Cromwell

Trump and Vought have made it clear from the beginning: federal employees are the worst form of scum imaginable. They are jackbooted thugs who need to be brought to heel. With the random DOGE firings, inflammatory rhetoric, and attacks on public employee unions, Trump has followed through with his program of destruction. The federal workforce is cowed and demoralized.

Now, it turns out, we actually need to replace some of the employees who were so unceremoniously dismissed, because, unbelievable as it may seem, they have expertise that is necessary to protect the public health, safety, and welfare. My question is, why would anyone with a choice in the matter work for a government which offers him nothing but misery and contempt?

The exception, of course, is ICE, which under the current leadership truly is a group of jackbooted thugs. If you’re a sadist or an authoritarian, we have plenty of room for you.

For Columbia and Brown.

UNDER MY THUMB

Under my thumb

Stuck up elites who once had me down.

Under my thumb

Elites who once pushed me around.

_________

It’s up to me.

Oh, yeah.

The difference in the profs they hire.

Up to me

The change has come

They’re under my thumb.

_____________

Under my thumb

The wokeness crowd once had its day.

Under my thumb

The wokeness crowd has just changed its ways.

__________

It’s up to me.

Oh, yeah.

The way they do just what they’re told.

Up to me

The change has come

They’re under my thumb.

______________

Under my thumb

The MAGA flag has just been unfurled.

Under my thumb

They all know who’s boss of the world.

____________________

It’s up to me.

Yes, it is.

The way they talk when they’re spoken to.

Up to me

The change has come

They’re under my thumb.

___________

Parody of “Under My Thumb” by the Rolling Stones.

For understandable historical reasons, India has been reluctant to embrace the US too closely even in the face of a serious threat from China. Nevertheless, both countries need each other, and Biden treated the Indians with respect and forbearance. As a result, India was slowly becoming a key player in Biden’s system of flexible containment.

Trump, on the other hand, has just hit the Indians with massive tariffs. Does that make sense, from a geopolitical perspective?

Of course not, unless your primary geopolitical objective is to show the world you’re the boss.

In the late 1840s, hundreds of thousands of people, driven by political strife, economic problems, and famine, left Europe for America. They brought their religion, their language, and their customs with them. How did predominantly WASP America respond?

Millions of Americans fretted that the new immigrants could not be assimilated. They were too Catholic, too strange, and too insular to fit in this country. Something had to be done. The result, of course, was the creation of what was popularly called the Know Nothing Party.

So we have been here before. MAGA is not attempting to deport the descendants of the 1840s immigrants; in fact, it considers them to be “legacy Americans.” MAGA is therefore effectively arguing that the current crop of immigrants is fundamentally different in some way from the Irish, German, and Italian immigrants who allegedly would, if unchecked, have swamped our culture. The obvious question is, how? What evidence supports that proposition?

Israel’s friends are increasingly turning against it due to its starvation campaign in Gaza. Even Bret Stephens is questioning the wisdom of it. What is going on here?

Four things. First of all, starvation hits children first, which means the optics are bad. Second, it serves no obvious military purpose in the battle against the pathetic remnants of Hamas. Third, the imbalance of power in Gaza has been so great for months now that the world is unwilling to blame the war on Hamas. Finally, starvation plays into the narrative that Israel wants to commit either genocide or ethnic cleansing in Gaza in order to redevelop the place for Jewish settlers. The presence in the cabinet of extreme right ministers who clearly want this to happen doesn’t help.

Nothing with Trump is ever final, of course; he will slap additional tariffs on anyone who pisses him off through the end of his term. Some of his agreements are fragmentary at best, and nothing is resolved with the Chinese. For all that, the end game of his trade war is becoming reasonably clear. What is it?

Here are my observations:

1. Whether out of fear of market reaction or just out of realism, Trump has abandoned the Godly Society. The tariffs are way too small to create an industrial renaissance in America. It was never going to happen, anyway.
2. As I’ve noted many times before, the investment commitments from the EU, Japan, and South Korea are mostly illusory. To the extent that they actually materialize, however, they will give Trump new resources with which to reward his friends and punish his enemies, which is pretty scary.
3. Farmers, weapons manufacturers, and natural gas producers will get more export business. They are the American winners of the war.
4. The rest of us are the losers. We will pay higher prices for goods for the purpose of financing the tax cuts in the BBB. In the end, the desire for increased revenue appears to have been Trump’s principal objective, not the Godly Society.
5. The biggest remaining question is whether the price increases for goods will spark demands for higher wages and thus start an inflationary spiral. I think you will see some of that, particularly since Americans are more sensitive to inflation after the Biden years. If it happens, there will be pressure to raise interest rates, Trump will go berserk, and nothing good will result.

As I am writing this, Texas Democrats have fled the state in an effort to stop an effort by the GOP to impose an ambitious redistricting plan on them. California, Illinois, and New York are threatening to retaliate in kind. What should we make of this?

Two observations are pertinent. First, redistricting plans are intended to maximize the number of seats possessed by the party in power by reducing majorities in safe seats to a bare minimum. In a wave election, that can result in a boomerang gerrymander; the party that approved the redistricting could wind up actually losing seats. Second, this is the inevitable result of the Supreme Court’s decisions to step away from enforcement of the Voting Rights Act and to stay out of partisan gerrymandering cases altogether. There were some gentlemen’s agreements to avoid partisan warfare to protect the public interest before Trump, but Trump is as far from a gentleman as you can get, and the blue team isn’t about to disarm unilaterally.

During Trump’s first term, I used to say that the man’s many vices were mitigated, not by his virtues (does he even have any?), but by his other vices; he’s lazy, easily distracted, and vain, which makes it easier to shield him from his most destructive impulses. This time around, however, he is surrounded by minions who will work single-mindedly to make those impulses a reality. That’s why Trump 2.0 combines the worst features of both Trump 1.0 and a hypothetical DeSantis administration.

“All of the buildings and all of the costs/Were once just a dream in somebody’s head.”—-Peter Gabriel, “Mercy Street”

After you have determined what criteria you will use to determine what is true and what is false, the next logical question is one of causation. Was the visible universe created by an all-powerful intelligence transcending human understanding, or is it all there is? In other words, are you an idealist or a materialist?

Consider the quote from Peter Gabriel. Every building is a product of an infinite number of decisions, and not just from the owner, builder, and architect; it includes everything about the economic and social systems that made its construction possible. The material components of it are just inert parts of the planet. Are we to believe that the ultimate driving force behind the building is the raw materials for steel and glass?

Materialism has some intellectual appeal; it is simpler than idealism, and it avoids what I call the animal problem (more on that in a future post). It lacks a satisfactory answer to what I call the Joan of Arc problem (also to be discussed later), however, and it is contrary to my personal experience. Put me in the idealist camp.

The playing field is tilted against the Democrats in the Senate in 2026. On paper, the blue team needs to flip four seats to regain control. In reality, barring an economic collapse in the next two years, this is highly unlikely. The good news, however, is that Collins and Murkowski aren’t reliable GOP votes, so the Democrats really only need to flip two seats outside of Maine to deny Trump the approval he will seek for his most radical nominees. Which seats could these be?

The open seat in North Carolina is the most obvious opportunity. The second choice would probably be Ohio, particularly if Sherrod Brown decides to run against Vance’s appointed successor. Brown is a proven vote-getter, and he could have some success campaigning against the spending cuts in the BBB. I also suspect that Ramaswamy will be the GOP candidate for governor; given his anti-worker prejudices and rhetoric, he could well be a drag on the ticket for the right. On the other hand, Brown is a vocal supporter of tariffs, so his position on Trump’s protectionism will have to be nuanced, and nuance doesn’t usually play well in elections.

The bottom line here is that wrestling effective control of the Senate away from Trump would have some real benefits for the Democrats and the country, and the outlook is best described as partly cloudy. That’s not as good as sunny, but it could be a lot worse.

Given Trump’s poor approval ratings and the likelihood of further economic turbulence in the future, the Democrats will go into 2026 as the slight favorites to win the House even if extreme GOP gerrymandering efforts prove successful. It is an outcome that Trump clearly fears. Should he?

If the Democrats do, in fact, retake the House, you can expect to see a series of constitutional and fiscal crises for the following two years. The blue team will conduct investigations; Trump will stonewall them. The House will shut down the government; Trump won’t care. Trump will impound funds, the House majority will litigate, and the final decision will be left to Mr. Trump’s poodle, a/k/a the Supreme Court. It won’t be a pretty sight.

In short, the House will become a perfect foil for Trump and Vance, who will blame it for all of the problems they have actually caused themselves with their mass deportations, tax cuts, and tariffs. As a result, I submit to you that a House that stays under the nominal (but not effective) control of the GOP would actually be the better result for the blue team.

This afternoon, President Trump announced that he had fired all of the tens of thousands of teachers of science classes in the United States. Why? Because they persisted in instructing their students about the laws of gravity.

A spokesman for the administration told the media that Trump, in his eternal awesomeness, transcended anything which previously passed for a law of physics. In the new administration, unlike any of the old ones, things would go up and never come down. Anyone suggesting otherwise was clearly woke and richly deserved to be fired.

A representative for the teachers stated that a lawsuit was imminent, as Trump has no authority to fire them. The issue will ultimately be resolved by the Supreme Court, most likely on the emergency docket without an opinion.

Today’s jobs report was bad for July and worse for the previous two months. In the meantime, inflation has ticked up a bit. In other words, the evidence now shows that stagflation is here.

Trump won’t acknowledge that his tariffs and deportations are responsible for this, of course. He will blame Jerome Powell and Biden, because that’s what he does. If that doesn’t work, he can bring back the argument that the hypothetical long-term economic gains justify the short-term pain or go back to saying our kids should just learn to live with fewer imported dolls.

The tariffs are just beginning to bite. Things are going to get worse before they get better. Your job is to remember what the baseline was on January 20 and respond accordingly.

UPDATE: Trump is firing the employee who is responsible for compiling the bad employment numbers. I didn’t think of that alternative. I probably should have.

A pretty extreme GOP right-winger, Ralph Norman, is running for governor of South Carolina. In the speech opening his campaign, he blasted the mess and the corruption in Columbia. That’s standard practice, right?

Except that the current governor of South Carolina is a very conservative Republican, and the entirety of state government is similarly controlled by conservative Republicans. So what does this mean?

The populist outsider reflex of the GOP is so strong, it can’t be abandoned even when it is applied against people with a virtually identical bent. Imagine what that will imply for the Florida governor race, as well. I can’t wait to see Ron DeSantis attacked as a corrupt insider by candidates outside of his orbit.

Historically, as a result of some highly publicized scandals, American sports organizations did their best to build a wall between their events and gambling. In the end, they failed and embraced gambling instead; the sums involved were just too great to ignore. Commercials for gaming companies are now ubiquitous, even on regular network TV.

In professional sports, the assumption presumably was that the players were so highly paid, they wouldn’t risk being banned by consorting with gamblers. As fans of one of my teams, the Guardians, can attest, that assumption was always questionable at best. But what about collegiate athletes? The vast majority of them have no future in professional sports. In addition, they increasingly have few sentimental ties to their schools and view themselves as employees. What is to prevent them from taking the risk in exchange for big money? Not much.

I predict there will be a major gambling scandal in college sports, probably in NCAA basketball, within the next few years. It’s going to happen; it’s just a question of when.