- Trump keeps a trophy for himself;
- Paul Krugman on why the Trump administration is killing science;
- How MAGA needs stories in which they are the heroes;
- Why Trump fans aren’t forgiving Trump about Epstein;
- Heather Cox Richardson about Trump’s “mandate” vs. actual polls of Americans about immigration.
First, I amended Harari item posted yesterday.
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This seems to be the most popular story today, at least on social media.
The Daily Beast, 14 Jul 2025: Trump Kept Gold Club World Cup Trophy for Himself So FIFA Had to Give the Winners a Replica
President Trump has revealed that the champions of the Club World Cup won’t be getting the original trophy, because he’s keeping it.
And, apparently the team didn’t understand why Trump was intruding on their photo, and kept trying to push him off the stage. So finally, as seen all over Facebook today, the team photo-shopped Trump out of their photo.
What a vile, petty, self-centered, man.
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Paul Krugman, 15 Jul 2025: For MAGA, Ignorance is Strength, subtitled “Research cuts aren’t about shrinking government, they’re about killing science”
Traditionally, conservatives calling for smaller government want to see a less generous social safety net. Things like protecting Americans from economic hardship and guaranteeing health care, they argue, aren’t essential roles of government. And it’s true that those of us who want a stronger, not weaker safety net are mostly making a judgment about what kind of society we should be rather than an economic argument.
But weather forecasting and the research that supports it aren’t like retirement income or health care. They’re what economists call “public goods.” That is, they’re things provided by the government because they’re valuable to everyone but can’t easily be monetized, because there’s no good way to limit access to paying customers.
Here we are again about how privatization of government services will simply make everything more expensive for the average consumer, and make private industrialists richer.
I say no good way advisedly. Republicans have long sought to restrict access to National Weather Service data to private companies like AccuWeather, which in turn would provide forecasts only to paying customers. And they may succeed. But this would be obvious profiteering, creating artificial middlemen for access to information generated at taxpayer expense. And it would at best support forecasting, not the research that makes forecasting better.
With background about the government’s weather services, which go back to 1870.
Well, the Trump administration wants to cut funding for NOAA by 40 percent.
Since NOAA is a tiny budget item compared with Medicaid, what’s this about? Actually, there’s no mystery. Among other things, NOAA research helps us understand and predict climate change, and America’s right is firmly committed to climate denial. So Trump officials want to end research that might tell them things they don’t want to hear.
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The same logic lies behind the drastic cuts at the National Institutes of Health: They aren’t about saving money, they’re about preventing researchers from discovering things — like evidence that vaccines work and are safe — that don’t match the prejudices of the people in charge.
So Trump’s cuts to scientific research aren’t about shrinking government and saving money. They’re about dealing with possibly inconvenient evidence by covering the nation’s ears and shouting “La, la, la, we can’t hear you.”
Again, conservatives are about ideology. Honest people, including (most) scientists, are about engagement with the real world.
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The flavor here is about how people interpret the world through stories.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 15 Jul 2025: Trump doesn’t realize why MAGA needs the Epstein files, subtitled “His base needs a story where they’re the heroes, not the villains”
First with a summary.
On Saturday, Donald Trump tried to wave the MAGA base off the growing clamor to release the full case file of infamous sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, a close friend of Trump’s who evaded trial in 2019 by killing himself in jail. The president’s intervention seemed to reveal that he’s deeply worried there’s embarrassing or incriminating evidence about him in the Justice Department’s files. The furor, he insisted, is being driven by “selfish people” who are trying to hurt him. He said the files must be fabricated “by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration.” Trump’s tirade made it impossible to escape the conclusion that he’s trying to dissuade his voters from believing any damning evidence that may come out.
What was also telling in this defensive screed is how perplexed Trump is over his base’s fixation on this case. He begs them to move on to other conspiracy theories, offering a full menu of alternatives, like JFK’s assassination, Hunter Biden’s laptop and, his personal favorite, the “Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020.” “Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about,” he pleaded with his supporters, as if saying that no one cares about Epstein will somehow make it true.
Trump tries to deflect MAGA’s attention to one of the other conspiracy theories “offered by Trump and his allies: JFK, chemtrails, Hunter Biden’s laptop and COVID-19 conspiracies, to name just a few.”
But no, MAGA needs Epstein conspiracies, and the movement will accept no substitute. This craving for moral absolution is why.
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In all this back-and-forth, most MAGA voters are on the wrong side of history. They side with the rapists and harassers, and denounce the feminists who are trying to bring perpetrators to justice. Even as more stories of Trump’s abusive behavior toward women come to light, they keep voting for him. They’re invested in preserving sexist systems of power.
(Yet again, I view all this as manifestations of primitive human nature in a modern world it can barely understand.)
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Another piece on this.
NY Times, Michelle Goldberg, 14 Jul 2025: Trump’s Fans Forgive Him Everything. Why Not Epstein?
Now she [Pam Bondi] says there was no such client list. Last week the Justice Department and the F.B.I. released a memo saying that Epstein killed himself and no more information would be forthcoming: “It is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” Trump has implored his followers to forget about Epstein, writing, in a petulant Truth Social post, that the files were “written by Obama, Crooked Hillary” and various other purported deep state foes. Let’s “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about,” he wrote.
But he was wrong: Lots of people care. Trump’s followers responded to his attempt to wave Epstein away with uncharacteristic fury and disappointment. Bongino has reportedly threatened to resign over Bondi’s handling of the case. Epstein was a major subject at Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit, a conservative conference that began on Friday in Tampa, Fla. Speaking from the stage, the comedian Dave Smith accused Trump of covering up “a giant child rapist ring.” The audience cheered and applauded.
Having nurtured conspiracy theories for his entire political career, Trump suddenly seems in danger of being consumed by one. …
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Heather Cox Richardson, today, July 14, 2025
Trump appointees insist they have a “mandate” to drive undocumented immigrants out of the U.S. and prevent new immigrants from coming in, and are launching a massive increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and detention facilities to do so. But a poll released Friday shows that only 35% of American adults approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, while 62% disapprove.
The poll shows a record 79% of adults saying immigration is good for the country, with only 17% seeing it as bad. Only 30% of American adults say immigration should be reduced.
With a typical Heather history of American immigration policy from the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act onward. Very detailed, with lots of URL notes.
There’s the old saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” from George Santayana. This aligns with something I just read by Harari today: History is not the study of the past, but the study of change.
