Trump is a traitor plain and simple. This post lays it out. We lost a war without a single shot being fired. A lot of good that AI advantage is doing now. Thanks for this Noah. Clear thinking is the first step.
The case that Trump was recruited by the KGB--now called the FSB--sometime in the 1990's is quite plausible, especially considering his fawning subservience to Putin even before Helsinki. His current betrayal of US/NATO natsec interests by this abject surrender to Russia make perfect sense if he is indeed a Russian intelligence thrall.
Regarding Musk, most of his net worth is tied up in Tesla; and 50% of Tesla's batteries and cars are made in China. Musk paid Trump a whopping $250 million dollars--plus a ton more in kind by his de facto dedication of X to Trump/GOP. Trump's adding of a mere 10% in extra tariffs to Chinese imports seems like an ample quid pro quo for Elon. Especially when contrasted against the more drastic Chinese tariff numbers Trump was floating before Elon coughed up his quarter billion.
So, Noah, let's please just sacrifice Metternich and Kissinger on the altar of Occam's Razor and tell it like it is: Trump is an FSB thrall; and Elon paid him off to go easy on China.
>Regarding Musk, most of his net worth is tied up in Tesla; and 50% of Tesla's batteries and cars are made in China... Trump's adding of a mere 10% in extra tariffs to Chinese imports seems like an ample quid pro quo for Elon.
This would be more plausible to me if there was evidence that Musk was concerned with Tesla's prospects at all. Tesla's business challenges appear to be on the demand side, not the supply or manufacturing sides, and Musk's high-profile, anti-democratic activities seem to be significantly impacting demand for Tesla's products. No matter how much quid pro quo Tesla were to receive in the form of tariff or other tax exemptions from the federal government, it's hard to imagine they could possibly overcome the brand harm that Tesla is suffering from Musk's actions.
Put more succinctly, it seems Musk would stand to benefit more financially if he weren't publicly involved in the MAGA project of dismantling the federal government, and that makes it difficult for me to believe that his involvement is motivated by money. I expect that he is motivated primarily by a desire for more attention and power, and to some extent by earnest ideological beliefs.
You make some good points. Musk seems pretty savvy with his investments. Well, except for Twitter. Assuming his total realignment with conservative America--and alienation of liberal customers--is a clever calculation, and not just personality-driven, it's that he's: a) Looking at opening up marketing his EV's to conservatives; and/or b) Buying off Trump/GOP to go easy on his vulnerabilities vis a vis IRA and his Chinese manufacturing capacity; and a bit with his SpaceX contracts.
I just bought a Nissan Leaf last week. For years I'd dreamed of getting a Tesla. But not after Elon full-on turned X into a creepy neo-Nazi hangout.
Twitter was bad investment purely from financial side. But it was instrumental in bringing Trump back to power with Musk on board. It was a wild bet, but it played out. Now he got direct access to the deepest pocket in the world, probably the only one that can finance his Mars mission.
Musk is likely in the hole he's in because his brain broke around 2018 or so. That was when he started becoming addicted to drugs, Twitter, and paranoid obsession with his "enemies", in part due to his sleepless attempt to rescue Tesla from bankruptcy at the time.
His most immediate ideological objective, like Noah posits here, is likely to strike a grand "accord" with Russia and China, and to crush all dissent against Trump in the United States. . . because he believes to *not* do that would result in nuclear Armageddon before he can succeed in colonizing Mars.
Not even kidding.
Mars. Frigging Mars.
That, bizarrely and absurdly, is why he's turning into arguably one of the great monsters of our era.
When you think the alternative to crushing your enemies with force is the End Of All Things before you can achieve your Great Dreams In Space, and you're a personality like Elon, it's hard not to turn into the worst villain from every Bond movie.
There are other things that sent him over the edge too, of course--The pandemic, Putin's foul persuasion, Biden administration snubs, Elon's oldest living child disowning him, etc. But the Mars thing, believe it or not, is sincerely probably what's driving his brain-broke descent into madness.
I've heard this before. And frankly, no, none whatsoever.
Short version why: They're basically opposite kinds of people.
Long version:
Yes, Von Braun did join the Nazi party, and he did further an awful regime's war effort, out of what he felt was patriotic duty to his homeland. The factories that built his rockets employed slave labor, many of whom died. None of that is in dispute.
But to paraphrase Paul Harvey, there's more to the story.
After the war, while working for the U.S. (not entirely as a free man at first), he had genuine shame for what he'd been a part of, and by his friends' and colleagues' own account, had an unplanned religious awakening at the church his Army "minder" attended (and which he, therefore, had to attend as well).
He later ended up spearheading integration of his own workforce in Huntsville, Alabama (of all places), helping to establish the new civil rights era there, basically through sheer leadership in the face of a stubborn local populace.
He believed, apparently, that he owed it to God, as part of his "repentance".
Elon, as we speak, is hyperactively busy helping to politically purge and re-segregate the US federal work force, literally the opposite of what Von Braun helped to do in his time and place. He believes in God like I believe in Lean Six Sigma--as a feel-good excuse to do something you were already going to do.
Von Braun was also imprisoned by Himmler and the SS for "defeatist sentiments" and overheard "treasonous" remarks during the war, and very nearly got executed for them. He only was let out of prison when they realized no one else could run the V-2 program.
Elon is never going to be overheard saying disloyal things about Trump. He understands that as Trump goes, he goes.
Even as far as other aspects of his personality go, Von Braun was a conservative Prussian engineer to a fault, as opposed to Elon and SpaceX's heedless disregard of safety or procedure.
He would not let any rocket be launched until every i was dotted and t was crossed.
That was, in part, why the Russians beat us to launching the first man into space, even once the federal government woke up in the wake of Sputnik.
Basically, Elon and von Braun, despite their shared charisma, drive, engineering prowess, and ties to fascism, are opposites in every other way, especially the moral ways.
Von Braun's only comparable to Elon if you focus on what he was a part of in the first decade-plus of his adulthood, and disregard all the rest. As most people who've heard of him, let's face it, do.
I don't see much overlap. Braun was actually a scientist, Musk is not. The FBI found Braun to be earnest in his claims that he only joined the Nazi party out of fear and/or career advancement, whereas Musk seems like he might earnestly be a neo-nazi. I find this sentence and quote from attributed to Braun on his Wikipedia page quite pertinent:
Yet, he also wrote that "to us, Hitler was still only a pompous fool with a Charlie Chaplin moustache" and that he perceived him as "another Napoleon" who was "wholly without scruples, a godless man who thought himself the only god".
Russia likely exploited the fact that many American conservatives believe everything they see on Fox News: they suborned Fox News in 2014 in order to win the 2016 GOP primary for their asset.
Oh good Lord. Are we really back to this? Did you people learn nothing from the whole Russia collusion hoax the first time around?
By all means, feel free to peddle Manchurian Candidate conspiracies for the next 4 years. We're going to be busy making America work better for Americans.
Brian, I'd worry more about the fact that your guy is selling out not just you but everything you value and care about. You're being rugged. You don't have to like progressives or Democrats to realize that. Wake up, man!!
You prefer the "Useful Idiot" hypothesis then, Comrade? Or are you honestly defending Trump's recent moves with Putin? Or of his alienation of our closest allies Canada and Mexico? Or of Hegseth, Kennedy and Gabbard?
Never thought I'd see the day when conservatives became a bunch of Commie-lovers. The GOP has surrendered the Pax Americana to Russia and Communist China. Guess it's time to start learning Mandarin.
I don't see why we need to debate whether or not Trump is a Russian agent. This is little different to the far-right conspiracy theories about George Soros and the bug-eaters at the WEF. The better answer (according to Occam's Razor) is that Trump knows that liberals are triggered by Putin, he knows Putin is a right-wing culture warrior with a social base not unlike his own, and so they have interests that parallel each other.
Putin is a ruthless dictator, full stop. Who rules a kleptocracy with a dozen lesser robber barons.
To even compare the RW nonsense against Soros--which is deeply rooted in antisemitism, in case you didn't know--against the case of Trump as either Gullible Tool or FSB Traitor, belies the deep insight you've shown in your other posts, Elie.
The tripe dished out against Soros and others by FOX News and other 'alternative facts' RW outlets is almost always poorly constructed propaganda--or outright lies--that even cursory fact-checking will demolish.
But you are correct that Trump is aware that conservative voters are absolutely delighted over the screams of anguish emanating from Dem-land over the current blitzkrieg of Trump/DOGE antics. FOX has been running lots of segments on this angle lately.
I'd say the anti-Soros propaganda is more directly linked to Russia: this rhetoric often accuses Soros of helping "topple 8 foreign governments" but never mentions _which_ governments they actually were:
1. The Soviet puppet government of Estonia
2. The Soviet puppet government of Latvia
3. The Soviet puppet government of Lithuania
4. The Soviet puppet government of Poland
5. The Soviet puppet government of Czechoslovakia
6. The Soviet puppet government of Hungary
7. The Soviet puppet government of Romania
8. The Soviet puppet government of Bulgaria
In other words, they credit Soros with helping to destroy the Soviet Empire, but somehow make that out to be a bad thing!
Conspiracy theorists don't claim the WEF eat bugs themselves: they claim that they want to force _everyone else_ to eat bugs (presumably by taxing meat to the point that it becomes unaffordable to everyone outside the WEF elite itself).
What evidence is there that Trump was recruited by the FSB as a Manchurian Candidate? Do you also think Robert Mueller was paid off by them to tank the Russiagate conspiracy?
Elon Musk didn’t pay Trump, he donated to a super PAC, and if Trump is an FSB asset, why didn’t he ignore Musk and go hard against China?
Google "The case for Donald Trump as an FSB Asset"
Much of the material is quite good, especially the content from back during 2016 and Trump1 before Helsinki. It's all hypothetical of course; but the evidence such that it is, is compelling.
Mueller, as you no doubt know, uncovered a considerable amount of contact between individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and individuals associated with or suspected of ties to Russian intelligence. But there were no direct ties to Trump himself.
Mueller did most definitely encounter extensive amounts of obstruction into his investigation by the Trump campaign, but as per DOJ regulations punted actual prosecution to Congress.
Trump has alienated our allies while giving away the farm to our enemies. He's not only the worst president of my lifetime, he's blowing past James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson as the worst president America has ever had. If we survive his presidency as a hegemonic power we will be VERY lucky.
Looking in from the outside its really painful seeing America so weak. It's not like anyone currently in charge hid what they were thinking; they outright said all this on the campaign trail, and Americans voted for it. I hope that America re-discovers its strength in the next few years.
The good news is that the more pain Americans feel the better the chance of a political reversal in 2/4 years that would allow the opposition party enough of a majority to change things. But without a Senate majority, a lot of protections the USA needs are not going to happen.
The institutional damage won't be repaired for a century, because they're pocketing the money we'd need to rebuild, and the "opposition" party hasn't meaningfully opposed him when they had a majority *or even the Presidency*
Americans are always convinced that our status quo will reassert itself, but eventually you get a Lenin, a Mao, a Caesar, and their various cronies; and their nation never recovers.
I have a hard time getting excited about this possibility right now. A lot of the damage Trump is causing will be permanent regardless of what happens in 2028.
Yes, I just think this is fundamentally different than the past, where you could kind of hope the current administration would make mistakes, cause a bit of pain, and that would ultimately be ok because it would allow Dems to come back into power.
Much of what the Trump administration is salting the earth - future dem administrations won’t be able to repair the damage in the foreseeable future.
The bush administration hurt alliances, but in a much less fundamental way - we were still committed to our alliances in principal if in every deed.
I don’t think the Bush administration made a point of demonstrating that the US will not keep its word if a new administration comes into power. Up until now, administrations of both parties have changed future plans but never reneged on agreements that were currently in place. But this administration has demonstrated that you need an insurance policy if you want any sort of US federal agreement for more than 4 years.
Considering the previous administration gave us "toxic masculinity", "logic is white supremacy", and "the female penis"... can you blame them?
Liberals brought this on themselves. Joe Biden promised a return to normalcy and instead we got batshit crazy stuff pushed from the bully pulpit and anyone (even liberals) who weren't 100% on board with the postmodernist program were economically destroyed.
I think Trump has already answered your question definitively. It's Metternich-Lindbergh.
Trump, in October 2024, in Wisconsin:
"The crazy lunatics that we have — the fascists, the Marxists, the communists, the people that we have that are actually running the country. . . Those people are more dangerous — the enemy from within — than Russia and China and other people.”
He wants to have a truce with China so he can crack skulls in America. So does Vance, so does Elon. That's their entire reason for being in power right now.
Trump's enemy is Americans, as they currently are. He wants to wage war on us.
Do you realize that when you ask voters why they support Trump, most of them say some form of "the elites hate people like me and are waging war on us."
You think they're trying to kill you. They think you're trying to kill them. Maybe a national divorce really is the only solution.
A national breakup would render any kind of "constitution", in blue or red states, a permanent dead letter. (That was Lincoln's original justification for putting down the Confederate rebellion, above and beyond ending slavery.) So that ain't happening.
But to your point, no, I don't think Trumpers sincerely want to kill me--and nor, when push comes to shove, do I even think most of them fear I want to kill them.
They're just bored. Bored, and delusional. They see politics and government policy as a big morality play on the TV screen.
Trump mass-firing civil servants, and really, civil servants themselves, is no more real to them than bad guys getting killed in Breaking Bad, or the Sopranos. What they want is to feel good and get the *rush* of triumph over some 2-dimensional enemy on their smartphone.
Otherwise, they're good people, and they think I'm, more or less, good.
Why do I say that? Because we just elected Trump during a time of prosperity and stability. You don't do something like that if you truly, really, want to kill an enemy and fear for your life from them.
You do it if you are an unserious, childish, lumpy-headed people treating serious matters with all the gravity of a video game.
Trump, of course, sees his election as validation for a reign of terror and crushing of his enemies in the streets, and across the world. As does Elon. They will try to act on that "mandate". The physical consequences for all of us will be severe. Their own voters, at least a good portion of them, are already taking pause.
So how exactly do you suggest we share a country, David? That's a real question. Roughly half of us (the Right) mostly want to left alone but can't be because the other half (the Left) is convinced the former is a bunch of deplorable bigots for not wanting dicks in their daughter's locker room and racists who can't be trusted not to lynch black people. So what do you suggest?
A "national divorce" is quite possible within the Constitutional framework - in fact, the Constitution was designed to make even radical pluralism possible. David Brooks a few years ago suggested that federalism might be our only salvation. (Proof of the old adage about broken clocks.)
For this to work though, the Left has to be willing to accept the legitimacy of freedom of association, objective virtue, and conservative positions. They have to be OK with Kansas and Texas making abortion illegal. They can have their morality but must give up the universalism, because the combination has led them to a crusader mindset that can't accept even the slightest deviation from their view of the world.
They show no sign of being willing to do that. Which is why the Right has gone scorched Earth via Trump.
According to the NCAA there are 10 trans-gender athletes out of 225,000 women athletes. While I agree that trans women shouldn't be competing in womens sports, this is hardly a problem big enough or serious enough to determine someone's vote.
Yes the CNN chyron was silly, but the report itself was accurate about how peaceful the daytime demonstrations were, and that trouble started after sundown (the reason I don't go to nighttime demonstrations) I agree that violence at demonstrations is wrong. Vast majority of demonstrations at the time were peaceful. Fox News has crazy chyrons too, and the actual content is also crazy.
"Lawfare against conservatives" The 75 year-old was tried and convicted by a jury of her peers not for praying or demonstrating, but for a "lock and block" occupation of an abortion clinic, preventing people from lawfully obtaining healthcare services. How is this wanting "to be left alone"?
And by "elite" they mean basically anyone who's ever been to college, or has close relatives that did. Which probably includes you, the person reading this comment.
If you take nothing else away from this post, let it be this: anti-intellectualism is classism against the educated white-collar middle class.
That is what "intellectual" means to anti-intellectuals: it refers to people of a certain socio-economic class. It is a class characterized by being college-educated professionals who earn their livings by doing intellectual labor. People whose job, or at least aspiration, it is to be experts in something cerebral: education, medicine, science, research, journalism, law, technology, the arts, etc.
In other words, what you, being someone who is reading this, probably considers a "normal person".
....
And, crucially, because it is a cultural class, and not defined by how much money an individual has or how they make their living, a person can be in it because it is their culture either by upbringing or acculturation, regardless of whether they, themselves, are knowledge or cultural workers. So it may include not just the doctor, but the doctor's kid. Not just Harvard-trained philosopher, but the Harvard drop out. Not just the legal scholar writing about critical race theory, but the very pierced genderqueer teen scolding someone about "intersectionality" on Twitter. Not just the columnist writing a thought piece about the logical incoherence of eating meat, but the white dude with dreadlocks, birkenstocks, and bookbag, whom the hostess addresses saying, "You'll want the vegetarian menu, yes?" Not just the Senate-confirmed head of a part of the Federal government, but the chick in the firetower on a National Parks Service pittance all summer.
That was an interesting link. Thanks Doug. One of the first comments to Siderea’s post mentioned the role Covid and WFH played in compounding the problem. This rings true as well. If only the Elites had been more perceptive of these dynamics.
Very interesting link. The fascinating part of Noah's piece is the view that Trump regards his true enemies as internal, basically Democrats. Probably Canada and Mexico and Denmark too, are in his crosshairs because they are more Democrat-like. It is so bizarre--to have an American President lambaste these likable, liberal moderate allies, but, apparently, that's precisely why he does it. I think only his MAGA base--a minority--supports this but it is scary stuff. He could inflict a lot of damage on us and give China (and to a lesser degree Russia) even more of an advantage against us and our allies. Frankly my greatest concern was that, having secured state power, Trump would declare the Democratic Party a terrorist organization, and make the whole lot of us criminals. Take our property and cancel our Social Security and Medicare and who knows what....
I'm a class traitor, Doug, and I freely admit it. And I hate the anti-intellectualism on the Right. But the Left's solution -- deciding that anyone who didn't go to college is a deplorable bigot who should be ignored -- doesn't work either. So what do you suggest?
Dude, you need to log off and talk to more people of various political perspectives in the real world. You will be pleasantly surprised by the reasonableness of your average random person who isn’t addicted to Twitter, and that includes liberals.
There are major campaign promises that have now become major EOs. Not all of Trump's EOs poll this well, but the major ones do. Why?
You're talking about "swing voters" who are a vanishingly small group (<5% likely). The far larger group is people who voted on exactly these issues and are glad to see a President keep his campaign promises. (And who doesn't hate them.)
Also, who are the 25% of people who think dicks belong in women's locker rooms anyway? Incels?
Who is "us." What war is he waging on me? I don't agree with his foreign policy at all, but I don't feel any animosity from his political movement. I believe that some of their bad policies will eventually come back to bite me, but they are not intentionally targeting me. And that's a lot more than I can say about the other side who I see as outright malicious.
I’m curious as to what outright malice you think liberals intend towards you. But since you asked about Trump, and “us”:
Trump tried to overturn my vote and the votes of millions, the last election, by violence. He thinks any election he loses is “fraud” by definition, and has convinced a clear majority of his party that that is the case.
As such, he is laying the groundwork to suppress free and fair elections in the United States. When I say “us”, I mean any American who either does not support him politically, or does not display sufficient personal loyalty to him, and him alone.
To wit: His Department of Justice and (politically purged) FBI will soon be trying to sue, prosecute, and jail any major liberal nonprofit, any major voting rights lawyer, any major politician who gets too popular in swing states or districts. These are actions he’s promised, and you can bet his new appointees are going to do their level best to deliver.
He just pardoned over 1,500 people who participated in insurrectionary violence on his behalf four years ago, including the ringleaders and those who actually assaulted cops. Likely they’re operating under the assumption they have a pre-emptive pardon from him for any future, anti-Democrat, pro-Trump violence.
He is now planning to purge the U.S. Postal Service and end mail-in voting in blue states—and only blue states—using specious excuses of “fraud” as the pretext.
This is just his election-related actions alone. I could go on about his endless statements about the “enemy within”, calling people who don’t support him “scum”, “vermin”, “traitors”, “Marxists”, or worse, his longstanding life philosophy of “revenge”, and his currently-underway plans to demolish the federal government—with particular focus on in states and cities who didn’t vote for him, or any government functions whatsoever he considers potential reservoirs of “disloyalty” and “treason” by definition.
But I figure the election-related stuff should give you enough pause by itself.
They discriminate against me for my race and gender in open violation of civil rights statutes. They want to control the information I have access to by forcing private companies to censor those who disagree with them in circumvention of the 1st amendment. They are the party who most strongly supports the police state agencies in their CCP like internal surveillance (the Dems used to be the better party on this but not anymore). IMO if they get control you will see Americans arrested for politically incorrect opinions like is happening now in Europe. If you want to see where liberal attitudes on free speech are going just look at these numbers from Nate Silver https://www.natesilver.net/p/free-speech-is-in-trouble
And there are lots of other things I hate, like slowing tech advancement and infrastructure development with endless regulation, and generally representing the interests of gatekeepers and bureaucrats over people who actually get things done, but I don't consider that malicious, just self interested and bad policy like I see the Republicans
I don't support any of those things you mentioned, particularly the pardoning of the violent rioters. And I didn't say the Republicans are free of malice, just not towards myself like the liberals. I don't like the Republicans, I just dislike them less, and it's a low bar. Also I know it isn't all liberals, but then it doesn't really matter what the liberals like Noah Smith think because I don't have the option of voting for them, only the Democrats.
Given all the things you’re about to experience in your life, the complaints you just cited strike me as complaining about the dryness and seasoning of a chicken entree, while the alternative is a pile of excrement.
Just to cite one of your complaints—I’m guessing we’re the same race and gender. Or if not, in the same boat.
I do not feel “discriminated against”, or my speech suppressed, by the goddamned Democrats. I have felt a little henpecked by “speech policemen” here and there—but then again, I’ve felt that from various people my whole life. Both left and right (especially right, when it comes to encounters with fellow evangelicals in church).
The notion that Americans would have been “arrested” for supporting right-wing thought, had Kamala won, is ludicrous paranoia. This is, with respect, a lie people tell themselves to justify to themselves supporting terrible things. Or to avoid any consideration of supporting people they resent, for rather petty reasons.
You might as well tell me “I hate punk music because punk fans are Nazis and want me dead.” No, just one or two you’ve met, and have never forgotten.
These are all rationalizations and excuses, IMO, in the grand scheme of things. Trump may be bad, but I have to excuse him, because his opponents must, by definition, be worse. This argument will likely age like a pile of garbage, and rather soon.
I don't care about speech policing from peers. That's just normal social behavior. I care about it coming from the government. I guess you are fine with open violation of civil rights law if it doesn't happen to you directly, but I think that's insane.
"There's No Guarantee to Free Speech on Misinformation or Hate Speech, and Especially Around Our Democracy"
- Tim Walz
So I'm not being paranoid. I don't want liberal judges in there that are going to start "reinterpreting" the 1st amendment to allow them to ban whatever they declare "misinformation" and I'm willing to pay a heavy price in Republican nonsense to prevent it.
Wait, if you don’t care about speech policing from peers, and only care about it from government, then shouldn’t it be more worrying that the government is cutting off the funding of anyone saying politically incorrect things about DEI than that companies blocked tweets with hateful messages?
That's why Trump won. Because Biden and Harris and the Democrats went so loony that even someone as flawed as Trump was seen as a better choice.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders put it best in her response to the SOTU in 2022: "the choice isn't between Left and Right but between normal and crazy." In 2024, most voters decided she was correct -- the Democrats had gone insane.
A party indiscriminately mass-firing 15%-plus of the federal workforce—and doing much of it in black-letter violation of federal law—is what you consider “normal”. And those opposing that, as crazy.
I would recommend reading back some of what you’re saying on this board, out loud. Consider how it sounds to most sane people.
“So many of those extremists, those MAGA extremists... at some point, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members.”
The lack of self-awareness in this comment boggles the mind.
MAGA mostly wants to be left alone. That's why we want out of "America World Police". That's why we want the border secure. That's why we want dicks out of our daughter's locker rooms. Just freakin' leave us alone and let us live our lives... but the Left just can't do that. They're on a moralistic crusade, a holy war to remake America, and decolonizing Western civilization means that if you think this is a problem -- https://nypost.com/2023/08/05/lia-thomas-so-well-endowed-i-had-to-refrain-from-looking-riley-gaines/ -- you're a Nazi.
You want to know why we went scorched Earth with Trump? That's why. Because we finally concluded you would never willingly share a country with us.
<MAGA mostly wants to be left alone. That's why we want out of "America World Police". That's why we want the border secure. That's why we want dicks out of our daughter's locker rooms. Just freakin' leave us alone and let us live our lives...>
I hate bougie overeducated liberals as much as the next guy, but this is just pathetic. The same people who voted for MAGA voted for Dubya and his godawful War on Terror, which is why the NSA was (and quite possibly still is) listening to our phone calls and reading our emails. The same people who voted for MAGA have no problem with invading Mexico and bombing the drug cartels, even though WE are the ones buying their drugs and selling them weapons. They have no problem keeping embargoing Cuba and Iran, even though 9/11 (arguably one of the most pivotal historical moments in recent history) was planned and executed by Saudi-backed terrorists (but Trump did an arms deal with MBS, so all water under the bridge). Many of the same people who voted for MAGA had no problem insinuating that the first black president was a closeted Muslim commie. Don't pretend for a second like y'all were innocent bystanders in this culture war we're having: there's more than enough blame to go around.
I respect the point of view Elie, but the Right was never the one trying to change the culture (and thus pushing a culture war). That was always coming from the Left.
On your other points, you're correct about the George Bush years. But most of MAGA hates the George Bush wing of the party. We joke about them: conservatives who wouldn't conserve anything. I really thought this was well known, but perhaps it's not so obvious from outside the conservative bubble. This ain't Ronald Reagan's GOP anymore. And that's the other thing we joke about: "zombie Reaganism" championed by the Never-Trumpers. David Brooks and Max Boot are the leading proponents, and MAGA detests both.
Full disclosure, I voted for W and supported many of the things you mentioned. I was wrong, and I was lied to. And that experience is part of what pushed me away from the Republicans -- still registered Ind today. In 2008 I voted for Obama. If the Democrats hadn't gone bonkers with racial and sexual grievance at the same time I was realizing the error of my ways, I might well have ended up a Dem. But they made it clear they didn't want white males. I refused to vote for Trump in 2016, but (like J.D. Vance) finally came around.
I respect that it's hard for you to see, but the "desire to be left alone" really does run deep among conservatives.
"it's obvious that his movement would have no qualms whatever about throwing me and my family into a reeducation camp just because we oppose him"
Read verbatim an responded to in the first paragraph.
Also, when I said the "lack of self-awareness" I wasn't talking about you; I was talking about Hillary Clinton. Sorry if that came out wrong.
I'm willing to believe you when you can show me evidence that Trump is or is even talking about doing what you're saying. Until then, it's pure hyperbole rooted in partisan hatred. (Which I get, as you said elsewhere, you and I are not swing voters.)
Who have the Republicans thrown in a "reeducation camp" for opposing them? That's a ridiculous statement. I oppose him too. I think he is fundamentally incompetent to hold the presidency, totally corrupt, and a criminal. I hate his policies on many things e.g. Ukraine, tariffs on allies, and opposing tech development like the Chips Act and renewable energy development. I am not going to jail for saying it and neither are you.
Just this morning I was reflecting on how the rapidly evolving international system is becoming similar to Metternich’s Congress of Europe that was established after the defeat of Napoleon and the French Revolution. I am not as sanguine as you about how all this will turn out. Metternich’ created a system that ruthlessly and effectively suppressed all efforts to liberalize Europe for nearly a half century. With their nuclear arsenal and non-interference in their respective spheres of dominance, the leaders of China, Russia and the United States could surely suppress any efforts to create/recreate liberal democratic societies for many years to come. I’m an old (almost 83) man, and I pray that my pessimism is unwarranted. And as a historian, I am well aware that history almost never repeats itself, so I remind myself that none of us really know what will happen in the future.
I would say in this case, only Australia and NZ (maybe some other countries as well) would have liberal democracies survived in the West (in Australian case, voting is compulsory so extremist rhetoric would not be able to flourish, even Pauline Hanson or Clive Palmer - Australian versions of MAGA - never got their national votes to double digits. Its conservative party here is also not extremist as well, and Peter Dutton - its current leader - is too unpopular).
Translation: Trump tried to extort Ukraine into confecting a lie that Hunter Biden had illegal deals with a Ukrainian oil company. Trump was impeached for this.
Trump and Musk, both emotionally weak men, are picking a fight with a guy [Zelenskyy] who refused to flee the invading Russian military, saying: “I need ammunition. Not a ride.” Russian snipers tried for weeks to hunt down and kill Zelenskyy in Kiev.
I wouldn’t bet against Zelenskyy, especially when he’s going up against a couple of wimps who are rapidly becoming unpopular.
But Hunter Biden really was getting kickbacks from a Ukrainian oil company. Granted, it was a "salary" for being a board member, but the guy was a crack addict with no experience in Eastern Europe or energy development who's Dad just happened to be Vice President (and bragged he was in charge of Ukraine for the Biden administration) while his son was raking in $1M+ from the Ukrainians.
The offense here is that apparently no one in the press was willing to ask the obvious question: why?
The why is very easy to explain. He's a conman who used his family name to pretend to have political access and influence on foreign policy. Any other explanation is either idiotic or an acceptance of the fact that all Republicans are complete morons who couldn't pin anything on Biden after investigating this for years.
So the VP's kid was engaged in fraud and attempted bribery all on his own and Jim and Joe knew nothing about it at all. And the "art" was purchased because it was beautiful. And the buyers were totally anonymous. And there's this bridge I'd like to sell you...
The choices for defenders of Joe Biden are pretty bleak: either he was totally corrupt and using his family as a money laundering machine, or he was too clueless to realize his family was totally corrupt and using him to take kickbacks. There's really not a third option here.
These are the low IQ comments that I expect from most Republicans. If there was fraud and bribery, prove it. Trump had 4 years, Republicans had 8 years since 2017.
Influence peddling is not a crime in itself. That’s what lobbying firms do and get paid for, whether they’re successful or not. Hey dad, these are my business partners, say hi to them, doesn’t make someone a criminal.
You don’t like it so it’s fraud and people should go to jail is a kid’s view of the world. Yes, it reflects poorly on Biden that his son had shady dealings and has many personal flaws but being the father of a lowlife is not a crime.
Siddhartha, listen to yourself here. You're defending marginally legal bribery and corruption. Do you really think a US Attorney couldn't charge a crime here if they wanted to. (Well, they can't now because Joe pardoned everyone involved going back to 2014 -- gee, I wonder why that year was chosen.)
If Jared Kushner was on the board of a Saudi oil company getting paid $1M a year for doing nothing, I would have a problem with that. I have a problem with it when Hunter Biden does it too.
Like I said, you having a problem with someone doing something and that something being a crime that prosecutors could charge that person with and win in the court of law are two separate things. Because you think like a child you can't tell the difference between the two. Hunter joined the board of Burisma in 2013. Trump became the President in 2017 and did try to find dirt on him and Biden. He came up empty after 4 years of Presidency and so did the Republicans for the last 8 years. 8 years is a long time even for low IQ Republicans in the Congress. What Biden did with Hunter's pardon was absolutely an abuse of Presidential power but it does not prove guilt. Republicans had their chance and all they came up with was childish accusations without any proof.
Jared Kushner has gotten paid a *lot* more than a measly $1m/year for being 45's son-in-law. He's been given something like $2billion to manage by the Saudi's.
Do the math Brian. What's a 1% per annum (or 1.25%) management fee for $2 billion. When it comes to graft, Republicans beat those amateurish Dems hands down.
Joe was improperly tolerant of Hunter, yes. But what did Donald do about Donald’s ownership of a hotel that foreign diplomats were bribing him to stay at, and what did Donald do about Donald’s use of his name to sell a cryptocurrency right before the election, and what did Donald do about Donald’s attempt to steal beachfront property in Gaza, let alone the corrupt actions of his other relatives?
It's all on his laptop. That's what conservatives believe, anyway.
Just like they believed that overwhelming evidence was going to be released in just a few days on how exactly those nefarious Dems had stolen the election in 2020.
You're acting like this is some weird conspiracy theory when Joe and Hunter have both acknowledged it happened. As others here have mentioned, this sort of corruption (like Hunter's "art" business) is at least nominally legal but sure does stink.
I say nominally though, since crossing the line to open bribery is pretty easy when foreign companies are throwing millions of dollars at you because you're the VP's drug-addled kid. I don't want to relitigate the Biden era, but there's a reason Joe set Hunter's pardon back to 2014.
Nobody who can reason needs the press to tell them why. The potential benefit to the country was $100B. The investment in Hunter was ~$1M. They would have been dumb not to pay him what was, to them, a few pennies, on the off chance it might help.
I wasn't asking why the Ukrainians were doing it. I was asking why the press wasn't the least bit bothered by the VP's drug addict son being handed a million bucks by a state-affiliated entity on Russia's front door.
You keep saying people knew, but as you've said, you and I aren't the typical voter. You know who is? My 75 and 81 year old parents who watch CBS News every night. They are my universal stand-ins for "typical, politically disengaged, median voter".
We were talking about this several months ago and neither of them knew anything significant about Hunter Biden's drug habits, his laptop, and knew nothing about him being employed by a state-sponsored Ukrainian oil company.
People didn't know. That's the whole reason the laptop story was suppressed in Oct of 2020; the establishment class was terrified that people might find out.
People don’t follow the news because they’re busy doing something else is somehow the media’s fault now? I stand by my comment that you’re incredibly dumb and low IQ.
Turn the situation around, James. Imagine the example I used above: Jared Kushner works as an advisor to the House of Saud's Sovereign Wealth Fund. You would hear about nothing else from the NYT/WaPo/CNN/MSNBC/ABC/CBS/NPR for weeks on end.
Now compare that to the treatment of Hunter's role in Ukraine. I know you're ideological (and I respect that; I am too), but you can't honestly say the press did any serious digging on Hunter. Did they notice? Sure. On page A17 paragraph 31. And most of the articles started with "Republicans pounce..."
I don't agree with his decision to pardon his son and I think it's an abuse of Presidential power. Having said that, it doesn't prove guilt but a desire to protect his family from harassment by Trump's DOJ.
Hunter joined the board of Burisma in 2013. Trump became the President in 2017. He had 4 years to dig up dirt on Biden and Hunter and he did try. The Republicans in the Congress had 8 years to investigate him and come up with evidence to indict him. They tried very hard but came up empty handed. If they couldn't do anything for 8+ years, either because they're dumb and incompetent (true) or because there's no evidence (may or may not be true), they should stop wasting taxpayer's dime on this and move on.
I doubt Trump has any kind of even semi-coherent foreign policy plan. I think he is first and foremost about putting as much money in his pockets as possible, and that lots of Russian money and lots of Chinese money is attaching to Trump one way or another, and that in itself becomes a hold those countries have on Trump-that they could reveal in detail how, why and much he benefited financially.
I think Musk is similar in a sense. I don't think he has any loyalty to the US. or its national interests, but sees himself as global citizen who is major player on the global field in his own right and wants to wield power and expand his businesses through mutual back-scratching with the leaders of powerful countries who are open to that kind dealing.
There is a lot of good context here. However, I believe the explanation is all about a power grab. Trump can project and amass power in the United States more easily than he can in Europe and Asia. I think the thirst for power is at the heart of everything the administration is doing with ideology as convenient messaging and an effective recruitment tool.
But I agree that stupidity and carelessness and overreach will doom the power grab.
Presidents actually have vastly more power in foreign affairs than they do at home. Despite decades of delegating lawmaking authority to the executive branch and nearly creating an imperial Presidency, domestic policy is still mostly the domain of Congress.
If inflation doesn't cool, you may be right. At the present moment, however, conservative voters are wildly approving nearly everything Trump is doing.
You think that his plummeting approval rating is from Democrats who previously approved of him? I am hearing very little cheering (where there once was) and a bit of grousing on the one pro Trump discussion group (not originally political) with which I am affiliated.
The two polls that came out this week show he's slipped with Independents. But with the exception of pardoning the violent Jan. 6th insurrectionists, conservatives are still overwhelmingly approving of what he's doing. Probably because FOX News is running segments on how mortified Dems are. Owning the Libs.
I mean, Trump has a point here. What did Americans get for their 350 billion dollars? What would we get if we spent another 350 billion, or if we spent 20 years and 2 trillion like we did in Afghanistan? Showing that the stock valuations of defense contractors went down doesn't seem to strengthen the case that the American people had something to gain here.
I suspect a big theme of American politics going forward is that the government is simply running out of money. We are over $36 trillion in debt, racking up additional large deficits every year despite a raging bull economy, and interest on servicing prior debts is now the 3rd largest line item of the budget, behind only social security and medicare, even eclipsing our spending on defense. For a while we could all delude ourselves with the hope of modern monetary theory, but inflation has disabused us of that notion.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like the guy, and I voted against him; but surely someone needs to do something at some point and it was never going to be pretty. DOGE seems like the first serious attempt to do something in my lifetime.
I think if your mental model is "America is rapidly going bankrupt and we need to do something fast before it's too late", then maybe what Elon is doing makes some sense. If your mental model is "America is wealthy and strong and powerful and Pax Americana could have continued indefinitely" then what is happening is indeed a tragedy.
Well first of all, we didn't spend most of the $350 billion, just "approved" it.
Second of all, what we got was REARMAMENT. We started rebuilding our defense-industrial base. That will be INCREDIBLY useful if and when we have to fight China.
Think of the Ukraine war as something akin to the Spanish Civil war under Franco. Fascist Spain was so devastated by that war, that they refused to enter WW2 on Germany's side. If Russia finishes this war similarly weakened, and refuses to join China when they move on Taiwan, then it will help us immeasurably.
Noah, you've read Hazlett. You're literally engaged in the broken window fallacy here.
We could have economically stimulated our manufacturing base and set ourselves on the road to rearmament without blowing through a million Ukrainian and Russian lives, and without putting US global credibility on the line in a conflict on Russia's front door.
The argument you're making is the same as the high-speed rail project makes here in CA: "sure, we've only built 20 miles of track, but we created 100K jobs!"
I have read it, I suspect on your recommendation. It's a great book and illustrates the criticality of industrial potential in fighting and winning wars. Some of those stories were wonderful.
But my point stands. Readying the country for a war against China never required turning a million young, Eastern European men into canon-fodder.
3 days from now will mark 3 years of a war that likely could have been prevented by taking Russia's diplomatic comments seriously, and certainly could have been been ended by April in Istanbul.
Why wasn't it? Because influential people decided subsidizing Ukrainians killing Russians was a small price to pay to get America "on a war footing" against China -- which may not be exactly your argument here but does rhyme. And now there's a bombed out shell of a country and a million dead young men.
Look, I respect that we disagree on Ukraine, man. You're convinced that Putin is Hitler Jr, and I'm not. That's OK -- both views are common and either could be wrong.
I understand the argument "Ukraine must remain free". It's a valid question: is it in American interest to help kill Russians in Ukraine? (I don't think so, but maybe it is.) But saying that our behavior toward Ukraine is justified because it got us to "rebuild our defense industrial base"? That facilitating mass death in Eastern Europe prepares us to cause more death in Asia? And this is good? I can't go there.
Russia demanded rollback of NATO to 1997 borders and was piling up gold for large-scale war since like 2014. The fact that USA rearmed doesn't mean that the war broke out for that purpose.
But supposing for a minute that they are correct about this (which judging from your writing, I think you believe is a possibility):
> Trump, Musk, & co. may have looked at that lopsided manufacturing equation and decided that there’s just no way that America, even in concert with its allies and potential partners like India, can match Chinese power over the next few decades
Perhaps we need to learn from the Chinese, and reconfigure our economic system to one that will produce great INDUSTRIES as opposed to great FIRMS?
Almost all rich countries subsidize agriculture, because markets without any government interference attempt to match supply to demand, and while excess food production is no big deal, insufficient food production is catastrophic.
Similarly, post-Mao China stumbled (likely by accident) into an economic system that incentivises the production of industrial capacity, and that is far more effective than antitrust legislation at preventing oligopolies from restricting production for their own benefit.
"Western economists who are often shy about addressing distributional issues in our own economies have a very strong view that ordinary households should have more purchasing power and Xi Jinping should have less. Maybe so!"
"But let's consider a model with three classes of purchaser: Ordinary households, Xi Jinping, and Marc Andreessen. There is the economy that would have prevailed if only ordinary households had purchasing power, in roughly equal amounts. There is the economy that prevails when a very large pool of purchasing power is directed by Xi Jinping. Xi uses this purchasing power to produce a lot more steel, batteries, EVs, solar panels, on the theory that strategic, rather than demand-driven investment in those sectors will leave his nation-state better positioned for the future. No doubt, the resulting is an economy "distorted" relative to an entirely demand-driven economy."
"Now let's transfer the purchasing power under Xi's direction to Andreessen. (I'm using poor Marc here as a stand-in for the venture capital industry. I'm not making specific claims about the man.) Marc does not invest so much in steel, solar, or EVs, because he knows there will be inadequate demand for those goods to recoup Xi-scale investments. Where Xi subsidizes loss-making solar panel companies, Andreessen subsidizes loss-making Ubers, DoorDashes, etc. on the theory that he can eventually recoup those losses by scaling fastest in what will become winner-take-all markets, and earning thick profits thereafter. This economy also is "distorted" relative to an economy driven only by meeting demand from hypothetical approximately equal households. It is warped beyond recognition relative to the optimum under any model in which perfect competition would obtain."
"Western economists applaud Andreessen's economy, but disparage Xi's. I think that is madness."
The US did not approve 350 billion to Ukraine. The $350 billion was the World Banks estimated rebuilding cost of Ukraine. Congress passed five bills that provided aid that costs $175 Billion. Of that $175 Billion, $119 Billion was directly for Ukraine.
What did we get? We got to replenish our weapons stock while giving out our older weapons instead of destroying them (that money stayed in the US btw supporting domestic jobs), we got valuable data on our weapons used in an actual war setting without actually having to go to war ourselves, we massively weakened an antagonistic power without putting our own soldiers' boots on the ground, we signaled to China and other territory-expansionist powers to think twice before trying something similar, we bolstered our relationships with European allies, and we get moral capital because standing up to tyrants is not only good, actually, but it's what the US should stand for.
I saw one young Briton said that he would not shed blood for Ukraine - even though the UK government doesn't plan to send soldiers to fight for Ukraine, just for peacekeeping in the ceasefire!
Afghanistan was a different mission: nation-building as as opposed to defence from an imperial power. The moral case isn't hard to make for Ukraine aid and to the extent that that it's hard to justify it's (almost exclusively imo) because we've had Trump spewing bs and lies to the MAGA base which fully controls the GOP.
Minor correction: It was FOX News (and its lesser imitators) that were--and still are --spewing lies to conservative voters. About how masculine, Christian and non-Woke Putin's Russia is. And how the historic Russian/USSR "Sphere of Interest" gave them the right to invade Ukraine and Georgia. About how our Ukraine aid was of zero benefit to us.
When FOX starts spinning how we shouldn't send our boys to defend Taiwan from China, then we'll know for sure that the GOP has gone total Quisling.
Sometime someone will produce the ultimate lucid explanation about how and, more importantly why, the imagination of the American Christianist far right was so fully captured by Putin's Russia - a regime where less than 6% of the population attends religious services and abortion is, as it was in Soviet time, the principal form of birth control. Is it really possible to hate drag shows THAT much?!
As I've probably mentioned before on this Substack, I'm increasingly partial to Phillip Hallam-Baker's view that the Russians hacked Fox News in 2014, with their first objective being to help Trump win the 2016 GOP primary.
The notion of turning Afghanistan into a Western-style democracy was doomed from the start, and the fact that it was attempted at all shows how much Westerners (especially neocons) underestimated the resilience of tribal Muslim societies in general.
While cousin marriage in the West is stigmatized after being banned by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, Arab culture actually _encouraged_ marriage to one's father's brother's daughter (such a preferred wife even has a special name "bint al-'amm" in Arabic). This custom emerged about a century before Muhammad's birth, but was spread by the Arab conquests in the 7th century. As a result, societies in this region of the world (roughly Morocco to Pakistan inclusive) are splintered into largely self-contained tribes and clans bound by blood relations.
Such societies crush female autonomy (as women are seen as bargaining chips to be married off to cousins to keep wealth within the clan, or perhaps to a specific member of another clan in order to build an alliance) and are too fragmented to form modern nation-states. Note that Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq was made up almost entirely of members of his own Tikrit-based clan.
Detribalizing such societies has historically only been possible by brutal coercion including mass murder of religious leaders and forcible separation of families: historically this was done mainly by communist regimes. Stalin's regime did it in Soviet Central Asia (which previously was culturally similar to Afghanistan: a British traveller to Tsarist-era Bukhara remarked on how depressing it was going for months without seeing a woman's face) while China is currently now doing this to the Uyghurs. And there was no way that the West was going to behave like this in Afghanistan.
For one thing, China's treatment of the Uyghurs isn't merely condemned in the West but often branded as genocide, and for another both the Soviets in Central Asia and the Chinese in East Turkestan were from geographically neighbouring lands and had no intention of ever leaving, while Westerners had no desire to annex a landlocked country on the other side of the world. And if/when the occupiers DID leave, Afghanistan would have doubtless become just as much of a source of anti-Western terrorism as before (albeit for a completely different reason: not jihadist Islam but revenge for the brutality of the detribalization policy)!
I once had the cynical notion that Russia's stereotypical unhealthy vodka-sodden lifestyle actually makes it more powerful: unlike Western countries it isn't having to expend vast resources on dementia care, because few Russians live long enough to develop dementia in the first place!
"DOGE seems like the first serious attempt to do something in my lifetime."
DOGE is hiring 19 year old hackers calling themselves "Big Balls" and can't tell the difference between $8 million and $8 billion. The idea that it represents a serious effort to do anything is laughable on its face.
Yeah to be clear I'm not saying the people doing this are serious, or competent, or even effective. I'm simply saying the *attempt* is serious, in the sense that it's not just blowing hot air. It's taking real actions even if that risks painful consequences or breaking things. That makes it dangerous and is why everyone is so upset, of course.
Prior attempts like the Simpson-Bowles commission or CBO reports tend to be just that, reports with recommendations, which are mentioned in the news and then subsequently ignored and forgotten about by all politicians of both parties.
The fact that the GOP refuses to even *consider* raising taxes a smidgen on the 1% and corporations, tells you how serious they are about balancing the budget. Or taxing stock buybacks.
They will push hard for another tax bill this year, adding a further $2trn in debt.
Try to avoid mistaking "big action" for "doing something about the problem".
I get that many Americans see politics and policy entirely in terms of loud boasts on TV and loud men barking orders and firing masses of people in public. Because that's "at least, doing *something*".
Many Americans can be purblind and ignorant like that if they want to be. We should aspire to be better than that, while we have the chance.
You will know when the attempt is serious, because it will involve Congress, and will be a discussion about which spending items in the US Budget represent value for money and which do not.
A serious attempt would probably focus on the private sector's parasitic role in US healthcare, given that they US spends far too much of its GDP on health for worse outcomes, compared to virtually all other OECD countries.
The federal government in the US is actually under-taxed though, and no one in the last election - Trump or Harris - put a serious proposal to reduce the deficit (even Harris said that no family with income lower than $400000/year would face higher taxes!)
There should be a balance of higher taxes and reduce public spending to limit the debt growth (~6% peacetime deficit is definitely unsustainable), but with what Trump + Elon are doing with DOGE and cut taxes for the rich? These are just a pipe dream!
Yes, we are all severely undertaxed (and to be clear, this is true of me personally). But we do not have any leaders with the abillity to explain that and get taxes raised. And the immense sums spent on DEI being uncovered by DOGE (and yes, they ARE immense, even if only a tiny percentage of the total budget) is not going to help with that case.
I live in California and the combined taxes I pay is 55% of my earnings ( plus paying highest gas, electric, water and fuel prices) so it’s hard for me to feel ‘ under taxed.’ I’m curious what kind of rate do you think I should be paying?
That's your marginal rate, what is your actual rate? That is, total dollars in annual income taxes (fed + state) divided by your total annual income BEFORE any deductions or adjustments.
I’m in CA and in relatively high-earning (W2) couple with no children and a house purchased in 2017. I can’t promise I’ll have my taxes done in time that anyone will care here, but I’ll be able to tell you for sure how much of my income went to taxes moving forward.
If he was in California with a marginal combined tax rate of 55%, he would be well educated enough to know that it was his marginal tax rate. Seems safe to assume he is trolling.
I'm not trolling. I was being sincere. I'm a working person, not a billionaire using all the tax shelters available but still paying the highest rates. I don't feel undertaxed and wanted to know what Mark thinks is enough. And not attacking him for his opinion, not debating, just curious what it is.
Your problem is that your income is not from unearned income and capital gains. Or, if you were like Elon or another Oligarch, you could borrow money against the value of your assets, pay zero income tax, and even get to deduct the loan interest.
If someone makes personal loans for living expenses, whether using appreciated stocks as collateral, or not then the interest payments they make are not a tax deductible expense. If you try to do this, please consult a tax advisor first. Mortgage interest on primary residences are tax deductible, which is a stupid tax policy which both parties have supported for a long time, but this is different than personal loans.
This is a nonsense conspiracy theory. If the stock market averages 7% a year, interest rates are currently 5% (bare minimum), you would expect 2% from this strategy (pre-tax). Why would you ever do that when you could just put it in 10 year treasuries at 4.5% without the uncertainty?
No conspiracy required. Did you think Warren Buffet was fibbing when he mentioned that his secretary paid a larger nominal tax rate than himself?
Yes, even 6 month CD's would work, if you want to go the unearned income route. But depending on your goals, you will want to consult with your financial people to minimize your overall tax liability.
Capital gains taxation is the kicker. Which is why it's better to leave your profits unrealized, and simply borrow against your assets for living expenses.
Except that the market averages 10% per year and 5% beats 4.5% which is why nobody who can tolerate a bit of volatility picks treasuries over the market.
Yeah, maybe the individualist ethos of Americans actually hinders them to have a welfare state similar to Europe - for example, even though Americans are the "sickest of the rich" with healthcare costs high and lower life expectancy, there have been little progress to curb powers of private insurance though (main reason why the assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO last year was hailed as a hero by many Americans!)
DOGE doesn't seem like a serious effort to cut unnecessary expenditures: it is limited to a small slice of the budget and the basis of its choices seems blatantly political, not fiscal.
We got plenty for that $350b (much of which was plowed back into the US economy as contracts for replacement materiel): we used it to repair the hole Trump blew in NATO and restore the badly damaged reputation of US foreign policy in Europe. That's what it costs to exercise non-violent hegemonic power to build a bulwark against very large threats, such as China. Being a dominant global power costs a lot of money, yes -- I can't imagine why people pay no attention to the global benefits, and instead focus on the inevitable subset of missteps alone. If you're looking for actual efficiency in a complex human organizations you're looking at the wrong species.
We pay service on debt because it is in our interest to deploy the principal elsewhere. We get something for that debt service, just as a mortgage owner receives a net benefit in paying down the loan. I think it's agreed that there must be a scale at which debt is unsustainable, but no consensus on where it is. If you go back 50 years you'll see the same Cassandra calls about the size of a much smaller pre-Reagan deficit, and not only did the catastrophe fail to materialize, Reagan tax cuts magnified the danger, putting us on a path towards today . . . which is a path towards larger deficits tomorrow. I have no idea where a threshold to Doom is crossed, but cries of "The deficit is $X trillion!" when the economy is booming do seem suspect to someone who's been hearing the same alarm for over half a century, with the number almost always growing. (No one gives the Clinton years a second look.) . . . Let me add, I am not an economist. If you are I beg forgiveness in advance!
It’s important to stick to facts, especially with a guy like Trump in charge. The US did give substantial amounts of aid to Ukraine, concretely: $86.7 billion were disbursed so far.
Of those, about $58 billion of the total aid was spent in the U.S., directly boosting the U.S. defense industry.
I'm sure that Donald Trump has never read about, or even heard of, Metternich, the Concert of Europe or the Congress of Vienna. I suspect his diplomatic choices are more determined by his prejudices, resentments, greed and whether or not each country's leaders have flattered him or criticized him. He is a malignant narcissist, and narcissists like him become enraged when their fragile ego is threatened by criticism, sarcastic comments or exposure of their ignorance and lies. It is obvious he loves wealthy, corrupt dictators who know how to flatter him or send him beautiful love letters. On the other hand, democratic leaders who argue with him, like Merkel or, years ago, Trudeau, obviously enrage him. And Zelensky refused to help his campaign in 2020 (unlike Putin), so Zelensky is the target of his angry lies and vitriol. The fact that Putin and Xi are cold-blooded, competent sociopaths means that they can easily manipulate a lazy, ignorant narcissist with a fragile ego like Trump. Claire Berlinski wrote a very insightful essay about Trump's psychopathology, and how it likely determines his actions, titled "Impeach Him: Trump's psychopathology and the suicide of a superpower" in the Cosmopolitan Globalist substack (2/6/2025). Musk, on the other hand, is not lazy, but is very greedy, ruthless and power-hungry. He clearly wants to maximize his wealth and power, and may push Trump toward an accommodation or even a de facto semi-alliance with Xi. Neither Musk nor Trump seems to have any sympathy for our democratic European allies. As Noah wrote earlier, Trump's disdain for our allies could easily lead to nuclear proliferation and a much more dangerous world, for us and everyone else on earth.
Agree about Trump, but while Elon is narcissistic and power obsessed, as well as eccentric, I don’t think greed is what motivates him. Developing the first mass produced EVs, the first reusable rockets, the first useful satellite broadband, AI for self driving cars and robots, and neuralink implants for nerve damage treatment don’t seem to be what a greedy business person (like Trump) would even consider developing.
Very possibly true, but as he keeps increasing his power (via buying a worldwide communication system, buying a presidency for DJT, and trying to influence elections worldwide), he keeps earning (at least on paper) tens of billions more dollars. If he were less interested in enriching himself, perhaps he would donate some of that money to charities, or pay his employees more (or himself less), rather than buying politicians and businesses.
For an economist, Noah, you're ignoring a far more obvious possibility: we're broke. Our debt is 120% of GDP. Interest alone consumes 4.5% of GDP and about 20% of federal spending. We're still running the credit card at 5% of GDP annually and not Trump nor the Democrats nor the American people have the willpower to stop. Tyler Cowen made a good case today that we're looking at mild stagflation.
You've laid out before here why we would lose a war with China: we manufacture very little, even less end-to-end, and even less of military usefulness. If anything, the Ukraine war has made that clearer than ever. We have the strongest military in the world... if we were fighting WWII naval battles. I pissed about Trump dropping the China sanctions too and especially undermining the CHIPS act, but as we've seen, things get walked back by this administration, so before you start down another Manchurian-candidate rabbit hole (remember the phony Russia collusion narrative?) let's see what happens in the coming few weeks.
Big picture, America faces weakness on a lot of fronts. Some form of refocus on the Western Hemisphere is likely inevitable -- it can happen on our terms now or on someone else's after a major strategic defeat. Our options are becoming limited by our financial and military reality. As someone who wants to Make America Great Again, I wish that wasn't true. But contra your party's guiding philosophy, reality is NOT a social construction -- my wishes (or yours) don't change it.
(Good policy could improve this, over time. Trump won't be that vehicle though. He's a wrecking ball -- and many of us who voted for him intentionally chose the wrecking ball because that's what was needed right now. Someone else -- perhaps named Vance -- will need to rebuild.)
What you need is a responsible Congress that seeks to distribute the benefits of the USA's vast wealth appropriately among its citizens, and seeks to maintain the strong alliances that have served it will since WW2. Sorting out the USA's self-destructive healthcare system would be a good start.
But instead, US citizens are so bored and aimless that they have let themselves be duped into that sort of thinking. Fake crises that need a 'wrecking ball'.
So there won't be any useful, thoughtful reform of anything. Just a wrecking ball that will make the whole world worse off.
We haven't had a responsible Congress in my lifetime. Keep wishing.
But I do know there's no way to build an effective country again without tearing down the ineffective things that the Left has spent 50 years building. Hence, the wrecking ball. I noticed Trump did something Noah has been advocating for a while, took his wrecking ball to NEPA.
I don't like it either man, but I've come to the conclusion that reforming this stuff is impossible and it simply must be destroyed and rebuilt. And the crap that we're finding now ($20B parked at an NGO to distribute to green projects; $2B in a Stacey Abrams backed "charity" that didn't exist 12 months ago) makes me suspect the govt-run, Lefty patronage machine is far larger than I could have ever imagined.
I actually understand $200K for an anti-Catholic musical in Ireland or $50K for a trannie comic book in Peru. But we're talking $Billions here, with a B. Throwing around that kind of money to private organizations whose only job is to decide who to give it to absolutely reeks of money laundering and corruption.
And yet the citizens of the US have been doing just fine, so your Henny Penny routine about “the Left” is probably a temperamental flaw in your part more than anything else.
In terms of citizen welfare, the reforms the USA needs most are in a leftward direction e.g. a better healthcare system.
In any case, your lust for the wrecking ball could not be more wrong. I hope you and people like you learn quickly from here.
Or look at the divorce rate. Or the drug addition rate. Or the out of wedlock birth rate. Even the overall birthrate. Straight GDP, it's plausible to claim "citizens of the US have been doing fine", but GDP masks a great deal.
The Democrats had near unified control of the US Congress from 1950-1992. How did they do: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA GINI: 1964 - 35; 2004 - 41; 2024 - 41. Great job promoting equality, guys!
Trump's party ain't Reagan's GOP. The new alignment embraces much that old-school, Bernie-type liberals will recognize: safety net, industrial policy, pro-worker. Look at what Oren Cass is doing -- that's MAGA. If you can get over your dislike of Trump (something I pretty much share with you) you might find considerable common ground with the new conservative agenda. Josh Hawley put it correctly 2 years ago: "the Republicans are now the blue collar party."
Note, that doesn't mean everything Trump does will benefit workers. It won't -- he's a billionaire who cares mostly about himself. But our next generation (Hawley, Vance, et al) is all about class politics; the Dems next generation doubles down on woke racial and sexual grievance. It sounds to me like you are more into the former than the latter. (As is Noah.)
Republicans are the blue collar party now, at least among whites and ‘men’. But it’s all based on lies and misdirection. They get away with it because (i) most of those blue collar people don’t have much to worry about day to day (they have their iPhones and Netflix etc.) and (ii) they’re so child-like that they have no idea how the serious things work and can be easily manipulated and misled.
Hawley, Vance, etc. are charlatans who fancy themselves as ‘Trump, but smarter’. It won’t work for them, because Trump will destroy them one way or another.
What that "someone . . . named Vance" seems to be all about is the institution of nastily authoritarian integralism in place of a pluralist, secular democratic republic. If that's the price of "rebuilding", then we really are about to experience the cure that is far far worse than the disease.
The US grew its debt to deal with the crisis due to financial deregulation and to deal with the pandemic. I doubt that a wrecking ball in the form of a wave of deregulation (favoring things like cryptos) and weakening of health / research institutions would help to decrease the debt. Quite the opposite, they seem like “the wrecking ball” increases the probably and expected duration of crisis, making more likely increases in debt.
The wrecking ball just did something Noah's been advocating for a couple of years: gutted NEPA.
I agree that the wrecking ball is a bull in the China shop. Trump will destroy some useful stuff. But the Left has spent 50 years systematically seeking out the most priceless pieces in the store and smashing them to bits. So given the choice, I choose accidental destruction with good intentions instead of targeted destruction with the goal of destroying the country.
I didn't always feel this way. For most of my life, I really believed liberals wanted what was best for America but were just wrong about how to get there. But the last 10 years convinced me otherwise: some may fall into that category, but most just the country and specifically most of the people in it.
My argument is that they appear to hate the country, and having your country run by people who hate it is suicidal.
Trump appears to honestly love the country. He loves himself more, but he also loves America. So does Musk, in a way only an immigrant can. So given those choices, I'll take incompetent America lovers over slightly less incompetent America haters.
The idea of Trump loving the US is pretty absurd to me. He talks constantly about what a hellscape it is, violates it's norms, destroys the very institutions and alliances that made it powerful.
I think the Democrats have a marketing problem around the view of whether or not they hate the country, but the majority of mainstream democrats and liberals very clearly love this country.
What deregulation? The financial sector is one of the most tightly regulated sectors of the economy and was also in 2008. Financial bubbles happen again and again over history and there is no stopping it. The government will never actually do it because everyone is getting rich as the bubble inflates and stopping that is politically impossible.
We are broke. And I wonder if this is not the logical endpoint of a democratic welfare state and whether they are a fundamentally unstable entity in geopolitics. It seems to be at a strategic disadvantage to an authoritarian state that can force cuts in standard of living to prepare for war. And WWII is not a counterexample. The US was a much different entity then. Social Security didn't make its first payout until 1940 and government revenues were about 1/4th of their post war average. If we needed to mobilize like that today, I doubt that the voters would tolerate the inevitable cuts in transfer payments.
Given that the biggest items in the federal budget are Social Security and Medicare, isn't the real impediment to mobilization thus "having a large elderly population that need to be kept alive"?
If Vance will be associated with 4 years of wrecking-balling, will people still vote for him and believe that he can build something?
On a reality and social construction - isn't it becoming more fragmented with social media algorithms? I mean, 99% of information out there is not something people can directly experience or fact-check. But they argue about it as fierce as Soviet citizens fought in bread lines, and make political decisions based on that. So actual reality matters less than subjective bubble. And wether America is great again or not is purely a subjective opinion that can be socially engineered. Just look at economic sentiment charts that flip after each election. Musk with a chain saw will make some people forget about egg prices - well, at least for some time.
Interesting, and probably right. But how about this - Trump is applying his experience in real estate to international affairs. In real estate, it makes sense to make your customers and business partners feel like they are offering very little, because you are hoping to get them to make more concessions to you. You tell them their building is worthless to get them to lower the price or offer something extra. Trump feels like America's allies aren't offering America enough in return, so he insults them and threatens to make sweetheart deals with their enemies. Maybe he wants Europe, South Korea, and Japan to buy more American goods, and maybe he wants Ukraine to give us mineral rights.
Meanwhile, it makes sense to be nice to new potential customers and business partners in real estate. You can't get anything out of a client or whatever if the relationship is nonexistent.
Trump is definitely drawing the wrong conclusions from his business experience, and his business experience never led to a lot of success in the first place. But it might explain his behavior.
This is a VERY insightful comment and one I've heard rarely in the last few weeks. Anyone who hasn't read The Art of the Deal really should, since it provides a window into a young-Trump's thought processes, which don't appear to have changed much.
Noah, I think you're making an assumption here that Trump is trying to be a President, i.e. trying to represent the interests of US citizens. I know that you have your eyes open to his corruption and bad ideas, but you still seem to imagine that he is pursuing a strategy that has something to do with the USA.
I don't think he's trying to be President at all.
He and Musk seem to be most happy if everyone is talking about them and they're extracting wealth and power at the expense of others. They do not give two hoots about the welfare of American citizens, the impact they're having on geopolitics, or even their own political legacy.
You might be right about the 'grand conspiracy' theory.
But there is another explanation: political power in the USA is now finely concentrated with a couple of genuine psychopaths, and both of them are now determined to blow more hot air into this balloon until it pops.
Ignoring congressional power has started already. Ignoring court orders has also started. Like Putin, they won't stop.
There are so many more possibilities for new arrangements than Noah sees. The permutations are endless. trump's actions won't determine if he is taking us down one of the two paths mentioned.
For one thing I don't think trump is being guided by that kinda strict ideology. I think has has a notion of an American unencumbered by alliances , but not necessarily isolationist or willing to cede or abide by zones of influence. Trump is an opportunist. He'll look for opportunities anywhere. For example, if he thinks he can get something out of supporting Taiwan he will. He won't link that to supporting South Korea as an overall anti- China strategy.
Trump doesn't want to divide the world up, he wants to grab anything he sees as low hanging fruit wherever it might be. That's why it'd probably be a mistake to try and divine anything trump does as an indication of what grand world dividing strategy he's embarking on.
If Trump cancels and/or hinders the chips act I don’t know how the tech bros will come back from that. And if Palantir and Palmer get rugged I’d at least savor seeing them express what selling out their souls got them. Honestly that would be the largest tell I can think of at this point in time (As I watch Samuel Hammond wring his hands regarding AI positions being canned by DOGE in the government). But for all of our sakes I hope none of it comes to fruition.
Regarding China - you’ve highlighted Rush Doshi’ work already. Xi and the CCP will not stop until we are no longer a threat to their ends. Which as you mentioned is precisely why “turtling” at this point will simply leave us open to a Zerg rush later. Doesn’t matter how many siege tanks you have if you can’t replace them fast enough.
At the end of the day it increasingly feels like I just need to get this tattooed on my arm and throw in the towel. Musk will do anything to secure a trip to Mars and Trump will do anything to enrich himself.
“The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
Nah, it's not that complicated. These are all rookies in the government house, not statesmen. Once they get smacked about a bit, they'll be more competitive. Of course, our allies will suffer but not if they go nuke quickly.
Trump is a traitor plain and simple. This post lays it out. We lost a war without a single shot being fired. A lot of good that AI advantage is doing now. Thanks for this Noah. Clear thinking is the first step.
The case that Trump was recruited by the KGB--now called the FSB--sometime in the 1990's is quite plausible, especially considering his fawning subservience to Putin even before Helsinki. His current betrayal of US/NATO natsec interests by this abject surrender to Russia make perfect sense if he is indeed a Russian intelligence thrall.
Regarding Musk, most of his net worth is tied up in Tesla; and 50% of Tesla's batteries and cars are made in China. Musk paid Trump a whopping $250 million dollars--plus a ton more in kind by his de facto dedication of X to Trump/GOP. Trump's adding of a mere 10% in extra tariffs to Chinese imports seems like an ample quid pro quo for Elon. Especially when contrasted against the more drastic Chinese tariff numbers Trump was floating before Elon coughed up his quarter billion.
So, Noah, let's please just sacrifice Metternich and Kissinger on the altar of Occam's Razor and tell it like it is: Trump is an FSB thrall; and Elon paid him off to go easy on China.
>Regarding Musk, most of his net worth is tied up in Tesla; and 50% of Tesla's batteries and cars are made in China... Trump's adding of a mere 10% in extra tariffs to Chinese imports seems like an ample quid pro quo for Elon.
This would be more plausible to me if there was evidence that Musk was concerned with Tesla's prospects at all. Tesla's business challenges appear to be on the demand side, not the supply or manufacturing sides, and Musk's high-profile, anti-democratic activities seem to be significantly impacting demand for Tesla's products. No matter how much quid pro quo Tesla were to receive in the form of tariff or other tax exemptions from the federal government, it's hard to imagine they could possibly overcome the brand harm that Tesla is suffering from Musk's actions.
Put more succinctly, it seems Musk would stand to benefit more financially if he weren't publicly involved in the MAGA project of dismantling the federal government, and that makes it difficult for me to believe that his involvement is motivated by money. I expect that he is motivated primarily by a desire for more attention and power, and to some extent by earnest ideological beliefs.
You make some good points. Musk seems pretty savvy with his investments. Well, except for Twitter. Assuming his total realignment with conservative America--and alienation of liberal customers--is a clever calculation, and not just personality-driven, it's that he's: a) Looking at opening up marketing his EV's to conservatives; and/or b) Buying off Trump/GOP to go easy on his vulnerabilities vis a vis IRA and his Chinese manufacturing capacity; and a bit with his SpaceX contracts.
I just bought a Nissan Leaf last week. For years I'd dreamed of getting a Tesla. But not after Elon full-on turned X into a creepy neo-Nazi hangout.
Twitter was bad investment purely from financial side. But it was instrumental in bringing Trump back to power with Musk on board. It was a wild bet, but it played out. Now he got direct access to the deepest pocket in the world, probably the only one that can finance his Mars mission.
Agreed.
Musk is likely in the hole he's in because his brain broke around 2018 or so. That was when he started becoming addicted to drugs, Twitter, and paranoid obsession with his "enemies", in part due to his sleepless attempt to rescue Tesla from bankruptcy at the time.
His most immediate ideological objective, like Noah posits here, is likely to strike a grand "accord" with Russia and China, and to crush all dissent against Trump in the United States. . . because he believes to *not* do that would result in nuclear Armageddon before he can succeed in colonizing Mars.
Not even kidding.
Mars. Frigging Mars.
That, bizarrely and absurdly, is why he's turning into arguably one of the great monsters of our era.
When you think the alternative to crushing your enemies with force is the End Of All Things before you can achieve your Great Dreams In Space, and you're a personality like Elon, it's hard not to turn into the worst villain from every Bond movie.
There are other things that sent him over the edge too, of course--The pandemic, Putin's foul persuasion, Biden administration snubs, Elon's oldest living child disowning him, etc. But the Mars thing, believe it or not, is sincerely probably what's driving his brain-broke descent into madness.
Anyone drawing comparisons between Elon Musk and Wernher von Braun?
I've heard this before. And frankly, no, none whatsoever.
Short version why: They're basically opposite kinds of people.
Long version:
Yes, Von Braun did join the Nazi party, and he did further an awful regime's war effort, out of what he felt was patriotic duty to his homeland. The factories that built his rockets employed slave labor, many of whom died. None of that is in dispute.
But to paraphrase Paul Harvey, there's more to the story.
After the war, while working for the U.S. (not entirely as a free man at first), he had genuine shame for what he'd been a part of, and by his friends' and colleagues' own account, had an unplanned religious awakening at the church his Army "minder" attended (and which he, therefore, had to attend as well).
He later ended up spearheading integration of his own workforce in Huntsville, Alabama (of all places), helping to establish the new civil rights era there, basically through sheer leadership in the face of a stubborn local populace.
He believed, apparently, that he owed it to God, as part of his "repentance".
Elon, as we speak, is hyperactively busy helping to politically purge and re-segregate the US federal work force, literally the opposite of what Von Braun helped to do in his time and place. He believes in God like I believe in Lean Six Sigma--as a feel-good excuse to do something you were already going to do.
Von Braun was also imprisoned by Himmler and the SS for "defeatist sentiments" and overheard "treasonous" remarks during the war, and very nearly got executed for them. He only was let out of prison when they realized no one else could run the V-2 program.
Elon is never going to be overheard saying disloyal things about Trump. He understands that as Trump goes, he goes.
Even as far as other aspects of his personality go, Von Braun was a conservative Prussian engineer to a fault, as opposed to Elon and SpaceX's heedless disregard of safety or procedure.
He would not let any rocket be launched until every i was dotted and t was crossed.
That was, in part, why the Russians beat us to launching the first man into space, even once the federal government woke up in the wake of Sputnik.
Basically, Elon and von Braun, despite their shared charisma, drive, engineering prowess, and ties to fascism, are opposites in every other way, especially the moral ways.
Von Braun's only comparable to Elon if you focus on what he was a part of in the first decade-plus of his adulthood, and disregard all the rest. As most people who've heard of him, let's face it, do.
I don't see much overlap. Braun was actually a scientist, Musk is not. The FBI found Braun to be earnest in his claims that he only joined the Nazi party out of fear and/or career advancement, whereas Musk seems like he might earnestly be a neo-nazi. I find this sentence and quote from attributed to Braun on his Wikipedia page quite pertinent:
Yet, he also wrote that "to us, Hitler was still only a pompous fool with a Charlie Chaplin moustache" and that he perceived him as "another Napoleon" who was "wholly without scruples, a godless man who thought himself the only god".
Russia likely exploited the fact that many American conservatives believe everything they see on Fox News: they suborned Fox News in 2014 in order to win the 2016 GOP primary for their asset.
Oh good Lord. Are we really back to this? Did you people learn nothing from the whole Russia collusion hoax the first time around?
By all means, feel free to peddle Manchurian Candidate conspiracies for the next 4 years. We're going to be busy making America work better for Americans.
Brian, I'd worry more about the fact that your guy is selling out not just you but everything you value and care about. You're being rugged. You don't have to like progressives or Democrats to realize that. Wake up, man!!
You prefer the "Useful Idiot" hypothesis then, Comrade? Or are you honestly defending Trump's recent moves with Putin? Or of his alienation of our closest allies Canada and Mexico? Or of Hegseth, Kennedy and Gabbard?
Never thought I'd see the day when conservatives became a bunch of Commie-lovers. The GOP has surrendered the Pax Americana to Russia and Communist China. Guess it's time to start learning Mandarin.
Brian you forgot the first rule of Noah's substack. Never read the comments lol. The looniest lefties are in here, it's actually wild.
There’s actually a lot more MAGA types in the comments than people like me who support some woke-ism.
I don't see why we need to debate whether or not Trump is a Russian agent. This is little different to the far-right conspiracy theories about George Soros and the bug-eaters at the WEF. The better answer (according to Occam's Razor) is that Trump knows that liberals are triggered by Putin, he knows Putin is a right-wing culture warrior with a social base not unlike his own, and so they have interests that parallel each other.
Putin is a ruthless dictator, full stop. Who rules a kleptocracy with a dozen lesser robber barons.
To even compare the RW nonsense against Soros--which is deeply rooted in antisemitism, in case you didn't know--against the case of Trump as either Gullible Tool or FSB Traitor, belies the deep insight you've shown in your other posts, Elie.
The tripe dished out against Soros and others by FOX News and other 'alternative facts' RW outlets is almost always poorly constructed propaganda--or outright lies--that even cursory fact-checking will demolish.
But you are correct that Trump is aware that conservative voters are absolutely delighted over the screams of anguish emanating from Dem-land over the current blitzkrieg of Trump/DOGE antics. FOX has been running lots of segments on this angle lately.
I'd say the anti-Soros propaganda is more directly linked to Russia: this rhetoric often accuses Soros of helping "topple 8 foreign governments" but never mentions _which_ governments they actually were:
1. The Soviet puppet government of Estonia
2. The Soviet puppet government of Latvia
3. The Soviet puppet government of Lithuania
4. The Soviet puppet government of Poland
5. The Soviet puppet government of Czechoslovakia
6. The Soviet puppet government of Hungary
7. The Soviet puppet government of Romania
8. The Soviet puppet government of Bulgaria
In other words, they credit Soros with helping to destroy the Soviet Empire, but somehow make that out to be a bad thing!
Conspiracy theorists don't claim the WEF eat bugs themselves: they claim that they want to force _everyone else_ to eat bugs (presumably by taxing meat to the point that it becomes unaffordable to everyone outside the WEF elite itself).
What evidence is there that Trump was recruited by the FSB as a Manchurian Candidate? Do you also think Robert Mueller was paid off by them to tank the Russiagate conspiracy?
Elon Musk didn’t pay Trump, he donated to a super PAC, and if Trump is an FSB asset, why didn’t he ignore Musk and go hard against China?
Google "The case for Donald Trump as an FSB Asset"
Much of the material is quite good, especially the content from back during 2016 and Trump1 before Helsinki. It's all hypothetical of course; but the evidence such that it is, is compelling.
Mueller, as you no doubt know, uncovered a considerable amount of contact between individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and individuals associated with or suspected of ties to Russian intelligence. But there were no direct ties to Trump himself.
Mueller did most definitely encounter extensive amounts of obstruction into his investigation by the Trump campaign, but as per DOJ regulations punted actual prosecution to Congress.
We are very much headed for trouble.
Trump has alienated our allies while giving away the farm to our enemies. He's not only the worst president of my lifetime, he's blowing past James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson as the worst president America has ever had. If we survive his presidency as a hegemonic power we will be VERY lucky.
Looking in from the outside its really painful seeing America so weak. It's not like anyone currently in charge hid what they were thinking; they outright said all this on the campaign trail, and Americans voted for it. I hope that America re-discovers its strength in the next few years.
The good news is that the more pain Americans feel the better the chance of a political reversal in 2/4 years that would allow the opposition party enough of a majority to change things. But without a Senate majority, a lot of protections the USA needs are not going to happen.
The institutional damage won't be repaired for a century, because they're pocketing the money we'd need to rebuild, and the "opposition" party hasn't meaningfully opposed him when they had a majority *or even the Presidency*
Americans are always convinced that our status quo will reassert itself, but eventually you get a Lenin, a Mao, a Caesar, and their various cronies; and their nation never recovers.
I have a hard time getting excited about this possibility right now. A lot of the damage Trump is causing will be permanent regardless of what happens in 2028.
Yes, I just think this is fundamentally different than the past, where you could kind of hope the current administration would make mistakes, cause a bit of pain, and that would ultimately be ok because it would allow Dems to come back into power.
Much of what the Trump administration is salting the earth - future dem administrations won’t be able to repair the damage in the foreseeable future.
The bush administration hurt alliances, but in a much less fundamental way - we were still committed to our alliances in principal if in every deed.
I don’t think the Bush administration made a point of demonstrating that the US will not keep its word if a new administration comes into power. Up until now, administrations of both parties have changed future plans but never reneged on agreements that were currently in place. But this administration has demonstrated that you need an insurance policy if you want any sort of US federal agreement for more than 4 years.
Depending on how SCOTUS rules, there may never be a need for a Senate majority again.
Considering the previous administration gave us "toxic masculinity", "logic is white supremacy", and "the female penis"... can you blame them?
Liberals brought this on themselves. Joe Biden promised a return to normalcy and instead we got batshit crazy stuff pushed from the bully pulpit and anyone (even liberals) who weren't 100% on board with the postmodernist program were economically destroyed.
Where did the Biden administration even once support the Tema Okun “logic is whites supremacy” stuff?
And where did they do any “economic destroy” stuff of the sort that Trump has done dozens of times in a single month?
Found the weakness of America right here folks.
You're being lied to Brian! I wish propaganda wasn't so effective. You'll never see the truth.
I think Trump has already answered your question definitively. It's Metternich-Lindbergh.
Trump, in October 2024, in Wisconsin:
"The crazy lunatics that we have — the fascists, the Marxists, the communists, the people that we have that are actually running the country. . . Those people are more dangerous — the enemy from within — than Russia and China and other people.”
He wants to have a truce with China so he can crack skulls in America. So does Vance, so does Elon. That's their entire reason for being in power right now.
Trump's enemy is Americans, as they currently are. He wants to wage war on us.
Do you realize that when you ask voters why they support Trump, most of them say some form of "the elites hate people like me and are waging war on us."
You think they're trying to kill you. They think you're trying to kill them. Maybe a national divorce really is the only solution.
Well, we can't do that.
A national breakup would render any kind of "constitution", in blue or red states, a permanent dead letter. (That was Lincoln's original justification for putting down the Confederate rebellion, above and beyond ending slavery.) So that ain't happening.
But to your point, no, I don't think Trumpers sincerely want to kill me--and nor, when push comes to shove, do I even think most of them fear I want to kill them.
They're just bored. Bored, and delusional. They see politics and government policy as a big morality play on the TV screen.
Trump mass-firing civil servants, and really, civil servants themselves, is no more real to them than bad guys getting killed in Breaking Bad, or the Sopranos. What they want is to feel good and get the *rush* of triumph over some 2-dimensional enemy on their smartphone.
Otherwise, they're good people, and they think I'm, more or less, good.
Why do I say that? Because we just elected Trump during a time of prosperity and stability. You don't do something like that if you truly, really, want to kill an enemy and fear for your life from them.
You do it if you are an unserious, childish, lumpy-headed people treating serious matters with all the gravity of a video game.
Trump, of course, sees his election as validation for a reign of terror and crushing of his enemies in the streets, and across the world. As does Elon. They will try to act on that "mandate". The physical consequences for all of us will be severe. Their own voters, at least a good portion of them, are already taking pause.
This wasn't a delusion: https://www.businessinsider.com/trans-swimmer-lia-thomas-beats-olympic-medalists-wins-ncaa-title-2022-3?op=1
This wasn't either: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/513902-cnn-ridiculed-for-fiery-but-mostly-peaceful-caption-with-video-of-burning/
Nor was the lawfare against Trump. Nor was the lawfare against conservatives: https://nypost.com/2024/06/06/us-news/elderly-pro-life-activist-75-sentenced-to-prison-after-abortion-clinic-demonstration/
So how exactly do you suggest we share a country, David? That's a real question. Roughly half of us (the Right) mostly want to left alone but can't be because the other half (the Left) is convinced the former is a bunch of deplorable bigots for not wanting dicks in their daughter's locker room and racists who can't be trusted not to lynch black people. So what do you suggest?
A "national divorce" is quite possible within the Constitutional framework - in fact, the Constitution was designed to make even radical pluralism possible. David Brooks a few years ago suggested that federalism might be our only salvation. (Proof of the old adage about broken clocks.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20180724081207/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/opinion/national-politics-localism-populism.html
https://time.com/5887428/american-political-division/
For this to work though, the Left has to be willing to accept the legitimacy of freedom of association, objective virtue, and conservative positions. They have to be OK with Kansas and Texas making abortion illegal. They can have their morality but must give up the universalism, because the combination has led them to a crusader mindset that can't accept even the slightest deviation from their view of the world.
They show no sign of being willing to do that. Which is why the Right has gone scorched Earth via Trump.
According to the NCAA there are 10 trans-gender athletes out of 225,000 women athletes. While I agree that trans women shouldn't be competing in womens sports, this is hardly a problem big enough or serious enough to determine someone's vote.
Yes the CNN chyron was silly, but the report itself was accurate about how peaceful the daytime demonstrations were, and that trouble started after sundown (the reason I don't go to nighttime demonstrations) I agree that violence at demonstrations is wrong. Vast majority of demonstrations at the time were peaceful. Fox News has crazy chyrons too, and the actual content is also crazy.
"Lawfare against conservatives" The 75 year-old was tried and convicted by a jury of her peers not for praying or demonstrating, but for a "lock and block" occupation of an abortion clinic, preventing people from lawfully obtaining healthcare services. How is this wanting "to be left alone"?
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/paulette-harlow-convicted-blocking-abortion-clinic-not-praying-2024-06-11/
And by "elite" they mean basically anyone who's ever been to college, or has close relatives that did. Which probably includes you, the person reading this comment.
Seriously, read this link. It's important.
https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1865048.html
---begin quote---
If you take nothing else away from this post, let it be this: anti-intellectualism is classism against the educated white-collar middle class.
That is what "intellectual" means to anti-intellectuals: it refers to people of a certain socio-economic class. It is a class characterized by being college-educated professionals who earn their livings by doing intellectual labor. People whose job, or at least aspiration, it is to be experts in something cerebral: education, medicine, science, research, journalism, law, technology, the arts, etc.
In other words, what you, being someone who is reading this, probably considers a "normal person".
....
And, crucially, because it is a cultural class, and not defined by how much money an individual has or how they make their living, a person can be in it because it is their culture either by upbringing or acculturation, regardless of whether they, themselves, are knowledge or cultural workers. So it may include not just the doctor, but the doctor's kid. Not just Harvard-trained philosopher, but the Harvard drop out. Not just the legal scholar writing about critical race theory, but the very pierced genderqueer teen scolding someone about "intersectionality" on Twitter. Not just the columnist writing a thought piece about the logical incoherence of eating meat, but the white dude with dreadlocks, birkenstocks, and bookbag, whom the hostess addresses saying, "You'll want the vegetarian menu, yes?" Not just the Senate-confirmed head of a part of the Federal government, but the chick in the firetower on a National Parks Service pittance all summer.
That was an interesting link. Thanks Doug. One of the first comments to Siderea’s post mentioned the role Covid and WFH played in compounding the problem. This rings true as well. If only the Elites had been more perceptive of these dynamics.
Very interesting link. The fascinating part of Noah's piece is the view that Trump regards his true enemies as internal, basically Democrats. Probably Canada and Mexico and Denmark too, are in his crosshairs because they are more Democrat-like. It is so bizarre--to have an American President lambaste these likable, liberal moderate allies, but, apparently, that's precisely why he does it. I think only his MAGA base--a minority--supports this but it is scary stuff. He could inflict a lot of damage on us and give China (and to a lesser degree Russia) even more of an advantage against us and our allies. Frankly my greatest concern was that, having secured state power, Trump would declare the Democratic Party a terrorist organization, and make the whole lot of us criminals. Take our property and cancel our Social Security and Medicare and who knows what....
Great link. Thanks!
I'm a class traitor, Doug, and I freely admit it. And I hate the anti-intellectualism on the Right. But the Left's solution -- deciding that anyone who didn't go to college is a deplorable bigot who should be ignored -- doesn't work either. So what do you suggest?
Dude, you need to log off and talk to more people of various political perspectives in the real world. You will be pleasantly surprised by the reasonableness of your average random person who isn’t addicted to Twitter, and that includes liberals.
Border enforcement: 60% approval.
Dicks out of women's sports: 75% approval.
Color blindness: 60% approval.
No federal work-from-home: 55% approval.
There are major campaign promises that have now become major EOs. Not all of Trump's EOs poll this well, but the major ones do. Why?
You're talking about "swing voters" who are a vanishingly small group (<5% likely). The far larger group is people who voted on exactly these issues and are glad to see a President keep his campaign promises. (And who doesn't hate them.)
Also, who are the 25% of people who think dicks belong in women's locker rooms anyway? Incels?
Have they done any of these things? I thought they’ve mostly just cut jobs and healthcare and international agreements so far.
Who is "us." What war is he waging on me? I don't agree with his foreign policy at all, but I don't feel any animosity from his political movement. I believe that some of their bad policies will eventually come back to bite me, but they are not intentionally targeting me. And that's a lot more than I can say about the other side who I see as outright malicious.
I’m curious as to what outright malice you think liberals intend towards you. But since you asked about Trump, and “us”:
Trump tried to overturn my vote and the votes of millions, the last election, by violence. He thinks any election he loses is “fraud” by definition, and has convinced a clear majority of his party that that is the case.
As such, he is laying the groundwork to suppress free and fair elections in the United States. When I say “us”, I mean any American who either does not support him politically, or does not display sufficient personal loyalty to him, and him alone.
To wit: His Department of Justice and (politically purged) FBI will soon be trying to sue, prosecute, and jail any major liberal nonprofit, any major voting rights lawyer, any major politician who gets too popular in swing states or districts. These are actions he’s promised, and you can bet his new appointees are going to do their level best to deliver.
He just pardoned over 1,500 people who participated in insurrectionary violence on his behalf four years ago, including the ringleaders and those who actually assaulted cops. Likely they’re operating under the assumption they have a pre-emptive pardon from him for any future, anti-Democrat, pro-Trump violence.
He is now planning to purge the U.S. Postal Service and end mail-in voting in blue states—and only blue states—using specious excuses of “fraud” as the pretext.
This is just his election-related actions alone. I could go on about his endless statements about the “enemy within”, calling people who don’t support him “scum”, “vermin”, “traitors”, “Marxists”, or worse, his longstanding life philosophy of “revenge”, and his currently-underway plans to demolish the federal government—with particular focus on in states and cities who didn’t vote for him, or any government functions whatsoever he considers potential reservoirs of “disloyalty” and “treason” by definition.
But I figure the election-related stuff should give you enough pause by itself.
They discriminate against me for my race and gender in open violation of civil rights statutes. They want to control the information I have access to by forcing private companies to censor those who disagree with them in circumvention of the 1st amendment. They are the party who most strongly supports the police state agencies in their CCP like internal surveillance (the Dems used to be the better party on this but not anymore). IMO if they get control you will see Americans arrested for politically incorrect opinions like is happening now in Europe. If you want to see where liberal attitudes on free speech are going just look at these numbers from Nate Silver https://www.natesilver.net/p/free-speech-is-in-trouble
And there are lots of other things I hate, like slowing tech advancement and infrastructure development with endless regulation, and generally representing the interests of gatekeepers and bureaucrats over people who actually get things done, but I don't consider that malicious, just self interested and bad policy like I see the Republicans
I don't support any of those things you mentioned, particularly the pardoning of the violent rioters. And I didn't say the Republicans are free of malice, just not towards myself like the liberals. I don't like the Republicans, I just dislike them less, and it's a low bar. Also I know it isn't all liberals, but then it doesn't really matter what the liberals like Noah Smith think because I don't have the option of voting for them, only the Democrats.
Honest response:
Given all the things you’re about to experience in your life, the complaints you just cited strike me as complaining about the dryness and seasoning of a chicken entree, while the alternative is a pile of excrement.
Just to cite one of your complaints—I’m guessing we’re the same race and gender. Or if not, in the same boat.
I do not feel “discriminated against”, or my speech suppressed, by the goddamned Democrats. I have felt a little henpecked by “speech policemen” here and there—but then again, I’ve felt that from various people my whole life. Both left and right (especially right, when it comes to encounters with fellow evangelicals in church).
The notion that Americans would have been “arrested” for supporting right-wing thought, had Kamala won, is ludicrous paranoia. This is, with respect, a lie people tell themselves to justify to themselves supporting terrible things. Or to avoid any consideration of supporting people they resent, for rather petty reasons.
You might as well tell me “I hate punk music because punk fans are Nazis and want me dead.” No, just one or two you’ve met, and have never forgotten.
These are all rationalizations and excuses, IMO, in the grand scheme of things. Trump may be bad, but I have to excuse him, because his opponents must, by definition, be worse. This argument will likely age like a pile of garbage, and rather soon.
I don't care about speech policing from peers. That's just normal social behavior. I care about it coming from the government. I guess you are fine with open violation of civil rights law if it doesn't happen to you directly, but I think that's insane.
"There's No Guarantee to Free Speech on Misinformation or Hate Speech, and Especially Around Our Democracy"
- Tim Walz
So I'm not being paranoid. I don't want liberal judges in there that are going to start "reinterpreting" the 1st amendment to allow them to ban whatever they declare "misinformation" and I'm willing to pay a heavy price in Republican nonsense to prevent it.
Wait, if you don’t care about speech policing from peers, and only care about it from government, then shouldn’t it be more worrying that the government is cutting off the funding of anyone saying politically incorrect things about DEI than that companies blocked tweets with hateful messages?
100% accurate. "I just dislike Republicans less".
That's why Trump won. Because Biden and Harris and the Democrats went so loony that even someone as flawed as Trump was seen as a better choice.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders put it best in her response to the SOTU in 2022: "the choice isn't between Left and Right but between normal and crazy." In 2024, most voters decided she was correct -- the Democrats had gone insane.
A party indiscriminately mass-firing 15%-plus of the federal workforce—and doing much of it in black-letter violation of federal law—is what you consider “normal”. And those opposing that, as crazy.
I would recommend reading back some of what you’re saying on this board, out loud. Consider how it sounds to most sane people.
15%+ of the federal workforce has been fired? You're watching Rachel Maddow too much man.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/how-many-federal-employees-have-been-fired-and-laid-off-what-we-know/3847944/
James, what serious Republican do you see trying to "throw people into re-education camps"? I do remember a Dem Presidential candidate suggesting such a thing for Republicans though: https://www.mediaite.com/online/despicable-hillary-clinton-blasted-over-bizarre-proposal-for-formal-deprogramming-of-trump-supporters/
“So many of those extremists, those MAGA extremists... at some point, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members.”
The lack of self-awareness in this comment boggles the mind.
MAGA mostly wants to be left alone. That's why we want out of "America World Police". That's why we want the border secure. That's why we want dicks out of our daughter's locker rooms. Just freakin' leave us alone and let us live our lives... but the Left just can't do that. They're on a moralistic crusade, a holy war to remake America, and decolonizing Western civilization means that if you think this is a problem -- https://nypost.com/2023/08/05/lia-thomas-so-well-endowed-i-had-to-refrain-from-looking-riley-gaines/ -- you're a Nazi.
You want to know why we went scorched Earth with Trump? That's why. Because we finally concluded you would never willingly share a country with us.
<MAGA mostly wants to be left alone. That's why we want out of "America World Police". That's why we want the border secure. That's why we want dicks out of our daughter's locker rooms. Just freakin' leave us alone and let us live our lives...>
I hate bougie overeducated liberals as much as the next guy, but this is just pathetic. The same people who voted for MAGA voted for Dubya and his godawful War on Terror, which is why the NSA was (and quite possibly still is) listening to our phone calls and reading our emails. The same people who voted for MAGA have no problem with invading Mexico and bombing the drug cartels, even though WE are the ones buying their drugs and selling them weapons. They have no problem keeping embargoing Cuba and Iran, even though 9/11 (arguably one of the most pivotal historical moments in recent history) was planned and executed by Saudi-backed terrorists (but Trump did an arms deal with MBS, so all water under the bridge). Many of the same people who voted for MAGA had no problem insinuating that the first black president was a closeted Muslim commie. Don't pretend for a second like y'all were innocent bystanders in this culture war we're having: there's more than enough blame to go around.
I respect the point of view Elie, but the Right was never the one trying to change the culture (and thus pushing a culture war). That was always coming from the Left.
On your other points, you're correct about the George Bush years. But most of MAGA hates the George Bush wing of the party. We joke about them: conservatives who wouldn't conserve anything. I really thought this was well known, but perhaps it's not so obvious from outside the conservative bubble. This ain't Ronald Reagan's GOP anymore. And that's the other thing we joke about: "zombie Reaganism" championed by the Never-Trumpers. David Brooks and Max Boot are the leading proponents, and MAGA detests both.
Full disclosure, I voted for W and supported many of the things you mentioned. I was wrong, and I was lied to. And that experience is part of what pushed me away from the Republicans -- still registered Ind today. In 2008 I voted for Obama. If the Democrats hadn't gone bonkers with racial and sexual grievance at the same time I was realizing the error of my ways, I might well have ended up a Dem. But they made it clear they didn't want white males. I refused to vote for Trump in 2016, but (like J.D. Vance) finally came around.
I respect that it's hard for you to see, but the "desire to be left alone" really does run deep among conservatives.
"it's obvious that his movement would have no qualms whatever about throwing me and my family into a reeducation camp just because we oppose him"
Read verbatim an responded to in the first paragraph.
Also, when I said the "lack of self-awareness" I wasn't talking about you; I was talking about Hillary Clinton. Sorry if that came out wrong.
I'm willing to believe you when you can show me evidence that Trump is or is even talking about doing what you're saying. Until then, it's pure hyperbole rooted in partisan hatred. (Which I get, as you said elsewhere, you and I are not swing voters.)
Who have the Republicans thrown in a "reeducation camp" for opposing them? That's a ridiculous statement. I oppose him too. I think he is fundamentally incompetent to hold the presidency, totally corrupt, and a criminal. I hate his policies on many things e.g. Ukraine, tariffs on allies, and opposing tech development like the Chips Act and renewable energy development. I am not going to jail for saying it and neither are you.
Just this morning I was reflecting on how the rapidly evolving international system is becoming similar to Metternich’s Congress of Europe that was established after the defeat of Napoleon and the French Revolution. I am not as sanguine as you about how all this will turn out. Metternich’ created a system that ruthlessly and effectively suppressed all efforts to liberalize Europe for nearly a half century. With their nuclear arsenal and non-interference in their respective spheres of dominance, the leaders of China, Russia and the United States could surely suppress any efforts to create/recreate liberal democratic societies for many years to come. I’m an old (almost 83) man, and I pray that my pessimism is unwarranted. And as a historian, I am well aware that history almost never repeats itself, so I remind myself that none of us really know what will happen in the future.
Allen
I would say in this case, only Australia and NZ (maybe some other countries as well) would have liberal democracies survived in the West (in Australian case, voting is compulsory so extremist rhetoric would not be able to flourish, even Pauline Hanson or Clive Palmer - Australian versions of MAGA - never got their national votes to double digits. Its conservative party here is also not extremist as well, and Peter Dutton - its current leader - is too unpopular).
“He [Zelenskyy] played Biden like a fiddle.”
Translation: Trump tried to extort Ukraine into confecting a lie that Hunter Biden had illegal deals with a Ukrainian oil company. Trump was impeached for this.
Trump and Musk, both emotionally weak men, are picking a fight with a guy [Zelenskyy] who refused to flee the invading Russian military, saying: “I need ammunition. Not a ride.” Russian snipers tried for weeks to hunt down and kill Zelenskyy in Kiev.
I wouldn’t bet against Zelenskyy, especially when he’s going up against a couple of wimps who are rapidly becoming unpopular.
Time will tell.
But Hunter Biden really was getting kickbacks from a Ukrainian oil company. Granted, it was a "salary" for being a board member, but the guy was a crack addict with no experience in Eastern Europe or energy development who's Dad just happened to be Vice President (and bragged he was in charge of Ukraine for the Biden administration) while his son was raking in $1M+ from the Ukrainians.
The offense here is that apparently no one in the press was willing to ask the obvious question: why?
The why is very easy to explain. He's a conman who used his family name to pretend to have political access and influence on foreign policy. Any other explanation is either idiotic or an acceptance of the fact that all Republicans are complete morons who couldn't pin anything on Biden after investigating this for years.
So the VP's kid was engaged in fraud and attempted bribery all on his own and Jim and Joe knew nothing about it at all. And the "art" was purchased because it was beautiful. And the buyers were totally anonymous. And there's this bridge I'd like to sell you...
The choices for defenders of Joe Biden are pretty bleak: either he was totally corrupt and using his family as a money laundering machine, or he was too clueless to realize his family was totally corrupt and using him to take kickbacks. There's really not a third option here.
These are the low IQ comments that I expect from most Republicans. If there was fraud and bribery, prove it. Trump had 4 years, Republicans had 8 years since 2017.
Influence peddling is not a crime in itself. That’s what lobbying firms do and get paid for, whether they’re successful or not. Hey dad, these are my business partners, say hi to them, doesn’t make someone a criminal.
You don’t like it so it’s fraud and people should go to jail is a kid’s view of the world. Yes, it reflects poorly on Biden that his son had shady dealings and has many personal flaws but being the father of a lowlife is not a crime.
"Influence peddling is not a crime"
Siddhartha, listen to yourself here. You're defending marginally legal bribery and corruption. Do you really think a US Attorney couldn't charge a crime here if they wanted to. (Well, they can't now because Joe pardoned everyone involved going back to 2014 -- gee, I wonder why that year was chosen.)
If Jared Kushner was on the board of a Saudi oil company getting paid $1M a year for doing nothing, I would have a problem with that. I have a problem with it when Hunter Biden does it too.
Like I said, you having a problem with someone doing something and that something being a crime that prosecutors could charge that person with and win in the court of law are two separate things. Because you think like a child you can't tell the difference between the two. Hunter joined the board of Burisma in 2013. Trump became the President in 2017 and did try to find dirt on him and Biden. He came up empty after 4 years of Presidency and so did the Republicans for the last 8 years. 8 years is a long time even for low IQ Republicans in the Congress. What Biden did with Hunter's pardon was absolutely an abuse of Presidential power but it does not prove guilt. Republicans had their chance and all they came up with was childish accusations without any proof.
Jared Kushner has gotten paid a *lot* more than a measly $1m/year for being 45's son-in-law. He's been given something like $2billion to manage by the Saudi's.
Do the math Brian. What's a 1% per annum (or 1.25%) management fee for $2 billion. When it comes to graft, Republicans beat those amateurish Dems hands down.
Joe was improperly tolerant of Hunter, yes. But what did Donald do about Donald’s ownership of a hotel that foreign diplomats were bribing him to stay at, and what did Donald do about Donald’s use of his name to sell a cryptocurrency right before the election, and what did Donald do about Donald’s attempt to steal beachfront property in Gaza, let alone the corrupt actions of his other relatives?
It's all on his laptop. That's what conservatives believe, anyway.
Just like they believed that overwhelming evidence was going to be released in just a few days on how exactly those nefarious Dems had stolen the election in 2020.
You're acting like this is some weird conspiracy theory when Joe and Hunter have both acknowledged it happened. As others here have mentioned, this sort of corruption (like Hunter's "art" business) is at least nominally legal but sure does stink.
I say nominally though, since crossing the line to open bribery is pretty easy when foreign companies are throwing millions of dollars at you because you're the VP's drug-addled kid. I don't want to relitigate the Biden era, but there's a reason Joe set Hunter's pardon back to 2014.
They couldn't pin anything on him because that particular brand of corruption is legal. Just like Kushner taking bribes from the Saudis.
Nobody who can reason needs the press to tell them why. The potential benefit to the country was $100B. The investment in Hunter was ~$1M. They would have been dumb not to pay him what was, to them, a few pennies, on the off chance it might help.
I wasn't asking why the Ukrainians were doing it. I was asking why the press wasn't the least bit bothered by the VP's drug addict son being handed a million bucks by a state-affiliated entity on Russia's front door.
You keep saying people knew, but as you've said, you and I aren't the typical voter. You know who is? My 75 and 81 year old parents who watch CBS News every night. They are my universal stand-ins for "typical, politically disengaged, median voter".
We were talking about this several months ago and neither of them knew anything significant about Hunter Biden's drug habits, his laptop, and knew nothing about him being employed by a state-sponsored Ukrainian oil company.
People didn't know. That's the whole reason the laptop story was suppressed in Oct of 2020; the establishment class was terrified that people might find out.
People don’t follow the news because they’re busy doing something else is somehow the media’s fault now? I stand by my comment that you’re incredibly dumb and low IQ.
Turn the situation around, James. Imagine the example I used above: Jared Kushner works as an advisor to the House of Saud's Sovereign Wealth Fund. You would hear about nothing else from the NYT/WaPo/CNN/MSNBC/ABC/CBS/NPR for weeks on end.
Now compare that to the treatment of Hunter's role in Ukraine. I know you're ideological (and I respect that; I am too), but you can't honestly say the press did any serious digging on Hunter. Did they notice? Sure. On page A17 paragraph 31. And most of the articles started with "Republicans pounce..."
If Hunter Biden wasn’t actually criminally corrupt, why did Joe preemptively pardon him for all his actions since 2014?
I don't agree with his decision to pardon his son and I think it's an abuse of Presidential power. Having said that, it doesn't prove guilt but a desire to protect his family from harassment by Trump's DOJ.
Hunter joined the board of Burisma in 2013. Trump became the President in 2017. He had 4 years to dig up dirt on Biden and Hunter and he did try. The Republicans in the Congress had 8 years to investigate him and come up with evidence to indict him. They tried very hard but came up empty handed. If they couldn't do anything for 8+ years, either because they're dumb and incompetent (true) or because there's no evidence (may or may not be true), they should stop wasting taxpayer's dime on this and move on.
The part about Musk and Trump being weak men is brutally true. The Trump part has come out of my mouth since 2017, too. Very obvious.
I doubt Trump has any kind of even semi-coherent foreign policy plan. I think he is first and foremost about putting as much money in his pockets as possible, and that lots of Russian money and lots of Chinese money is attaching to Trump one way or another, and that in itself becomes a hold those countries have on Trump-that they could reveal in detail how, why and much he benefited financially.
I think Musk is similar in a sense. I don't think he has any loyalty to the US. or its national interests, but sees himself as global citizen who is major player on the global field in his own right and wants to wield power and expand his businesses through mutual back-scratching with the leaders of powerful countries who are open to that kind dealing.
There is a lot of good context here. However, I believe the explanation is all about a power grab. Trump can project and amass power in the United States more easily than he can in Europe and Asia. I think the thirst for power is at the heart of everything the administration is doing with ideology as convenient messaging and an effective recruitment tool.
But I agree that stupidity and carelessness and overreach will doom the power grab.
Presidents actually have vastly more power in foreign affairs than they do at home. Despite decades of delegating lawmaking authority to the executive branch and nearly creating an imperial Presidency, domestic policy is still mostly the domain of Congress.
Acting President Musk would beg to differ.
He’s gonna flame out in not too long. The US on the domestic front will wake up (it already is) and fight back. We don’t take kindly to this BS.
If inflation doesn't cool, you may be right. At the present moment, however, conservative voters are wildly approving nearly everything Trump is doing.
You think that his plummeting approval rating is from Democrats who previously approved of him? I am hearing very little cheering (where there once was) and a bit of grousing on the one pro Trump discussion group (not originally political) with which I am affiliated.
The two polls that came out this week show he's slipped with Independents. But with the exception of pardoning the violent Jan. 6th insurrectionists, conservatives are still overwhelmingly approving of what he's doing. Probably because FOX News is running segments on how mortified Dems are. Owning the Libs.
If you follow the constitution, yea. But they very explicitly tore that up with their first week in office.
David,
What do you mean by power?
Tim
Yes, it's not any more complicated than that
I mean, Trump has a point here. What did Americans get for their 350 billion dollars? What would we get if we spent another 350 billion, or if we spent 20 years and 2 trillion like we did in Afghanistan? Showing that the stock valuations of defense contractors went down doesn't seem to strengthen the case that the American people had something to gain here.
I suspect a big theme of American politics going forward is that the government is simply running out of money. We are over $36 trillion in debt, racking up additional large deficits every year despite a raging bull economy, and interest on servicing prior debts is now the 3rd largest line item of the budget, behind only social security and medicare, even eclipsing our spending on defense. For a while we could all delude ourselves with the hope of modern monetary theory, but inflation has disabused us of that notion.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like the guy, and I voted against him; but surely someone needs to do something at some point and it was never going to be pretty. DOGE seems like the first serious attempt to do something in my lifetime.
I think if your mental model is "America is rapidly going bankrupt and we need to do something fast before it's too late", then maybe what Elon is doing makes some sense. If your mental model is "America is wealthy and strong and powerful and Pax Americana could have continued indefinitely" then what is happening is indeed a tragedy.
Well first of all, we didn't spend most of the $350 billion, just "approved" it.
Second of all, what we got was REARMAMENT. We started rebuilding our defense-industrial base. That will be INCREDIBLY useful if and when we have to fight China.
To ignore this is very short-sighted IMO.
In addition, the Ukrainians have badly degraded Russia's military supplies and caused huge numbers of Russian casualties.
This.
Think of the Ukraine war as something akin to the Spanish Civil war under Franco. Fascist Spain was so devastated by that war, that they refused to enter WW2 on Germany's side. If Russia finishes this war similarly weakened, and refuses to join China when they move on Taiwan, then it will help us immeasurably.
Noah, you've read Hazlett. You're literally engaged in the broken window fallacy here.
We could have economically stimulated our manufacturing base and set ourselves on the road to rearmament without blowing through a million Ukrainian and Russian lives, and without putting US global credibility on the line in a conflict on Russia's front door.
The argument you're making is the same as the high-speed rail project makes here in CA: "sure, we've only built 20 miles of track, but we created 100K jobs!"
I'm not talking about stimulus at all here. Nothing macroeconomic.
I'm talking about the defense-industrial base. Read "Freedom's Forge" and then get back to me. I'm serious, get a copy and read it right now.
I have read it, I suspect on your recommendation. It's a great book and illustrates the criticality of industrial potential in fighting and winning wars. Some of those stories were wonderful.
But my point stands. Readying the country for a war against China never required turning a million young, Eastern European men into canon-fodder.
3 days from now will mark 3 years of a war that likely could have been prevented by taking Russia's diplomatic comments seriously, and certainly could have been been ended by April in Istanbul.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/turkeysource/experts-react-after-russia-ukraine-talks-in-istanbul-is-an-end-to-war-imminent/
Why wasn't it? Because influential people decided subsidizing Ukrainians killing Russians was a small price to pay to get America "on a war footing" against China -- which may not be exactly your argument here but does rhyme. And now there's a bombed out shell of a country and a million dead young men.
Brian, we didn't turn a million young Eastern European men into cannon fodder. Russia did that.
It takes 2 to tango, Noah.
Look, I respect that we disagree on Ukraine, man. You're convinced that Putin is Hitler Jr, and I'm not. That's OK -- both views are common and either could be wrong.
I understand the argument "Ukraine must remain free". It's a valid question: is it in American interest to help kill Russians in Ukraine? (I don't think so, but maybe it is.) But saying that our behavior toward Ukraine is justified because it got us to "rebuild our defense industrial base"? That facilitating mass death in Eastern Europe prepares us to cause more death in Asia? And this is good? I can't go there.
Russia demanded rollback of NATO to 1997 borders and was piling up gold for large-scale war since like 2014. The fact that USA rearmed doesn't mean that the war broke out for that purpose.
But supposing for a minute that they are correct about this (which judging from your writing, I think you believe is a possibility):
> Trump, Musk, & co. may have looked at that lopsided manufacturing equation and decided that there’s just no way that America, even in concert with its allies and potential partners like India, can match Chinese power over the next few decades
What policy would you recommend then?
Perhaps we need to learn from the Chinese, and reconfigure our economic system to one that will produce great INDUSTRIES as opposed to great FIRMS?
Almost all rich countries subsidize agriculture, because markets without any government interference attempt to match supply to demand, and while excess food production is no big deal, insufficient food production is catastrophic.
Similarly, post-Mao China stumbled (likely by accident) into an economic system that incentivises the production of industrial capacity, and that is far more effective than antitrust legislation at preventing oligopolies from restricting production for their own benefit.
(From https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/08/13/china-as-a-model/)
"Western economists who are often shy about addressing distributional issues in our own economies have a very strong view that ordinary households should have more purchasing power and Xi Jinping should have less. Maybe so!"
"But let's consider a model with three classes of purchaser: Ordinary households, Xi Jinping, and Marc Andreessen. There is the economy that would have prevailed if only ordinary households had purchasing power, in roughly equal amounts. There is the economy that prevails when a very large pool of purchasing power is directed by Xi Jinping. Xi uses this purchasing power to produce a lot more steel, batteries, EVs, solar panels, on the theory that strategic, rather than demand-driven investment in those sectors will leave his nation-state better positioned for the future. No doubt, the resulting is an economy "distorted" relative to an entirely demand-driven economy."
"Now let's transfer the purchasing power under Xi's direction to Andreessen. (I'm using poor Marc here as a stand-in for the venture capital industry. I'm not making specific claims about the man.) Marc does not invest so much in steel, solar, or EVs, because he knows there will be inadequate demand for those goods to recoup Xi-scale investments. Where Xi subsidizes loss-making solar panel companies, Andreessen subsidizes loss-making Ubers, DoorDashes, etc. on the theory that he can eventually recoup those losses by scaling fastest in what will become winner-take-all markets, and earning thick profits thereafter. This economy also is "distorted" relative to an economy driven only by meeting demand from hypothetical approximately equal households. It is warped beyond recognition relative to the optimum under any model in which perfect competition would obtain."
"Western economists applaud Andreessen's economy, but disparage Xi's. I think that is madness."
The US began to do this under Biden. Just search Noah’s posts for “industrial policy”, “CHIPS” and “IRA”.
Social-democratic central planning. Not my cup of tea personally, but it's nice to see somebody thinking outside the box.
What have you got against Industrial Policy? We've been letting China dictate ours for two decades now.
The US did not approve 350 billion to Ukraine. The $350 billion was the World Banks estimated rebuilding cost of Ukraine. Congress passed five bills that provided aid that costs $175 Billion. Of that $175 Billion, $119 Billion was directly for Ukraine.
What did we get? We got to replenish our weapons stock while giving out our older weapons instead of destroying them (that money stayed in the US btw supporting domestic jobs), we got valuable data on our weapons used in an actual war setting without actually having to go to war ourselves, we massively weakened an antagonistic power without putting our own soldiers' boots on the ground, we signaled to China and other territory-expansionist powers to think twice before trying something similar, we bolstered our relationships with European allies, and we get moral capital because standing up to tyrants is not only good, actually, but it's what the US should stand for.
The thing is, Americans still do not forget about their debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, so justifying aid to Ukraine is a big problem, sadly.
Also, maybe another reason is that with the declining birth rate, Americans have become a post-heroic society? https://unherd.com/2024/06/who-will-win-a-post-heroic-war/
I saw one young Briton said that he would not shed blood for Ukraine - even though the UK government doesn't plan to send soldiers to fight for Ukraine, just for peacekeeping in the ceasefire!
Afghanistan was a different mission: nation-building as as opposed to defence from an imperial power. The moral case isn't hard to make for Ukraine aid and to the extent that that it's hard to justify it's (almost exclusively imo) because we've had Trump spewing bs and lies to the MAGA base which fully controls the GOP.
Minor correction: It was FOX News (and its lesser imitators) that were--and still are --spewing lies to conservative voters. About how masculine, Christian and non-Woke Putin's Russia is. And how the historic Russian/USSR "Sphere of Interest" gave them the right to invade Ukraine and Georgia. About how our Ukraine aid was of zero benefit to us.
When FOX starts spinning how we shouldn't send our boys to defend Taiwan from China, then we'll know for sure that the GOP has gone total Quisling.
Sometime someone will produce the ultimate lucid explanation about how and, more importantly why, the imagination of the American Christianist far right was so fully captured by Putin's Russia - a regime where less than 6% of the population attends religious services and abortion is, as it was in Soviet time, the principal form of birth control. Is it really possible to hate drag shows THAT much?!
I suspect the American right's fawning over Russia is likely more about fossil fuels than it is about Christianity.
As I've probably mentioned before on this Substack, I'm increasingly partial to Phillip Hallam-Baker's view that the Russians hacked Fox News in 2014, with their first objective being to help Trump win the 2016 GOP primary.
The notion of turning Afghanistan into a Western-style democracy was doomed from the start, and the fact that it was attempted at all shows how much Westerners (especially neocons) underestimated the resilience of tribal Muslim societies in general.
While cousin marriage in the West is stigmatized after being banned by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, Arab culture actually _encouraged_ marriage to one's father's brother's daughter (such a preferred wife even has a special name "bint al-'amm" in Arabic). This custom emerged about a century before Muhammad's birth, but was spread by the Arab conquests in the 7th century. As a result, societies in this region of the world (roughly Morocco to Pakistan inclusive) are splintered into largely self-contained tribes and clans bound by blood relations.
Such societies crush female autonomy (as women are seen as bargaining chips to be married off to cousins to keep wealth within the clan, or perhaps to a specific member of another clan in order to build an alliance) and are too fragmented to form modern nation-states. Note that Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq was made up almost entirely of members of his own Tikrit-based clan.
Detribalizing such societies has historically only been possible by brutal coercion including mass murder of religious leaders and forcible separation of families: historically this was done mainly by communist regimes. Stalin's regime did it in Soviet Central Asia (which previously was culturally similar to Afghanistan: a British traveller to Tsarist-era Bukhara remarked on how depressing it was going for months without seeing a woman's face) while China is currently now doing this to the Uyghurs. And there was no way that the West was going to behave like this in Afghanistan.
For one thing, China's treatment of the Uyghurs isn't merely condemned in the West but often branded as genocide, and for another both the Soviets in Central Asia and the Chinese in East Turkestan were from geographically neighbouring lands and had no intention of ever leaving, while Westerners had no desire to annex a landlocked country on the other side of the world. And if/when the occupiers DID leave, Afghanistan would have doubtless become just as much of a source of anti-Western terrorism as before (albeit for a completely different reason: not jihadist Islam but revenge for the brutality of the detribalization policy)!
I once had the cynical notion that Russia's stereotypical unhealthy vodka-sodden lifestyle actually makes it more powerful: unlike Western countries it isn't having to expend vast resources on dementia care, because few Russians live long enough to develop dementia in the first place!
And more importantly, the Afghans and Iraqis (mostly) didn't want us there in the first place.
If NATO *did* send soldiers to Ukraine (which they haven't yet done out of fear of nuclear war) the Ukrainians would be overjoyed!
Russia was also unable to go to Assad's aid, helping remove an anti American leader.
Yes, you could effectively say that Ukraine liberated Syria.
"DOGE seems like the first serious attempt to do something in my lifetime."
DOGE is hiring 19 year old hackers calling themselves "Big Balls" and can't tell the difference between $8 million and $8 billion. The idea that it represents a serious effort to do anything is laughable on its face.
Yeah to be clear I'm not saying the people doing this are serious, or competent, or even effective. I'm simply saying the *attempt* is serious, in the sense that it's not just blowing hot air. It's taking real actions even if that risks painful consequences or breaking things. That makes it dangerous and is why everyone is so upset, of course.
Prior attempts like the Simpson-Bowles commission or CBO reports tend to be just that, reports with recommendations, which are mentioned in the news and then subsequently ignored and forgotten about by all politicians of both parties.
The fact that the GOP refuses to even *consider* raising taxes a smidgen on the 1% and corporations, tells you how serious they are about balancing the budget. Or taxing stock buybacks.
They will push hard for another tax bill this year, adding a further $2trn in debt.
Try to avoid mistaking "big action" for "doing something about the problem".
I get that many Americans see politics and policy entirely in terms of loud boasts on TV and loud men barking orders and firing masses of people in public. Because that's "at least, doing *something*".
Many Americans can be purblind and ignorant like that if they want to be. We should aspire to be better than that, while we have the chance.
The attempt is not serious. At all.
You will know when the attempt is serious, because it will involve Congress, and will be a discussion about which spending items in the US Budget represent value for money and which do not.
A serious attempt would probably focus on the private sector's parasitic role in US healthcare, given that they US spends far too much of its GDP on health for worse outcomes, compared to virtually all other OECD countries.
The federal government in the US is actually under-taxed though, and no one in the last election - Trump or Harris - put a serious proposal to reduce the deficit (even Harris said that no family with income lower than $400000/year would face higher taxes!)
There should be a balance of higher taxes and reduce public spending to limit the debt growth (~6% peacetime deficit is definitely unsustainable), but with what Trump + Elon are doing with DOGE and cut taxes for the rich? These are just a pipe dream!
Yes, we are all severely undertaxed (and to be clear, this is true of me personally). But we do not have any leaders with the abillity to explain that and get taxes raised. And the immense sums spent on DEI being uncovered by DOGE (and yes, they ARE immense, even if only a tiny percentage of the total budget) is not going to help with that case.
"Immense sums spent on DEI" Source: Elon's word (worth less than dogsh*t)
I live in California and the combined taxes I pay is 55% of my earnings ( plus paying highest gas, electric, water and fuel prices) so it’s hard for me to feel ‘ under taxed.’ I’m curious what kind of rate do you think I should be paying?
That's your marginal rate, what is your actual rate? That is, total dollars in annual income taxes (fed + state) divided by your total annual income BEFORE any deductions or adjustments.
I too am in California, BTW.
I’m in CA and in relatively high-earning (W2) couple with no children and a house purchased in 2017. I can’t promise I’ll have my taxes done in time that anyone will care here, but I’ll be able to tell you for sure how much of my income went to taxes moving forward.
If he was in California with a marginal combined tax rate of 55%, he would be well educated enough to know that it was his marginal tax rate. Seems safe to assume he is trolling.
I'm not trolling. I was being sincere. I'm a working person, not a billionaire using all the tax shelters available but still paying the highest rates. I don't feel undertaxed and wanted to know what Mark thinks is enough. And not attacking him for his opinion, not debating, just curious what it is.
Your problem is that your income is not from unearned income and capital gains. Or, if you were like Elon or another Oligarch, you could borrow money against the value of your assets, pay zero income tax, and even get to deduct the loan interest.
If someone makes personal loans for living expenses, whether using appreciated stocks as collateral, or not then the interest payments they make are not a tax deductible expense. If you try to do this, please consult a tax advisor first. Mortgage interest on primary residences are tax deductible, which is a stupid tax policy which both parties have supported for a long time, but this is different than personal loans.
This is a nonsense conspiracy theory. If the stock market averages 7% a year, interest rates are currently 5% (bare minimum), you would expect 2% from this strategy (pre-tax). Why would you ever do that when you could just put it in 10 year treasuries at 4.5% without the uncertainty?
No conspiracy required. Did you think Warren Buffet was fibbing when he mentioned that his secretary paid a larger nominal tax rate than himself?
Yes, even 6 month CD's would work, if you want to go the unearned income route. But depending on your goals, you will want to consult with your financial people to minimize your overall tax liability.
Capital gains taxation is the kicker. Which is why it's better to leave your profits unrealized, and simply borrow against your assets for living expenses.
Except that the market averages 10% per year and 5% beats 4.5% which is why nobody who can tolerate a bit of volatility picks treasuries over the market.
Yeah, maybe the individualist ethos of Americans actually hinders them to have a welfare state similar to Europe - for example, even though Americans are the "sickest of the rich" with healthcare costs high and lower life expectancy, there have been little progress to curb powers of private insurance though (main reason why the assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO last year was hailed as a hero by many Americans!)
Not all. The US middle class and below are undertaxed. Those who're in the top 10% are heavily taxed in most blue states.
DOGE doesn't seem like a serious effort to cut unnecessary expenditures: it is limited to a small slice of the budget and the basis of its choices seems blatantly political, not fiscal.
We got plenty for that $350b (much of which was plowed back into the US economy as contracts for replacement materiel): we used it to repair the hole Trump blew in NATO and restore the badly damaged reputation of US foreign policy in Europe. That's what it costs to exercise non-violent hegemonic power to build a bulwark against very large threats, such as China. Being a dominant global power costs a lot of money, yes -- I can't imagine why people pay no attention to the global benefits, and instead focus on the inevitable subset of missteps alone. If you're looking for actual efficiency in a complex human organizations you're looking at the wrong species.
We pay service on debt because it is in our interest to deploy the principal elsewhere. We get something for that debt service, just as a mortgage owner receives a net benefit in paying down the loan. I think it's agreed that there must be a scale at which debt is unsustainable, but no consensus on where it is. If you go back 50 years you'll see the same Cassandra calls about the size of a much smaller pre-Reagan deficit, and not only did the catastrophe fail to materialize, Reagan tax cuts magnified the danger, putting us on a path towards today . . . which is a path towards larger deficits tomorrow. I have no idea where a threshold to Doom is crossed, but cries of "The deficit is $X trillion!" when the economy is booming do seem suspect to someone who's been hearing the same alarm for over half a century, with the number almost always growing. (No one gives the Clinton years a second look.) . . . Let me add, I am not an economist. If you are I beg forgiveness in advance!
The $350 billion are a lie, plain and simple.
It’s important to stick to facts, especially with a guy like Trump in charge. The US did give substantial amounts of aid to Ukraine, concretely: $86.7 billion were disbursed so far.
Of those, about $58 billion of the total aid was spent in the U.S., directly boosting the U.S. defense industry.
I'm sure that Donald Trump has never read about, or even heard of, Metternich, the Concert of Europe or the Congress of Vienna. I suspect his diplomatic choices are more determined by his prejudices, resentments, greed and whether or not each country's leaders have flattered him or criticized him. He is a malignant narcissist, and narcissists like him become enraged when their fragile ego is threatened by criticism, sarcastic comments or exposure of their ignorance and lies. It is obvious he loves wealthy, corrupt dictators who know how to flatter him or send him beautiful love letters. On the other hand, democratic leaders who argue with him, like Merkel or, years ago, Trudeau, obviously enrage him. And Zelensky refused to help his campaign in 2020 (unlike Putin), so Zelensky is the target of his angry lies and vitriol. The fact that Putin and Xi are cold-blooded, competent sociopaths means that they can easily manipulate a lazy, ignorant narcissist with a fragile ego like Trump. Claire Berlinski wrote a very insightful essay about Trump's psychopathology, and how it likely determines his actions, titled "Impeach Him: Trump's psychopathology and the suicide of a superpower" in the Cosmopolitan Globalist substack (2/6/2025). Musk, on the other hand, is not lazy, but is very greedy, ruthless and power-hungry. He clearly wants to maximize his wealth and power, and may push Trump toward an accommodation or even a de facto semi-alliance with Xi. Neither Musk nor Trump seems to have any sympathy for our democratic European allies. As Noah wrote earlier, Trump's disdain for our allies could easily lead to nuclear proliferation and a much more dangerous world, for us and everyone else on earth.
Agree about Trump, but while Elon is narcissistic and power obsessed, as well as eccentric, I don’t think greed is what motivates him. Developing the first mass produced EVs, the first reusable rockets, the first useful satellite broadband, AI for self driving cars and robots, and neuralink implants for nerve damage treatment don’t seem to be what a greedy business person (like Trump) would even consider developing.
Very possibly true, but as he keeps increasing his power (via buying a worldwide communication system, buying a presidency for DJT, and trying to influence elections worldwide), he keeps earning (at least on paper) tens of billions more dollars. If he were less interested in enriching himself, perhaps he would donate some of that money to charities, or pay his employees more (or himself less), rather than buying politicians and businesses.
For an economist, Noah, you're ignoring a far more obvious possibility: we're broke. Our debt is 120% of GDP. Interest alone consumes 4.5% of GDP and about 20% of federal spending. We're still running the credit card at 5% of GDP annually and not Trump nor the Democrats nor the American people have the willpower to stop. Tyler Cowen made a good case today that we're looking at mild stagflation.
You've laid out before here why we would lose a war with China: we manufacture very little, even less end-to-end, and even less of military usefulness. If anything, the Ukraine war has made that clearer than ever. We have the strongest military in the world... if we were fighting WWII naval battles. I pissed about Trump dropping the China sanctions too and especially undermining the CHIPS act, but as we've seen, things get walked back by this administration, so before you start down another Manchurian-candidate rabbit hole (remember the phony Russia collusion narrative?) let's see what happens in the coming few weeks.
Big picture, America faces weakness on a lot of fronts. Some form of refocus on the Western Hemisphere is likely inevitable -- it can happen on our terms now or on someone else's after a major strategic defeat. Our options are becoming limited by our financial and military reality. As someone who wants to Make America Great Again, I wish that wasn't true. But contra your party's guiding philosophy, reality is NOT a social construction -- my wishes (or yours) don't change it.
(Good policy could improve this, over time. Trump won't be that vehicle though. He's a wrecking ball -- and many of us who voted for him intentionally chose the wrecking ball because that's what was needed right now. Someone else -- perhaps named Vance -- will need to rebuild.)
The USA was flying economically through to 2024.
What you need is a responsible Congress that seeks to distribute the benefits of the USA's vast wealth appropriately among its citizens, and seeks to maintain the strong alliances that have served it will since WW2. Sorting out the USA's self-destructive healthcare system would be a good start.
But instead, US citizens are so bored and aimless that they have let themselves be duped into that sort of thinking. Fake crises that need a 'wrecking ball'.
So there won't be any useful, thoughtful reform of anything. Just a wrecking ball that will make the whole world worse off.
We haven't had a responsible Congress in my lifetime. Keep wishing.
But I do know there's no way to build an effective country again without tearing down the ineffective things that the Left has spent 50 years building. Hence, the wrecking ball. I noticed Trump did something Noah has been advocating for a while, took his wrecking ball to NEPA.
I don't like it either man, but I've come to the conclusion that reforming this stuff is impossible and it simply must be destroyed and rebuilt. And the crap that we're finding now ($20B parked at an NGO to distribute to green projects; $2B in a Stacey Abrams backed "charity" that didn't exist 12 months ago) makes me suspect the govt-run, Lefty patronage machine is far larger than I could have ever imagined.
https://apnews.com/article/green-bank-epa-zeldin-climate-clean-energy-191b394cda251ef772867369f61f07b7
https://www.aol.com/news/zeldin-epa-discovers-2-billion-030707036.html
I actually understand $200K for an anti-Catholic musical in Ireland or $50K for a trannie comic book in Peru. But we're talking $Billions here, with a B. Throwing around that kind of money to private organizations whose only job is to decide who to give it to absolutely reeks of money laundering and corruption.
And yet the citizens of the US have been doing just fine, so your Henny Penny routine about “the Left” is probably a temperamental flaw in your part more than anything else.
In terms of citizen welfare, the reforms the USA needs most are in a leftward direction e.g. a better healthcare system.
In any case, your lust for the wrecking ball could not be more wrong. I hope you and people like you learn quickly from here.
Take a look at non-college educated median income over the last 40 years.
Chart: https://www.russellsage.org/research/chartbook/real-median-household-income-educational-attainment-household-head-1968-2012-repo
Article: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ (that's a great one BTW, and you would agree with a lot of it)
Or look at the divorce rate. Or the drug addition rate. Or the out of wedlock birth rate. Even the overall birthrate. Straight GDP, it's plausible to claim "citizens of the US have been doing fine", but GDP masks a great deal.
The Democrats had near unified control of the US Congress from 1950-1992. How did they do: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA GINI: 1964 - 35; 2004 - 41; 2024 - 41. Great job promoting equality, guys!
Trump's party ain't Reagan's GOP. The new alignment embraces much that old-school, Bernie-type liberals will recognize: safety net, industrial policy, pro-worker. Look at what Oren Cass is doing -- that's MAGA. If you can get over your dislike of Trump (something I pretty much share with you) you might find considerable common ground with the new conservative agenda. Josh Hawley put it correctly 2 years ago: "the Republicans are now the blue collar party."
Note, that doesn't mean everything Trump does will benefit workers. It won't -- he's a billionaire who cares mostly about himself. But our next generation (Hawley, Vance, et al) is all about class politics; the Dems next generation doubles down on woke racial and sexual grievance. It sounds to me like you are more into the former than the latter. (As is Noah.)
Republicans are the blue collar party now, at least among whites and ‘men’. But it’s all based on lies and misdirection. They get away with it because (i) most of those blue collar people don’t have much to worry about day to day (they have their iPhones and Netflix etc.) and (ii) they’re so child-like that they have no idea how the serious things work and can be easily manipulated and misled.
Hawley, Vance, etc. are charlatans who fancy themselves as ‘Trump, but smarter’. It won’t work for them, because Trump will destroy them one way or another.
What that "someone . . . named Vance" seems to be all about is the institution of nastily authoritarian integralism in place of a pluralist, secular democratic republic. If that's the price of "rebuilding", then we really are about to experience the cure that is far far worse than the disease.
Yeah, his comments in Munich, "you can't have a democratic mandate by trying to imprison your opposition" sure sound authoritarian.
The US grew its debt to deal with the crisis due to financial deregulation and to deal with the pandemic. I doubt that a wrecking ball in the form of a wave of deregulation (favoring things like cryptos) and weakening of health / research institutions would help to decrease the debt. Quite the opposite, they seem like “the wrecking ball” increases the probably and expected duration of crisis, making more likely increases in debt.
The wrecking ball just did something Noah's been advocating for a couple of years: gutted NEPA.
I agree that the wrecking ball is a bull in the China shop. Trump will destroy some useful stuff. But the Left has spent 50 years systematically seeking out the most priceless pieces in the store and smashing them to bits. So given the choice, I choose accidental destruction with good intentions instead of targeted destruction with the goal of destroying the country.
I didn't always feel this way. For most of my life, I really believed liberals wanted what was best for America but were just wrong about how to get there. But the last 10 years convinced me otherwise: some may fall into that category, but most just the country and specifically most of the people in it.
So your argument sums up to: oh liberals are bad
My argument is that they appear to hate the country, and having your country run by people who hate it is suicidal.
Trump appears to honestly love the country. He loves himself more, but he also loves America. So does Musk, in a way only an immigrant can. So given those choices, I'll take incompetent America lovers over slightly less incompetent America haters.
The idea of Trump loving the US is pretty absurd to me. He talks constantly about what a hellscape it is, violates it's norms, destroys the very institutions and alliances that made it powerful.
I think the Democrats have a marketing problem around the view of whether or not they hate the country, but the majority of mainstream democrats and liberals very clearly love this country.
What deregulation? The financial sector is one of the most tightly regulated sectors of the economy and was also in 2008. Financial bubbles happen again and again over history and there is no stopping it. The government will never actually do it because everyone is getting rich as the bubble inflates and stopping that is politically impossible.
Mmmm, they literally dropped a case against a crypto scam
Yeah, I don't see that either. The financial deregulation is a past-tense thing and was bipartisan.
We are broke. And I wonder if this is not the logical endpoint of a democratic welfare state and whether they are a fundamentally unstable entity in geopolitics. It seems to be at a strategic disadvantage to an authoritarian state that can force cuts in standard of living to prepare for war. And WWII is not a counterexample. The US was a much different entity then. Social Security didn't make its first payout until 1940 and government revenues were about 1/4th of their post war average. If we needed to mobilize like that today, I doubt that the voters would tolerate the inevitable cuts in transfer payments.
Given that the biggest items in the federal budget are Social Security and Medicare, isn't the real impediment to mobilization thus "having a large elderly population that need to be kept alive"?
If Vance will be associated with 4 years of wrecking-balling, will people still vote for him and believe that he can build something?
On a reality and social construction - isn't it becoming more fragmented with social media algorithms? I mean, 99% of information out there is not something people can directly experience or fact-check. But they argue about it as fierce as Soviet citizens fought in bread lines, and make political decisions based on that. So actual reality matters less than subjective bubble. And wether America is great again or not is purely a subjective opinion that can be socially engineered. Just look at economic sentiment charts that flip after each election. Musk with a chain saw will make some people forget about egg prices - well, at least for some time.
Interesting, and probably right. But how about this - Trump is applying his experience in real estate to international affairs. In real estate, it makes sense to make your customers and business partners feel like they are offering very little, because you are hoping to get them to make more concessions to you. You tell them their building is worthless to get them to lower the price or offer something extra. Trump feels like America's allies aren't offering America enough in return, so he insults them and threatens to make sweetheart deals with their enemies. Maybe he wants Europe, South Korea, and Japan to buy more American goods, and maybe he wants Ukraine to give us mineral rights.
Meanwhile, it makes sense to be nice to new potential customers and business partners in real estate. You can't get anything out of a client or whatever if the relationship is nonexistent.
Trump is definitely drawing the wrong conclusions from his business experience, and his business experience never led to a lot of success in the first place. But it might explain his behavior.
This is a VERY insightful comment and one I've heard rarely in the last few weeks. Anyone who hasn't read The Art of the Deal really should, since it provides a window into a young-Trump's thought processes, which don't appear to have changed much.
Noah, I think you're making an assumption here that Trump is trying to be a President, i.e. trying to represent the interests of US citizens. I know that you have your eyes open to his corruption and bad ideas, but you still seem to imagine that he is pursuing a strategy that has something to do with the USA.
I don't think he's trying to be President at all.
He and Musk seem to be most happy if everyone is talking about them and they're extracting wealth and power at the expense of others. They do not give two hoots about the welfare of American citizens, the impact they're having on geopolitics, or even their own political legacy.
You might be right about the 'grand conspiracy' theory.
But there is another explanation: political power in the USA is now finely concentrated with a couple of genuine psychopaths, and both of them are now determined to blow more hot air into this balloon until it pops.
Ignoring congressional power has started already. Ignoring court orders has also started. Like Putin, they won't stop.
There are so many more possibilities for new arrangements than Noah sees. The permutations are endless. trump's actions won't determine if he is taking us down one of the two paths mentioned.
For one thing I don't think trump is being guided by that kinda strict ideology. I think has has a notion of an American unencumbered by alliances , but not necessarily isolationist or willing to cede or abide by zones of influence. Trump is an opportunist. He'll look for opportunities anywhere. For example, if he thinks he can get something out of supporting Taiwan he will. He won't link that to supporting South Korea as an overall anti- China strategy.
Trump doesn't want to divide the world up, he wants to grab anything he sees as low hanging fruit wherever it might be. That's why it'd probably be a mistake to try and divine anything trump does as an indication of what grand world dividing strategy he's embarking on.
Vance can have a grand strategy. Trump does not. He lacks the personality, education, and attention span.
If Trump cancels and/or hinders the chips act I don’t know how the tech bros will come back from that. And if Palantir and Palmer get rugged I’d at least savor seeing them express what selling out their souls got them. Honestly that would be the largest tell I can think of at this point in time (As I watch Samuel Hammond wring his hands regarding AI positions being canned by DOGE in the government). But for all of our sakes I hope none of it comes to fruition.
Regarding China - you’ve highlighted Rush Doshi’ work already. Xi and the CCP will not stop until we are no longer a threat to their ends. Which as you mentioned is precisely why “turtling” at this point will simply leave us open to a Zerg rush later. Doesn’t matter how many siege tanks you have if you can’t replace them fast enough.
At the end of the day it increasingly feels like I just need to get this tattooed on my arm and throw in the towel. Musk will do anything to secure a trip to Mars and Trump will do anything to enrich himself.
“The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
Don't fret. Spoken Mandarin is actually pretty easy to learn. It's the written part that's the kicker.
Méi nàme jiǎndān
Nah, it's not that complicated. These are all rookies in the government house, not statesmen. Once they get smacked about a bit, they'll be more competitive. Of course, our allies will suffer but not if they go nuke quickly.