- The Trump/Musk bromance implodes;
- Hannity lies about the impact of the “big beautiful bill”;
- Republicans try to discredit experts warning about the cost of tax cuts;
- David French on Joni Ernst, and how Christianity has become a vertical, not horizontal, faith;
- David Brooks on world-shifting political movements and how it’s somehow the Democrats’ fault for not properly responding to the current populist movement here and around the world; with my comments.
And, Jeffrey Epstein!
ABC News, 5 Jun 2025: Trump Musk feud explodes with claim president is in Epstein files, subtitled “Trump has not responded to Musk’s attack regarding the alleged sex trafficker.”
CNN, 5 Jun 2025: Trump and Musk escalate public feud over agenda bill
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Perhaps trivial by comparison. But again: Hannity, on behalf of Trump, just lies. And knows his viewers won’t know any better.
Media Matters, 5 Jun 2025: Sean Hannity grossly misrepresents CBO report about Trump’s “big beautiful bill.” Even Fox’s own website got it right., subtitled “The Congressional Budget Office report said that the “big beautiful bill” would add $2.4 trillion to the deficit, but Hannity falsely claimed the report projected it would actually reduce the deficit by $2.5 trillion.”
No, *everyone* out of the Trump cult bubble is reporting how the BBB will *increase* the debt. This is what led Elon Musk to condemn the bill — because it completely overwhelms the claimed savings he accomplished with DOGE. Claimed to be some $165 billion, without evidence, so probably much less.
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Trump’s fans will believe anything Trump tells them, apparently. If meteorologists say it’s raining and Trump wants it to be sunny, he will claim the meteorologists are Democrats, or woke, and can’t be trusted. Looking at actual evidence is not an option.
NY Times, Tony Romm, 4 Jun 2025: Republicans Try to Discredit Experts Warning About the Cost of Tax Cuts, subtitled “President Trump and his allies have united around a new foe: the economists and budget experts who have warned about the costs of Republicans’ tax ambitions.”
Listen to this guy, Mr. Smith.
Even before House Republicans learned the full price of their tax package on Wednesday, one of the bill’s chief authors, Representative Jason Smith of Missouri, was sowing doubt about the accuracy of the estimate.
“I’m skeptical,” Mr. Smith quipped at an event last month when asked about the coming analysis of the legislation’s cost. “Unless I like the number, I’m against the number.”
If he doesn’t “like” the number, it can’t be right.
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One more about Joni Ernst.
NY Times, David French, 5 Jun 2025: Selfishness Is Not a Virtue
French begins by recounting Ernst’s comments, all the way up to her follow-up video extolling Jesus Christ as the solution to Medicaid cuts. Then, here’s the core of French’s essay:
The fact that a sitting United States senator was that callous — and then tried to twist her cruelty into a bizarro version of the Christian gospel — is worth highlighting on its own as another instance of the pervasive “own the libs” ethos of the Republican Party. But Ernst’s fake apology was something different — and worse — than simple trolling. It exemplified the contortions of American Christianity in the Trump era.
Americans are now quite familiar with the “no apologies” ethos of the Trumpist right. They’re familiar with Trumpist trolling and with MAGA politicians and MAGA influencers doubling and tripling down on their mistakes. My former Times colleague Jane Coaston has even popularized a term — “vice signaling” — to describe MAGA’s performative transgressiveness. Trumpists think it’s good to be bad.
But why bring Jesus into it?
America has always been a country with lots of Christian citizens, but it has not always behaved like a Christian country, and for reasons that resonate again today. An old error is new. Too many Christians are transforming Christianity into a vertical faith, one that focuses on your personal relationship with God at the expense of the horizontal relationship you have with your neighbors.
I like that distinction between vertical and horizontal faith. Yet the horizontal faith is usually just tribal.
Then French recalls Wendell Berry reflecting on Christianity in the slave-owning South. The essay concludes:
Ernst isn’t the chief offender here by any means. Nor do I think that she’s consciously trying to narrow Christian doctrine to the kind of purely vertical relationship that enables so much injustice. Senators aren’t theologians, and neither are columnists.
But politicians are weather vanes (as we’re all tempted to be), and there’s a foul wind blowing out of parts of American Christianity. Ernst’s first quip was a gaffe. Her apology video was no such thing. It was a premeditated effort to say exactly what she thinks Republicans want to hear.
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Is the reactionary response of conservatives to the modern era really the Democrats’ fault? A longish piece by David Brooks, that puts current issues in a larger perspective.
NY Times, David Brooks, 5 Jun 2025: The Democrats’ Problems Are Bigger Than You Think
First, the historical overview:
There have been only a few world-shifting political movements over the past century and a half: the totalitarian movement, which led to communist revolutions in places like Russia and China and fascist coups in places like Germany; the welfare state movement, which led in the U.S. to the New Deal; the liberation movement, which led, from the ’60s on, to anti-colonialism, the civil rights movement, feminism and the L.G.B.T.Q. movement; the market liberalism movement, which led to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and, in their own contexts, Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev; and finally the global populist movement, which has led to Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Brexit and, in their own contexts, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
The global populist movement took off sometime in the early 2010s. It was driven by a comprehensive sense of social distrust, a firm conviction that the social systems of society were rigged, corrupted and malevolent.
And then he claims that
The Republicans have adjusted to the shift in the zeitgeist more effectively than the Democrats. Trump tells a clear story: The elites are screwing America. He took a free trade party and made it a protectionist party, an internationalist party and made it an isolationist party.
Which elites? The billionaires that the GOP embraces (for a while at least)? Or the residents of blue states? To think the latter is paranoia. Further, I would say, because it’s easy to invoke simple solutions from simpler times, rather than to wait for the general population to catch up to modern times in an increasingly complex world. Many of us catch up easily and adjust, and marvel at how different things are now than when we were children. Many others, to the extent they notice, resent it.
And so what are Democrats supposed to do?
If I could offer Democrats a couple of notions as they begin their process of renewal, the first would be this: Cultural elitism is more oppressive than economic elitism. The welfare state era gave Democrats the impression that everything can be solved with money funneled through some federal program. But the populist era is driven by social resentment more than economic scarcity.
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My second notion is this: Pay attention to Dwight Eisenhower. Ike was a Republican president in the middle of the welfare state era. He basically said: I’m going to endorse the basic shape of the New Deal, but I’m going to achieve those ends more sensibly. You can trust me.
And concluding:
For today’s Democrats that means this: If people rightly distrust establishment institutions and you are the party of the establishment institutions, then you have to be the party of thoroughgoing reform. You have to say that Trump is taking a blowtorch to institutions, and we are for effectively changing institutions.
To show that, you have to be willing to take on your activist groups: We’re going to reform schools in ways the unions don’t like. We’re going to reform zoning in a way the NIMBY brigades don’t like. We’re going to reform Congress in ways the incumbents don’t like. We’re going to talk about patriotism and immigration in ways the groups don’t like. We’re going to fix how blue cities are governed in a way the groups don’t like.
Do you really think professional politicians are going to lead the tectonic shifts that are required? That takes intellectuals, organizers, a new generation, all of us. It’s the work of decades, not election cycles. Clear your mind. Think anew.
Or, perhaps, the problem is that actual change is outpacing the rate that many people can adjust to change. But not all. It will happen, eventually. It may take a couple generations.
Also: history, it seems to me, is about progress and regression. Would Brooks have given similar advice in an era of slavery?
