- Frank Bruni on people who excuse Trump’s outrageous behavior for the relatively minor sins of the previous administration, unable to tell the difference in magnitude;
- Briefly noted items about Mark Kelly and Benedict Arnold; NYT on Trump’s fatigue and Trump’s resultant outrage; Republicans getting rid of auto safety features; Trump wants money so he can get into heaven; Liberty Counsel’s boycott list and what it means; how Trump is what the founders were fighting against; and how new US rules subvert the idea of human rights.
This is about motivated thinking, whataboutism, and insensitivity to scale (i.e. black-and-white-ism). About seeing the speck in your brother’s eye…
NY Times, opinion by Frank Bruni, 24 Nov 2025: The Outrageous False Equivalences That Prop Up President Trump (gift link)
While President Trump certainly has supporters who adore him and feel no need to justify that, he survives — and too often prospers — with the crucial help of voters who basically regard him as the lesser of evils.
They tell themselves something like this: Trump has shortcomings, but those are merely mirrors of the corruption and craziness on the other side. Almost any accusation leveled at him is lodged as easily — and often more righteously — against his opponents. In a government of bad apples, he’s no mealier than the rest.
But those claims insist on a symmetry that doesn’t exist. They’re equivalences not merely false but fantastical. They ignore the severity, the prevalence, the consequences of the misconduct in question. Imagine defending a suitor who’s a serial arsonist because the other guy has a jaywalking citation; both bachelors are lawbreakers, after all. That’s the perverse moral arithmetic of more than a few Trump apologists.
Bruni focuses on two in particular.
Trump is merely using his Justice Department as President Joe Biden used his and persecuting opponents in the fashion that Biden did.
That isn’t some random, cherry-picked absurdity. That’s practically every hour of Fox News. Trump’s supposed mimicry of Biden when it comes to politically motivated investigations and prosecutions is more than an article of faith on the right. It’s the dogma that washes Trump’s authoritarianism clean.
And it’s bunk.
He goes on to explain why. The other:
Trump’s grifting merely echoes the graft of his predecessor, who was not only a senator, vice president and then president but also the don of the “Biden crime family,” in the cracked MAGA parlance.
Yes, there are some shady episodes in Biden’s career, but nothing like the “relentless, boundless and unabashed monetization and merchandising” of Trump’s political station. It’s in the news every day; he doesn’t even try to hide it.
Bruni’s last line:
But cynicism and tribal loyalty have a way of replacing discernment with delusion.
Which supports my current top-level thesis, as stated yesterday.
(That citation from Matthew (so variously translated!) is an example of how wise people throughout history have noticed the things that we now clinically call psychological biases. These kinds of observations are what make great literature great, and how I think you can take any great work of literature, from Shakespeare to Austen, and take it apart in terms of modern psychology.)
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Briefly noted: from the upside-down world of conservatives.
- Media Matters, 26 Nov 2025: Newsmax host says Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) “does have a great record, but so did Benedict Arnold” (Via) — — All Sen. Kelly did was quote the law.
- NY Times, 25 Nov 2025: Shorter Days, Signs of Fatigue: Trump Faces Realities of Aging in Office, subtitled “President Trump has always used his stamina and energy as a political strength. But that image is getting harder for him to sustain.”
- This outraged Trump of course: JMG, 26 Nov 2025: Trump Screams Over NYT Report About His Aging.
- JMG, 26 Nov 2025: Republicans Want To Get Rid Of Auto Safety Features, via a press release by Ted Cruz. — — Of course they do! Safety features cost auto manufacturers money, and the number one priority of Republicans is to make wealthy industrialists wealthier.
- Right Wing Watch, 24 Nov 2025: Trump: Send Me Money So I Can Earn My Way Into Heaven — — This is just lunacy, in so many ways; a sign of Trump’s tiny mind.
- JMG, 22 Nov 2025: Liberty Counsel Issues Annual Xmas Retail Boycott List: Barnes & Noble, Dick’s, Gap, Walgreens, TJ Maxx, More — — They do this every year. More evidence that Christians, in our inescapably multicultural society, present themselves as being unable to get along with people unlike themselves.
- LA Times, LZ Granderson, 22 Nov 2025: Men like Trump represent what the founders were fighting against — — Trump and MAGA don’t know history; they are reverting to primal human nature, which is what the Enlightenment and the American founders were trying to overcome.h
- And this takes today’s cake. Apparently a gift link; copied from a Facebook post.
- BBC, Tom Bateman, 6 days ago: New US rules say countries with diversity policies are infringing human rights
- Turning the ideas of human rights upside-down, the Trump administration is now considering policies that enforce race or gender diversity, DEI, and legality of abortions, to be human rights violations.
