And Threats. And Extortion. And Lies.
- A quote from Bertrand Russell;
- Trump wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize, while making wars worse and threatening countries around the world;
- Heather Cox Richardson on the motives behind the idea of changing how the census works;
- Hegseth promotes a pastor who would criminalize gay sex, end voting by women, and ban non-Christian faiths;
- Changing minds: Hundreds of weather service employees hired back; Trump fires the IRS chief he just hired 2 months ago;
- Backing off: Smithsonian restores language about impeachments, mostly;
- Trump took credit for “Operation Warp Speed,” which involved mRNA vaccines against Covid, and now shrugs as RFK Jr. shuts down research on mRNA vaccines;
- Extortion against UCLA;
- America is now the outlier in the world recognizing the danger of climate change;
- No one is claiming that America has the best health-care system in the world anymore.
Let’s begin with this quote from Bertrand Russell
A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world is suffering. But at present, in most countries, education aims at preventing the growth of such a habit, and men who refuse to profess belief in some system of unfounded dogmas are not considered suitable as teachers of the young.
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Then we can pivot to the daily news, full of more evidence that the current party in power ignores evidence, defies education, and clings not so much to dogma (e.g. from the Constitution or the Bible) as the raw pursuit of power and the tribalistic demonization of people they don’t like.
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Slate, Fred Kaplan 8 Aug 2025: Trump Wants to Win the Nobel Peace Prize. He’s About to Make Two Wars Worse.
Just a sample:
The double standard is staggering. Trump and his crew have no hesitation trying to dictate what’s in many other countries’ interests. He imposed a 50 percent tariff on Brazil for arresting its former president—a friend and political ally of Trump’s—on charges of attempting a coup. He has threatened to punish Denmark if it doesn’t let him buy Greenland and to punish Canada if it doesn’t join the U.S. as the 51st state. Vice President J.D. Vance criticized Germany not long ago for outlawing pro-Nazi speech and even held a friendly meeting with the head of its neo-fascist party just before an election. Yet both Trump and Vance said Israel should decide on its own whether to resume its total occupation of Gaza (which it last held from 1967 to 2005).
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This is about his extra-legal ambition to change how the census works.
Heather Cox Richardson, August 7, 2025
First, it shows how aware he and administration officials are that their program is deeply unpopular and that they expect to lose control of the House of Representatives in 2026 unless they rig the system. As Lisa Needham wrote today in Public Notice, “‘We stood aside so Trump could shutter vital agencies, take away your healthcare, and spend every last dime scooping up immigrants to help get Stephen Miller his 3,000 arrests a day’ is not exactly a rallying cry that will turn out voters.”
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But there is an even darker image behind destroying our democratic system. If undocumented immigrants aren’t counted, their districts will be shortchanged on representation and whatever federal monies are still available for states, for sure. But if undocumented immigrants aren’t counted, will they be easier to dehumanize? Already the government is taking people from the streets and denying their right to due process. Observers are describing human rights abuses in detention facilities where most of those incarcerated have no criminal record. If undocumented people are not officially recognized as existing, they could simply disappear.
MAGA doesn’t care.
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Once again, plain as day.
JMG, from Politico, 8 Aug 2025: Hegseth Promotes Pastor Who Wants To Criminalize Gay Sex, End Voting By Women, & Ban Non-Christian Faiths
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And they keep changing their mind(s)!
CNN, 5 Aug 2025: Weather Service is now hiring back hundreds of positions that got cut in the DOGE chaos
And
NY Times, 8 Aug 2025: Trump Is Removing I.R.S. Chief 2 Months After He Was Confirmed, subtitled “Billy Long, a former Republican congressman, will no longer serve as the tax agency’s head. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will oversee the agency as acting commissioner, according to a U.S. official.”
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Trump, or his targets, back off from his threats and demands.
CNN, 8 Aug 2025: References to Trump’s impeachments are reinstalled at Smithsonian exhibit — with some slight but crucial changes
(Like inserting the word “alleged.”)
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Trump once bragged about “Operation Warp Speed.” Now, meh.
NY Times, 8 Aug 2025: Trump Just Shrugs as Kennedy Undermines His Vaccine Legacy, subtitled “President Trump’s laissez-faire approach is notable, given that the development of the Covid vaccine was seen as one of his first term’s most notable achievements.”
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Don’t forget the extortion.
NY Times, 8 Aug 2025: Trump Wants U.C.L.A. to Pay $1 Billion to Restore Its Research Funding, subtitled “The Trump administration has ended about $500 million for the Los Angeles-based university. The president said he wanted nearly double that to restart the flow of funds.”
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A couple more substantial pieces.
The Atlantic, Zoë Schlanger, 8 Aug 2025: America Is Living in a Climate-Denial Fantasy, subtitled “On climate, the U.S. and the rest of the planet are now in ‘completely separate worlds.'”
Last month, the world’s highest court issued a long-awaited opinion on how international law should regard climate harm. The International Court of Justice concluded, unanimously, that states have binding legal obligations to act to protect the climate system, and failure to do so—by continuing to produce, consume, and subsidize fossil fuels—may “constitute an internationally wrongful act.” In other words, curbing greenhouse-gas emissions is not merely voluntary in the eyes of the court; failure to do so is illegal.
A week later, the U.S. government proffered an entirely opposite picture of legal responsibility. It announced a plan to rescind one of the most important legal underpinnings of the federal effort to combat climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, from 2009, says quite simply that these emissions endanger the public and qualify as harmful pollution; they can therefore be regulated under the Clean Air Act. This finding is the legal basis for power-plant rules, tailpipe-emissions regulations, and almost every other action the executive branch has taken to curb the release of carbon dioxide and methane. And the U.S. EPA would now like to throw it out.
I keep thinking about this notion of American exceptionalism. How Americans think they’re the bestest people on the planet — at least the white Christian ones are — and how rules, or even reality, don’t apply them. They can *believe* themselves into exceptionalism.
That’s been a trait of many fallen empires throughout history.
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The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait, 8 Aug 2025: So Much for the ‘Best Health-Care System in the World’, subtitled “Republicans used to trumpet the innovation of the American medical sector. Now they’re taking a meat axe to it.”
Here’s a piece of Republican rhetoric that used to be ubiquitous but that you never hear anymore: America has the best health-care system in the world.
Republican politicians liked this line because it helped them dismiss the idea that the system needed major reform. American health care at its finest offered the most advanced treatments anywhere. Democrats wanted to expand coverage, but why mess with perfection? “Obamacare will bankrupt our country and ruin the best health-care-delivery system in the world,” then–House Speaker John Boehner said in 2012.
In Donald Trump’s second term, Republicans haven’t given up their opposition to universal coverage—far from it—but they have mostly stopped singing the praises of American health-care innovation. Indeed, they are taking a meat axe to it, slashing medical-research funding while elevating quacks and charlatans to positions of real power. The resulting synthesis is the worst of all worlds: a system that will lose its ability to develop new cures, while withholding its benefits from even more of the poor and sick.
Big picture thought: How is it all the other advanced nations in the world have reached different conclusions than the US about how to run health care? Partial answer: because Americans think they’re the best in the world, so by definition their health care system is the best, and everyone else is irrelevant. Partial answer: because America is run by oligarchs, who donate to the Republican Party, who pass laws in favor of the oligarchs. Never mind policies, or principles.
