- Thomas Edsall on the destructiveness of the Trump presidency;
- As the US discounts investments in the future, China is taking the lead;
- How Trump World clings to conspiracy theories;
- And how Trump folks simply stop enforcing rules they don’t like, misunderstand basic legal principles, and prioritize red “taker” states;
- A remembrance of Desi Arnaz and “I Love Lucy”.
The simpletons are destroying what they do not understand. The barbarians are at the gates.
NY Times, guest essay by Thomas B. Edsall, 20 May 2025: ‘I Even Believe He Is Destroying the American Presidency’
As usual Esdall quotes and corresponds with numerous others. I’ll cover just the first.
One thing stands out amid all the chaos, corruption and disorder: the wanton destructiveness of the Trump presidency.
The targets of President Trump’s assaults include the law, higher education, medical research, ethical standards, America’s foreign alliances, free speech, the civil service, religion, the media and much more.
J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush, succinctly described his own view of the Trump presidency, writing by email that there had never
been a U.S. president who I consider even to have been destructive, let alone a president who has intentionally and deliberately set out to destroy literally every institution in America, up to and including American democracy and the rule of law. I even believe he is destroying the American presidency, though I would not say that is intentional and deliberate.
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Let’s look at just one target of the administration’s vendetta, medical research. Trump’s attacks include cancellation of thousands of grants, cuts in the share of grants going to universities and hospitals and proposed cuts of 40 percent or more in the budgets of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation.
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Which dovetails with this piece.
NY Times, Kyle Chan, 19 May 2025: In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant.
As I’ve wondered before, I don’t understand why conservatives, supposedly being supportive of business, don’t understand the value of investing in the future. But Trump and MAGA and Musk and DOGE, claiming a mandate to cut government spending, are cutting the investments! The warning systems to avoid catastrophes from weather events! And previous agencies and commissioners whose job was to ferret out government fraud!
Mr. Trump is taking a wrecking ball to the pillars of American power and innovation. His tariffs are endangering U.S. companies’ access to global markets and supply chains. He is slashing public research funding and gutting our universities, pushing talented researchers to consider leaving for other countries. He wants to roll back programs for technologies like clean energy and semiconductor manufacturing and is wiping out American soft power in large swaths of the globe.
China’s trajectory couldn’t be more different.
It already leads global production in multiple industries — steel, aluminum, shipbuilding, batteries, solar power, electric vehicles, wind turbines, drones, 5G equipment, consumer electronics, active pharmaceutical ingredients and bullet trains. It is projected to account for 45 percent — nearly half — of global manufacturing by 2030. Beijing is also laser-focused on winning the future: In March it announced a $138 billion national venture capital fund that will make long-term investments in cutting-edge technologies such as quantum computing and robotics, and increased its budget for public research and development.
With many details and examples.
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Once again: Conservatives are those who live by basic, intuitive human nature, and reject principles designed to overcome how that human nature becomes destructive when people live in larger and larger groups. And reject findings (science) that contradict their intuitive ‘common sense’ about how the world works. The result is clinging to religion, finding refuge in pseudo-science, and retreat into the comforting illusions of conspiracy theories.
The Bulwark, Will Sommer, 20 May 2025: The Real Reason Trump World Just Can’t Quit Conspiracy Theories
I link this as evidence without being able to provide Sommer’s explanation; I’m not a paid subscriber and so can see only the top of the article. But the opening is about Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, the conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton murdered Jeffrey Epstein, and lack of actual evidence that she did.
Bongino has pleaded with them for patience and repeatedly insisted that he and Patel are doing behind-the-scenes work that would satiate their frustrations. But that work has not materialized. And on Sunday, he seemed almost distraught in trying to explain why. “In some of these cases, the ‘there’ you’re looking for is not there,” he said in talking about the theory that Trump assassination attempts were actually attempted hits by Deep State actors.
And the irony:
To some extent, Bongino himself is to blame for his predicament. That it is an article of faith for the right that Trump’s assassination attempts were part of a nefarious plot or that Epstein was murdered—presumably by Democrats—is owed in part to people like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino suggesting as much prior to joining the administration.
But instead of being given a degree of credibility and trust from the conspiracists, Bongino is now being treated as a “deep state traitor” for telling them that the wild theories he used to preach and they still collectively believe in aren’t true. It’s a plight facing the broader administration, and really, the whole country.
The world is complicated, and full of random events, which humans, with their pattern-seeking minds, want to make sense of. When they can’t, they make things up.
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…And so conservatives prefer authoritarian strong men and disregard for ‘norms’ and ‘rules.’ This is how the entire Trump administration is working.
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The headline will do.
Washington Post, 18 May 2025: Trump orders the government to stop enforcing rules he doesn’t like, subtitled “Critics say the administration is breaking the law and sidestepping the rulemaking process that presidents of both parties have routinely followed.”
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Meanwhile, Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary, defines a key legal term to mean the opposite of what it actually means, because that’s the meaning Trump wants.
NY Times, 20 May 2025: Noem Incorrectly Defines Habeas Corpus as the President’s Right to Deport People, subtitled “The right allows people to legally challenge their detentions by the government and is guaranteed in the Constitution.”
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, bungled answers on Tuesday about habeas corpus, incorrectly asserting that the legal right of people to challenge their detention by the government was actually the president’s “constitutional right” to deport people.
All the reports of this incident (such as this one at Boing Boing) include this exchange.
At a Senate hearing, Senator Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire, asked Ms. Noem about the issue. “Secretary Noem,” she asked, “what is habeas corpus?”
“Well,” Ms. Noem said, “habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their right to—”
“No,” Ms. Hassan interjected. “Let me stop you, ma’am. Excuse me, that’s incorrect.”
Ms. Noem’s answer, which echoed the Trump administration’s expansive view of presidential power, flipped the legal right on its head, turning a constitutional shield against unlawful detention into broad presidential authority.
This administration doesn’t understand the Constitution, let alone care about it. They think they have a mandate to make America white again, and ignore any laws that would get in their way.
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A cogent observation.
JMG, 20 May 2025: Jeffries: I Won’t Be Lectured By “Taker” Red States
I floated this notion once before. If Trump and MAGA are so intent on sealing the US off from world trade, insisting that everything be made in the US, wouldn’t the next step be some kind of ‘civil war’ or ‘divorce’ in which red states trade only with other red states? Maybe install tariffs on products from blue states? Well, because they likely realize it simply wouldn’t work.
“States like New York and New Jersey and Connecticut and Illinois and California, are donor states, we regularly send billions of dollars more to the federal government than we get back in return. We are donor states! So we’re not going to be lectured by people who are actually in what has sometimes been referred to as taker states, who actually receive more money every year from the federal government. Than they send in terms of taxpayer dollars as to what is fair and what is right.”
Once again: the blue states are more cosmopolitan, more inclusive, and more productive. They welcome the scientists that the Trump administration is firing and sending to other countries. A coincidence? It’s the trend of history.
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On a completely different note.
NY Times, Todd S. Purdom, 18 May 2025 (though in today’s print paper): Hollywood Couldn’t Imagine a Star Like This One [gift link]
This is about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, and their TV show “I Love Lucy” in the 1950s, near the dawn of broadcast television. This is prehistory for most people alive these days, and it’s almost prehistory for me. I never saw this show except in a few reruns. The fact that I *could* see such reruns is part of the point here.
Seventy-five years ago, a fading redheaded movie star and her itinerant bandleader husband were searching desperately for a way to save their careers — and their marriage. She was starring in a network radio show in Hollywood, and he was a musician on the road all the time, so they rarely saw each other. In their 10 years together, she’d already filed for divorce once and was nearing her wits’ end.
Two key issues here. Lucille Ball agreed to a TV show, but only if her husband, the Cuban-immigrant Desi Arnaz, could play the TV husband. The network was skeptical (they always are), but Lucy and Desi did a road tour to demonstrate the couple’s audience appeal. (Imagine what MAGA and the anti-DEI folks would say now.) Second, and even more ground-breaking:
Before “I Love Lucy,” television was largely a live medium in which programs ran once, then disappeared. Arnaz assembled a team that arranged to film their show in front of a live audience so that it could be preserved pristinely on 35-millimeter film.
This production method was more costly, so the network insisted that Ball and Arnaz take a weekly pay cut. They agreed — if they could own the negatives of the show. The eventual multimillion-dollar value of the approximately 180 half-hours they produced provided the capital that made Desilu Productions the largest studio in Los Angeles, and the biggest producer of television content in the world. Arnaz’s technical innovations also made it possible for the show to be repeated (thus giving birth to the rerun) and resold (thus creating the syndication market). His refusal to be shut out of television led to the birth of a business model that persisted for seven decades.
The article doesn’t mention this, but Star Trek, its original series that began production in 1964, was produced at Desilu Studios (named after Desi and Lucy) and Lucy was instrumental in talking people into financing it, as is well-known in Trek lore. The other larger story here is, as I’ve written about before, when Trek was broadcast, TV shows were made to be seen once, maybe a second time in a Summer rerun, and were thought to then disappear forever. This explains so much… which I think I’ve written about before.
