Politics

Books and podcasts that I’ve been cogitating about.

Trump lawyer and all-around whackadoodle Rudy Guiliani claims he’s the most ethical person ever. Of course, his association with one of the least ethical people ever suggests otherwise. Thus, it prompts me to articulate “Duncan’s Law.” Succinctly stated, if someone claims absolute superiority in some particular characteristic, his actual performance in that characteristic is actually somewhere between average and the least performant.

Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke exploring role as Fox News contributor - sounds about right. Yes, the guy who rode into D.C. on a horse. Please find the man a sad horse to ride home.

Yes. Yes, they’ve done a fine job for “you”. But what about the rest of us? Moreover, what about the “us” in perpetuity, those who will have to deal with the erosion of civic norms?

I’m an atheist, but I’m familiar enough with the Christian canon that this photograph of “President” Trump with “journalist” Sean Hannity reminded me of a verse from the Gospel of Matthew (Chapter 16, verse 26):

First lady says ‘I really don’t care’ jacket was meant to troll press (Source) - so says the woman who claims to be the most bullied person ever. (Source)

• Republicans reprising their classic role of sore winners.

This article by Christopher Browning published in The New York Review of Books puts the unprecedented polarization of American political life in an eery historical context. As he puts it, “Trump is no Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism” but certain parallels are inescapable. The article surfaces an old question that I’ve harboured for almost a decade - Is the chaotic concentration of all power the intentional end-game of the Republican party or did they simply provoke the worst darkest tendencies of voters, only later finding they couldn’t control what they started? Whatever the answer to that question, the piece is worth reading if only to observe how beautiful sentences are crafted. The essay is that well-written.

This piece in The Atlantic by Adam Serwer is a reminder that for Trump’s supporters, cruelty isn’t just a side-effect of Trumpism. It’s a feature. That the current U.S. president chose to mock the victim of a sexual assault by a Supreme Court nominee is hardly surprising. But what little hope I had for Trump supporters, particularly those at the Mississippi rally who joined Trump in his mockery, is gone.

Oh, those fiscally-responsible Republicans

Axios has an article on Trump’s love of debt. He’d borrow the first installment from Russia.

A recent piece in The Atlantic by Peter Beinart filled in a cognitive gap in understanding how a large minority of U.S. citizens continue to support an abjectly incompetent, almost certainly criminal, willfully ignorant, and generally hateful man as president. The article Why Trump supporters believe he is not corrupt makes the argument that when Trump defenders concern themselves with the idea of corruption they are not thinking of political corruption so much as corruption of the purity. This is consistent with Jonathan Haight’s research into the determinants of a person’s moral judgments as a function of political affiliation.^[This has been noted before by Thomas Edsall back in early 2016 writing for The New York Times.] Conservatives are likelier than liberals to concern themselves with tradition and purity. When Donald Trump uses the word disgusting which he has done scores of times on Twitter, he’s invoking the conservative fear of taint. The Special Prosecutor’s inquiry into possible collusion and other crimes committed during the 2016 elections, in Trump’s view, are not only unlawful, biased, or unfavourable in some other objective way. It is, to Trump, disgusting (“this Rigged and Disgusting Witch Hunt.”)