Distracted from being able to write a blog post three times in the past week, a record perhaps. But gathering notes, compiling thoughts, as always.
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A point made many times. And this is a conservative NYT columnist.
NY Times, opinion by Ross Douthat, 30 May 2026: The Best News in America [gift link, the last for this month]
I’ll cut to the lede. He speaks of Baltimore.
In the last few years it’s become a case study in how remarkably and rapidly crime rates can fall. In 2008, the end of what I remember as Baltimore’s halcyon days, there were 234 murders in the city. By 2019, there were 348. In 2025, there were just 133.
The national trend is similar and striking. There are many ways in which America in 2026 is not experiencing the “golden age” that our president promised upon his re-accession to the White House. But with crime rates, there’s at least an argument that we’re headed there. Murder rates haven’t just fallen back from the heights they hit during the Covid-era urban crisis. They’ve fallen to a point where the crime analyst Jeff Asher can plausibly predict that this year might have the lowest homicide rate ever recorded in F.B.I. statistics.
Of course, I would hazard to guarantee that this has not come about from anything Trump has done. What then?
Relative to the 1960s or 1980s or almost any prior era, we ought to expect a lower murder rate today, for three big reasons: American society is older than ever and violent crimes are mostly committed by young people, American society is much more surveilled than in the past and young Americans today spend way more time inside and online.
These forces should make the murder spike we just lived through seem that much more unusual and terrible. But they also limit how much credit any mayor, prosecutor or bureaucracy can reasonably take for pushing the trend downward once again.
I’ve noted before two things. First, that no president, especially, has much influence on policies or their implementation, because there are two other branches of government (though Trump keeps trying to autocratically order things into place, and gets shot down by judges who note that he’s breaking the law). And secondly, that anything a president does likely has effects that take years to appear. So anything that happens today is probably due to something Biden did, and so on. Of course most people do not appreciate this.
My conversational orbit is filled with people convinced that our nation is trending inexorably toward internal ruin, that our social order is dystopian or unsalvageable. Meanwhile, outside America, from Europe to China, a vision of the United States as a violence-plagued Hobbesian nightmare often serves as anti-American comfort food.
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And this fits neatly with this next.
Salon, Andrew O’Hehir, today: Do Americans really know how much the world hates us?, subtitled “The global romance with America turned sour years ago. Now the world’s ready for a divorce”
In part about Americans who are trying to flee the country they’re embarrassed by.
If being an American of approximately liberal inclinations in the 21st century seems to require constant public apologies, some disgruntled Yanks actually are exploring their escape options. Applications for foreign citizenship have reportedly exploded over the past couple of years, for reasons I hardly need to explain. Nearly 20,000 Americans applied for Irish citizenship in 2025, while about 9,000 applied for British citizenship, a considerably more difficult and expensive process. Both were record highs.
Examples follow. Finally: it’s not just Trump; it’s about the decline, for whatever reason, of America. Ending with a family scene.
That precipitous collapse in global perception is, without question, an aspect of the Trump effect. But if we understand anything at all about the last traumatic decade or so, it should be that the rise of Trump — not once but twice — is itself a symptom of the catastrophic decline of America over the last five or six decades, both as a coherent, functional democracy and as an intermittently constructive force in the world. (Assuming, for the moment, that it ever was either of those things.) Whether that trajectory can be altered this late in the day, and whether Americans are ready to stop lying to themselves about how the rest of humanity sees our country, is hard to say.
I always spend the Fourth of July with my kids. When they were younger, we did fireworks, BBQ, a summer night alive with fireflies and bullfrogs, all that stuff. Not this year: We’re going to an Oscar Wilde play in Dublin, no doubt followed by a couple of pints in the pub. It’s just a momentary escape. We’re still a bunch of Yanks, despite the passports. I’m pretty sure we’ll be coming back, but not that night.
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Briefly noted.
- The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last, 29 May 2026: The Murder of ‘60 Minutes’
- Subtitled: Bari Weiss is turning the best TV news show ever into Trump’s personal fleshlight.
- JMG, today: Trump: My Physical Showed “Extreme Intelligence”
- He’s a moron. The tests he took only indicated he’s not demented. (Though I suspect he fibbed even those tests…) He’s never seen a real intelligence test in his life.
- Robert Reich, today: Beware of Trump’s 250th Rally on the Mall
- Subtitled: He’s given up on all the “talent” except for You Know Who
- Paul Krugman, today: Learning from a Mentally Ill President
- Subtitled: We need to deal with the powers and system that put him in power and keep him there
- Video and transcript.
- More examples of cave-man mentality from the right.
- JMG, yesterday: Paxton Ad Calls Talarico “Too Low-T For Texas”
- JMG, yesterday: Tuberville: Talarico Is An Example Of Feminine Dems
