- David Wallace-Wells on the Epstein scandal, with items by Zack Beauchamp and Shawn McCreesh;
- How simple-minded Trump characterizes his adversaries as “evil”;
- How Trump’s economic agenda is driven by simple-minded lies and misunderstandings;
- How the question “Is the world a friendly place” underlies the range of human nature that determines our politics;
- And Robert Reich conducts a poll asking when Trump and his followers think American was “great”.
NY Times, David Wallace-Wells, 16 Jul 2025: The Epstein Story Is Both Conspiracy Theory and Genuine Scandal [gift link]
The writer (a science writer and essayist; see here and here) recalls hearing about all this ten years ago, and many times since.
The imagined center of the “Epstein files” has long been his supposed “client list.” But how much of Epstein’s life is still secret? Gawker published his address book a full decade ago; New York magazine delivered an annotated version in 2019 and Business Insider a searchable version the next year. There followed investigations by The Times and The Wall Street Journal, prolific enough that they now have their own landing pages, and depositions and civil suits and a public criminal trial for Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime partner in crime. The Epstein flight logs were made public in 2021, the same year that Michael Wolff published an astonishing account of Epstein’s final months, including the long transcript of an interview that Steve Bannon conducted with Epstein. Bannon has said he is sitting on 15 hours of material; Wolff says his own audio recordings run about a hundred hours. In one clip released just before the election, Epstein calls himself Trump’s “closest friend.”
But all of this doesn’t scratch the itch that most people, but especially conspiracy theorists, need scratched.
Almost none of this information has satisfied those seeking it, or those seeking still more. And really, how could it? As with so many contemporary conspiracies, the known picture is expansive and uncomfortable enough, with abundant detail arrayed like so much proverbial red yarn. But the logic of paranoid thinking demands ever more cycles of disclosure and running epicycles of analysis. (This is among the many ways it is an extremely good match for the age of social media.) And what is missing in the Epstein story isn’t exactly more information — it’s more meaning.
… We get a classic conspiracy theory, we’re often told, when disempowered people try to make sense of a disordered world, seizing on a story that gives them a comforting sense of control, at least as analysts of an otherwise overwhelming system producing improbable or inscrutable outcomes.
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Also noted, from Zack Beauchamp at Vox today: Why Trump betrayed his base on Jeffrey Epstein, subtitled “And why he’ll get away with it.”
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And this, from Shawn McCreesh on NYT’s front page today: Will the Conspiracists Cultivated by Trump Turn on Him Over Epstein?, subtitled “The fallout of the Epstein case is testing the power the president holds over his most loyal followers, many of whom have broken into open revolt against him.”
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A characteristic of conspiracy theorists is that they need simple answers to complex matters, and divide the world into good (them) and evil (the ‘others’). Trump is also remarkably simple-minded.
NY Times, White House Memo by Peter Baker, 16 Jul 2025: For Trump, Domestic Adversaries Are Not Just Wrong, They Are ‘Evil’, subtitled “The president’s vilification of political opponents and journalists seeds the ground for threats of prosecution, imprisonment and deportation unlike any modern president has made.”
When the Pentagon decided not to send anyone to this week’s Aspen Security Forum, an annual bipartisan gathering of national security professionals in the Colorado mountains, President Trump’s appointees explained that they would not participate in discussions with people who subscribe to the “evil of globalism.”
After all the evils that the U.S. military has fought, this may be the first time in its history that it has put globalization on its enemies list. But it is simply following the example of Mr. Trump. Last week, he denounced a reporter as a “very evil person” for asking a question he did not like. This week, he declared that Democrats are “an evil group of people.”
“Evil” is a word getting a lot of airtime in the second Trump term. It is not enough anymore to dislike a journalistic inquiry or disagree with an opposing philosophy. Anyone viewed as critical of the president or insufficiently deferential is wicked. The Trump administration’s efforts to achieve its policy goals are not just an exercise in governance but a holy mission against forces of darkness.
That such Manichaeism is a prime feature of religious fundamentalists doesn’t make it any less simple-minded, or untrue.
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Vox, Eric Levitz, 16 Jul 2025: The lie at the heart of Trump’s entire economic agenda, subtitled “The White House wants to send Medicaid recipients to the mines.”
Keying first off tariffs, and Trump’s fundamental misunderstanding of them, and of trade deficits.
Trump ostensibly believes that his tariffs’ benefits will outweigh these harms. But this conviction rests less on reasoned thought than whimsical intuition.
Indeed, rebutting Trump’s theory of trade can feel a bit like refuting a child’s supposition that the moon is made of cheese. It isn’t hard to find reasons for doubting that the night sky is lit by a ball of mozzarella. But there are so many problems with that notion — astronomical, agricultural, and otherwise — that it’s difficult to know where to begin.
Trump’s trade agenda is similarly premised on a vast array of misunderstandings.
For one, Trump contends that anytime the United States runs a trade deficit with another country, our nation becomes poorer. In his mind, if we buy more stuff from Cambodia than it purchases from us, then we’ve lost money on that relationship, which means that we’ve been ripped off. But this is silly. Money is desirable because it can be exchanged for goods and services. Refusing to ever trade dollars for groceries might leave you with a higher bank balance. But doing so would not render you more prosperous in any meaningful sense: Few would rather subsist on backyard produce and roadkill than run a “trade deficit” with Costco. Mutually beneficial transactions exist.
Trump looks only at the dollar amounts, and ignores what we’re getting in return. Then there’s this:
America is not desperate for more low-paying, arduous jobs
Let’s say that Trump was correct about almost everything: All of America’s trade partners have been conspiring to steal our jobs, and his tariffs will swiftly bring back copper mining, sneaker production, and the manufacturing of myriad other goods.
Even then, his policy would still be at odds with a fundamental reality: America does not have a large pool of idle workers eager to take jobs in new mineral mines or textile factories.
America’s unemployment rate sits at just over 4 percent, near historic lows. And the percentage of prime-age Americans in the labor force is 83.5 percent, just off all-time highs.
It goes on, with a section subtitled “The administration’s solutions to this problem are all whimsical fantasies.” Including the notion about Medicaid recipients. The piece concludes:
The notion that there are tens of millions of American workers ready to take the place of foreign workers or fill newly created manufacturing jobs, as soon as Uncle Sam kicks them out of their welfare hammocks, is fantastical. Yet this fiction serves to rationalize the administration’s trade, immigration, and fiscal agendas simultaneously. So we’re probably going to keep hearing about it.
Trump may not share his administration’s cynicism on this point. It’s not clear that he even recognizes that his autarkic fantasies pose labor force challenges. What seems certain, though, is that he has not subjected his intuitions about trade to critical scrutiny. And he is not interested in doing so. As a result, the US government is deliberately driving up America’s consumer prices and fraying its geopolitical alliances, for the sake of utter nonsense. It would probably be less destructive — and only a bit more embarrassing — if the president believed that the Earth is orbited by a slice of provolone.
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Here’s a philosophical take that encompasses all these issues.
Salon, Allison Carmen, 26 Mar 2025: How the “wallet test” shows our need for a social safety net, subtitled “Is the world a friendly place? The answer might determine the future of America’s essential social programs”
“The most important decision we make,” a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein, “is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.”
This isn’t just philosophical musing. According to the 2025 World Happiness Report, this belief might be one of the most politically urgent questions of our time — because when we stop trusting each other, democracy begins to unravel.
The writer goes on to recount how she found a wallet in the back of a New York City cab, and went to great lengths to track down its owner. And heard of others who’d done the same, or had been beneficiaries of others who’d done the same.
These stories aren’t rare. The World Happiness Report cites a global experiment — originally published in Science — where researchers “lost” wallets to see if people would return them. Most people assumed the wallets wouldn’t come back, especially if they contained cash. But the opposite happened: wallets with money were returned far more often than expected — in many cases, even more than those without cash.
My takes: Trust erodes as societies grow and we come into contact with more and more people unlike us. And, has been exacerbated by social media, people’s propensity to believe in conspiracy theories, and the subsequent distrust of the institutions they don’t realize how much they rely on. This trend may settle down as people become accustomed to getting along with others, in big cities; but not, in turn, in small insular towns where outsiders are feared as threats.
The essay goes on with examples from politics, and about social programs.
The answer to the question attributed to Einstein is — yet again, resorted to the thesis that the universe is not simple, but multi-leveled — is both, at different scales. On the one hand, we all die, and given the minuscule fraction of the universe that is amenable to life, it does not seem as if the universe as a whole is very friendly. At the same time, at the scale of human experience and human history, that humanity has built a global civilization, which has required cooperation among larger and larger groups of people, suggests that humans can be friendly much of the time. That’s the trend of human evolution; altruism, and so on.
Remember that human conceptions of good and evil, friendliness or hosility, is based on the range of human experiences. We don’t take into account the extremes of that range, that humans don’t experience; but we see extreme examples in the non-human biological world.
It is cooperation, friendliness social checks and balances, that has built modern civilization.
And now I wonder, are religions the products of people who think other people are basically evil?
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One more, a poll from Robert Reich.
Robert Reich, 16 Jul 2025: Office Hours: Trump Wants to Roll Back America to … When?, subtitled “When do he and his followers think America was ‘great?'”
Reich is conducting a poll to answer this question, with four options: Early 2000s, 1980s, 1950s, and Gilded Age. Or Other.
I voted for 1950s, which I’ve come to conclude over the past years is what MAGA yearns for. When America was white and straight and Christian and was the king of the world. Blacks knew their places, and gays were unspeakable. Yet surprisingly, Gilded Age is leading in the poll, substantially. Despite the question about Trump and his followers… I’m fairly sure MAGA has no clue about what the Gilded Age actually was about.
