Back to Dwelling on The Awfulness

 I skipped some writing days, ignoring the inner voice last night that said I really needed to write something. But here I am now, writing, so.

I suppose I should compose another letter to my GOP senators. The SAVE act, which threatens to add enormous hurdles to voting in this country, has narrowly passed the House. The Senate is likely to pass it. It's depressing. 

The stock market rallied yesterday in reaction to Trump's "pause" on tariffs (which really wasn't a complete pause, just a reduction of all of them to 10%--still an unimaginable high). Today's stock market erased those gains as people realized, variously, (1) the US/China trade war is still very much on; (2) Trump appears to decide day-to-day or moment-to-moment about tariff policy; (3) the US is unreliable as a trade partner since it seems happy to elect Trump and allow him his whimsy; and (4) there is no plan.

That was Isaac Saul's takeaway from Trump's backing down on tariffs:

I wanted to understand the Trump administration’s grand plan, and it turns out they didn’t have one. When they said they were rolling out global tariffs to negotiate new trade deals but also said the tariff rates weren’t a negotiation tactic, that wasn’t 4D chess. It was a lack of a plan. When they said the plan was to end up with zero tariffs and total free trade and also said they wanted to raise tax revenue, that wasn’t 4D chess. It was a lack of a plan. When they warned about the need to be “tough” and “take our medicine” and promised that under no circumstances would they back down, and then backed down, that wasn’t 4D chess. It was a lack of a plan.

There is no plan, no master strategy, no "art of the deal" genius. There's only Trump's ego, according to Jamelle Bouie:

The fundamental truth of Donald Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance. His long history of scams and hostile litigation — not to mention his frequent refusal to pay contractors, lawyers, brokers and other people who were working for him — is evidence enough of the reality that a deal with Trump is less an agreement between equals than an opportunity for Trump to abuse and exploit the other party for his own benefit. For Trump, there is no such thing as a mutually beneficial relationship or a positive-sum outcome. In every interaction, no matter how trivial or insignificant, someone has to win, and someone has to lose. And Trump, as we all know, is a winner.

Other countries must pay us tariffs (as Bouie notes, Trump "genuinely seems to think of tariffs as fees that foreign countries pay to the United States") because that proves we're dominating them. Anything else is us being dominated, which is inconceivable. That his take on tariffs--and international trade--is so ludicrously, maladaptively wrong is, well, just our problem to deal with. I cannot blame the rest of the world for giving up on us.

It is disappointing that so many Republican voters seem ardently to believe exactly what Trump, Fox, and rightwing radio/web tell them: that these tariffs are a tax cut for Americans, that they'll bring back good times (i.e., times good for stable bluecollar jobs and secure retirements for white, straight, cis, conservative Christian, patriarchal people).

It's especially disappointing that so many politicians and justices who could check Trump seem completely unwilling to do so. The House just passed a measure preventing its members from challenging Trump's expansive tariff prerogatives. House and Senate majorities seem committed to passing Trump's budget, which adds to the debt via tax cuts for billionaires while repealing the ACA. There is no replacement, of course. That's been the M.O. for most Trump II "reforms"--get rid of vital services. Replace with nothing, or at best "concepts of a plan."

Sigh. 

I'm just not sure what comes next. 

What's There to Say?

 Man. I don't have much to say. Across-the-board tariffs for all (except for Russia and a few other exempted states). Math apparently based on fundamental misunderstandings of economy. Fantasy predictions of liberation and prosperity. Global stock futures tanking. Retaliatory tariffs incoming. 

This on top of massive and stupid cuts to vital services (HSS, most recently). This on top of abandoning or even mocking the idea of due process for all and of democratic checks and balances. Just lots of open revenge and power-grabs.

Can't even write in complete sentences rn. 

And the worst thing is that I'm afraid none of this will be enough, that popular apathy, boredom, distraction, and/or ignorance that will make it seem like those sounding the alarm about all this are the unreasonable ones. Or I'm worried that the consequences, though bad, won't be severe or sustained enough to alter the opinion of low-information citizens about either (1) passionately supporting Trump, or (2) disengaging from everything.

I don't know. 

Even the comedy of Trump assigning "reciprocal tariffs" on unoccupied Antarctic islands falls flat in the face of the magnitude of damage he's done to the country and the world. 

God help us.

The Sacrament of the Present

 My Lenten devotional group today reflected on the need to embrace (in Richard Rohr's words) "the sacrament of the present." Rohr's meditations in God For Us encourage us in the ancient practice of "being here now." We let go of living in the future or the past so that we can be fully present and give our attention to matters immediately before us.

As a practice of visio divina, we spent time contemplating Paul Gauguin's Christ on the Mountain of Olives (1889):

 

Visio divina (the visual art equivalent of lectio divina) involves focusing on a painting and opening oneself to inspiration. You contemplate the portrait. You ask four questions:

What do you see?

What do you feel?

Are you in the painting? If so, where/who?

What is God telling you?

 Since the meeting was on Zoom, I saw only the painting, not its title. I did not immediately catch on that the central figure was Christ on the night he was betrayed. I saw only a man consumed with worry and isolated from companions. He was suffering. It recalled to me times when I have felt isolated, fretting about some matter (including my isolation). 

Learning the painting's title and subject matter solidified my reading. Christ was suffering in heart and mind, knowing at least the broad contours of the more bodily, protracted suffering of the passion and the Cross.

But where Rohr invites us into a present focus that allows worry about what is to come to fall away, Christ here seems both focused on the present and also suffering. The feast of foot washing and communion is over. There's only the sweat drops of blood as he begs God to let this cup pass from him.

What is God telling me? 

I can't help but hear, "Suffering. Suffering is coming." 

Sometimes I think the sacrament of the present isn't sweet like unfermented wine or wholesome like bread. It is bitter and draining, a promise of pain and loss and sacrifice. It is a call to that sacrifice, not for the glory of martyrdom but out of love for the world, even the parts that inflict pain and hate.

I read words by Timothy Burke, a voice I usually listen to for perspective and calm. He argues that "the Trump Administration is not just walking away from the world system established in the aftermath of World War II. It is quite seriously running towards a world where territorial aggression and imperial conquest are entirely thinkable—and where the United States will not just ignore aggression in the spirit of isolationism but will actively pursue it for itself."

This is no bluff, Burke stresses. It has become increasingly evident that Trump and his closest allies believe this sincerely and deeply. (Burke speculates some of them may even accept the inevitability of global warming, encouraging climate-skeptical Trump northward so as to secure lands that will eventually be a destination from those fleeing hostile climes.)

Whatever his reasoning, whatever the reasoning or rationalizations by his supporters and enablers, the rest of the world needs to act now:

Canada needs to regard the threat as completely serious and not just bluster, in a way that goes beyond stalwart rhetoric from political leaders and clearing the shelves of bourbon. The Canadians need to be planning in response to scenarios that no one has modeled before—what if Trump directs the American military to deploy special forces and air power to seize Canadian airports and key government buildings with the goal of forcing a quick surrender while moving some ground forces to the northern border in anticipation of a longer conflict? It doesn’t matter if this is madness, because this administration has already made it clear that they’re not playing at being madmen for negotiating advantage but are in fact doing all of that self-destructive nonsense. The Canadian government and its real allies in NATO need to act now to remove the United States from all shared military and intelligence cooperation, no matter how hard that is to do in practical terms. The U.S. needs to be booted out of Five Eyes, needs to be expelled from NATO. Because now those countries have to plan as if the United States government is an enemy regime, to take all of what is being said as if it is serious. 

And us?

Americans need to plan in order to think what a war with Canada—and possibly Europe—means for the rest of their lives. Misery, deprivation, suffering, and the certain end of anything like a constitutional democracy in this country are only the immediate consequences. None of it necessary, none of it right, none of it for the better in the long or short run. . 

Burke ends by insisting that it is not yet too late for Americans--especially "people with real power in our unequal society"--to draw a line in the sand. Not on our watch. Not this time.

It may be that the sacrament of the present involves a full-scale, costly drawing of such lines.

I don't know. But the Gauguin painting and the Gospel narrative it portrays remind me that sometimes, it is OK to admit to fear, to look at what the present offers and pray that God take it away. And it is comforting, at least a little, to know that Christ suffers with us (com-passion), contemplating what it is to partake of a sacrament of sacrifice.

Boring Updates and Perspectives on The Awfulness

 Well, I got done SOME of what I had planned. Nothing read of the many comps for next week, nothing written in terms of rec letters or article reviews. 

But I took the car to the mechanic--replaced a sensor and met another prof from my university. Both of us are stuck at the associate level, too overworked to focus on a book (maybe). Both of us are nervous in that resigned way of institutional veterans: more of the same. Both of us wonder if this time is worse? Because the governor hates us? Hates higher ed? Stacked the Board of Regents with his cronies? 

And I got good news: a call from one of the seminaries I applied to, offering me a full tuition scholarship. Very nice, that personal touch. 

I also figured out midterm grades, loaded them up, sent them out--and then immediately discovered an error in the grades for one class, recalculated, changed the grades, and sent out an explainer email.

And I dipped back into some News. Tariffs seem to be off again. Or delayed? Suspended? Who knows. Some random quote from some anonymous White House staffer basically praised it as a thrilling what-comes-next story line. We'll see how enjoyable markets find chaos. 

Another death from measles, this time an adult. This is more deaths this year than we've had in the past twenty-two years. 

I read two pieces today about The Awfulness--well, two blog posts and a video.

Writing in 3 Quarks Daily, Barry Goldman reflects on the conventional wisdom he has absorbed and transmitted about care and deliberation in the face of seeming emergencies. Goldman recalls a speech by a political science professor he heard once when he was young:

He said all revolutionary movements are essentially utopian. The central idea is that there is a madman at the wheel. If we could just knock out the madman and grab the wheel, we could steer to safety. He said, sadly, this is a juvenile fantasy. The bitter truth, he told us, is there is no madman. And there is no wheel.

The world is much more complicated than the slogans of the revolutionaries would have it. There are no simple solutions. There are not even any simple problems.

Worse, the idea that there are simple solutions leads inevitably to fanaticism. The notion that there is a simple truth, we know it, and that guy over there is preventing us from reaching it, leads us to excuse pushing that guy out of the way.

Goldman says he has long attested to the truth of this insight. But, quoting e.e. cummings, "There is some shit I will not eat":

There can be no respectful listening to the other side when the other side says children shouldn’t be vaccinated for polio, or January 6^th was a day of love, or Ukraine “got in a war.” Ukraine did not get in a war. Ukraine was attacked by a murderous dictator. RFK Jr. is a dangerous crank. Elon Musk has no business mucking around in the Treasury Department computer system. There is no such thing as the Gulf of America.

So I have changed my mind. I do so with the greatest reluctance. It goes against everything I’ve been saying for nearly 50 years. But the facts have changed. And “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

The time for politics as usual has passed. We are in the midst of a coup. The Constitution is in danger. Democracy and the rule of law are at stake. There is a madman at the wheel.

THERE IS A MADMAN AT THE WHEEL!

(I'm reminded of John Mulaney's bit from the first T admin [I paraphrase]: It's like there's a horse loose in the hospital. The surgeries and procedures go on, but now and then you hear galloping, neighing, crashing--and you remember: There's a horse. In the hospital!)

 Timothy Burke (the historian, not the more famous one) offers some advice for those of us convinced that there's a madman at the wheel/a horse in the hospital/a coup in the US:

If you want to do something about it, whatever that it might be, you have a bigger and harder job than just being right. You have to be part of a we. Being part of a we is not just organizing, it is allowing yourself to be organized by others. It means giving up some of your own vanities, you own insistences, your own certainties and urgencies.

Don’t start from the biggest “we” imaginable, and we don’t start with the “we” that is required to win out in a struggle, as if fighting for a better world is a Request For Proposal with an attached list of minimum specs. We start from where we are as individuals, with the people who are most likely to know us. But that is precisely where the lonely purist fails hardest when they mistake their vain righteousness for a truth everyone has to be bullied and cajoled into accepting. If you can’t convince the people most proximate to you, most likely to listen to you, about what you want to make a shared cause or common concern, then that’s what you have to leave behind. If you can’t leave it behind, then embrace being alone, accept that what matters to you is being right as opposed to being effective. Choose the perfect and scorn the merely good. 

And finally,  John Green (one of the vlog brothers) simply gives a sitrep on his own anxiety. His book about tuberculosis gets released in a few weeks, just as (as he notes) we seem as a country dead set on giving a huge boost to "diseases of injustice" like HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis. This boost to disease (by abruptly and cruelly withdrawing aid) will cost lives. He ends by admitting "I'm scared because it's scary." But, he reminds us, we live not at the end of history but in the middle of it. We don't know the ending, which gives us hope and lays out for us work to do.  

The work, it seems, involves not merely raising the alarm about the present but also imagining a "we" who live today and tomorrow with us.

 

Feeling the Burn

 A friend showed me the Facebook feed of an old buddy of his, someone who's all in for Trump. On that feed was a cartoon to the effect that Democrats' only plan involves hoping for bad things to happen to the country.

As I write this, we're enduring the first day of Trump II's Mexico and Canada tariffs. Trump has made it plain that he's immovably convinced that such tariffs will make life better for Americans. Dozens of people have--in public, before cameras--attempted to walk him through why this isn't so. 

Jeff Tiedrich quotes one such exchange from Feb 27:

reporter: “tariffs don’t hurt other countries — they’re paid by American businesses and consumers.”

[Trump]: “no, no. China pays. other countries pay. it’s a beautiful thing.”

reporter: “then why did farmers need billions in bailout money when tariffs crushed exports?”

Donny: “we took care of farmers! they love me. the best farmers.”

 Even Trump fan Ben Shapiro is baffled:

 I still am unclear as to what the actual demand is against Mexico or Canada that would get rid of the tariffs. If the idea of the tariffs is that they are inherently a good for the United States, that is not true. The tariffs are in fact a tax on American consumers. They drive up the prices.

And sure enough, markets have taken a dive. Target announces price hikes on food. Gas is likely to go up. Cars will cost thousands more.

All of this pain was predictable--was predicted, loudly, time and time again by Democrats and practically everyone else, even many Republicans. The framing of "Democrats hope for the country to fail" makes as much sense as saying parents "hope" their child gets burned if they touch a hot stove. Murc's Law strikes again: Only Democrats have agency. Here's how it goes:

1.  Trump and the entirely quiescent GOP run on plans that will harm the country. 
2. Democrats point this out. 
3. Trump and GOP initiate those plans. 
4. Country is harmed. 
5. Democrats: "We warned you!" 
6. GOP: "Those sadistic Democrats, hoping for the worst!"

 For what it's worth--no, I don't want the country harmed. I don't want people to lose jobs and healthcare. I don't want people to suffer and die here or abroad from preventable diseases. I don't want us to lose standing with the international community. I don't want billionaires to further enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us. I don't want democratic norms further eroded by a reckless autocrat wannabe. 

I want none of these things. Does that mean I hope for bad results from Trump's policies? Of course not! It's not up to me, is it? The bad results aren't punishments I'm inflicting. They're natural--predictable--consequences of bad choices. If a kid chooses to touch a hot stove despite all warnings, the best the parent can hope for is that the burn isn't too bad--and that the kid learns not to touch hot stoves. 

Unfortunately, we're all in this together. We're all gonna feel the burn. I hope it's not too bad, and I hope we (meaning they) learn. 

Scales of Awful

 With the constant firehose of gobsmacking awfulness from Trump II so far, it can be tough to keep perspective. Relative to the vast sweep of Trump's activities, his renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America is "irritating awful." Banning the Associate Press for refusing to use that name is a notch more awful than that. DOGE's indiscriminate firing of thousands of federal workers and machete-slashing of vital departments and programs perhaps qualifies as the next order of magnitude up--not just irritating but actively harmful both to the workers affected and to the workings of government.

Probably around the same scale of bad but of a different species would be Trump's rank cronyism and graft, extending or withholding favors (DOJ prosecutions, for example) based on whether someone flatters and/or enriches him. Also in that bag are his $5 million citizenship ticket or the payout to billionaires he's promised. The Muskification of government functions (e.g., Starlink promising to take over the FAA) augers a world where vital aspects of civic order turn into privately own subscription services by enshittified for-profit companies. 

The war against all things DEI also ranks here. It looks more and more like a flat-out desire to roll the society back to cishet white patriarchy at the expense of people of color, women, and queer/trans folk. It will cost lives. It damages our country's very soul (never especially healthy or clean to begin with). 

On the world stage, the US suddenly becoming an adversary to former friends and a friend to former (and current!) adversaries may just be the next level up. The Trump-Vance-Zelenskyy meltdown and its aftermath--withdrawal of support from Ukraine until Trump gets an "abject apology" (what does that even mean?) exemplifies how horrific we've become. Add this to increased military and economic aggression toward our northern and southern neighbors and you get a new Empire in need of defeating. And as much as I hear many of the pundits I attend to insisting that Trump isn't in fact a Putin stooge--well, if he were, what would look different than what he's doing already? 

But a degree of awful above even this sullying of our international reputation, even beyond the infiltration by malign (Russian) forces we're inviting (e.g., Hegseth closing down DoD research into Russian cyber-warfare)--is the USAID withdrawal. 

Today, news agencies reported on a series of memos circulated by USAID's Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for global health. These memos detailed the cost in lives that cutting of USAID funding internationally will take. The breakdown of consequences includes some shocking figures:

• up to 18 million additional cases of malaria per year, and as many as 166,000 additional deaths;

• 200,000 children paralyzed with polio annually, and hundreds of millions of infections;

• one million children not treated for severe acute malnutrition, which is often fatal, each year;

• more than 28,000 new cases of such infectious diseases as Ebola and Marburg every year.

Enrich was fired Sunday. 

Atul Gawande skeets a longer list of aid programs terminated by Trump II.

I don't want to discount the deaths in this country due to Trump's maneuvers (e.g., queer/trans suicides; violence against people of color, queer folk, women; deaths due to unemployment and insurance hikes; deaths due to curtailing reproductive care). But the scale of human death and suffering worldwide because of Elon/Trump's conspiracy theories about USAID--and Congress's quiescence in the face of Trump's actions--is hard do imagine.

HIV and tuberculosis will surge, likely with new and drug-resistant strains. Diseases we thought vanquished may make a comeback. Widespread health disparities will further destabilize impoverished regions. We'll of course start feeling this in the RFK era of vaccine skepticism (though he has about-faced on measles somewhat). 

There's no contest for which of Trump's acts so far will prove to be most destructive. There's no award. But if there were, I think ending USAID may win that grisly prize. It's an awful trespass against the whole world.

So quickly.

 I've never seen as many people close to me as scared as they are now--not during COVID, not after 9-11. My DnD buddies all work for the FAA. They keep getting ominous notes that huge cuts are coming. No one knows who's safe and who's not. No one has any notion of who's making these decisions, or what criteria they're using.

It baffles me to hear of people acting as if all this suffering constituted victory. "I never knew people hated government so much," one of my buddies marveled.

The short- and long-term suffering is going to be terrible. 

I keep thinking of books I've read (Max Brooks's Devolution most recently) in which a disaster happens and various characters have to adjust to the abrupt change from first-world safety to wartime all-against-all survival mode. 

How close are we to that stage? 

How much military or armed forces support does the billionaires-and-bullies-first accelerationis agenda have? Hegseth seems bound and determined to start a border war with Mexico. I fear what happens if there's any loss of life on the American side--or, just as likely historically, a fake story about American loss of life--from some random Mexican or drug gang or whatever. Nothing galvanizes like a war--We're the wounded ones now! 

I don't know. 

Things fell apart so quickly. 

Things fell apart so quickly.

Things fell apart so quickly. 

Weary

 It turns out the list of forbidden words amounted to three: diversity, equity, and inclusion. At least, that's the official case.

First--I find that hard to believe. Hundreds of pages had those words?

Second--even if that's the case, it's still unconscionable censorship. 

I'm weary. 

The Trump-Vance-Zelenskyy debacle today in the Oval Office encapsulates my frustration. The bits I've seen--even those touted by Trump defenders as proof of Zelenskyy's fault--all seem like ignorant bullies being ignorant bullies. All the core Trump tropes are on display: arrogance (chiding Ukraine as if it were a child), bad faith (marveling that Zelenskyy thinks Putin is untrustworthy--when the whole world knows that's so), pettiness (the bizarre "did you ever say thank you?"), and of course good old-fashioned DARVO ("I think it's disrespectful..."). 

But truly--no matter how obviously cruel or unprofessional Trump seems in any given public scenario, people leap to his defense, framing Zelenskyy somehow as the one suggesting inappropriate things. 

I concur with the frequent observation: if Trump et al. were actually, literally pro-Putin double agents, they would surely be doing exactly what we've seen them doing. I take that back: a professional double agent would be subtler. 

I just don't know. 

I read an account from NPR reporter Zach Mack about the year he spent trying to wean his father away from conspiracy theories. His dad even made a $10,000 bet with him that 10 conspiracy-theory predictions would come true by 2024--$1,000 a prediction. None did. By the time his dad had repaid Mack, he had driven away his wife of 40 years as well as Mack's lesbian sister. His father only doubled down on his beliefs. Mack reflects:

I don't know what comes next. Things fell apart so quickly, but also slowly; as the years passed, cracks started opening up, eventually turning into a chasm. In the end, we didn't make it.

I think about that quote a lot.  Things fell apart so quickly, but also slowly. I think we as a country may be falling apart. I think the next few months will tell the tale.

I don't know what comes next.

Roller-Coaster Days

 My mood roller-coasters. Today was a downward slope. I could tell by the number of irreverent and off-color jokes I kept making in my grad seminar. 

Why? Oh, I could do the [gestures at everything] move. But I guess a few immediate shots to my mood happened when I read one of my senators--deep, deep red--dismissing constituents' worries about federal workers as mere whining. So GOP representatives are getting booed and criticized in town hall meetings? The GOP solution: stop having town hall meetings. If you aren't a billionaire or a bully, they don't care to hear from you.

I had some hopes for some bipartisan action against the nightmarish budget proposal by the House Republicans, but those got dashed. Reclaim Congress's power of the purse from an overreaching executive branch? No thanks, says the GOP. Speaker Johnson seems to be curving his entire political will and power into one end: please Donald Trump.

And then there's RFK, our new top health official, cancelling the annual meeting to hash out next year's flu vaccine, dismissing the first measles death in the US in ten years, saying framing it not only as normal (it is not) but caused by the MMR vaccine itself (it is not). My other senator, supposedly the moderate-sane one, is a medical doctor. He approved Kennedy's appointment, promising that he'd watchdog Kennedy to make sure he didn't waver on promoting this tried-and-true lifesaving public health intervention. Where is he? 

And I saw the assembled presidential cabinet being hailed and addressed not by Trump but by Elon Musk, who still has no officially appointed role in DOGE but is still somehow the de facto president as Trump himself fades into senescence. I repeat my therapist's amazed observation: Trump defers to Musk in a way he rarely defers to anyone, save perhaps Putin. With Musk tweeting openly about wanting to go the way of El Salvador (getting rid of any judges that dare to challenge the executive branch, taking over the country by force), I wonder how much support he's winning from the armed forces.

I keep hearing from my lefty sources how even rank-and-file Trump voters seem increasingly restive about the mass firings and coming economic collapse. And the reaction from the administration only underlines how little the billionaire-bully krato-kakistocracy cares. But maybe I'm just stuck in my echo chamber? I do occasionally hear about non-AI-produced folk absolutely charmed by the wholesale destruction of our government. 

I wrote to my Representative--one of our state's few democrats--to complain about the GOP and thank him for his vote against the "big, beautiful budget." 

I suppose I'll call my senators' offices tomorrow, even though one at least has communicated as clearly as possible he does not care to hear from the likes of me.

It's . . . hard to keep going when the roller coaster is at the bottom of the hill.

Interesting Times

Yeesh, but this timeline keeps taking turns for the worse. And by "timeline" I mean "Trump administration." Trump just nominated right-wing podcaster Don Bongino as the deputy director of the FBI. Federal employees face an uncertain Monday after Musk's government-wide email demanding that they list five things they accomplished last week or lost their jobs ("failure to reply is taken as resignation" or some such). Ukraine looks to Europe, which now charts a path ahead with America as adversary rather than ally. The wave of universities suspending PhD applications keeps growing.

 "I would just like to live in less interesting times for a while," one of my friends on Discord said. 

I concur. 

Someone on Bluesky posted that it's like Musk has fixated on the "What do you do here actually" scene from Office Space--and taken it ask a true guide to what most government employees do. That is, they're lazy and/or incompetent wastes of space. Viewing the world through that lens, why not take a machete to the employee rolls? 

We keep seeing and hearing about good, hardworking, and often irreplaceable people losing jobs to the detriment of basic government function. But I don't predict Musk recognizing an error and correcting course. 

I do foresee public outcry growing to the degree that Trump finally throws him under the bus. It would constitute the latest in that signature Trump maneuver: threaten to create a crisis, back down from the threat, and then loudly crow about having solved the crisis. Musk's doing all of this via DOGE serves Trump well. He's coated in plausible deniability for if/when DOGE goes belly-up. (Though how it has avoided getting stalled or stopped after dozens of stories ripping apart its so-called "wall of receipts" about how much it's saved, I don't know.)

I wonder what the tipping point will be? What volume or quality of public outcry would be sufficient to either move the GOP majority into reclaiming Congress's power or--miracle of miracles--cause Trump to flip on Musk? So far, I don't sense the level of "here's how he's causing pain to the people you hate" propaganda necessary to overwhelm the "I voted for Trump, but now my daughter's out of a job!" stories bubbling on social media. But then--I'm not the audience for such propaganda. I'm sure there are lots of useful idiots happy to sing praise hymns to Trump/Musk's genius.

 But still. I know that the competence of totalitarian regimes ("they made the trains run on time") is largely a myth. But I'm still struck by the sheer chaotic amateurism that seems to define Trump 2 so far--amateurism spiked with pettiness, cruelty, and (a Trump constant) whining. To be sure, Trump 2 has already delivered crushing blows to vital sectors of government, research, outreach, and diplomacy. I don't know how our international reputation recovers. We'll be decades repairing the destruction he's wrought in just a month. But it's not hard to imagine a smarter, more coordinated coup rather than the clumsy toddler-smashing-the-tower-of-blocks-and-crying-that-it-falls performance we've witnessed so far.

What really remains to be seen, I guess, is whether a clumsy coup is still coup enough to topple us as a democracy. The stopgaps that we rely on to prevent such collapse--well, they seem muted or absent (with some strong exceptions). 

Interesting times continue, alas.

The "I Told You So" Impulse

 A friend sent me a video yesterday that, I admit, captures a recurrent theme in my thoughts about the awfulness:

 

 It's from the Lincoln Project's co-founder Rick Wilson. The title says it all: "If You Voted for Trump, You're Not Allowed to Act SURPRISED!" As the thumbnail says: "Welcome to the FIND OUT phase."

It's an angry cri du coeur directed at Trump voters. Like me, Wilson has already started to detect elements of backfire in Trump's wrecking-ball attack on federal institutions and norms. People are dying due to USAID monies being frozen. People are shocked and scared at their jobs being ripped away from them for no reason other than a group of early twentysomethings (and Elon Musk) decided (how? using what criteria?) that their job was not important. (Take, for example, the hastily retracted firings of nuclear weapons experts.) And people are livid upon finding out that Trump's long-stated brilliant plan of "tariffs on everything" is leading to--as everyone else predicted--higher prices.  

Fuck Around and Find Out currently wins out for "phrase of the year." Or, in its G-rated version: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. We're all finding out, winning stupid prizes.

And some I frickin' TOLD YOU SO is understandable. I certainly feel it. I've created many a mental monologue just like Wilson's here. 

Lefty-libs like me enjoy such righteous reversals. It's the stuff of The West Wing--people being put in their place with a well-crafted, well-delivered speech. Such speeches fueled that show, gave us a romanticized view of how disagreements resolve: someone is forcefully and irrefutably corrected. And oh my stars do I ever want some folk in this country to be forcefully and irrefutably corrected (for the record: corrected with words/results, not with, you know, actual force or violence).

But West Wing style putdowns. . . aren't how things work in real life. That TV show is a fiction. As I tell my students, even the most slice-of-life, naturalistic play is edited reality, life distilled into entertaining chunks. 

In real life, interpersonal arguments seldom resolve cleanly before a commercial break. They rarely conclude with one person getting a pristine last word and the other person simply surrendering. Usually there's hot words and high volumes, and both parties stalk away feeling like they're in the right.

Few people who voted for Trump are going to respond well to a rant like Wilson's. I mean, would you? It takes a special kind of person to be able to absorb an acid-soaked jeremiad like this with equanimity, let alone contrition. I am not that special kind of person, especially when the acid is coming from my political opponents. I don't trust their view of reality most of the time. Why would I trust their evaluation of who's to blame when the economy crashes, our global reputation tanks, and more people start suffering and dying?

I'm hardly the first to say it: we on the left would rather denounce a heretic than win a convert. Our recruitment sucks. We make it worse when we assume that "reality itself" or "the obviously bad results of Trump's policies" will do our recruiting for us. We also make it worse when we expect contrition, silence, or loud repentance from apostates of from the Church of Trump. People are attracted to Trump--just like people are attracted to the left--because he gives them a story that makes them feel seen, important, and cared about. I think Trump's story is a con, a promise offered in bad faith. But just because people might come to recognize Trump's story as repellent doesn't mean they'll find the left's story appealing. 

Dare I say, we need to be better evangelists--winsome witnesses to a better way. And part of that evangelism must involve suppressing or moderating our frustration with the bad results of the majority's choices. 

Make no mistake: I'm often furious at those who voted for Trump. I'm incensed at those who chose not to vote at all or who decided that both sides were equally bad. There's part of me that cheers along with Wilson. But not everything we feel is a good guide to how we should act. 

 Right now, we need more people who feel like we do about Trump's policies. We need them to make common cause with those of us who have been fed up for a long time. For that to happen, we long-term-anti-Trumpers have to swallow the urge to chide or lecture newcomers about why it's taken them as long as it has to come to our conclusions.

Satisfying as Wilson's rant is, then, I'm hopeful that we can generate some better evangelists--and soon. Because when the "find out" phase really hits, Trump et al. are going to spin some wicked lies about who's to blame (spoilers: it'll be the usual suspects: immigrants, people of color, queer/trans folk, university folk, women, etc.). We need a better--not just truer but more appealing--counter-narrative. 

Grim Hopefulness

 My blogging roller coaster continues. Yesterday found me down in the dumps. So many people support Trump and (I feared/fear) will continue to support him no matter what. Why? Because he's promising to hurt groups of people whose persecution makes other groups feel good-vindicated-superior. He won the election. Voters wanted this, wanted affirmatively to purchase comfort for themselves by harming others. 

That downer-doomer post reflected where I was yesterday.

Tonight I'm in a different place, for better or worse. A skeet from Hamilton Nolan: 

We are in a dangerous time but here are two important facts: 1. Trump's base of support is a minority. 2. That base is going to shrink as his agenda is enacted. The opposition is the majority. No moping allowed. www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/they-are-a...

[image or embed]

— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan.bsky.social) February 14, 2025 at 10:09 AM

His linked Substack post unpacks things.

 When you brush away the chaotic bombardment of daily outrages and look at the actual base of support for these policies, you will see that that base is a significant minority of the public, and that it is going to shrink as the impact of the policies begins to be felt in the real world. In other words: We, the opposition, are the majority. Take heart.

It's nothing brand new. I could have (and have) told myself many of the same things he says. But it's helpful to read someone else saying them. Nor is he sanguine about the length or cost of the fight ahead:

 Let me hasten to add here that the fact that we are the majority does not mean that we are automatically going to prevail. No. That is going to take a lot of work. It is going to take a lot of organizing, and it is going to take a lot of mass communications, and it is going to take the creation of political coalitions between groups that do not care for one another, and it is going to take level of bravery and resoluteness from the Democratic Party that they have not yet displayed. But it is important to recognize all of these tasks as things that exist within the realm of possibility, and not as some sort of far-fetched dream. How do regimes manage to impose minority rule on enormous populations? By getting the majority to give up. Don’t do that.

I've posted before on here about feeling guilty for burning so many words on here about "the awfulness." I gotta get myself off of a doomer-gloomer-outrage cycle. But my therapist this week countered that it was actually good and healthy for me to get such frustrations out via writing. Where else are they gonna go? 

I similarly took some heart from another skeet/Substack, The Alt Media by Adam Parkhomenko and Sam Youngman. A confetti storm of conflicting bits of advice floods left-progressive spaces right now. Don't be distracted. Don't believe Trump. Don't fall for the con. Don't spend all your fuel on outrage. Parkhomenko and Youngman counter much of this. Yes, they concede, the Trump victory and Trump administration are wearying. BUT:

We’re not going to just throw up our hands and say oh well, it sucks that we’re so ignorant and misinformed that we elected someone who hates us and wants to hurt us. If anything, it makes us madder and makes us want to fight harder. Because the alternative is to decide which parts of Trumpism we’re ok with. And the answer is none. Not one goddamn bit of it. It is all evil. It is all corrupt. It is all anti-American. 

and

 Democrats can’t keep sending out fundraising text messages while believing that nothing matters and resistance is futile. It’s demoralizing. It’s self-defeating. It’s a total victory for Trump, and it will lead to the total collapse of our party.

and

It also means fighting every fight. We don’t have time to sit around with our thumbs up our asses trying to decide which battles will help us win elections. The answer is none of them. While so many people have struggled to learn the lessons of the 2024 election, the one that we learned is that right now the American people don’t give a damn about policies that help them. They want theater, drama, heroes and villains. They want pro wrestling, and we keep sending debate club champions to get body-slammed. It’s embarrassing.

It is past time for our party to change to a fighting posture. We can swing at every pitch. We can fight every battle. We can overreact to everything Trump and Musk are doing. We have nothing left to lose. Let’s act like it.

 "Fighting every fight"--now, on its face that seems to flout the wisdom of long-term battles, self-preservation, putting your mask on before helping others, etc. Maybe. But for me--right now--this quote acts a bit like my therapist's advice: it's OK--even good--to be angry at lots of things and to say as much. I'm not someone who enjoys expressing anger. I harbor a deep well of doubt about the righteousness of my own anger--about most anything--and an even deeper skepticism that my expressing anger ever accomplishes anything good. I tend to be very selective in what and how I complain (at least in official capacities). I don't think I have to abandon necessary lessons in taking breaks and self-care to embrace a bit more of a right to express impatience and outrage. 

The long-term veterans/heroines/martyrs of the last few centuries' grandest moral revolutions all seem to have developed a discipline of grim hopefulness at once rich, grounded, and empty. I mean "empty" in a kind of Buddhist sense of letting go of the need for immediate emotional gratification. It's similar to Vaclav Havel's notion of hope as opposed to optimism. I paraphrase: optimism believing that what you're doing will win the day; hope is doing what you're doing not because you think it will win but because it is the right thing to do. Those who realize (or helped to realize) advances in justice and equality played a long game, where patience was as necessary as passion. A commenter to Hamilton's Substack quoted at length from the leftist journalist I.F. Stone:

The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing — for the sheer fun and joy of it — to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.

I've not yet been able to confirm the provenance of that quote. It may be one of those "attributed to" sayings. But it captures that sense of dogged, meaningful moral action against tyranny. And yes--I know and will delve into how many on the other side think the same thing about their causes. Yes, yes. But for right now, I needed to hear this bit of unromaticized hope.

 

 

It's What the People Want

Ah, so hopeful for a second yesterday. And then today. A step outside of my usual Bluesky-colored glass house to folks at RedState, Fox, National Review, Federalist--and their comment threads (where available)--and I see the world through their lenses. DOGE is doing great. Trump and Musk are real men who only get tougher the more hysterical Dems shriek. Trump's approval rating is higher than his disapproval rating (true). An Axios focus group with Arizona swing voters suggests most people want more and more of what Musk/Trump are doing. 

Meanwhile, the CDC has lost its "disease detective" taskforce, the folk who in those realistic pandemic movies swoop in to do first-level assessments. RFK has been affirmed as HHS Secretary and has--as expected--set his sights on the last 150 years of germ theory. Bird flu is spreading still. Tuberculosis cases have spread from Kansas to Ohio even as USAID funding to tuberculosis treatments worldwide have been cut off. 

And most people love it.

A problem with me, and with lots of left-leaning folk, is that it's hard for me to get past what seems like plain evidence of Trump's corruption, incompetence, deceptiveness, ignorance, and authoritarianism. Again, the most bare-bones rendering of even one day's worth of his administration's actions reads like a pilot episode of It Can't Happen Here. I've been so convinced of the plain illegality of his executive orders and the manifest amorality of his cronyism (witness prosecutor resignations in response to dropping charges on NYC mayor Eric Adams) that it's still hard for me to think that anyone can spin these as positives. 

Yet people--a plurality, at least--do. 

Back in the Bluesky bubble, the folk I follow are (1) bitterly blaming Dems for not doing anything effective to stop Trump legislatively or win support electorally and/or (2) declaring this round fully lost and thinking that maybe, just maybe, we might be able to win enough to start the decades-long task of repairing what Trump has already shattered. From that perspective, the asteroid has already hit, and we're in the obliteration wave, waiting to see who survives. The only useful conversation now concerns post-apocalyptic rebuilding strategies. The lively debate resulting from that focuses on whether such winning or repair is even possible at this point. 

Right at this moment? I'm not hopeful. 

I can't help but expect that the massive and indiscriminate (and utterly corrupt/Musk-serving) cuts and modifications to federal agencies will result in several preventable disasters--a recession, a pandemic, the collapse of trustworthy air travel, etc. Yesterday I had some hope that these multiple failures would turn popular opinion against Trump, blemishing the image of him (and maybe Musk) as top-notch organizers and leaders. 

Now I think it'll just make the angry-reactionary part of the electorate (the ones who brought Trump into power) even angrier and more reactionary. Trump, like most successful authoritarian leaders, has proven adept at redirecting such anger at his ever-growing list of enemies. I expect a lot of violence against, well, anyone who isn't white cis-het Christian male.

And even if there isn't violence, even if the system somehow limps along, I no longer expect Trump to lose support. I no longer expect Trumpism to die with the man himself. It's just too popular, its appeal too enduring. 

I'll get to some better place on this. But for right now...bleah. 

A Thousand Stooges Syndrome

 There's an episode of The Simpsons (season 11, episode 12) where the evil, decrepit Mr. Burns goes to the Mayo Clinic. After a montage of examinations (including Mr. Burns getting stuck in the gears of an MRI machine), the doctor gives Burns the bad news: he's got everything. Every disease. 

"You mean I have pneumonia?" asks Burns.

"Yes," the doctor answers.

"Juvenile diabetes?"

"Yes."

"Hysterical pregnancy?"

"A-a little bit, yes."

But this isn't as bad as it sounds, the doctor reassures him. To explain, he takes out a tiny model doorway and a pile of little fuzzy toys of different colors. The fuzzies, he says, represent different diseases. The door represents Mr. Burns's body. They all try to cram in at once--the doctor grabs a handful and stuffs them into the doorway--but they get stuck. 

 

"We call it 'Three Stooges Syndrome,'" the doctor says, punctuating the explanation with sound effects and catchphrases from Larry, Curly, and Moe. 

Mr. Burns is enraptured. "So what you're saying," he concludes, "is I'm indestructible?"

 "Oh, no, no," the doctor counters. "Why, even a slight breeze--" 

"Indestructible," Burns interrupts, savoring the word.

This image crops up whenever I read the daily news about the latest mix of cruel, craven, and confused moves by the Trump (Trump/Musk) administration. They're doing so much, all at once, that's so objectionable on so many levels simultaneously. 

I get that's the aim--flood the zone and all that. But I'm wondering--hoping, at this point--that we might start to see some backfire here. Most of Trump's big-news executive orders (e.g., rescinding birthright citizenship, cutting funding for national agencies, firing independent councils, granting DOGE free rein and zero independent oversight) have been balked by court orders. Even some GOP senators (not nearly enough!) are now murmuring that Trump needs to back down and respect the rule of law. But instead he just keeps producing more and more toxic/unlawful/unenforceable executive orders.

Trump I was deft at deflecting blame. Since he faced a divided Congress, he was often able to foist responsibility for his administration's blunders onto the opposing party.

But right now Trump's wackadoodle plans (and/or their confusing and disastrous) are crowding the doorway of media attention. It's a thousand stooges syndrome--110% Trump craziness, all the time. And there just isn't a lot there that's positive. Even as so many of his moves appeal to the most fanatical parts of his base, their sweeping nature (and clumsy execution) impacts even his own supporters. I saw a clip of some farmers, for instance--Trump voters all--griping about how his tariffs-on-everything policy was making their lives worse. (I could wonder how these gentlemen could have been surprised by Trump's move; he was crystal clear that he was going to step boldly onto that rake.)

And right now, there's no other moves on offer that Trump could lift up as blameworthy. Now, it may be that he and the Fox/rightwing mediasphere can frame his crusade against the judiciary--the "activist judges" who dare to check his executive overreach--as a righteous battle by an embattled David (Trump, in his mind) against a corrupt Goliath. But I'm not seeing that catch on. 

Trump has a lot of trouble sharing a spotlight. He wants to be seen stuffing all those executive orders into the public consciousness, moving fast and breaking things, making strong (stupid, alienating, utterly unwise) gestures. I think--I hope--it might be harder for him to avoid the "find out" part of such F-ing around. 

He thinks he's indestructible. I'm hopeful such hubris will prove vulnerable to a slight breeze soon.

Panicky Rants about The Awfulness

Yikes. I missed yesterday's post.

It was a day in which I had already done quite a bit of writing work, partly for class and partly for a statement of purpose to a seminary. Sometimes I have days where it feels like I've written myself out already.

It was a busy day today as well, and I feel a similar sort of written-out-ness.

Alternately, I'm trying to avoid writing more about The Awfulness, which somehow continues to get more Awful. I'm losing the thread of whether the BlueSkySphere of panic/outrage has completely skewed my perspective--or whether things really are just getting dire.

I'm afraid it's the latter, but then that's what I'd think in the BlueSkySphere, no? 

And yet--even planning for recruitment to our grad program has become fraught. With NIH budgeting slashed/curtailed/stuck, our graduate teaching assistantship lines are  . . . in limbo? My chair suggested we just try to get everyone we can this year, as soon as possible, before we have all lines revoked. 

But then, would that even work? Lots of people at (or in projects dependent upon) USAID are right now out of jobs. A whole raft of already-funded projects across multiple agencies find themselves under re-review to make sure their proposals and reports do not contain the dreaded DEI verboten words.  I'm worried about us accepting students--particularly foreign nationals--only to find halfway through the summer that we can't fund them as promised. That would be a nightmare. 

Last I checked, it seems the Trump administration has chosen simply to ignore court orders to restore funding or refrain from cutting/curtailing funds. We do in fact seem to be heading into a Constitutional crisis. What Trump is trying is flatly illegal. What judges have ruled is plainly legitimate. But we're about to find out what happens if Trump and his cronies simply tell the courts to go pound sand. "Obey the terms of my restraining order? I'd prefer not to!" 

Who's going to stop him? Republicans in Congress so far seem to have sold their ethics in the name of avoiding Trumpian wrath. I have yet to see a Trump idea so utterly beyond the pale that Mike Johnson or other GOP lawmakers won't crawl over each other to get in front of a camera and declare how commonsensical and good this plan to, I don't know, turn Gaza into a resort development scheme (for Trump--not for Gazans, who will be forever forbidden from returning to their home).

Who's going to stop him? The Supreme Court has at least two members seemingly dedicated to entertaining and promoting maximalist views of executive power. The Overton Window is so far to the right currently that I'm not sure the plain text of the Constitution fits into it any more.

Who's going to stop him? The White House "adults in the room" have been purged, the guardrail structures in government tranquilized or euthanized. Elon Musk and his cadre of twentysomething hacker-programmers are doing heaven-knows-what to every database and digital system they can get their hands on. (As the viral quip goes: if he was looking for fraud, why bring in programmers instead of accountants?)

And there we are: another panicky rant about The Awfulness. 

I gotta do something else tomorrow.

Squealing and Wackadoodle Fixations

 I've got to write about something other than The Awfulness, but it's tough. Trump's superpower consists of the gravitational pull on attention, like a train derailment that's gained somehow gained sentience. You just can't look away. 

Villainous schemes to revile and hurt our most vulnerable populations I expected. But Trump accompanies these aims with such weirdness. Take over Canada! Rename the Gulf of Mexico! And now Become chairman of the Kennedy Center! He declared himself so earlier today, terminating all board members.

Does he . . . does he want to do this because the Center has honored comedians who've made fun of him in the past? I've heard--and cannot discount--the notion that Trump began aiming for the presidency in earnest way back at an Obama Press Dinner where the then-President made a joke at Trump's expense. 

But who knows? 

It seems Elon Musk also sets his own evil-scheme victims on the basis of his mercurial mood: USAID! NPR/PBS! The Department of Education! None of these, mind, make up nearly as significant a portion of overall federal spending as, say, defense, social security, or medicare. But each has in some random way landed on Musk's personal radar of pique. 

Like Trump, it seems Musk has certain idiosyncratic but reliable direct lines into his brain from certain sources--a bro podcaster, an alt-right pseudo-intellectual, his own brittle sense of cishet masculinity. 

And it seems that Musk and Trump are, at least for now, direct lines into each other's brains, circulating crackpot focus zones into collective idées fixes. That's my nearest explanation for Trump's newfound focus on the "plight" of white Afrikaners in South Africa, horribly oppressed by, well, the non-white people who spent decades living under apartheid oppression. 

Both also seem to share that juvenile squeal that happens when entitled preteen boys get stymied. Wired has over the past weeks exposed some of the otherwise anonymous (and unvetted, unauthorized, complete unknown) twenty-somethings serving as his advance DOGE guard. One of these the magazine exposed as having made rancidly racist posts, which quickly got him let go. Musk--and now Trump and J.D. Vance--are now calling (squealing) for him to be let back. Can't we have a little grace? tweeted Vance. 

Jon Favreau replied, wondering whether he had missed when the 26-year-old had apologized for or recanted the tweets he made when he was 25. 

As more and more of the Musk/Trump executive actions get delayed and blunted by courts and unions, we can expect more squealing, I bet. Squealing--spiced with some more wackadoodle fixations.

Waiting Til Breakdowns

 So many people are just plain stressed out right now. There's trans folk who have lost access to health care or even basic human regard. There's immigrants--legal and otherwise--who find themselves left out in the cold (at best) or hunted down by ICE (at worst). There are federal workers whose jobs have now become precarious based on the whims of unaccountable billionaires and their teen/twentysomething cronies. There are USAID employees out of work as well as USAID beneficiaries cut off from HIV meds and other vital care. Researchers dependent upon NSF funding suddenly face an uncertain future. Federal workers across dozens of agencies now have to scour their materials to delete references to any of a hundred newly forbidden words.

And then there's a whole lot of other people who just shrug and wonder why so many people let themselves get worked up over politics. 

I was wondering to my sister what might have to happen to get them to wake up and realize the magnitude of haphazard, blitzkrieg changes sweeping federal government. What trickle-down effects would possibly move them from either pox-on-both-houses apathy or full-throated MAGA support?

I read that Trump's bizarre obsession with emptying Gaza of Palestinians and claiming it for US-own development--ethnic cleansing on a massive scale--got some bewildered pushback on Twitter at least. Perhaps if he starts a war? 

No one seems to have noticed his inability to end the Ukraine war in a single day, with a single phone call. Courts seem to be stopping many of his most objectionable executive orders from happening. Musk may find himself the target of multiple class-action lawsuits soon.

But still, so much damage is being done. I confess to some morbid curiosity about how exactly Trump will spin the massive blowback of his massive (and so often clumsy, thoughtless, and unworkable) edicts. But more than that I'm just worried about all the lives he's ruining so casually. 

Our church's social justice team met. We dithered. What can we do? We're trying to define a lane, areas of local help and impact. But things are moving so quickly it's hard to tell even whom in our church is being affected. 

Surely this momentum can't continue like this for much longer. There's so much energy being burned by the administration right now. Elon's attention, I suspect, is finite. Trump's willingness to share the spotlight with him certainly is. Already I hear reports of Musk's young men screaming at White House officials.

How long before even some on the GOP Congress start throwing up their hands? Trump I's administration turned into a revolving door as even the most loyal loyalists either flamed out or got fed up or failed to meet Trump's idiosyncratic preferences.

Surely surely surely. We'll see.

Resisting the Urge to Retreat

 I'm pausing my Monday class preparations/administrative tasks in order to write a message to my senators and representatives. I imagine I'll be doing a lot of that for the foreseeable future. 

Today's ask is for some kind of oversight/check on Elon Musk and his (unelected, unaccountable, non-transparent) "DOGE" operation, which appears to be taking over key avenues of funding, appropriation, and HR in the federal government.

Dear [person]--

I write to express my alarm about the actions of Elon Musk's "DOGE" initiative. Access to sensitive personnel and administrative data and communication channels has traditionally been restricted to people who have been thoroughly vetted, regularly reviewed, and transparently accountable. I see no such safeguards or oversight for DOGE thus far.

Think how the GOP would feel if the situation were reversed. What if a Democratic president brought in a team of billionaire "experts" (who also happen to be some of the president's biggest funders) and their staff to restructure government to the extent we've seen DOGE attempting? What if that president granted this team free reign to access, take over, and reshape huge swathes of government--all without the slightest hint of security clearance, transparent mission parameters, or congressional accountability? What if any employee objecting to granting access/authority to such unknowns were summarily dismissed? Surely the floor of both houses overflow with denunciations, protective legislation, and investigative committees.

A decade ago, former Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton came under heavy fire--rightfully so--for using a private email server. How are DOGE's actions thus far not orders of magnitude more reckless and foolhardy?

Musk and his associates are accustomed to private enterprises in which they are unquestioned bosses. They get to move fast and break things at their whim--in their own companies. But in the USA, we elect representatives to a government that divides the power of the sword and the strings of the purse between different branches. It is the job of the legislative branch to act as a check on executive actions. 

In that spirit, then, I ask that you assert such oversight over DOGE. No one elected Musk. No Congressional body approved his team's operational protocol and limitations. And as far as I can tell, no Congressional committee has asserted its right to review, question, or overrule his decisions. 

This is unacceptable. Musk and DOGE must make themselves open to review, approval, modification, and challenge by Congress and the people that body represents. I ask you to act as the mechanism for that check.

Thank you,

[my name]

I don't expect this to have any immediate effect beyond putting me on the fundraising mailing lists (and perhaps other kinds of lists) for my overwhelmingly MAGA-red representatives. I'm doing this mainly for me, to force myself into some kind of action when my impulse is to curl up into a despair-ball.

That'll have to be enough for today.

Moving Fast and Breaking Everything

 I'll say this for the Trump II Administration: they're living up to their promise to do a lot of things all at once. 

Trump declared today that his long-rumored Tariffs Against Everyone (Canada, Mexico, China) start tomorrow. Folk on  excitable (but not necessarily wrong) left websites. Musk has apparently taken over HR servers at the Office of Personnel Management, reinforcing "go on your dream vacation by resigning now" emails to government employees. Federal websites are being purged of information about HIV, trans care, climate change, and other Trump-no-like-them topics. Trump is doubling down--without a shred of proof or justification--on the notion that DEI is to blame for the air disaster on Wednesday night. NSF grant processes still seem frozen. The CDC is prevented from communicating about HIV/AIDS, and CDC employees were frantically archiving data from its webpages before they're purged. We seem on the brink of voting in anti-vax, anti-medical-research Robert F. Kennedy as HSS Secretary (threatening iffy GOP Senators like Bill Cassidy if they don't confirm him). The DOJ fired dozens of employees involved in prior Trump-focused investigations, and the FBI is readying a purge of all FBI folk involved in investigating Trump's multiple crimes. The ICE raids continue, now with talk of deporting those arrested to Guantanamo.

I'm not even mentioning everything. Not two weeks in, and Trump shoves down our collective throats a multiple-constitutional-crises-at-once shot with a ruin-the-economy-as-quickly-as-possible chaser.

My guess is that they're betting on a combination of reliable propaganda dissembling (from Fox News et al.) and just plain exhaustion to make this all seem normal. But I have trouble seeing how, for example, driving out 70% of federal workers will do anything but cause basic governmental collapse. Nothing will work. Trump will have broken the government. 

I get that's what some of his supporters want--or at least what many of them think they want. The right since Reagan at least has ginned up deep hatred of government while at the same time fomenting ignorance about just what the government is and what it does. Will people like it when (for example) their tax returns take longer to come in right as prices are skyrocketing, interstates degrade, air traffic control disappears, medicare and social security admin grinds to a halt, etc., etc.?

The hopes I see on the left right now involve faith in the millions of brave/industrious government workers doing . . . things?  . . . to preserve vital pieces of government informational infrastructure, like scientists storing seeds underground to replant after the apocalypse passes. There's some thought, also, that swift legal challenges can freeze or slow a lot of Trump's plans. And then there's the grim, leopards-eating-faces schadenfreude hope vested in the inevitable "find out" phase that's coming (perhaps as early as next week!) after all this f-ing around. 

Surely, this line of hopeful thinking goes, Trump won't be able to deflect blame for the immediate and painful consequences of choices made by his move-fast-and-break-everything crew. Surely popular backlash will come for him. The cost of doing so many things all at once--loudly and publicly--is that you burn away any scrap of plausible deniability. You can't claim that it's not your fault when you boasted about doing all the things.

Surely.

I don't know. As long as Trump can convince his base that he's doing this most to the groups that deserve it (marginalized folk, brown folk, immigrants, queer folk, poor folk), I think his base will swallow it. As long as the billionaires he's surrounded himself with perceive continued profit for themselves, I think his funders will support it. As long as the politicians he's wrapped around his fingers see their careers as reliant on him, I think they'll allow it.

And schadenfreude? I don't anticipate much of that. The leopards dine on everyone's faces, not just those of the ones who voted them into power. Hard to say "I told you so" when you're shrieking through the jagged hole where your lips used to be.

Rough times ahead.

Every Day a Little (More) Death

 On Bluesky, someone skeeted that they had forgotten how it felt to wake up to awful news about our President every day. 

These first seven days have offered a crash course refresher in the worst way. The elaborate, performative cruelty of ICE raids and ICE arrest quotas already sullies our soul. But the ways Trump's government seems to be following the Project 2025 philosophy of federal nihilism--just stop doing everything--boggles the mind (to use a phrase from a Reagan-appointed judge swatting down Trump's attempt to overturn the 14th Amendment).

Asylum cases frozen. People who have "waited in line" to immigrate "the right way" having doors suddenly slammed in their faces. (This on top of the fact that no "line" exists, just a Sisyphean ordeal of endless paperwork and assessments and wait times and deadlines). National Science Foundation review processes frozen--for a week? for all time? The CIA lurching back to the mostly unpopular-with-experts, mostly not-as-well-supported theory that COVID came from a lab leak--not because the evidence changed but because their conspiracy-minded director changed. Hegseth the administratively unqualified and shockingly immoral confirmed as Secretary of Defense on a 50-50 vote with Vance breaking the tie.

A friend of mine who works for Catholic Charities ESL program had tears in her eyes as she related how terrified and confused her clients were as sources of assistance suddenly dried up overnight. Horror stories of victims and raids will fill timelines for weeks to come before Trump loses interest, declares victory, and moves on to some other shiny object.

Trump seems to be living out the Moon Knight meme where he throws oddly shaped blades, bellowing "Random bullshit go!" The list grows larger and more outrageous every day: Shipping ICE victims to foreign countries in shackles and military jets. Colombia's president objects, Trump proposes outrageous tariffs, they work out a deal (more humane travel), and Trump declares victory for his super-smart tough-guy moves. Installing billionaires and rewarding pretty much anyone else who gave him money with lucrative positions of power (all while claiming to be an enemy of the elites). Gutting DEI programs, terrorizing trans people, firing (illegally) inspectors general, instituting loyalty tests and purges.

And of course there's the idee fixe du jour of (somehow?) acquiring Canada and Greenland. It's another of those "can't tell if strategy or demented" moments. No one seems clear what playing hardball (i.e., issuing crude threats) to friendly nations would gain for the US aside from extremely painful trade wars. 

Bird flu is making eggs even more expensive and difficult to buy. Tuberculosis seems to be spreading in Kansas City--but no one seems too alarmed thanks to the Trump administration's moratorium on health messaging from key federal agencies. 

That Trump and his crew throw a ton of chaff into the air, "flooding the zone" with bullshit, to drain attention away from their really alarming agenda items is not new. But this time there's the sense that a there's less chaff. They're flooding the zone not with distractions but with the deep, vast sweep of their actual agenda. 

I get that all this is likely to cause so much pain that the 2026 midterms might wipe out Republican majorities. But I fear that the damage to institutional trust and to previously reliable Overton Window sensibilities will be impossible to repair.

I have trouble imagining a future. 

Yeah yeah, I know: discipline of hope, our despair is their victory, apathy and cynicism and exhaustion and surrender are the intentional results of all the crap. But, man: it's week one of four long years. 

I have trouble imagining a future.