in Manhattan and a set of Old Master paintings. His wife, Imelda, was known for amassing thousands of pairs of shoes—a habit so distinctive that few people recall she also tried to buy Tiffany & Co.

As Winters notes, oligarchs of this category govern through “fear and rewards.” Marcos subdued the business community by strategically deploying permits and broadcast licenses. He made a special example of Eugenio Lopez, the country’s richest man and the owner of the Manila Chronicle, by breaking up an empire estimated at four hundred million dollars. After a few years, there was little boundary between the President’s financial assets and the nation’s. Marcos gave the sugar industry to one of his former fraternity brothers, and turned over the banana business to another friend. As Marcos’s pals mismanaged their holdings, the country sank into its worst recession since the Second World War.

Oligarchs-in-chief don’t like to retire, because civilian life leaves them vulnerable to retribution from those they ejected from their club. But in 1986, after three years of public protests, the Marcoses fled into exile, with a planeload of jewels, cash, and gold bars. In time, their allies rewrote enough history that, after Ferdinand died, Imelda was able to return home and eventually got elected to Congress. In 2022, after a relentless disinformation campaign that cast the Marcos years as a “golden age,” their son became President. Their perfidy is memorialized in the English language, though. Alfred McCoy, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me, “Marcos’s corruption led to the creation of the term ‘crony capitalism.’ It’s a useful term to describe the Trump era.”

Needless to say, the consequences for the world of having Ferdinand Trump running things are far more dangerous. The Philippines is a great country but it wasn’t the world’s only superpower when it succumbed to this kleptocratic chaos. But Trump sure seems like a modern Marcos, down to the cheap and gaudy ersatz palace.

If you have the chance to read the whole thing do it. It’s the best, and most entertainingly written, piece on this subject that I’ve read.

That’s Trump saying to North Carolina that they “aren’t alone any longer” after Hurricane Helene during the campaign. After he was elected he went down there and said this:

President Donald Trump on Friday met with local officials in western North Carolina towns still recovering from Hurricane Helene, accusing the Biden administration of not doing enough to get aid where it’s needed, vowing to speed up recovery efforts and threatening to shut down the Federal Emergency Management Agency altogether.

“It doesn’t matter at this point. [former President Joe] Biden did a bad job,” Trump said during a roundtable with local officials in Fletcher, where he said some residents still don’t have drinking water and didn’t get sufficient financial compensation following the storm. “This is totally unacceptable, and I’ll be taking strong action.”

Here’s your strong action:

Nothing he loves more than for Democrats to help spread his rhetoric

Semafor observes the obvious:

Six months after losing to Donald Trump for the second time, the Democratic Party’s shortcomings remain the biggest story in Washington. Revelations from the new Biden book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson have prompted weeks of relitigation of the 2024 race. The duo have been on a book tour in which Tapper has gone beyond his reporting to act as a media critic himself, suggesting at one point that the kind of criticism he has received from the party is an indication of why it lost.

This week, The New York Times, too, said it would begin publishing a series of deep examinations on the Democratic Party’s defeat, beginning by revealing a $20 million dollar effort with the cringey codename SAM — “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan.”

Meanwhile, Biden allies’ attempts to counter Original Sin have only juiced news articles and interest in the book, which is on its way to being one of the best-selling political nonfiction books in years. And even in lefty online spaces, it’s grim for Democrats: In Washington this week, I spoke with a few congressional staffers who said that they had tried using Bluesky as an alternative to Twitter after Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk, but they gave up after their bosses kept getting yelled at by Democratic users angry at their impotence.

For the moment, Democrats and the media outlets they pay attention to seem most intent on making the party relive its most painful mistakes.

I can understand this happening for the first three or four months after a loss or longer if the loss was a massive landslide. But this is now just self-indulgence at best and masochism at worst. Just stop using Trumpian rhetoric and make the affirmative case, already. This sad sack act is getting embarrassing.

Leah Litman writing for Public Notice:

Last Thursday evening, the Supreme Court all but demolished the legal basis for the independent agencies that are part of the modern administrative state.

In a brisk four paragraphs, only two of which contained any attempt at legal reasoning, the Court’s six Republican justices allowed the president to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) in violation of federal law. The decision highlights the lawlessness of the Court and is likely to further embolden a president who is very keen to place himself above the law.

The Court’s order in Trump v. Wilcox allows the president to violate the federal laws that prohibited him from removing NLRB and MSPB members without cause for doing so. Laws that insulate the heads of multimember commissions such as the NLRB are a common feature of the administrative state. The Supreme Court upheld one such law almost a century ago in Humphrey’s Executor v. Federal Trade Commission, the case that now undergirds modern independent agencies.

It was therefore a little surprising to read the Supreme Court’s order in Wilcox, which permits the president’s statutorily prohibited removal of officers on multi-member commissions, and see no mention of Humphrey’s Executor, the decision upholding statutes that prohibited such removals. Humphrey’s didn’t appear until the dissent.

But this dismissal of important precedents structuring modern society and government has become a hallmark of the Roberts Court. In a decision few years ago, the Court confidently declared that an earlier precedent on the Establishment Clause had been “abandoned.” Did that mean overruled? Unclear, but it at least meant the Court didn’t have to follow it!

Last term, the Court formally overruled the Chevron doctrine that had allows agencies to interpret ambiguous statutes they administer, as the Republican Justices turned tail on a a precedent they had previously embraced. The year before that, the Court announced that the time had come to end affirmative action programs in higher education, as if it was just closing up shop on the precedents upholding such programs.

In Wilcox, the Republican Justices announced a new rule would take the place of Humphrey’s Executor and the statutes that have been built around it. The Court doubled down on a muscular version of the unitary executive theory — the idea that the president, and president alone, possesses all of the executive power, and that such power also gives the president the authority to control anyone else exercising it through the power to remove them.

These same ideas featured prominently in the Court’s catastrophic immunity decision from last summer — one that placed the president above the law when exercising his official duties. Apparently, the last few months haven’t given the justices pause about the expansive version of executive power they adopted in that case.

Read the rest. It’s really good. And unnerving. Litman is an expert on the Roberts Court and I hate to say it but she does not have much faith that they’re going to save us from this nightmare.

To scale

The effects of the tax cuts in the Big Butt-Ugly Bill:

That’s from G. Elliot Morris.

President Trump:
"I'm not happy with what Putin is doing. He's killing a lot of people and I don't know what the hell happened to Putin … he's shooting rockets into Kyiv and other cities. I don't like it at all!" pic.twitter.com/DJKP3B9Abx

— Igor Sushko (@igorsushko) May 25, 2025

He kept going:

I’d laugh if it wasn’t so sad. He’s so ridiculous.

Hours after a massive Russian attack killed 12 people and injured nearly 80 others in Ukraine, Trump unloaded on Putin to reporters in New Jersey and then again shortly afterward in a social media tirade.

A Kremlin spokesperson has responded to President Donald Trump’s rage post against Russian President Vladimir Putin by calling Trump’s comments the result of “emotional overload.”

Clearly Putin knows he’s ridiculous too.

I have a bad feeling about this

These AI videos have sprouted up all over the hellsite in the last week. I suspect many of the “creators” are AI enthusiasts and Google employees — and bots — promoting Google’s shiny new thing.

Axios sums it up for me. Google’s new AI video tool floods internet with real-looking clips:

Google’s newest AI video generator, Veo 3, generates clips that most users online can’t seem to distinguish from those made by human filmmakers and actors.

Why it matters: Veo 3 videos shared online are amazing viewers with their realism — and also terrifying them with a sense that real and fake have become hopelessly blurred.

Before you ask: yes, everything is AI here. The video and sound both coming from a single text prompt using #Veo3 by @GoogleDeepMind .Whoever is cooking the model, let him cook! Congrats @Totemko and the team for the Google I/O live stream and the new Veo site! pic.twitter.com/sxZuvFU49s

— László Gaál (@laszlogaal_) May 21, 2025

This was made entirely in Veo 3 (text to video).

I can't believe that making an ad is this easy. Shooting something like this would have taken me and 50 crew members over 2 months from script to final edit.

Here's my prompt for the opening shot 👇🏼

— PJ Ace (@PJaccetturo) May 22, 2025

I then worked with Grok/ChatGPT on the rest of the script (I wrote most of it but it helps me come up with the ideas).

Once the script was done, I then had it create a shot list based on that prompt structure.

13 shots. 5-10 gens per shot to get right. About $500 in credits.

— PJ Ace (@PJaccetturo) May 22, 2025

I did more tests with Google's #Veo3. Imagine if AI characters became aware they were living in a simulation! pic.twitter.com/nhbrNQMtqv

— Hashem Al-Ghaili (@HashemGhaili) May 21, 2025

#Veo3 further blurs the lines between reality and imagination with audio, stronger text adherence, and richer visual details. pic.twitter.com/Tv5H9Uwzh3

— MBZ (@babaeizadeh) May 20, 2025

I made these using AI #google #Veo3 Yeah it's over bro
Comment your prompt ideas so I can create more @mattfarmerai pic.twitter.com/DXjkr3Jz7b

— Sam Samie (@SamSamieReal) May 25, 2025

This one below may actually have it right.

AI video is about to change everything! I generated this using #google #Veo3 🤯 pic.twitter.com/GVVQ9OdwNq

— Matt Farmer | AI & Marketing (@mattfarmerai) May 25, 2025

Used Veo 3 to imagine if Jurassic Park was real. This entire thing is AI! Things are gonna get weird #Veo3 #ai #JurassicPark #JurassicWorld pic.twitter.com/hgw4RQkgAw

— Ian (@IanSharar) May 24, 2025

We are so screwed.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

No Kings Day, June 14th
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Bring your REAL ID

For fairly obvious reasons, my subconscious keeps renaming today’s national holiday:

Happy Memorial Day to federal judges applying settled law, against whom Trump is encouraging stochastic terrorism. In a functioning democracy this would produce an aggressive response, but Trump is right that neither a majority of Congress nor a majority of SCOTUS will do anything about it.

— Max Kennerly (@maxkennerly.bsky.social) 2025-05-26T11:47:10.851Z

As a bona fide, card-carrying political scientist, Brian Klaas writes that he’s

supposed to want to read the news voraciously, to follow every twist and turn, to devour front pages, drown myself in the minutiae of policy, wear out my elbow patches with late nights pondering the machinations of various leaders.

But I am, probably like you, exhausted by it.

I can relate. Except I spend days poring over past election data, building spreadsheets, and teasing out patterns others can’t or won’t see, in part, because my presentation skills are lacking.

Most of all, these days, I despair not just for the fact that we mostly have terrible people in charge—and we certainly do—but also that a disturbingly large proportion of them do not seem to care at all about other people who are less fortunate in life.

Except for protecting the most undervalued class of disenfranchised people in America. White men, poor dears.

We clearly have broken people in charge, as Klaas sees it. He asks audiences if any would trade places with politicians. Few raise their hands. Not even for the money, the fame, and the power? Nope.

So what kind of people do want the jobs?

Unfortunately, it turns out that psychopaths really want power—and are very good at getting it. There are, as we’ll soon see, a disproportionate number of psychopaths in politics (and business), destructive figures who have been dubbed “snakes in suits.”

That’s why the dedication of my previous book, Corruptible, reads as follows: “To all the nice, non-psychopaths out there who should be in power but aren’t.”

(That’s a bit too cynical. Officials with whom I rub elbows seem really dedicated to public service and the greater good. That last term has been reduced to a bad joke over the last decade or so, but my friends aren’t laughing. They mean it. One of my local reps comes from a farm family. State Rep. Eric Ager spent 25 years in the Navy before running to serve pretty thankleesly in the state House minority. NC Secretary of State Elaine Marshall is also from a farm family. She’s dedicated and pretty damned effective. Neither fit the description below.)

Klaas rehashes the elements of “The Dark Triad,” posting a chart from “Dark Politics“:

When you pause and consider it, it seems particularly obvious that people with these traits would excel as politicians. The Machiavellian schemes and strategizes. The narcissist chases the spotlight. The psychopath craves power and control.

Most politicians are not  psychopaths. But as a proportion of the whole, there are vastly more psychopaths in politics than in society more generally. And that’s bad news for all of us.

Indeed. See Truth Social post above.

It’s raining here. But it is supposed to stop raining in Washington, D.C. by 10 a.m. ET. Someone scheduled to deliver remarks at Arlington National Cementery at 11 about Americans who gave their last full measure won’t have to worry about the rain messing up his carefully sculpted comb over. Pray he does better than he did at his rambling West Point speech.

Bring your REAL ID, pal.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

No Kings Day, June 14th
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense