- David French on why Trump gets away with everything;
- Ezra Klein on how to beat Trumpism: something about Democrats not being so judgmental;
- Short items about Norman Rockwell, Nigeria and Christians, the welfare queen stereotype, how faith-base bigoty is just fine in Texas; and Noem’s lie about arrests of American citizens.
Everything we think we know about the world, the universe, about reality, is necessarily filtered through the perceptual limitations of the human body and the biases of human nature. As fish with water, there are some things we simply can’t see. And the things we do see are interpreted through protocols that evolved to promote human survival, not for accurate perception of reality.
All the political stories I mention here are of interest because they reveal, implicitly, these filters. All interactions among humans, politics broadly, come not so much from different takes on reality (though they’re a good part of it), let alone good vs evil (a simpleton’s take on reality), but from different goals, which ultimately boil down to my tribe vs your tribe. And the rules we establish, or ignore, about how to deal with each other. Those rules amount to different types of governments.
NY Times, opinion column by David French, 2 Nov 2025: Why Trump Can Do No Wrong
French reviews recent events and calls the second Trump administration “brazen.” And his take on how Trump can “do no wrong” is: because he does everything out in the open. He recalls Trump asking Zelensky to “do us a favor” back in 2019, then calling it a “perfect” call. Then reviews other Trump examples of what we used to call corruption.
Whether it’s by instinct or intention, Trump seems to have stumbled onto two key truths about his partisan supporters: They are desperate to rationalize, excuse and justify anything that he does, and they do not know much of anything about the law.
In that circumstance, when Trump acts out, openly and proudly, they don’t just rally to his side because they believe him and admire him, although many do, but because they can’t quite believe that deeds done in the open can be just as corrupt as deeds done in secret.
That is, since no one calls him out, not even other Republicans, his supporters think that whatever he does is just fine.
The average American doesn’t know how foreign affairs are conducted, how the Department of Justice is run or the ethical lines around foreign business dealings. They’re almost always going to grant their partisan allies the benefit of the doubt. In fact, they often don’t even allow for the possibility of doubt.
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Another take. Nothing seems to be happening. How about this?
NY Times, opinion by Ezra Klein, 2 Nov 2025: This Is the Way You Beat Trump — and Trumpism
Inside the Democratic Party — in its backrooms and its group chats, its conferences and its online flame wars — an increasingly bitter debate has taken hold over what the party needs to become to beat back Trumpism. Does it need to be more populist? More moderate? More socialist? Embrace the abundance agenda? Produce more vertical video?
The answer is yes, yes to all of it — but to none of it in particular. The Democratic Party does not need to choose to be one thing. It needs to choose to be more things.
So again I am reminded: politics is not about dealing with real problems and solving them.
In 1962, Bernard Crick, a political theorist and a democratic socialist, published a strange little book called “In Defense of Politics.” Politics, for Crick, was something precious and specific: It “arises from accepting the fact of the simultaneous existence of different groups, hence different interests and different traditions, within a territorial unit under a common rule.”
The fact of difference is not always accepted. There are other forms of social order, like tyranny or oligarchy, that actively suppress it. But to practice politics as Crick defines it is to accept the reality of difference — that is to say, it is to accept the reality of other people whose values and views differ deeply from yours.
In my favorite line from the book, Crick writes, “Politics involves genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people, not tasks set for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy.”
I love that. I think the path to a better politics — perhaps even a political majority — lives within it.
The solution is to not suppose that your way of life should be imposed on all others. From my perspective, it seems like conservatives are always trying to do that. But there are other perspectives:
A Democratic strategist who has conducted countless focus groups told me that when he asks people to describe the two parties, they often describe Republicans as “crazy” and Democrats as “preachy.” One woman said to him, “I’ll take crazy over preachy. At least crazy doesn’t look down on me.”
That echoes what I have heard from the kinds of voters Democrats lament losing. I feel as if I have the same conversation over and over again: Sometimes people tell me about issues where the Democratic Party departed from them. But they first describe a more fundamental feeling of alienation: The Democratic Party, they came to believe, does not like them.
Many of these people voted for Democrats until a few years ago. They didn’t feel their fundamental beliefs had changed. But they began to feel like “deplorables.” They began to feel unwanted.
The essay goes on and on.
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Notes from the Fringe.
- JMG, 2 Nov 2025: Norman Rockwell’s Family Blasts DHS For Stealing His Famous Works To Persecute Immigrants And Minorities —- We’ve seen this again and again, especially with Trump rallies using songs from artists who object to their works being used to implicitly support Trump. It’s another kind of lying.
- JMG: Hegseth To Trump: Pentagon Is Ready To Kill Nigerians —- Aside from this propensity to start another war, under a president who wants a Nobel Prize for Peace (!!), why is the issue limited to protecting Christians? What about universal civil rights? Well, obviously, because…
- Vox, 31 Oct 2025: The “welfare queen” stereotype is back — and it’s going viral — a racist lie going back to Reagan.
- Friendly Atheist, 1 Nov 2025: Texas Supreme Court says faith-based bigotry by judges doesn’t violate ethics rules, subtitled “The Texas Supreme Court has normalized religious discrimination in the judiciary, specifically against same-sex couples who want to get married” —- Another example of how religion makes you addle-brained; do they understand constitutional principles, or not?
- PolitiFact, 31 Oct 2025: Kristi Noem: “No American citizens have been arrested or detained” during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns. Rating: Pants on Fire. —-We’ve read about the evidence, over and over.
