Today’s Raspberry Patch post exhibits a looser structure than its Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle predecessors and carries a somewhat lighter tone—at least to start off with and intermittently thereafter. The most recent essays in the post-January 20 Age of Spectacle series have been pretty intense and radical, in the strict sense of digging down to core meanings and causal sources. Specks of sardonic humor aside, they have not been very entertaining. Some friends have told me they could not make it through some of the essays because they are so unsettling. So today I will gear back….a bit.
My recent approach has been deliberate: I’ve sought to make vivid how deeply serious the crisis touched off by the November 5 election really is. I’ve been trying to avoid any further normalization of what is dramatically abnormal by any reasonable measure of American history, despite sharing some of the new Administration’s policy goals—as I stressed in the March 21 post—just as I regretted such foolishness during the first Trump term and used my editorship of The American Interest in service to that end, until my editorship ended in October 2018. Then as now the danger was less visible in policy terms than in body-politic language terms. One could, for example, share with the MAGA crowd dismay over the excessive number of illegal immigrants in the country, making a mockery of the rule of law and depressing wages for less well off American citizens, but recoil at the brutalist bigotry, outright hatred, and sadistic xenophobia that has shrouded the MAGA mentality on this issue.
Normalizing that mentality, I thought then and still think now, is the road to perdition for the American constitutional order, certainly for the sensibilities of liberalism, but for the rule of law and for democracy itself, as well. To summarize that first-term history, as I saw it, in a single sentence: When Andrew Sullivan wrote six months before the 2016 election that “America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny” in New York Magazine he was boldly right (and I said so), and when Morris P. Fiorino responded with “Is America Ripe for Tyranny?” in the Hoover Institute Digest on January 23, 2018, he was complacently wrong (and I said so). If this is not clear now it will be some time before the 2026 midterms, of which more below.
And now for some scintillating but light-hearted housekeeping notes. This past Friday’s Raspberry Patch post, that of March 28, was a bit rushed in production and so bore more than the usual number of typos and fractured phraseologies--sorry. (As President George H.W. Bush once complained about some exuberant pro-Israel lobbying at the time. “Hey, I’m just one guy down here.”) Other people may be perfect in this regard but I am a terrible, Columbus method (discover-it-and-land-on-it) typist, a mediocre speller, and a highly unreliable proofreader, especially of my own writing. The post’s message got through anyway judging by the response, and the crud has been repaired so that the archival text now represents that essay at its best. Will posterity perhaps one day rummaging through that archive care? Well, one never knows about posterity for, as Algonquin Roundtable witticist extraordinaire Heywood Broun once famously wrote: “Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anybody else.”
The corrected version of March 28’s “Firehose Authoritarianism and Gnostic MAGA: Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle No. 5” also now contains an update as well as crud abatement, and rather then send readers to the archive to view it, for the sake of convenience I’m repeating it here.
We read last week about the cascade of capitulations by civil society bulwarks like the media, the universities, and the legal profession to the blandishments, blackmails, and intimidations of the Trump 2.0 Administration. We spoke of balls dropping and backbones quietly shattering, remember? In regard to the legal profession we read of the decision of Brad Karp, the head of the large law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rivkin, Wharton and Garrison LLP, to donate $40 million worth of legal time to promote some of Trump’s favorite causes (which turn out to be largely anyone and any organization that hates and wants to expunge anything smacking of DEI from the known universe). For that information we cited a post by Charlie Sykes, late of The Bulwark.
In the corrected/updated version of the essay now in the archive we have added this: “This was not a one-off: A few days later the Manhattan-based Milbank law firm agreed to a deal that will provide $100 million in pro bono legal services to causes supported by Trump. This follows similar deals negotiated by Willkie Farr & Gallagher, and by Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & From.” Just so you know, the beat, the beating, and the bleating goes on. So many expensive-suit pants knees are touching dirt these days it’s a wonder the planet doesn’t squeal out loud from the discomfort of all those new indentations.
Why All the Knee-bending?
So, to get serious for a moment: Why all the knee-bending? Why the complacency, the complicity, the rolling over and playing dead in American civil society before the Trump 2.0 demolition derby?
Well, there is the popular tactical fantasy, articulated for example by James Carville, that the incompetence, unpopularity, and internal divisions of the Trump 2.0 Administration will cause it to self-destruct in relatively short order. Democrats should therefore busily align themselves with popular policy positions according to the polls, and take special care not to do anything blameworthy in the face of the anticipated unpleasantries, and the break-ups and breakdowns, to come.
This is worse than wrong; it is so superficial and lazily misguided that it counts as delusional. Here is the actual reason for the yawning complacency we’ve lately been witness to, for which we again take trusty refuge in The Age of Spectacle argument.
If any narrative has not been turned into a fictoidal screen-borne pulse-raiser, it isn’t surreal enough to motivate collective action, or even to get much attention, in a demos that now in its political plurality (if not yet majority) sees politics as a form of bloodsport entertainment. The near disappearance of functional moral reasoning, the enthronement of the non-judgmental in other words, on the altar of materialist cost-benefit analysis is one thing, and it is bad enough. But more important is the joining together of left-to-right-moving lowest-common-denominator postmodernism—as in, there are no facts, no truths, no linear timelines, all is bio-essentially subjectivist in the wow-now, all is therefore non-intersubjectively communicable in conceptual language--with the sensory-induced tip-of-the-brain surrealism abetted by screens, at the expense of deep literacy, that has ripped a gaping hole in the perception of reality itself.
A plain majority of Americans today display an eerily attenuated grasp of what is real if it moves beyond the concrete into the conceptual, where, alas, liberal democratic political culture is inherently nested. A different kind of reality registers, however, in ethereal otherworldly mythic brain spaces, for thanks to the magic carpet of the new orality, the sub-deep-literate readily glom onto conspiracies and other forms of simpleminded escapisms. In their heads this now politically regnant plurality thinks they’re just watching a show, and they “know” it’s not serious. People in the mesmerizing clutches of spectacalized, cyber-delivered sensory flows, their brainwaves yanked down into low alpha and theta, have lost track of the meaning of the word serious. When the meaning of that word has been relativized to the extent it has been now, it is much too easy to assume that no matter how bad things seem to get “out there,” someone will hit the re-set button eventually, and there will be a new show, a new game, a new something to evoke yet another bout of dopamine masturbation. (Sorry, but that’s what it is.) It won’t be serious either.
After all, all the so-called news a plain majority of supposedly adult Americans expose themselves to these days comes to them on the identical machine media—two-dimensional, consciousness-counterfeiting screens of one size or another—that deliver them their entertainment fare. Who, then, at this advanced and still advancing stage in the American culture of spectacle entertainment, persists in thinking that it is improbable that the “news” (a.k.a. infotainment) will not blur into the fictive for those who do not deep read? And even from time to time, I dare say, for some who occasionally do deep read.
This is We the People-qua-spectocracy doing, well, doing what it does. Politics as bloodsport, a framing highly useful for and convivial to our clickbait broadcast media, is entertaining, even riveting. It’s not exactly like watching a zombie horror movie, but close enough, as we like to say, for government work. Since political life to so many self-brain-addled Americans today is just a movie, it follows that Trump’s high “attention economy” ratings are vastly more important than his plunging favorability marks. It’s the former that matter in the surrealist reality-TV mindset, not the latter. We as a culture have become fine with entertaining villains, and even with the merely unlikeable. You know, Vader, Voldemort, Vance….it’s all pretty much the same to a lot of people these days.
Evidence perhaps: One former IC professional, Michael B. Sellers writing in his Deeper Look Substack on March 27, estimated that when the Administration tried to flood the zone with shit last month in response to the Signalgate scandal—failing embarrassingly, one would think, to get its post-truth multiple stories straight in the process—the result nevertheless was that, according to reliable spot-polling, 30-40 percent of the adult population believed the Administration’s version of the story. Another 30-40 percent were too confused to sort it out, or didn’t bother to try because it was too technical a task to be entertaining. Only about 20 percent knew what had actually happened. I would bet the whole pot that the first 30-40 percent are nearly all of them sub-deep-literate, that the 20 percent are at most all the deep readers left among We the People, and that the middle 30-40 percent stratify somewhere in between.
Signalgate Obiter Dicta
Now, with all that in mind and keeping to the Signalgate theme, and speaking earlier of the archival, note a Raspberry Patch update that has not been inserted into last week’s essay (lest it burst through the Substack posting length limits). It concerns an April 2 essay in Politico that revealingly—sort of, see below—updated the scandal.
Dasha Burns’s “Waltz’s team set up at least 20 Signal group chats for crises across the world” copped a scoop by reporting a much wider use of Signal then was heretofore known. This revelation fits like a glove, as we say, with the Trump 2.0 Administration’s unprecedented (and outrageous) anti-democratic government-as-a-business mentality that we limned in some detail last week. How so? Let me answer by revealing bit more context than Ms. Burns did, or probably could have done.
For those who may be unaware, the U.S. Government has a system for enabling U.S. national security officials, sometimes also with officials of some allied nations, pretty much wherever they may be, to convene by secure video conferencing technology. Such means of teleconferencing is referred to in government as having a SVTC—pronounced “sivits”—meeting, meaning a Secure Video-Teleconferencing system meeting. So since this system has existed for years and was regularly used during the first Trump Administration, why has the second Trump Administration decided to use not just one Signal chat set-up, but more than twenty of them, in which sensitive information has been discussed, instead of an technically superior system that already exists in government?
According to one Administration official unnamed in the Burns article, a lot of people entered the Administration from the campaign and simply carried over from using Signal during the campaign into their government positions. He or she, whoever he or she may be, made it sound like a mere matter of convenience, perhaps punctuated by groupthink moving in a hurry. This is misleading, perhaps deliberately so. If a new government official either does not have or cannot get a security clearance, or if their names are not even submitted to the proper offices for that purpose, they may not use the SVTC system. If they try, all hell breaks loose in some offices the names of which I would rather not mention. Since Trump considers the IC as a whole part of the “deep state”—he just last evening fired the head of NSA and Cyber Command, General Timothy Haugh (USAF, Four-Star)—and since it is the IC that performs the security checks necessary to get a clearance,….do I really need to finish this sentence?
But more than that, the SVTC system is set up as per the law not just to facilitate but also to record and archive discussions of sensitive issues, whether classified information is used or not. This accords with standard USG classification protocols. For example, in the State Department some documents are marked SBU, which stands for “sensitive but unclassified.” What does that mean? It means that while no classified information is in any document so stamped, the information could nevertheless prove embarrassing or inconvenient to named or presumable sources mentioned in it. That is just one way among several that a discussion can be sensitive without being secret by dint of discussing classified information.
The archival function of the SVTC system is, above all, why Trump and his subordinates shun it: Like corporate heads and management types who habitually slither up to and sometimes beyond the letter of the law to gain advantage, they don’t want anyone to know what they discuss, either as it is happening or after-the-fact. In the business world that includes shareholders and competitors as well as law enforcement and tax authorities. If government is conceived as a for-profit business, just substitute citizens for shareholders and the rest of the sentence can stay as is and remain fully accurate.
In other words, the Trump 2.0 Administration would rather repeatedly run significant risks of leaking sensitive information to other states’ security services than have it archived in places where American citizens and officials may sooner or later acquire legally approved access to it. What does that tell you about the true motives and modi operandi of these uber-carpetbagging anarcho-libertarian “ businessmen,” their orange head “don” in particular?
Drink a highball and be jolly, here's a toast to dear old Penn!
Speaking of whom, we might take this opportunity to clear up a little internet clutter concerning an old story.
Back in 2017, during the first several months of Trump’s first presidential term, the new President boasted from time to time about the stellar academic credentials that had nurtured his self-described “big brain.” Some journalists smelled a foul ball—a foul something, anyway—and began nosing around. From that smell test came an iconic quotation from one of Trump’s professors at Penn, a prof named William T. Kelley who had literally written the (text)book on marketing at the time. According to Frank DiPrima, who knew Kelley as a friend for 47 years, Kelley told him that “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddam student I ever had” in 31 years of teaching.[1]
Other depictions of Trump as a transfer to Wharton undergrad from Fordham corroborated that he rarely showed up for class, was unprepared when he did, and yet displayed a know-it-all arrogance when he spoke. (You’re shocked to learn this, I know.) It then came to light that Trump only got into Penn as a Wharton undergrad because his uncle Fred knew someone in the admissions office, a James Nolan, who latter expressed regret over his friendly string-pulling. (Yes, you’re still quite shocked, clearly.)
Since 2017 this tale has been elaborated in two directions. Going backwards, Trump’s niece Mary revealed that Trump cheated on his SATs by paying someone to sit for him. That tallies with accusations that Trump did the same when he could—in big classes, in other words—when it came to sitting for exams at Penn.
Going forward it also tallies with Adam Kinzinger’s recent, particularly piquant, summary of Trump’s standard business ethics. Trump, he wrote, “first gained fame--and much of his fortune—through the betrayal of his business partners and a series of massive bankruptcies. Long before he became a reality TV host, Trump was a real estate developer who expanded into hotels, casinos, and even the airline industry. Along the way he cheated contractors, shortchanged investors, and, through strategic bankruptcies, left financiers with pennies on the dollar.” Now, as President a second time, continued Kinzinger, he is “applying the same pattern of broken promises to international trade, military alliances, and domestic affairs—throwing long-standing partnerships into chaos and eroding trust.”[2] I doubt anyone could have said it better. Maybe Vladimir Putin will be Trump’s next betrayed business partner. One is still allowed to hope even amid the dismal muck rising around us. If Jay Gatsby could do it, almost exactly a century ago, so can we.
Meanwhile, however, as frequently happens in the internet’s perpetual parenthetical commentaries festooned with random ignorance and prejudices—which Ambrose Bierce once defined in The Devil’s Dictionary as “vagrant opinions without visible means of support”—the iconic Professor Kelley quote has been cluttered by various and sundry forms of crud. Let just two examples suffice.
First, if you read the skein of comments on this story in Quora, for example, Penn often enough becomes Penn State. That unrare error means that the writer attended neither Penn nor Penn State. Second, several commentators said that Trump, who graduated in May 1968 with a B.A. in Business, did not attend Wharton as he claimed, because Wharton was and is only a graduate business school. That rarer error means that the writer did not attend Wharton undergrad, Wharton grad school, or Penn. This does not mean that these commentators were or are stupid, merely ignorant. Not the same thing, although as we will soon see, it helps to become the latter if one starts off with being the former.
Just to punctuate the point before turning in ernest to real gobsmacking stupidity, Trump himself several times publicly fumbled the correct name of the grad school he never attended but led others to believe he did, calling it the Wharton School of Finance instead of the Wharton Graduate School of Business. An MBA from Wharton Grad was and remain prestigious in that world of business mavens, of which I blessedly know little; a B.A. from Wharton undergrad really isn’t, or wasn’t, to be sure, in the late 1960s. We College types actually used to feel sorry for Wharton undergrads at the time. I had a freshman year roommate in the Men’s Quad whose teary-eyed goal in life was to become an unmovable career accountant at a large Manhattan firm. He listened to Frank Sinatra music while everyone else on the floor was down with Joe Cocker, the original acoustic James Taylor, and the Jefferson Starship. You see what I mean, right?
Let me conclude this Franklinesque paragraph by noting that I did not show up as an 18-year old freshman on the Penn campus until September 1969—some sixteen months after Donald Trump had departed—and I finished my Ph.D. in December 1979—long before Elon Musk showed up there as a transfer from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario on a student visa in 1992.[3] Luck just wants to follow me everywhere, don’t it?
You Can’t Fix Stupid, but Stupid in High Places Can Sure Put a Fix on You
Not long ago, we’re talking about a week here, I had considered quoting in my March 28 post the title of my old friend Dan Drezner’s March 24 Substack article, “American Foreign Policy Is Being Run by the Dumbest Motherfuckers Alive.” I resisted the temptation of using Dan’s scientific-technical language because I’m just not that kind of boy, and Dan, having dabbled over the years in zombies and Lord-knows-what-else, is that kind of boy. But that was before “Liberation Day” on Wednesday and this is now. So, swallowing hard, “dumbest motherfuckers alive” it is.
I am joined in that view, specific vocabulary aside, by, well, everyone with a brain. The nearly overpowering emotion at witnessing such stupidity close up and to hand—our house sits on a hill just a few miles north of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—calls to memory an old remark, to wit: Friedrich Schiller’s line from his 1801 play “Die Jungfrau von Orleans,” Act 3, Scene 6:“Gegen die Dummheit kämpfen die Götter selbst vergebens.”
Not everyone with a brain writes as well and powerfully as Claire Berlinski, a force of nature so prodigious that France could well do without Areva and the country’s nuclear power plants if they would just wire Claire up and let her illuminate the entire belle terre. So here is the essence necessary for the purpose now to hand: Trump’s “liberation day” tariff proclamation—assuming for the moment (as I do) that the whole thing is not a massive multipartite ploy to quickly negotiate lower barriers against American exports):
. . . goes beyond incompetence. . . . This is so phenomenally stupid. . . . What Trump does not understand, and what no one seems to be able—or willing—to explain to him, is that the US runs a large trade deficit because the dollar is the global reserve currency. Other countries need access to dollars if they’re to trade in dollars and maintain liquidity. The benefits of having the world’s reserve currency are enormous—lower borrowing costs, no exchange rate risk on external liabilities, reduced costs of imports for consumers, power over the global financial system. Trump has told other countries that if they stop using the dollar for international trade, he’ll put tariffs on them. But he doesn’t seem to realize that if the US doesn’t run a trade deficit with those countries, they can’t use the dollar as a reserve currency.
Now comes the uber-ignorance that combines with the stupid to produce the truly idiotic:
By definition, the inverse of the current account deficit—of which the trade-deficit is by far the largest component—is the capital account surplus. (The current account tracks the flow of imports and exports; the capital account tracks the flow of assets and liabilities.) Other countries trade their goods to us for dollars, then they take those dollars and invest them in US stocks, bonds, treasuries, and real estate—and this makes our capital account go into surplus. Foreign finance capital constantly flows into the United States, and this is directly related to the trade deficit. If you want to end the current account deficit, you must end the capital account surplus. And vice-versa. Trump is demanding that the rest of the world to do something that is by definition impossible. He wants to reduce the US current account deficit to zero and maintain the dollar as a reserve currency. He understands none of this. He just operates with a deep-seated fear that others are taking advantage of him. And now, because no one will say “no” to him, he has transformed his private psychopathology into a global economic crisis.[4]
And just to note further, with a domestic savings rate of just 0.6 percent, we deeply need foreign capital to keep coming here.
So at a minimum this is all quite stupid, yes. Schiller’s gods have decamped at the corner bar, and they’re even now getting hammered on Jägermeister because they have lost hope for their own efficacy. Trump should not have skipped Professor Arthur Bloomfield’s class in Dietrich Hall, because he was all about David Ricardo and Hecksher-Ohlin and all the rest of that comparative advantage stuff which, once you understood it, would alone have prevented Wednesday’s “liberation day” debacle.
Or maybe not: Trump’s “big brain” cannot seem to wrap itself around any kind of human social relationship except for the zero-sum win-lose kind. But that means, take careful note, that not only can he not imagine cooperative win-win relationships, which is tragic, but that he also cannot imagine lose-lose relationships, which is both tragic and stupid.
Actually, things are most likely even worse, which is to say more lose-lose pregnant, than Claire’s succinct description of our new circumstances suggests. First of all, the sheer level of ignorance involved here, not least of history, is staggering. Trump has said that the Great Depression would never have happened had the U.S. Government maintained its tariff wall. Clearly, Trump has never heard of Smoot-Hawley. He also rhapsodizes the 1870-1913 high-tariff era of American economic history as the time of the nation’s greatest wealth, as displayed graphically in his deranged Second Inaugural. But that period was the period of the largest time-concentrated immigration in American history. To build U.S. manufacturing industry at that stage of the Industrial Revolution required building a large labor proletariat, and we did that mainly through massive immigration. That would mean Trump understands very well and appreciates the economic value of immigration to a would-be growing or resuscitated industrial manufacturing economy, right? Whoops….
Look folks, the idea that a high tariff wall in the 21st century can generate a massive return of old-tech manufacturing in the United States straddles the variance between stupid and ignorant. Maybe it’s Peter Navarro who’s stupid and Trump who’s ignorant, or maybe it’s the other way around, or maybe Howard Lutnick is both—I don’t know, and I have better things to do than sit around handicapping fine degrees of economic cretinism. But under current conditions of relatively low unemployment—a pretty good report on that this morning, by the way—re-generating a competent, sufficiently educated industrial workforce to man the re-shoring of old-tech industry without liberal legal immigration policies simply can’t happen. And even if it could happen, by willing old techniques back into play just to create jobs—and there is an argument for that based on social purposes rather than purely economic ones—it takes years to build the factory infrastructure to do the sort of thing Trump describes. And never mind for the moment the factories’ eventual output; who’s going to build these factories, and at what cost using all domestic inputs? The more one thinks about this the goofier and internally contradictory the MAGA fantasy here becomes.
Of course, the mere fact of full-frontal contradiction doesn’t stop these people. If the whole barrel of malarkey about re-shoring old-tech manufacturing industry—perhaps moving the labor profile from the present roughly 7.5 percent back one or two percent toward the 30 percent it was forty-plus years ago—doesn’t impress you as being like a famous fictional scarecrow pointing every which way at once, consider what we are currently demanding that the Europeans do: rearm; ignore our threats of territorial expansion at Denmark’s expense that their rearming would prepare them to fight against; and still buy our high-tech major weapons platforms perhaps to use against…..us.
This by itself qualifies as certifiably insane, but there’s even more. Why are we telling the Europeans to rearm? Presumably so they can make themselves able to deter or defeat the Russians without us. But if they refuse to buy our weapons for that purpose—and we need an export market to justify the very high capital costs of building such platforms—we may well….now I am asking you to think the unthinkable, that you will quickly realize isn’t unthinkable at all with these guys…..sell them to Russia in return for this or that commercial or mineral extraction concession. See what I mean? Contradictions can’t exist in minds too febrile to connect dots, after all. Is this stupidity, ignorance, or insanity? All three, perhaps, a real hat-trick born of the Dunning-Kruger Effect? I confess to puzzlement here.
Back to economics, there is another way to gain advantage over trading partners if driving down barriers to American exports via tariff threats is not the intended use of those tariffs. We can always depreciate—a.k.a. further debauch—the dollar, making American exports cheaper, at least until the current system of floating exchange rates adjusts through consequent depreciations of other currencies so that their relative value compared to the U.S. dollar doesn’t get too far out of whack. (That’s what Richard Nixon and his Treasury Secretary John Connolly tried to do in 1971, when floating exchange rates were installed and dollar convertibility to gold ended; it didn’t work out so well. ) I think it’s a better than even bet that this is exactly what the Administration is planning as a complementary strategy with the tariffs. To do this, however, it will probably be necessary to oust Jerome Powell from the Fed and replace him with someone trained to lick Donald Trump’s shoes, or maybe some other part of him—possibly Kevin Hassett, currently director of the White House National Economics Council. (Hassett is, coincidentally as it happens, a Penn economics Ph.D. with a fairly sophisticated grasp of how tariffs can work as a policy lever to strengthen the dollar instead of shredding it….so he must be appalled by what he has seen in recent days.) Anyway, so much for the Fed’s statutory independence if this happens. Will Republicans in the Congress complain? Can pigs whistle?
Is that all? Not quite. A frenzy of competitive currency devaluations is not good for trade, for stable markets and capital flows, or anything else requiring at least a scintilla of predictability. Typically, it is less than good for nothing. One side effect of that kind of frenzy can be a contagion of fiscal crises, the likes of which we’ve seen in the past. In the United States, a fiscal crisis on top of a recession, but with simultaneous tariff-driven rises in price points throughout the economy, will constitute a management challenge, to put it mildly. Also note that context includes a debt of 122 percent of GDP estimated to reach 156 percent of GDP within a few years, making future service on that debt a budget-busting proposition no matter how much bureaucracy and how many programs the DOGE eliminates, wisely or otherwise.
So is that all? No. When dollar numbers of debt and deficits and everything else rise nominally, it’s a nice idea to check the solvency of the FDIC from time to time. You know, sort of like periodically checking the oil, brake fluid, and transmission fluid in your car. I’m not an economist (or an automotive mechanic), not by a long shot; but economists I have read and spoken with have suggested that we, as a nation and an economy, are looking at many trillions of dollars worth of unsecured bank deposits, and will be looking at lots more than that in pretty short order given our recent “liberation.” If a few trillion dollars can disappear within a single day from the stock market after the “liberation” spectacle put on in Washington on Wednesday, who thinks that bank runs are not in our future? When enough people find out that their bank deposits are not sufficiently insured, how is that likely to affect bank solvencies? We may be looking at a potential failure of banks and financial firms far more severe than what we went through in 2008-09.
“Stop the Steal” Redux
There is some good news in that, if it happens: It won’t make the President or the MAGAtized Republicans very popular. But come the midterms in some 19 months the MAGA inner circle will be ready for the any and all negative-drag fallout. They have practiced it now three times, and are already provisionally implementing it: Trump’s March 25 Executive Order, clearly unconstitutional, ordering states to implement stringent citizenship requirements for voting, is the opening tactic.[5]
So contrary to the wishful thinking of many Democrats, elections in states with Republican governors may not be free and fair next time around, and if Democrats win back control of the House and Senate anyway, will they be able to take their seats in the face of another “Stop the Steal” Big Lie, this time stratified out on a state-by-state level? Will election officials and judges be threatened and coerced for daring to do their jobs according to the law and to their oaths of office? Will pardoned J6 felons perhaps be involved in those threats and coercion? You tell me where the point-of-no return extinction event for constitutional government is. I’m not sure, for I’ve never lived though anything quite like this before.
Given its principal decision-maker and leader, not to speak of the electoral plurality that freely and fairly elected him, again, to the highest office in the land, is the Trump 2.0 Administration incompetent and unprofessional? Is it essentially stupid? Is it ignorant? Is it insane? I am loath to tell you, but that, even all of that, may not be the worst of it. Maybe the deeper question is: Is it also prone to nihilism, and are we bound soon to live not in an Spectocracy or an Idiocracy, but in a Nihilocracy? When Trump said on Wednesday that the United States of America would be “an entirely different country within a short period of time,” what did he mean?
By analogy we might ask: Is Trump the revenant spirit of Caligula, or of Nero, returned in the flesh (lots of flesh)? Caligula was a piece of work, to be sure, and wanted to make his horse a consul. Well, OK, I like horses and I’ve known a few American diplomatic consuls who performed no better than a horse would have in their jobs. But Nero murdered his own mother, played with matches, and fiddled, trance-like, while Rome burned. His nihilism led him to commit suicide, but Rome did not thereafter resume being a republic for a long, long time—as in roughly 1,900 years.
Let me leave you this afternoon on an utterly non-scary note. Donald Trump has frequently said in recent months that “tariff” is his favorite English word. That might suggest that he knows the etymology of that English world, right? Well just in case not, he may wish to know that its etymology happens to be Arabic—possibly not his “favorite” language.
Our word tariff comes from the Arabic for the verb to notify: عَرِفَة (pronounced ‘arrafa). The word came into Italian as tariffa in the 15th century, meaning notification of a tax on a traded good, in the context of extensive trade relations between the city-state of Venice—ruled by the real original Doge—and several Arab jurisdictions. The Venetians used tariffs on both exports and imports in order to control trade flows to their advantage. The word passed from Italian, then the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean, through French en route to establishing itself in English. The OED records the first English usage in 1756.
You’re welcome, Mr. President.
[1] Quoted in The Daily Kos, October 12, 2017.
[2] Kinzinger, “The Trump Doctrine: Breaking Trust at Home and Abroad,” Adam Kinzinger (Substack), April 2, 2025. Best to read the entire thing: It’s pithy, accurate, and incisive.
[3] See Sophia Powell, “Former Classmates, Girlfriend of Elon Musk, reflect on his time at Penn,” Daily Pennsylvanian, November 3, 2022.
[4] Berlinski, “Feeling Liberated Yet?” Cosmopolitan Globalist, April 3, 2025. Emphasis added.
[5] See Sam Tarazi, “Trump’s election executive order: explained,” Voting Rights Lab, April 4, 2025.