“Tariffs can’t be inflationary because if the price of one thing goes up, unless you give people more money, then they have less money to spend on the other thing, so there is no inflation.”
As James Fallows explained:
This is from the guy who is supposedly “the smart one” in the new Trump lineup. To spell this out: By the “logic” of future Treasury Secretary, by definition NOTHING can ever be inflationary. Gas goes to $15, you just spend less on … eggs.
So it’s no biggie?
It appears that Besset believes in the creed of Milton Friedman that “inflation” can only happen because of increases in the money supply. Ok. But that assumes that when prices go up from these tariffs, people will understand that it isn’t inflation so they will happily stop spending money on the things they want and simply substitute for things they don’t want. Good luck with that. If there’s one thing we have learned over the past couple of years it’s that people are freaked out by price hikes, period. I don’t think anyone’s going to care whether that fits the academic definition of inflation.
*needless to say, Trump’s cult will believe that the economy is fantastic no matter what happens. The only question is whether there is a majority that will be upset about it.
This is what happens when people think politics is just another Reality TV Show and they were just voting someone off the island.
I don’t know who people think will be compelled to do these jobs that nobody wants to do. But these are the same people who think slavery was no biggie so perhaps prison labor? What else can they do? Otherwise, wages are going to have to go up if there’s a labor shortage. That’s how this works. Housing costs are already too high for most people.
The Special Prosecutor’s office in the Trump federal cases moved to dismiss both cases today. They say that the DOJ policy against prosecuting a sitting president so that’s that. TV pundits are sayhing that he will write a report which Merrick Garland can make public but that even if he does it probably won’t say much we don’t know because the intelligence community will not have had time to vet the sensitive information. How lucky.
Trump and his henchwoman above have made it clear that they plan to seek vengeance against the prosecutors. I see no reason to believe they won’t do it. Trump had his DOJ fire Andrew McCabe on the day before he hit his 20 years in the bureau to deprive him of his pension. (The courts agreed that was unlawful and reinstated the pension.) The IRS audited James Comey and McCabe. He demanded prosecutions against his enemies including Hillary Clinton and was only thwarted because of the so-called “guardrails” that are no longer there. Pam Bondi sure as hell isn’t going to be one.
Will Bunch points out that she was at the most notoriously absurd moment of the 2020 coup attempt:
The long, strange trip of the United States of America has taken a wild and dangerous right turn, and you can see the exact moment that Pam Bondi — Donald Trump’s newest pick to become the nation’s 87th attorney general — jumped aboard the crazy train: in the parking lot of Northeast Philly’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping, on the unforgettable morning of Nov. 7, 2020.
Record scratch … yep, that’s her, the former chief prosecutor of Florida, at the end of a row of all the 45th president’s men in her bright Republican red blazer and COVID-era mask in the parking lot at the most notorious news conference in American political history.
Reporters looked on in amused befuddlement as Bondi and Trump insider Corey Lewandowski erected a podium in front of a garage that Trump himself mistakenly thought would be a Four Seasons luxury hotel, not a parking lot facing a sex shop and a crematorium. The ex-Florida AG stoically stood by as the later-to-be-indicted Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani stepped up to that podium to make false claims of voter fraud — rendered even more absurd by news that every TV network had just called the race for next President Joe Biden. “Networks don’t get to decide elections, courts do,” Giuliani insisted that day, even as some of the TV crews were quickly packing up their equipment.
That hilarious day of political infamy is exactly why Thursday’s surprise news that Trump, now the 47th president-elect, was naming Bondi as his choice to run the U.S. Justice Department — after the rapid implosion of her fellow Floridian and alleged teen sex creep ex-Rep. Matt Gaetz — is no laughing matter.
As you can see in the video above, she has declared that Trump’s prosecutors must be prosecuted and that the DOJ needs to “clean house.”
A couple of days after the election this year I wrote that I thought a lot of the anti-incumbent movement these past couple of years had to do with unprocessed trauma from the global pandemic. Here in America we lost over 1.2 million people in a very short time from a deadly disease that humans had never seen before. Within just a few weeks in the spring of 2020, New York City alone had lost more than 15,000 people. All of our medical systems were strained, supplies were unavailable and the whole country, the whole world, was in a state of barely suppressed panic. I don’t think we’ve ever really dealt with exactly what happened and we are now in danger of doing it all over again.
President Trump failed miserably at the most important thing he was tasked with doing — reassuring the public. Instead he lied, complained, pushed snake oil cures and worried more about the effects of the pandemic on his re-election prospects than the health of the American people. Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” lays out a terrifying narrative, from taped interviews with Trump himself, of just how inept and dishonest he was.
Mother Jones’s David Corn reported on the findings of The Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis which found that senior Trump officials tried to block CDC scientists from warning the public and barred them from holding press conferences as would be the usual protocol, subsitituting those demented Trump TV briefings instead. The White House listened to conspiracy theorists and unorthodox quacks with little experience in the field and leaned on the CDC to change its recommendations. The result of Trump’s mismanagement of the crisis is estimated to have resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the days before the vaccines became widely available.
We all recall Trump’s cult followers’ reaction to the government guidelines to try to save as many lives as possible. They rebelled like wild-eyed teenagers, burning facemasks, staging protests, indulging in conspiracy theories and Trump followed their lead, especially since it dovetailed with his own political needs to get out on the campaign trail. The consequences were grave. Vaccine refusal caused over 200,000 more unnecessary deaths.
Trump has not forgotten about any of that even if the rest of us have tried to suppress the sense of insecurity and chaos that crisis left us with. He is a man who bears grudges and the scientific community that disagreed with him is in his crosshairs. He cannot accept that they were right and he was wrong and he’s going to make them pay.
He found the perfect instrument for his revenge in Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a conspiracy theorist with a whole lot of crackpot ideas but who, like Trump, believes that he knows better than scientists. He apparently was responsible for some of the funding for the dangerous documentary called “Plandemic” which brainwashed a whole lot of people and probably contributed to many deaths.
Not only did RFK Jr suggest COVID was planned by the government as some are just now finding out, he also revealed that his group, Children’s Health Defence, financed Plandemic, a conspiracy “documentary” about the COVID-19 pandemic. pic.twitter.com/f9Utqyhs3d
His left field theories about vaccines and other standard life-saving medical treatments are well documented and despite his alleged commitment to changing the food Americans eat to make them more healthy (good luck with that) it’s fair to assume that his lack of ability at being anything but a gadlfly will likely result in chaos rather than reform. His previous efforts have been deadly.
To the extent there are any scientists he or Trump respect they are all heretical and eccentric. Trump named a group of those very scientists this week to top posts at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers For Disease Control. They were all opponents of the standard COVID guidelines and are all opponents of mainstream medical science, notably in opposition to vaccines.
Trump has nominated Dr. David Weldon an internist and former congressman from Florida to head the C.D.C. He is best known for pushing the thoroughly discredited theory that thimerosal, a preservative compound in some vaccines, causes autism. He’s a fanatic who tried ,as a congressman, to pass a “vaccine safety bill” in 2007 to create a separate agency for vaccines within HHS.
Dr. Martin Makary a pancreatic surgeon at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine is Trump’s choice to head the F.D.A. He questions some of the vaccines routinely given to children and in his Fox News appearances he’s made it clear that he’s opposed to the COVID policies. He wrote in the Wall Street Journal that it would be gone by April of 2021 due to natural immunity and vaccines. He was very wrong. More than 450,000 people died in 2021.
For Surgeon General he’s named Dr. Janette Nesheiwat a frequent Fox News contributor and supplement salesperson who also happens to be married to his new National Security Adviser, Florida Rep. Michael Walz. She has a book coming out called , “Beyond the Stethoscope: Miracles in Medicine,” which shows the “transformative power of prayer.” The good news is that she doesn’t seem to be hostile to vaccines which makes her an island in a sea of anti-vaxxers.
Trump hasn’t formally nominated anyone to the National Institute of Health but the smart money is on Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University-trained physician and economist. Apparently RFK Jr vetted him this week and really liked the cut of his jib. Of course, he would. Battacharya is one of the lead authors of the notorious Great Barrington Declaration, which argued against lockdowns during the pandemic. It was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial, which gives you some idea of the kind of “scientific” analysis went into it. The Washington Post reported:
Bhattacharya has called for rolling back the power of some of the 27 institutes and centers that constitute NIH, saying that some career civil servants wrongly shaped national policies at the height of the pandemic and did not tolerate dissent. Bhattacharya and other critics have singled out Anthony S. Fauci, the infectious-disease expert who led one of NIH’s centers for 38 years and helped steer the nation’s coronavirus response before leaving the federal government in December 2022. […]
It appears that Trump is intent upon stacking the nation’s most important health agencies with people who are hostile to modern public health science and vaccines, which is exactly what you would expect from a vengeful megalomaniac who’s put an anti-vaxx conspiracy nut in charge of them.
The pandemic did an immeasurable amount of damage and caused endless heartache for millions of families around the world. Here in America it was taken up as a political weapon by the right wing and will be the catalyst for the destruction of our public health system. We may be through with COVID but it still isn’t through with us.
First, good news courtesy of E.J. Dionne. Conservatives (with the most clout) have abandoned their opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. Why? They won’t admit it, but they caught that car and lost that fight:
After gyrating from one position to another, Donald Trump simply gave up on being a pro-life candidate. The states, he said, would settle the issue, and he didn’t give a damn how they did it. The Republican Party followed along, drastically weakening the antiabortion provisions in its platform because it recognized that opposing reproductive rights after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was an electoral loser.
And it is. Abortion rights prevailed in 7 out of 10 states where voters had a choice this year — in three carried by Vice President Kamala Harris (New York, Maryland and Colorado) but also in four won by Trump (Missouri, Arizona, Montana and Nevada). Reproductive rights won 57 percent of the vote in pro-Trump Florida, but the state had a 60 percent threshold for the referendum to pass. Opponents of abortion rights fully prevailed only in Nebraska and South Dakota.
So the right ginned up other bogeymen with which to frighten and activate their base and drive them to the polls: immigrants and transgender people. Even so, Trump’s narrow popular-vote margin wasn’t enough to justify “apocalyptic electoral analysis,” Dionne argues.
The right will, of course. And a left still licking its wounds over the election outcome doesn’t exactly feel celebratory. The economy and immigration worked better for Trump than the defense of democracy and women’s rights worked for Kamala Harris. Immigration and trans issues simply lit a hotter, brighter fire under Trump voters even if, as my post below explains, trans people are but 1% of the population. People perceive them as scary Others constituting a threatening 20-plus percent of the population.
The bad news comes from Jason Statler (LOLGOP):
“We can have democracy, or we can have billionaires. Not both. At least with these campaign finance laws,” he writes. The problem is that the billionaires are winning. They are drowning democracy in a flood of dollars:
Just 400 mega-donors outspentevery other contributor to the Republican Party based on what we know about the spending in the 2024 campaign. Elon Musk alone appears to have outspent every small donor to the Trump campaign. And that’s if you don’t count the multiple billions of dollars he put into the $44 billion he wrangled to purchase Twitter and turn it into a Trump campaign website. In return, Tesla has skyrocketed 40% since Trump’s election, making Elon about $70 billion he can blow on future elections.
It’s not a fair fight. But then, the right doesn’t believe in fair:
It’s the billionaires versus the people, and the billionaires are kicking our ass with Elon—and his grudge against his daughter and the culture that accepts her in a way he never can—leading the way. His Phishing Scam Approach to politics has helped him, officially the richest human being ever to live, to become significantly richer.
Many factors have made America the most unequal country in the OECD and now threaten our ability to govern ourselves.
He continues:
There is an obvious solution. We need to take our own side against the billionaires. We must stop behaving like “temporarily embarrassed billionaires” who are just one video or startup from getting high and playing Halo II with Elon.
There are more of us than there will ever be of them. But that only matters if we have a democracy where it’s even possible for us to fight for our interests.
A massive barrier in this fight is that Democrats feel they need their billionaires to fight the other billionaires. This “choose your fighter” strategy has proven to be a failed one. We will never be able to offer these moguls what they want—minimal taxes on the rich, no consumer protections, and an end to our votes mattering.
So, we need a progressive movement that can take the people’s side. The billionaires are activated. We no longer need to fear them turning on us and our Constitution. It’s happened. They sided with an insurrectionist who has made it clear he intends to rule as a dictator and will refuse ever to leave office peacefully. That’s done.
Now, we need to have the debate that matters most: do we want a democracy or billionaires? Because we can’t have both. Not like this.
I’d quibble some with taking our own side against billionaires being an obvious solution. Poorer people believing themselves “temporarily embarrassed billionaires” is a cultural myth dating from before Horatio Alger. It’s sustained by the monied class to keep the poors supporting nonsense like trickle-down economics and buying state lottery tickets in lieu of their organizing unions to rebalance the power dynamics in this country.
It’s not a viewpoint one can just turn off by telling the poors there are more of us than there are of them. Why do you think the less-well-off adopted as their champion a billionaire who would never admit them to his country club?
They don’t hate him. They want to be him. Immune from prosecution, unbound by any rule, truly free to be the biggest asshole in any room and to kick away the ladder behind you. Kicking the downtrodden and making money from it? That’s real freedom, baby.
They learned more from a four-hour Trump rally than they ever learned in Sunday school.
During the runup to Nov. 5, there was a lot of talk about “vibes.” This was a vibes election more about what people felt than about what they think (or think they know). Jonathan V. Last has a Bulwark post about how out of synch people perceptions are with reality. It’s rather instructive. First, the results of a YouGov poll on how people perceive what percentage of the population various groups constitute:
The results were hilarious. Here are some of the percentages that Americans (on average) think their fellow citizens are:
Transgender: 21 percent
Muslim: 27 percent
Jewish: 30 percent
Black: 41 percent
Live in New York City: 30 percent
Gay or lesbian: 30 percent
We’ll get to the actual, in vivo percentages in a moment. First I want to point out the absurdity: 1-in-3 are gay/lesbian? Muslims and Jews make up 57 percent of the country? Blacks are 40 percent of the population?
We are talking about errors of perception measured by orders of magnitude. On the trans population, the average American’s estimation is off by 2,000 percent.
People make a consistent mistake in the same direction, Last observes. They wildly overestimate the number of people from recognized minority/interest groups of every kind and underestimate how numerically common their own group is. He dubs it “a particularly American cognitive bias.”
I wonder how much it has to do with the evangelical perception that there’s a secret war going on just below the surface of observable reality that Christians wage daily against spiritual principalities and powers, “against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” They learn that the Devil and his demons lurk around every corner waitin’ to git ya.
These perceptions are conclusions drawn from little or no actual encounters in real life with trans people, gay people, Muslims, etc. Yet people assume these Others are everywhere.
Like imaginary Satanic pedophile cults that way. It’s this learned paranoia that perhaps says something fundamental about Americans’ psyche, long haunted by paranoid fantasies, whether it’s savages in the woods or commies in woodpiles.
This distorted perception leads people in majorities to a combative, oppositional politics. They worry about being displaced by minorities they rarely encounter but fear are lurking somewhere, out there, in great masses.
Richard Hofstadter wrote about the paranoid style in American politics in 1964 and he was looking at both the contemporary and the historical. Developments since then have mostly confirmed his thesis. I think we can take it as read that paranoia is an important component of American social and political life.
And if this is the case, then I would say that our bizarre perception bias is both symptom and cause. People are paranoid about The Other, which is why they believe that hordes of The Other must exist. And the belief that their own majority group is small while The Other is large feeds the underlying paranoia.
“I’m not sure how democracy is supposed to work with a population that is this paranoid, confused, and oblivious to reality,” Last concludes.
I’m not sure either. But this misperception of threats that the poll reveals is nothing new. I noticed that decades ago after the Three Mile Island accident when nuclear power was more on people’s threat radar:
I have a 1982 Scientific American article here (Xeroxed. Remember kids?) in which study subjects were asked to rank a sampling of 30 sources of risk. Nuclear power topped the list for the League of Women Voters and college students, although it ranked 20 in terms of attributable deaths. Business professionals ranked nuclear power No. 8. Pesticides also made the top ten for the League and college students. It showed up at 28 on the researchers’ list. At the bottom of list of risks for all three groups? Vaccinations. Where would they rank today? We’re not very good at this.
The dangers from vaccinations may leapfrog ionizing radiation as a perceived risk after Jan. 20. Getting them or not getting them.
California has at many points been held up as an American paradise. Now it’s widely seen as closer to hell. Runaway housing prices, tax burdens, homelessness, congestion, fire, drought, flood. The best sides of tech innovation, and the worst of tech-bro greed and narcissism. These are the state’s hallmarks. This perception is particularly rampant among Republicans: Polls show that two-thirds of Republicans say this one US state has done more damage than good for the country, and that almost half of them don’t consider it “American” at all. Beyond political party, fully half of adult Americans say in polls that California is in decline. As a recent headline put it shortly before Harris became the Democratic nominee, “California’s image will be a weapon” against her as a candidate.
Never mind that one in every eight Americans still lives in California—a population larger than 21 other US states combined—and that its economic output is bigger than any entire non-US country except China, Japan, or Germany, and that it’s the birthplace of an disproportionate share of the world’s most familiar and valuable brand names. The overwhelming sense is that the California miracle is over, its reservoirs of dynamism as tapped out as the Central Valley’s aquifers during recent years of drought.
As a Californian who has spent most of his life in other parts of the United States, and as an American who has lived for more than a dozen years in other parts of the world, I’ve often been struck by the ways declinist alarmism about my home state can feel like a displaced version of declinist alarmism about my home country as a whole.
“California is America, but sooner,” the USC sociologist Manual Pastor has said. That goes for huge cultural and demographic shifts (California was the first mainland US state whose diverse population became “majority-minority,” back in the 1990s, a full generation ago) and for era-defining crises, self-inflicted and not. And most importantly, it also goes for solutions—the kind that can redirect the momentum of American life, and life around the world, with a leverage no other state possesses.
Just take the area of gasoline-powered transportation. After World War II, when American car culture was famously getting minted in Southern California, the state used a gas tax hike to build out one of the first modern freeway networks. In the ’50s, the US federal government borrowed that same model to construct the interstate highway system. Then, starting in the 1980s, California led the fight against leaded gasoline, eventually banning its sale in 1992, four years before the US as a whole did the same. In 2019, after Donald Trump’s administration rolled back emissions standards for cars, California struck a deal with the world’s leading carmakers, from Ford to Honda to VW and BMW—to make existing standards even tougher in the face of climate change. The size of the California market made this a de facto national standard (which the Biden administration later ratified).
It would be one thing if this were just a history lesson. But the same kind of dynamic is playing out right now in a few crucial arenas that virtually no one beyond California is talking about. And I’m happy to report that the America taking shape on its Pacific coast is again inventing solutions far more rapidly than conventional wisdom has accounted for.
[…]
California deserves new attention as the “reinvention state” rather than a “resistance state.” Even under Trump, there’s still a good chance that as California goes, so eventually goes the country, and eventually much of the world. Here are a few illustrations of where it’s headed. None of these is “the” solution to California’s many problems. But each of them illustrates the creative spirit from which solutions have always come.
I urge you to read the whole thing while it’s still beyond the paywall. It’s really good and should provide at least a modicum of hope that despite the destruction Trump is about to unleash there is another vision.
It’s not that California doesn’t have problems. It has all the problems everyone else has and often shows the new problems before the rest of the country. It’s spawned the era of the tech bro libertarians that has become a blight on all of us. But because of its massive population, resources, wealth and talent, it also often shows the path out of it.
I live here and I didn’t know the half of it. It’s reassuring. If we can get through this perilous period without an unrecov erable catastrophe, there is hope.
Fallows concludes:
The story of America involves continued rediscovery of its potential. That is the story of the most American state as well. “I’d give anything to trade for America’s problems,” a senior Chinese bureaucrat told me in 2008, when I was living in Beijing and the United States seemed to be in free fall. America had emergencies; China, he explained, had more threatening long-term weaknesses—as has become clear in the years since then. As I write, America’s immediate political prospects are uncertain. But however this year’s election turns out—with a president who was born in California, or with a California girding itself to show that it still represents the future—the state demands attention for its many innovations, and not just its travails.
In case you were wondering why all these people involved in sexual assault are being chosen for the Trump administration, this is why. And it is why those fucked up, incel bros voted for him:
He “tells it like it is” — that they were asking for it. And he’s right that for millenia some men have told themselves that.
Now read the Pete Hegseth police report. Listen to Matt Gaetz defend himself. It’s all a version of the same thing. When you’re a star you can get away with it. And Trump and his miserable, garbage cabinet and staff are proving it.
Timothy Snyder lays out the case against Pete Hegseth. It’s worse than you think:
1. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, has no qualifications for the job. He has never run a large organization and has no national security expertise.
2. Hegseth has zero notion of which other countries might threaten America or how. In his books this is simply not a subject, beyond a few clichés.
3. Hegseth does not believe in alliances. For him, “NATO is a great example of dumb globalism.”
4. Hegseth wants a political army that bans women from combat roles, is purged of “cowardly generals,” and is anti-woke.
5. Hegseth never notes that the politicized Russian army meets all of his standards perfectly, but is is ineffective and commits war crimes.
6. Hegseth never notes that the Ukrainian army, which does have women in combat, and is not politicized in the way he would like, has overperformed.
7. Hegseth has almost nothing to say about the most significant armed conflict of our time and has not visited Ukraine or learned anything about it.
8. Hegseth’s misogynist gender politics are consistent with his polygamy and the accusations of rape.
9. Hegseth’s enemies are all internal: the Left, Muslims, and immigrants. He repeatedly claims that the Left wishes to annihilate everyone else, which is a call to violence.
10. Hegseth, a Christian Reconstructionist, believes that Americans should be governed not by law or by the Constitution but by God — as interpreted of course by Hegseth and his friends.
11. Hegseth calls for a “holy war” and a “crusade” against Americans who think differently than he does because “God wills it.” Trump is the pretext: Hegseth wants “to make crusade great again.”
12. Hegseth, according to his books, could be counted upon to ignore threats to America from abroad, and to use a purged and politicized military against “enemies within.” This is consistent with Trump’s avowed intention to build a kind of dictatorship on the ruins of a dysfunctional government.
13. Hegseth thus represents a policy of regime change. Trump’s nomination of Hegseth is best understood as part of a decapitation strike against the republic. A Christian Reconstructionist war on Americans led from the Department of Defense is likely to break the United States.
People like Hegseth who have half-baked ideas based upon superficial reading of history are all over the place. Sometimes I am one of them. But people like that should not be put in charge of anything as important as the US Military. The danger lies in the egomania that compels him to accept such a position despite his totally unqualified background and experience. Hegseth is someone who does not believe that war crimes should be crimes. He is a violent sexual assaulter. He is, in other words, a violent man, possibly a sociopath.
I can easily see him and the enablers around him doing some truly terrible things because they are too ignorant of the consequences and have no restraint. People like that often do something destructive simply because they don’t have the imagination or the know-how to do anything different.
