Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

An Inside Analysis

Those of us who loathe Donald Trump use a variety of words to explain that reaction. We note that he is ignorant, intellectually deficient and incompetent, that his maturation and vocabulary appear to have stopped developing around third grade, that he is mentally-ill, mean-spirited, selfish, vindictive and criminal…I could go on, but the bottom line is that he exhibits not a single redeeming human attribute.

But it has taken someone who actually worked with and for him to append the word that sums him up: evil.

As Lincoln Square has recently reported,

Ty Cobb, the former White House lawyer who once represented President Donald J. Trump, issued a public warning this week, saying the president’s conduct and his approach to the judiciary pose what Cobb described as a serious risk to the country’s constitutional structure.

“The Constitution really is not adequate to deal with a president as evil as Trump,” Cobb said in an interview broadcast on MSNow, adding that the president’s recent actions reflected “a desire to accumulate and abuse power.”

In the interview, Cobb expanded on his observations, noting that his concerns have sharpened as the administration has experienced setbacks in the courts. (An appeals court threw out Trump’s attempt to revive a defamation lawsuit against CNN; another federal judge found his deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., illegal; and yet another called the president’s cuts of millions of dollars of local government funding “probably illegal.”) Cox noted that–as we all now know– Trump reacts intensely to setbacks and perceived personal slights.

“Any insult tweaks his narcissism in a way that brings out a fight or flight instinct,” Cobb said, “and with Trump, the flight instinct really doesn’t kick in. It’s really just fight, and it’s fight by any means possible — legal or otherwise.” He said he viewed actions such as “sending in the National Guard” and “zip tying mothers and separating [them] from their children” as examples of this pattern.

Congress came in for its (richly deserved) criticism. Cobb decried that body’s lack of response to the administration’s lawlessness, and the reality that members have “neutered themselves through their cowardice and greed.” And he pointed out that the ability of the courts to constrain the administration is limited to constitutional violations. Only Congress has the constitutional authority to override policies, censure and impeach.

Trump’s contempt for both the Constitution and bodies of law is demonstrable. He continues to pardon people whose criminality (and lack of remorse for that criminality) is manifest. He’s committing blatant war crimes in Venezuela and Colombia.

Cobb concluded that “It’d be nice to have a Nuremberg trial of all these people,” although he admitted such a trial is unlikely. In his opinion, the judiciary is America’s only institutional safeguard– and if he acknowledged the corruption of the current Supreme Court, the article doesn’t mention it. The lower courts, at least, have been holding the constitutional line, and not every setback can be appealed.

So here we are. Recent polling shows that large majorities of Americans strongly oppose Trump and his administration, and it seems very likely that it will be up to We the People to exact whatever retribution or accountability is feasible. Most of us have come to realize that the only viable cure for Trumpism is political, As genuine public servants like Jamin Raskin have reminded us, We the People need to build and maintain a new coalition dedicated to serving the common good through the institutions of a democratic republic.

That–as we all understand–is easier said than done.

We need to be clear about how we got here. The apathy that kept some 80 million voters from the polls merged with the racial animus of MAGA Republicans to elect–albeit by a very slim margin– the vicious, dangerous man who is wreaking havoc with America’s legitimacy both at home and abroad. If survey research is to be believed, a significant portion of both those groups is experiencing remorse.

We have just under a year until the midterm elections, and the GOP is trying desperately to rig that election. Given public opinion, I don’t think those efforts will succeed, and I anticipate a large “Blue wave” in 2026. Between now and then, the resistance must increase the pressure in every way we can–through protests, boycotts, and lawsuits.

When we finally neuter this criminal administration, the first order of business will be to repair the structural flaws in our government that facilitated what historians will mark as a tragic episode in America’s history.

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About That Misuse Of Language…

In yesterday’s post, I focused on the Right’s habit of using words to mean their opposites, exemplified by MAGA’s insistence that working for social amity and equal treatment for all Americans was really playing “identity politics.” In reality, MAGA’s core belief–that the country should privilege White Christian men–is the essence of “identity politics.”

MAGA’s tactic of using language to undermine the actual meaning of the words being used isn’t limited to that one example. As an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently pointed out, in last year’s legislative session, Indiana Republicans provided another, even more egregious example. Under the pretext of protecting “intellectual diversity,” Indiana’s Act 202 is  aimed at limiting the plurality of viewpoints on campus. The Act is a frontal attack on academic freedom, masquerading as the opposite.

The essay began by noting the removal of a social work professor from her classroom for the unpardonable sin of making one graduate student “uncomfortable.” His discomfort was triggered by the instructor’s use of a chart distinguishing between overt and covert racism. The chart included “Make America Great Again” as one of several slogans that can be used as covert white supremacy, and it was used in a class on “Diversity, Human Rights and Social Justice.”

As the essay pointed out, IU’s suspension of the instructor (after the student complained to Indiana’s ultra-MAGA Senator Jim Banks) actually violated the clear terms of the act, both procedurally and under terms which prohibit institutions from limiting the freedom of faculty members “teaching, researching, or writing publications about diversity, equity, and inclusion or other topics.” (This language was intended to protect critics of DEI, but it clearly applies here.)

As the essay’s author points out, attacks on universities on pretexts of protecting intellectual diversity have a long history.

The right has taken the language of the left, mockingly imitating the words and then turning them into tools of repression.

In 2003, David Horowitz urged conservatives to “use the language that the left has deployed” and declare that there is “a lack of ‘intellectual diversity’ on college faculties.” Horowitz tried to invoke “academic freedom” to justify suppressing it, creating the Academic Bill of Rights and his “Students for Academic Freedom,” claiming that protecting the rights of students meant banning professors from expressing political views.

Act 202 undermines both intellectual diversity and due process by permitting university trustees to fire professors deemed “likely to subject students to political or ideological views and opinions that are unrelated to the faculty member’s academic discipline or assigned course of instruction.” Note that no evidence of actual misconduct is needed, simply a belief–founded or not– that a professor might be “likely” to say something forbidden.

Act 202 also prohibits professors from saying anything unrelated to their classes. Anything. That’s in clear contrast to AAUP’s appropriate standard, which is for “teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject.”

It’s not the presence of any ideas unrelated to a class that violates academic norms, but only persistently intruding material. And this rule must be applied in a viewpoint neutral manner. Colleges cannot punish unrelated speech about politics more than they punish unrelated speech about football or the weather or any other topic. By targeting political viewpoints alone for penalties, SB 202 clearly violates the First Amendment.

Act 202 also weakens tenure protections–protections that were specifically created to protect intellectual diversity. Act 202 requires–okay, threatens– a “post-tenure review” by trustees–officials with no demonstrated competence to judge academic work. A professor’s work should be judged by academic peers rather than unqualified political appointees.

I can attest to the chilling effect of these provisions and IU’s over-eager implementation of them. During numerous conversations, former colleagues have shared dismay and discomfort, given that–under the Act’s language– it is impossible to know what ideas might be deemed “unrelated” to a professor’s academic field by a trustee who knows nothing about that field. (And in Indiana, where our MAGA Governor has personally chosen all of the trustees, that ignorance is pretty much a given.)

The tactical brilliance of laws like Act 202 is obvious. People resisting a law that is dishonestly framed as protective of intellectual diversity invites critics to charge that they are denouncing the concept rather than trying to protect it.

Indiana’s legislature may be accomplishing the true purpose of Act 202. The state is losing some of its best academic minds, who are decamping to institutions willing to protect genuine intellectual diversity, and under its current administration, a formerly proud and storied academic institution is poised to descend to the self-satisfied mediocrity of that legislature.

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The Real Identity Politics

One of the many things that exasperate me about what currently passes for political dialogue is the substitution of labels for efforts to communicate. (And yes, I find myself engaging in that practice from time to time–it’s easier to call the administration “fascist” than to carefully describe the behaviors that lead me to affix that label. Mea culpa.)

Although people on all sides of the political divide indulge in this dismissive exchange of epithets, there’s one particularly dishonest label that is increasingly employed by MAGA and the Right: Identity politics. The accusation is a companion to the “woke” label and the persistent attacks on DEI and similar efforts meant to erase the bigotries that have made life more difficult for women and minorities.

If there is one tactic that the MAGA movement has perfected, it is calling out its opponents for behaviors that are actually its own. A recent article from the New Republic pointed out that it is the Right, not the Left or Center Left, that is consistently engaged in “identity politics.”  The article was a conversation with Kimberle Crenshaw, a noted scholar of America’s various forms of bigotry and their interrelationship.

Crenshaw began by discussing the anti-Black animus that is the core of Trump’s agenda and appeal–an animus that has become too obvious for the rest of us to ignore–and the way in which anti-Black and anti-woman bias worked to defeat Kamala Harris.

I found one observation especially “on target,” because it gets to the root of the way labeling often deflects reality. Crenshaw points out that when the Right screams “identity politics” it defines identity politics in “terms of women, queer people, and Black folks.”

When Trump and MAGA world say things like, If you want to get anything done, you have to put white men in charge, they don’t call that identity politics. When they take all the books off the shelves that they think are about identity politics and leave Mein Kampf on the shelves at the Naval Academy, that’s identity politics that they don’t talk about. So the identity politics that is at the core of the anxiety that MAGA builds itself into is never named.

So it’s clear that there’s a particular kind of identity politics that they are willing to wrap themselves in. And that’s an old-school, long part of the American faction that wanted to think about the United States as a white, male, Christian country, which has now shown up in white Christian nationalism. That is the identity politics of the moment.

It is in pursuit of protecting the prerogatives of that identity–White Christian male identity–that MAGA and the Trump administration are attacking any and all efforts to promote equity in what is, despite their hysterical denials, a multiracial society.

That is their identity politics now. It’s called the assault on improper ideology. And if you want to see what it looks like in real time, look at their assault on DEI. The assault on DEI is basically if people of color, if women, if any people who don’t look like us, are in any way involved in something that is bad, we can say that they are the fault of it.

And what does that mean? If you happen to be the mayor of Baltimore when a ship collides into your bridge, because you’re Black and you are there, we can pin the responsibility on you. If there’s an air disaster over Washington, D.C., we can pin it on DEI. No proof, no nothing. All we have to do is claim it.

When I read this, my first thought was “of course! Why didn’t I see this before?” When I thought about that question–why I hadn’t recognized the real identity politics–I had to (grudgingly) give the Right credit for learning the lessons taught years ago by Frank Luntz and first employed by Newt Gingrich.

Luntz advocated using vocabulary that was carefully crafted to produce a desired political effect (an effect that didn’t include descriptive accuracy). He counseled GOP strategists to use the term death tax instead of estate tax, for example. Luntz has described his specialty as “finding words that will help his clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate.”

I don’t know whether Luntz was personally involved in the (mis)use of the term “identity politics,” but that tactic–accusing opponents of something you yourself are doing–certainly bears his hallmark.

And that hallmark is misdirection, not communication. 

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False Equivalence

Most of us learned early in our lives that pointing out the misdeeds of others wasn’t going to persuade our parents to forgive our own misbehaviors. Evidently, a lot of political actors either never learned that lesson or have forgotten it, because one of the favored arguments of today’s partisans are accusations of false equivalence.

As Frank Bruni recently noted in an essay for The New York Times, those claims tend to claim 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 notes the dishonesty of claims that Trump is no worse than Biden–claims that send me up the wall. Biden was an institutionalist; his longstanding public service had given him a respect for the norms of American governance, the independence of the Department of Justice and the authority of the co-equal branches of our government. And the fact that Biden surrounded himself with highly competent officials meant that when he suffered the ravages of age, the country wasn’t plunged into chaos; the clown car that is the Trump administration has no ability to temper the damage done daily by Trump’s ignorance and increasingly obvious dementia.

As Bruni points out, nothing that occurred during the Biden administration is even remotely analogous to Trump’s purge of Justice Department lawyers who have been unwilling to pursue his improper thirst for vengeance–his insistence that lawsuits be brought against those who crossed him despite the lack of evidence of any wrongdoing.

The Trump supporters who swallowed the Big Lie that the 2020 election was “rigged” argue that partisanship, rather than  wrongdoing, motivated the legal cases against him. As Bruni writes,

To accept that magical thinking, you must erase the photographs of classified documents keeping company with a commode at Mar-a-Lago. You must delete the recording of Trump telling Brad Raffensperger, the top election official in Georgia, to figure out some way to reverse Biden’s victory there in 2020. And you must persuade yourself that Trump’s emphatic proclamations that the 2020 election was being stolen, his haranguing of former Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results and his support of Big Lie conspiracy theorists were just politics as usual. That’s a sequence of moral calisthenics so arduous they burn more calories than an hour at CrossFit.

Bruni offers many other examples; he focuses especially on the “relentless, boundless and unabashed Trump’s monetization and merchandising of his political station.” It’s worth clicking through and reading the entire, sorry story.

The wrongheadedness of these efforts to draw false and phony equivalences is part of the larger effort to normalize behavior that is abhorrent, criminal and decided uncivil. The truth of the matter is that, in the history of this country, there has never been a President or an administration remotely like this one. (“Tricky Dick” Nixon was, indeed, a crook–but at least he had a sense of propriety that motivated him to pretend that he wasn’t.)

The offenses that Bruni focuses on, and the many–many–others that we read about daily, are unprecedented. Much of what this administration is doing is blatantly criminal. But allow me to indulge in my own version of a false equivalence by suggesting that Trump’s crass and boorish language and behavior–his utter lack of any civility–may be equally damaging to the body politic.

No former President has used the sort of demeaning language that Trump routinely employs; no former public servant would have survived an episode in which he called a reporter “piggy.” It isn’t simply the looney, misspelled and ungrammatical tweets–it’s the utter lack of propriety and respect, what we used to call (dismissively, to be sure) “political correctness” that is taking America into a gutter of animus and our public discourse to the level of a third-grade playground.

Granted, the loss of civility isn’t killing people– RFK, Jr., the DOGE cuts, and the Big Beautiful Bill are doing that. But the decline of civility isn’t a small matter; it’s an invitation to barbarism, to attitudes and behaviors inconsistent with a civilized society.

When we finally eject this abominable administration and begin the necessary legal and policy remedies, we also need to insist that our elected officials demonstrate the civility required by a democratic polity. (Good grammar would be a plus…)

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A Refreshing Reality Check

In the wake of the 2024 election, there was no escaping negative punditry. “Expert” political analysts declared the effective end of Democratic election victories, dubbed Trump’s slight incursions into minority voting blocs a “re-alignment,” and issued scathing criticisms of the Democratic Party.

Most of this was click-bait hogwash, and a “Never Trump” Republican recently cited data demonstrating just how far afield these “analyses” were. In a recent essay, Stuart Stevens has done just that. (After quoting some of those pontificating headlines, Stevens snarkily writes “This is how societies end up worshipping volcanoes. There’s a drought, the volcano belches, and it rains. Next thing you know, you’re sacrificing virgins to honor the Volcano God.”)

Donald Trump won the 2024 election by one of the smallest margins in modern history– a cumulative 230,000 votes, or 0.15% of the total. Furthermore, in polling right before the election, when Americans were asked whether they thought America was heading in the right direction” only 27% said yes. Stevens notes that no incumbent party has won a presidential race when the number choosing “right track” was below 45%.

2024 was a great year for a challenger to run against an incumbent president. It is entirely delusional to interpret Trump’s narrow victory as an endorsement of Trumpism. Any credible challenger would have done considerably better than Trump. Polls showed that Nikki Haley overperformed Trump by five to seven points.

The less-reported results of recent elections confirm Stevens’ thesis. In addition to Democrats winning statewide offices in Georgia, Republicans in Mississippi losing their legislative super-majority, Moms for Liberty losing every single one of their 31 contests– Republican margins dropped by 50% in Florida’s Congressional races, and Wisconsin saw a 12-point shift toward Democrats.

And when it comes to policy?

Turns out, Americans actually like the constellation of basic social net programs that ketamine-fueled weirdo Elon Musk is trying to slash. Nearly four in five Americans (79%) oppose any reductions to Social Security benefits. For all the hate MAGA piles on the Americans who depend on SNAP, Medicaid, and housing assistance, 41% say that the government should do more to help those in need; 27% say the government does too much.

How about those tax cuts? Guess what? Cut taxes for billionaires sucks as a political rallying cry. This isn’t some Bernie Sanders niche “eat the rich” issue. In 2020, only a quarter of voters thought the Trump tax cuts were positive. A recent Navigator survey found that by a 10-point margin, Americans believe that Trump’s tax plan will “hurt people like me.”

Not only is the Trump administration on the wrong side of major policy positions, the utter ineptitude of the clowns in the administration is enraging Americans daily. As Stevens writes,

Does anybody other than the MAGA faithful believe that gutting the Centers for Disease Control make their lives better? Or that a former heroin addict nutcase should be in charge of America’s public health?

Stevens calls the 2024 election the “Pickett’s Charge of MAGA. They were given the keys to the kingdom, controlling three branches of government. They squandered the opportunity with a train wreck of nutty policies implemented by a Star Wars bar of unlikeable freaks.”

Trump’s “policy” announcements, like making Canada the 51st state, or invading Greenland, certainly didn’t help. Neither did his far more serious efforts to weaken the West in favor of Putin, like pulling the US out of NATO and betraying Ukraine. Granted, MAGA folks aren’t typically interested in policy unless those policies are intended to marginalize those they consider “Other,” but the rest of us know stupidity (and graft) when we see it. As Stevens writes, the numbers don’t lie.

In 2020, Trump’s coalition was 85% white. Sure, he did better with the non-white vote in 2024. This time, only 84% of his vote was white. In a country that is 59% white. Republicans are celebrating that only 86% of African Americans voted against them and that only 63% of Asians and 54% of Hispanics voted Democratic. The base of Trump’s support is still non-college-educated whites. In 2000, that was 60% of the electorate. Now it’s 38% and is America’s fastest declining large demographic.

None of this should make us complacent. Americans appalled by the chaos and destruction, the overt criminality, the effort to turn America into a semi-fascist autocracy still have a ton of work to do. If nothing else, we need to motivate a significant faction of those who stayed home in November of 2024 to do their civic duty by pointing out how their lives have been worsened by the gang of incompetent grifters who–by a very slim margin–gained control of our government.

But the data should definitely encourage us. Happy Thanksgiving!!

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