- Tribal thinking: Jan 6 rioters: good, pardoned; prosecutors following law and order: bad, fired;
- Troops for Chicago, New York, Baltimore? It’s the revolt of the rubes;
- With a US map showing the concentrations of blue and red;
- How Gavin Newsom is spoofing Trump, and the right hasn’t yet quite gotten it. Insight from Tom Nichols.
At some point you have to stop giving these people the benefit of the doubt, because of their presumed high-minded holiness, since in this country at least we’re supposed to be deferential to religious faith; and call them out for what they are — cultists, driven by ignorance, tribal loyalty, and a quest for power. Certainly not law and order. Or principles.
NY Times, 24 Aug 2025: Reframing Jan. 6: After the Pardons, the Purge, subtitled “In its campaign of ‘uprooting the foot soldiers, the Trump Justice Department has fired or demoted more than two dozen Jan. 6 prosecutors, even as those they sent to prison walk free.”
(Print title on today’s front page: “Jan. 6 Rioters Walked. Prosecutors Were Shown the Door.”)
It tells the story of a prosecutor in Tampa who was summoned upstairs in late July to be fired.
Although the brief letter, signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, provided no justification, Mr. Gordon knew the likely reason: Jan. 6, 2021.
He was being fired for successfully prosecuting people who had stormed the United States Capitol that day — assaulting police officers, vandalizing a national landmark and disrupting that sacrosanct moment in a democracy, the transfer of presidential power.
He was being fired for doing his job.
The letter did more than inform Mr. Gordon, a 47-year-old father of two, that he was unemployed. It confirmed for him his view that the Justice Department he had been honored to work for was now helping to whitewash a traumatic event in American history, supporting President Trump’s reframing of its violence as patriotic — and those who had prosecuted rioters in the name of justice as villains, perhaps even traitors.
The article goes on with all sorts of rationalizations, for the rioters, and for firing the prosecutor. But it’s not that complicated. Rioters were on the side of the tribe in power, so they were released. Those who prosecuted them, were terminated. Law and order had nothing to do with it. Only a corrosive sort of conservative, tribal ‘morality.’ Us against them, where law and order only applies to ‘them.’
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And now Trump is turning the nation into a police state — at least in the big cities of blue states.
NY Times, 24 August 2025: Democrats Criticize Trump’s Push for National Guard in More Cities, subtitled “President Trump said he was considering sending troops to Chicago, New York and Baltimore. State and local leaders say they have crime under control.”
Democrats pushed back on Sunday against President Trump’s characterization of blue-state cities as crime-ridden and lawless, which the White House has used to justify calling up National Guard troops and sending federal law enforcement agents to Washington streets.
Mr. Trump said on Friday that he was considering using the same playbook in other major American cities, and that Chicago could be next. The administration has not indicated when the National Guard could be sent to Chicago, New York or any of the other cities the president has mentioned.
Rahm Emanuel, the former mayor of Chicago, said on CNN on Sunday that Mr. Trump’s threat was more a reflection of the president’s animus toward Chicago’s Democratic leadership and desire to crack down on immigration than a considered strategy to take on crime.
“When you look at what he did in D.C., he’s not going to actually deal with crime,” Mr. Emanuel said. “This is an attempt to deal with cities that are welcoming cities, known as sanctuary cities, and deal with immigration.”
There are any number of maps online like this one, that attempt to depict the red and blue population proportionately rather than by the area they occupy. Never mind redistricting, the structure of US voting gives the minority red population, spread out across many states with lots of land (and senators) but with relatively low population, an advantage over the blue population in a few dozen big cities.
The MAGA movement amounts to the revolt of rubes, determined to wipe out the influence of the blue population through a majority of representatives and senators.
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The right doesn’t quite realize that they’re being spoofed.
CNN, 24 Aug 2025: Newsom continues to troll Trump on social media
It’s a video. “Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has started imitating President Donald Trump’s posting style on social media. CNN’s Manu Raju explains how the strategy is impacting Newsom’s popularity.
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And, from Tom Nichols.
The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 22 Aug 2025: MAGA World Is So Close to Getting It, subtitled “Gavin Newsom’s parodies are riling people up—and they don’t quite seem to understand why.”
The Fox News commentator Dana Perino has finally had enough. “You have to stop it with the Twitter thing,” she told the chief executive. “I don’t know where his wife is,” she fumed. “If I were his wife, I would say, ‘You are making a fool of yourself! Stop it!’” She went on to note that he has a big job, and that he has to be “a little more serious.”
What a relief to see someone from Fox, the flagship MAGA network, getting completely fed up with juvenile social-media behavior from a national politician. Except the chief executive in this case was not Donald Trump, the president of the United States, but Gavin Newsom, the governor of California.
Once again, easily explained by basic principles: anything the fearless leader of your *own* tribe does is forgivable, even commendable. Where the same behavior on the other side is condemned. Reason and balance, law and order, principles and standards, are irrelevant.
Newsom has taken to trolling Trump on social media by imitating his bizarre rants, odd capitalizations, and affection for exclamation points. He has also posted several memes that are on-the-nose parodies of things Trump has fed to his followers for years. Politico recently summarized some of Newsom’s activities on social media:
There’s Newsom on Mount Rushmore. There’s Newsom getting prayed over by Tucker Carlson, Kid Rock and an angelic, winged Hulk Hogan. There’s Newsom posting in all caps, saying his mid-cycle redistricting proposal has led “MANY” people to call him “GAVIN CHRISTOPHER ‘COLUMBUS’ NEWSOM (BECAUSE OF THE MAPS!). THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”
This is why America has become an embarrassment before the world, while MAGA doesn’t care. Continuing:
Newsom got even closer to Trumpian perfection with a post yesterday that is almost impossible to tell apart from an actual outburst from the president:
WHAT IS WRONG WITH CRACKER BARREL?? KEEP YOUR BEAUTIFUL LOGO!!! THE NEW ONE LOOKS LIKE CHEAP VELVEETA “CHEESE” FROM WALMART, THE PLACE FOR “GROCERIES” (AN OLD FASHIONED TERM)!!!
Later in the piece: They know.
Newsom has made his point and should move on. But his lasting accomplishment has been to reveal that Trump’s supporters are not as impervious to reality as the president’s opponents might believe. I suspect—as I have since the day Trump announced his first run for president a decade ago—that the MAGA faithful are hypersensitive to criticisms of Trump because, in their hearts, many of them know. They know that many of Trump’s statements are offensive and alarmingly detached from reality. They know that Trump has a disordered personality. They know that the president is a daily embarrassment to his party and to his nation.
But once you’re bound to tribal loyalty, everything is forgiven. A couple posts ago I invoked cognitive dissonance. The piece concludes:
For years, these MAGA partisans have employed various tactics to prevent the imminent pain of cognitive dissonance. They resort to “what about” arguments aimed at other politicians; they claim that Trump actually knows what he’s doing or that they understand the message underneath all the broken thoughts, garbled words, and dead-end sentences. Now Newsom is forcing them to see what Trump looks like without the distorting force field created by Trump’s showmanship and his aggressive delivery of incoherent statements.
Come to think of it, maybe MAGA world isn’t close to getting it; maybe they do get it, and maybe that’s why, this time, they’re especially angry.
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What is the legacy of Alan Hovhaness? Next time.
