I decided to keep a record of my thoughts as events transpire, a diary. I have read several reactions by Germans to the rise of Nazism and I was struck by their difficulty to understand where the daily events they lived through could or would lead. In retrospect, we will know, analyze, and make sense. In retrospect everything will have been determined. We may conclude, as did Amos Alon (The Pity of It All) that what did transpire was not inevitable, that history may have taken a different course. But prospectively we can only fear or hope and we do not know which. I have dark premonitions but this is all I have. So my purpose is only to inform the future retrospect by providing a record of my gut reactions to the daily events, as they happen.
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
I have spent a good part of my life, 50 years, thinking about political regimes, categorizing them, studying their dynamics, and their effects. And I find myself at a loss. I am trying to find categories in which to place the current situation and historical precedents from which one could draw some enlightenment. I fail in both.
Trump was elected in fair elections, having actually won a majority of votes. Perhaps to the surprise of some of his supporters, he is implementing his campaign promises. He continues to be supported by a narrow majority in the polls, as are most of his announced measures. Hence, nothing he has done thus far disqualifies the current political regime in the United States as democracy. At the same time, tens of his measures, some only announced but several already implemented, violate the extant laws. Moreover, the government is pursuing some of them even if they have been temporarily stopped by the courts. I am not the only one who does not know what categories to apply to it: Paul Krugman thinks it is an "attempt at an autogolpe," Le Monde, in an editorial of today, sees it as "Imperial Presidency." The word "personalistic" has been used by political scientists to categorize autocracies, but not democracies.
The measures, announced or already adopted, add up to a revolutionary change of the relation between the state and society. The immediate aim of Trump's administration is to reduce the size of the government and to use loyalty as the exclusive criterion of public service: total control of the State apparatus, by the way, is the instrument of all revolutionary governments. The second aim is to drastically curtail the scope and the magnitude of government services to private institutions and individuals. These two offensives are to serve the goal of reducing taxation without increasing government deficit. I cannot find a historical precedent of a transformation of this scope resulting from elections. I thought of Thatcher, who succeeded in decimating unions, but even she did not reduce social expenditures. Milei, in Argentina, is another candidate and he may be closer.
Over the years, I developed a theory of the conditions under which democracies process whatever conflicts that arise in society in liberty and peace. Indeed, my name is associated with one sentence I wrote some 35 years ago, namely that "democracy is when parties lose elections." The conditions, I thought, required for elections to peacefully process conflicts are that elected governments do not make the electoral defeat too costly to temporary losers, so that they are "moderate," and that they do not foreclose the possibility of being removed in elections, so that losing is temporary. Elections fail to maintain peace when they generate revolutionary transformations and, as the absence of precedents indicates, they never do. Unless the government use physical force, that is.
There is also statistical research which shows that democracies survive in countries with high per capita income and countries accustomed to peaceful alternation in office through elections. When I apply this statistical model to the US, with its income and its past 23 partisan alternations in the office of the president, I find that the probability that democracy would die in the US is 1 in 1.8 million country-years, zero.
Hence, neither my analytical nor statistical results equip me to understand the events that unravel hour-by-hour. I just cannot think of either some theoretical framework or of historical precedents that could serve to form expectations about what is about to happen. Is democracy dying in the United States?
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
The core of the American self-perception about its political system is that it is a country obeying "the rule of law." Conceptually, it is a shaky construction. As Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca observed, "The law cannot rule. Ruling is an activity, and laws cannot act." "Rule of law" can only mean that everyone, government included, obeys it.
The relation between democracy and the rule of law is one between two populated institutions: governments and courts. It is a relation contingent on the expected electoral consequences. Governments may obey judges because they fear that otherwise they would lose elections, so that the law rules. But governments may believe that they would win elections when they disobey judges, when a majority does not want governments to listen to what judges tell them they can or cannot do. The rule of law is then violated but as long as government's actions are motivated by the fear of losing elections, the system is still democratic, "illiberal" but still democratic.
Now, all laws leave some margin for interpretation but in the United States there is no law that would regulate in a stable and predictable manner the scope of presidential powers. The Constitution is almost silent about them, restricting the president's role to taking "Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Yet over the two and half century, presidents used several instruments of ruling: executive orders, proclamations, memorandums, national security directives, and presidential signing statements. Their constitutional status is not defined, so that the only barriers to their use are court rulings or actions of Congress. Presidents are free to try whatever they think they could get away with and what they do get away with depends on political circumstances. This system is neither stable nor predictable. Its consequences can perhaps be analyzed using game-theoretic tools but cannot be deduced from any written norms. This is not a "rule of law" by any stretch of imagination.
As of today, the harbinger of things to come is the issue of the freeze of the NIH funding for the already awarded research grants. Given so many transgressions of laws by the government, it may not be the most important one. But this is the issue where the Trump's administration respect for the judicial rulings will be perhaps first revealed. The government not only announced limiting all indirect costs to 15%, an action which is patently illegal, but also froze the disbursement of all the already allocated research funds. This freeze was itself frozen by a temporary restraining order, the government withdrew its announcement, but it did not stop the freeze. The judge who issued the original restraining order found that the government is in violation of this order, the government appealed, and lost. Some universities are banking that the government would comply but some are already taking precautionary that assume it would not. Here is where "the rule of law" is as of this moment.
As vice-president Vance already observed, the courts have no instruments to enforce their rulings. This is why Montesquieu thought the judicial power is the least effective one. Ezra Klein had a long podcast about this possibility and several journalists already jumped in. But all the legal scholars arrive at is that if the government does not obey the courts we will face a "constitutional crisis." Indeed, we will. But then what? Moving against "elite" universities is popular and probably electorally costless, if not advantageous. So will they brazenly ignore the courts?
Changing the topic. The Democratic Party has been almost mute during the past few weeks. It acts as if nothing big were at stake. Moreover, except for Elisabeth Warren, their gut reaction was to come out in defense of the least popular government policy, namely, foreign aid. But they are in a difficult predicament. Republicans just won an election, they are implementing their electoral program, and thus far the public opinion has not turned against them. Resisting every new policy may appear anti-democratic: after all, the government is just doing what newly elected governments have the prerogative to do. When people in Turkey came out to the streets when the newly elected Erdogan government authorized the use of Islamic scarves in public institutions, the government easily suppressed the protests and was supported by the public opinion. Hence, Democrats need to tread carefully. They need to focus exclusively on the issues on which the public is most likely to be swayed. The role of Musk is a good one at this moment, which is perhaps why Trump sought to institutionalize it by an Executive Order yesterday. But to have a strategy, any organization must be able to discipline its members and the Democratic Party does not have this capacity.
Some street protests are popping up but, given the Nixon experience, I do not know how to think about their effects. My fear is that unless they are truly massive, they will only serve as a pretext of selective repression, confirming Trump's language of "enemies from within." Moreover, they may lead to the rise of decentralized violence that would be condoned by the FBI and the DOJ. Note that as of now, these organizations are just being purged and reorganized. But I cannot help but expect that the worst is still to come, namely, that they will energetically engage in repression of political opponents.
The best bet against Trump is that the fanatics will show themselves to be incompetent and will lose popular support as the economy and government services crash. Inflationary pressure is increasing, with new evidence as of today. The tariffs, whatever their scope will end up to be, will increase inflation. Reduction, and in some areas elimination, of public services will hurt some people who voted for Trump. I am yet to find an economist who thinks inflation will be curtailed and some think that the combination of Trump's policies plus deregulation of financial markers will lead to a major crisis. Interestingly, Bloomberg is in the forefront of government critics. So there are reasons to think that people would turn against Trump on purely economic grounds already two years from now.
Whether this is a good bet still depends, however, whether the people in power are willing to be defeated in a fair election. I do not think they are but the question is what can they do. Given the class composition of the electorates of the two parties, measures aimed at restricting voting rights do not seem to have a clear partisan bias. I may lack imagination but I cannot envisage legal measures taken before the mid-term election that would guarantee Republican victory. This is not necessarily an optimistic thought because it implies that the only way to avoid electoral defeat is to engage in violence.
Thursday, February 13, 2025
I cannot figure out what his happening with NIH disbursements, which I think is the litmus test of the government's strategy vis-a-vis the courts. According to a website, Popular Information, some high officials within the NIH recognized yesterday that the institution must obey the court rulings and announced that it would continue to disburse grants "according to the previously approved negotiated indirect cost rates." I see no echoes of this internal memo in the news today and I do not know what is in fact happening. But the statement of a White House spokesman, cited in today's NYT, is ominous: "Each executive order will hold up in court because every action of the Trump-Vance administration is completely lawful. Any legal challenge against it is nothing more than an attempt to undermine the will of the American people." It seems to indicate that Trump decided that he can get away with ignoring the courts. If this is true, the last institution that could peacefully regulate conflicts is muted.
Some thoughts about the anti-immigrant offensive. Before Trump took office, I thought as many others did, that his announcements were just a campaign strategy. Given the dependence of several sectors of the US economy on immigrant labor and given the costs and the logistics of massive deportations, I expected Trump to perform some highly visible stunts and stop at that. I now think that I may have been too optimistic. The administration is in fact changing legal provisions and building the infrastructure for a long-term, systematic campaign. So far, the numbers are not large but everything indicates that they are about to grow.
I am trying to stay away from emotional reactions but I cannot avoid this one. I know a family which immigrated from a Latin American country two decades ago and now has kids born in the US. [ I described all the nuances of their immigration status in the original draft but I was advised to remove the potentially identifying details.] They all live in terror. Every day as the father leaves for work, his children give him a big hug, fearing he would not return home. Kids in New York City schools are taught what to do if they return home and do not find their parents there. I am an immigrant, now for several decades a US citizen, but I went through some of the same, having been refused at two moments the right to remain in the country and, after I left, to return. I know in my gut what it feels like, even if my misadventures pale in comparison to the terror experienced by millions of people at this moment. It is just impossible to lead a comfortable everyday life in the world of ICE.
The big item on the agenda for the coming weeks is the budget. I have been reading what there is and talking to economist friends but nothing is clear as of now. The deficit for 2024 was around 6%. The task facing Republicans is to reduce taxes (the aim is by 10T over the next 10 years) without increasing the deficit. So for the next year they must find about 1 Trillion, about 3.3% of GDP, by reducing government spending or in additional revenue. Projected increases of the military and border control expenditures add another 0.3T or 1% of GDP. Given 6.9T in 2024 government expenditures. they must somehow save 19%, about a fifth. Tariffs, even if implemented, will bring next to nothing. Reducing government employment, the cost of which is about 6% of government budget, even by a half, would save 3% of expenditures. If the tariffs and government employment cuts generate 5% of current expenditures, 15% still remains to be cut.
This will not be an easy task. They may have trouble even in the House. The remnants of the Tea Party will resist any increase of the deficit and perhaps the debt ceiling. Expenditure cuts will hurt districts controlled by Republicans, so electoral considerations will come into play. And their margin is narrow, so they cannot tolerate defections.
Tax cuts favor the rich, program cuts hurt the poor. If they cut the federal work force by a half, that will add up to about 1.5 million people. Moreover, while in the past people who left government service after elections found jobs in think tanks, universities, and NGOs, their budgets will also suffer. So the ranks of unemployed educated people will swell. All of this augurs badly for the Republican electoral support, so the fundamental issue is what will happen in the election two years from now.
Friday, February 14, 2025
No update on NIH disbursements and the stance of the government vis--a-vis the courts in general.
Trump announced a new tariff policy, "reciprocal." It was sharply attacked by an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, "Reciprocal Tariffs Make No Sense." The subtitle explains why: "How is it in American national interest to let other countries decide what duties we pay." Bloomberg, FT, and WSJ all seem to be skeptical about Trump's economic policies but the stock market remains flat. I find it puzzling.
Returning to the budget. According to Politico today, "Johnson's most immediate problem comes from swing-district Republicans who believe that the steep spending cuts across Medicaid, food assistance and other safety-net programs for low-income Americans could cost them their seats. Moreover, the plan to raise the debt ceiling by 4T is deeply controversial among Republicans, some of whom never always voted against it.
Now let me plunge into something perhaps ill-conceived. I do not know anyone, anyone, who I know to be a Trump supporter. This obviously says something about me, perhaps about the country, and probably about both. The effect is that I never had a chance to engage in a conversation with a reasonable Trump supporter. So I can only imagine what he or she would say. Let me try to guess:
(1) The government is inefficient. This argument is twofold. The services it renders could be delivered at a lower cost. Some of the services are unnecessary and subject to abuse.
(2) The DEI policies are harmful. They promote to positions people who are unqualified to perform their jobs and they are costly.
(3) Some people are naturally more intelligent than others and they should be the ones who decide.
(4) Reduction of government spending will lead to higher economic growth.
Of these arguments, only the first two could lead to a conversation. Point (1) stands: Anything can always be done at a lower cost, and government services are not an exception. I am sure that privately delivered health care could be delivered at a lower cost: it is sufficient to look at international statistics. Internet connection costs about 50% more in New York City than in Paris and the speed in higher in Paris. I thus imagine that US private firms are highly inefficient and the reason is that many markets are oligopolistic, if not monopolistic at the local level. Now, government is a monopoly with regard to most services, so there are reasons to think that it could be made more efficient. In fact, government efficiency has been a concern for several administrations, Republican and Democratic. Moreover, several institutional decides were built into federal bureaucracy to monitor efficiency: government inspects, who Trump just fired, were among them. But my argument would be that to stream the government one should use clippers, not chainsaw ("motosierra," the favorite instrument of Javier Milei). Cutting without knowing what one is cutting does not seem to be an efficient operation.
As for what should be cut, ideological differences are too big to lead to a reasoned discussion. I believe that the "welfare functions" of the government are essential, Trumpyists believe that everyone should be left to their resources. This chasm cannot be breached: this is kind of conflicts that is processed by elections, in which I was on the losing side.
My views about DEI are much more mixed, so a conversation is perhaps possible. A large part of the US society, particularly the more educated and the very young, has embraced a project of expiating for all the sins and horrors committed by their forefathers. The horrors were there, as is systematic discrimination in everyday life. Recognizing them can be salutary for every society even when it is extremely polarizing, as it is in the US. This project is selective: violence against workers is not a part of this list of deadly sins, even though for every race riot, there was deadly repression of unions: between 100 and 300 Black people were killed in the race riot in Tulsa in 1921 but the same year between 50 and 100 striking miners were killed in Ludlow County, WV. But what always undermined my confidence in this project is that it is expiatory rather than remedial. And the expiatory measures are mainly symbolic: censorship of the language in which we refer to one another, of art generated by men who led unsavory lives, removal of offending monuments. This is not a project to restructure the society so that everyone, independently of their skin color, gender, or class could lead a decent life, with secure incomes and social services.
I think I understand the appeal of Trumpism to white males. The vision of society in which people of European origins are all oppressors just makes little sense. Tell this to a fifty year old white man who cannot find a job after the only factory closed in his town. Tell this to millions of white males who survive day to day at the minimal wage. Tell them that "they" are responsible for the past racial injustice. Who are the "they"? Their grandfathers who immigrated from some forsaken European village to pave the streets on which we now walk? Their grandfathers who were being killed for union organizing? Their offspring, who desperately try to escape the fate of their fathers? Are "they" responsible?
I was thus never taken by the vision of society that generated the DEI policies. But Trump's attack on them, the vituperative language, the rancor, reminds me of my life under communism. When I was living in Poland, the communist government censored the words "elite" (because it was used by Milovan Djilas to criticize communist parties) or "bureaucracy" (because it was used by Leon Trotsky about the Bolsheviks). Now US government agencies generated long lists of words that disqualify research grants. My favorite is "unbiased," on the list issued by the NSF, as in BLUE, "Best Linear Unbiased Estimator." Perhaps 100% of statistical papers are thus disqualified.
It is clear that Trump cadres feel that they must move immediately and indiscriminately. They are not open do any discussion. And they are willing to use the power they have without any scruples.Where this will lead remains to be seen. Thus far, the instrument of coercion has been money. Will they use political repression?
Saturday, February 15, 2025
Time bomb? For as long as I remember, going back to an essay by Edward Shils in the 1960s, high unemployment among young educated people was seen as a mine that could blow up any regime. The Trump administration just fired, indiscriminately across all agencies, federal employees who were hired within the last two years. Their number is estimated at 200,000. The administration also fired more selectively employees of the NIH and CDC. In addition, 75000 federal employees accepted to retire. Finally, while I find it difficult to find exact information, there are stories that FBI will fire all those who were in any way involved in January 6 investigation, about 6,000 people.
I have no idea what the reduction of the federal labor force will do to the operation of the government and to the delivery of its services. I am thinking only about the political consequences. The projections about the ultimate scope of the firings vary, all the way from 10 to 50 percent. Hence, somewhere between 300,000 and 1,450,000 educated, mostly young, people will lose jobs. They include not only FBI and Homeland Security agents but also veterans, some of whom were employed by the Veteran Administration and the US Forest Service. In the past, a few thousand people who left the government when a new president was elected found jobs in the think tanks, universities, or the NGOs. Now their numbers are of a different order and all the institutions in which they found exile in the past are under financial pressure. Obviously one question is what will happen to them. But the politically explosive question, I think, is "What will they do?"
Sunday, February 16, 2025
Following the news as they pop up with a blistering rhythm takes a psychological toll. I was going to take a pause today, read a novel and watch soccer, escape from the world. But it is not possible.
When I read a couple of years ago an article on the "ceasarist" ideology propagated by some people I did not know of, I dismissed it as a fringe. But today was shaken by Trump's echoing what was supposed to have been proclaimed by Napoleon: "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."
My immediate reaction is to think the nineteenth century Latin American dictatorships: "Whether sincere or deliberately deceptive, the documents of the period always employed expressions suggesting a crisis: liberator, restorer, regenerator, vindicator, deliverer, savior of the country, and so on. Somebody was constantly having to 'save' these countries...". ( from the historian Fred J. Rippy). But this is a long story, going back to Ancient Rome, where dictators were "saviours" whose prerogatives, however, were minutely regulated and restricted to restoring the Roman salus publica. The crucial between Rome and Latin America was that, although dictators almost always insisted that they are performing a task authorized by a constitution, their mission to save the country was unilaterally undertaken by force. Nevertheless, dictatorships were seen in Latin America as something exceptional and something to self-dissolve when the situation is restored to normal. They were "commissarial" in the language of Carl Schmitt.
"Ceasarism" is a concept that emerged in reaction to the regimes of the two Napoleons in France. The phenomenon of grabbing power by a coup and then elaborately institutionalizing the new regime was unprecedented and the contemporaries were at a loss where it belonged in the extant political categories. The first labels attached to these regimes bear witness that it was seen as new: "Bonapartism," "Napoleonism," "Imperialism" (from the "Emperor"). But then an analogy was found in Ceasar's attempt to establish a permanent new regime, so they became instances of "Ceasarism." In Schmitt's distinction, such dictatorships were "sovereign."
What survives from these conceptual debates is the idea that there are times when the only way to save the country is to delegate unrestricted power to someone who enjoys popular support and who would use it, relying on force if need be, not to restore the status quo, but to found a new system that would be impervious to the threats that caused the crisis to the begin with. Too much is at stake -- the very survival of this or that: the country, the nation, the traditional way of life, religion -- to be squeamish about legal niceties.
If this is truly the ideology of the people around Trump, there is nothing they will stop short of, particularly if conflicts spill to the streets.
On a lighter note, I cannot stop myself from quoting in full this Press Release:
Washington, DC -- Congresswoman Claudia Tenney (NY-24) today introduced the Trump's Birthday and Flag Day Holiday Establishment Act to officially designate June 14 as a federal holiday to commemorate President Donald J. Trump's Birthday and Flag Day.
Born on June 14, 1946, President Donald J. Trump's birthday coincided with Flag Day, which is observed annually and recognizes the anniversary of the adoption of the Stars and Stripes as the official US flag in 1777. This legislation would permanently codify a new federal holiday called "Trump's Birthday and Flag Day" on June 14 to honor this historic day.
"No modern president has been more pivotal for our country than Donald J. Trump. As both our 45th and 47th President, he is the most consequential President in modern American history, leading our country at a time of great international and domestic turmoil. From brokering the historic Abraham Accords to championing the largest tax relief package in American history, his impact on the nation is undeniable. Just as George Washington's Birthday is codified as a federal holiday, this bill will add Trump's Birthday to this list, recognizing him as the founder of America's Golden Age. Additionally, as our nation prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, we should create a new federal holiday honoring the American Flag and all that it represents. By designating Trump's Birthday and Flag Day as a federal holiday, we can ensure President Trump's contributions to American greatness and the importance of the American Flag are forever enshrined into law."
Monday, February 17, 2025
I have not been able to do any academic work last week but today I had a zoom meeting with collaborators on a game-theoretic model of democracy. At many moments in the past I was able to escape from unpleasant events into mathematics and it worked today again, but only for a couple of hours. But there is little new.
One comment that attracted my attention is by Pete Buttigieg, someone I very much respect. He said "If you wanted to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, you would empower the inspectors general," rather than fire them. This is obviously true but I was struck that this is not the scale of the Trump's or Musk's offensive. They are out to destroy the government, not tweak it by institutional reforms. Is this the scale at which the Democrats see the issues?
Several street demonstrations are currently taking place all over the country. I wonder whether Trump will react to them and, if yes, how?
Wednesday, February 19
The purge continues: Federal Housing Administration, several institutions under Health and Human Services, NSF, IRS, Federal Aviation Administration. I still cannot find out whether the NIH is disbursing funds for the already awarded grants, in compliance with a court order. There is only gossip.
I am puzzled why Trump and his acolytes, yesterday Senator Ted Cruz, refer to their target as "Neo-Marxist Class Warfare Propaganda." They obviously have no idea what "Marxist" or "Neo-Marxist" might conceivably mean. "Class warfare" would be Marxist. But "Neo-Marxist" is not about class but about race and gender. The ideological enemy which Trump, Putin, and the Polish PiS party share is "genderism."
Other than for reducing the role of the State, it is difficult to identify the ideological blueprint of Trump's revolution. Perhaps the most explicit statement of it is the first Executive Order, issued on January 20:
Section 1. Purpose and Policy. The previous administration has embedded deeply unpopular, inflationary, illegal, and radical practices within every agency and office of the Federal Government. The injection of "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI) into our institutions has corrupted them by replacing hard work, merit, and equality with a divisive and dangerous preferential hierarchy. Orders to open the borders have endangered the American people and dissolved Federal, State, and local resources that should be used to benefit the American people. Climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.
To commence the policies that will make our Nation united, fair, safe, and prosperous again, it is the policy of the United States to restore common sense to the Federal Government and unleash the potential of the American citizen.
To be "hegemonic," in Gramsci's sense, an ideology must claim that the interests of those who rule coincide with the interest of everyone. "Trickle down" is the mechanism which makes the interests of the rich compatible with those of everyone else in the neo-liberal ideology. But Trump ideologists are strangely silent even about trickling down. They identify their adversaries but seem unable to offer a forward looking blueprint of a prosperous society free of conflict. "Unleashing the potential of the American citizen" is a paltry vision of the collective future. "Again" is the key to MAGA: all it offers is a return to some mythical past. Identifying enemies is often a successful ideological operation but it is not enough to build a lasting popular support.
Even more puzzling is a question which pops incessantly in private discussion ever since 2016. What does Trump want? I am yet to hear or read a convincing answer. Perhaps this is a source of his strength. Ezra Klein observed in one of his podcasts that Trump lacks inhibitory mechanisms that qualify others as politicians. Some people complain that he lies but this seems to be epistemologically inaccurate: "lying" assumes that someone knows the truth but communicates falsehood. Trump just bursts out with whatever comes to his mind at a moment. He demonstrates his political strength by not censoring himself: "I can say that Zelinsky has only 4 percent support among the Ukrainians (while he enjoys the support of 57 percent) and who is going to contradict me?" His strength is perhaps due to being unpredictable, to uttering in public things that no politician concerned with electoral consequences would say. So a lot of people see him as telling "the truth," while other politicians professionally hide or lie. Perhaps he is purely reactive, spewing at random but listening to the noise of the crowds, and repeating the messages that evoke louder applause?
But it still remains undecipherable what he wants, what he is trying to accomplish. Is his objective to get personally rich? Is it to annihilate those he perceives as enemies? Is he just listening to the applause? Perhaps we should take him by his words, in which he declared himself "The King" (in yesterday's tweet about a traffic zone in New York City). In this interpretation, Trump's objective would be to establish a complete personal control over the government, at all levels. The willingness to obey is the only criterion required of the government personnel. Whatever he happens to want at any moment, is implemented by government agencies, without hindrance by the Congress or the courts. His power is absolute.
Obviously, this is just a guess. As someone with game-theoretic instincts, I desperately need to understand what Trump wants and this is the only conjecture that seems plausible to me.
I try not to seek analogies in Hitler but find them hard to avoid. (I rely here on historians but this is not an academic paper, so I just cite their names but do not provide exact references.) According to Hans Frank, head of the Nazi Lawyers Association, "Constitutional Law in the Third Reich is the legal formulation of the historic will of the Führer." Richard Evans comments that "Hitler's word, ..., was thus law, and could override all existing laws." When a German court found Pastor Niemöller not guilty, Hitler had him rearrested by the Gestapo, announcing that "this is the last time a German court is going to declare someone innocent whom I have declared guilty." According to Wikipedia, "As early as 1935, a Prussian administrative court had ruled that the Gestapo's actions were not subject to judicial review. The SS officer Werner Best, one-time head of legal affairs in the Gestapo, summed up this policy by saying, 'As long as the police carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally'." Still according to Evans, Hitler "insisted repeatedly that if state institutions proved ineffective in implementing the Party's policies, then 'the movement' would have to implement them instead'," declaring that "The battle against the inner enemy will never be frustrated by formal bureaucracy or its incompetence." So this is what absolute power looks like.
Yet even if a dictator disciplines the State, the government remains a complex organization, while multiple groups always compete for resources and for political influence. The will of the Leader is supreme but the Leader cannot list every detail. His subordinates have to often guess what the Leader wants and their guesses may differ, so at some times the Leader has to intervene. Exercising absolute power still consists of arbitrating conflicts. According to Martin Broszat, "Hitler practiced no direct and systematic leadership but from time to time jolted the government of the Party into action, supported one or the other initiative of Party or department heads and thwarted others, ignored them or left them carry on without a decision." According to Ian Kershaw, "Hitler was content, indeed wanted, to keep out of wrangles among his subordinates, had little interest in participating in the legislative process -- especially in areas of peripheral concern -- except where his own authority was directly invoked, and actively furthered rather than tried to hinder the government chaos on occasion ...." At the same time, he was extremely intolerant of any signs of disloyalty and intervened freely, capriciously, and unpredictably whenever he sensed a danger to his popularity or his image. The same was true of Mussolini, who would complain "If you could imagine the effort it cost me to search for a possible balance in which you could avoid collisions between antagonistic powers touching side by side, jealous, distrustful of each other: Government, Party , Monarchy, Vatican, Army, Militia, prefects, federal ministers, Confederations and very big monopoly interests, etc."
Trump's claim to legitimacy of all of his actions is that he won the election and continues to enjoy popular support. So was Mussolini's, who claimed in retrospect that "strictly speaking, I was not even a dictator, because my power to command coincided perfectly with the will to obey of the Italian people" (a note to a journalist, Ivanoe Fossani, in March 1945). The limits to power can be institutional or only electoral. In spite of his claim, Mussolini was not willing to face a competitive election. Trump seems willing to ignore institutional barriers. Is he willing to obey the verdict of the polls?
Thursday, February 20
To take stock of where I think we are, I need to organize my hopes and fears.
Hopes first. I was never a believer in the politique du pire, the idea that if things get sufficiently bad, something good will happen. But here goes another of my principles: I now hope that the economy tanks. The inflationary pressure is unabating. Tariffs -- who knows if, when, and on what? -- would add to it. So would tax cuts. The stock market remains an enigma but I am struck that Bloomberg, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal oppose Trump's economic plans.
Bad economic performance combines with the erosion of public services must reduce popular support for Trump. And then there is a ticking bomb to which I referred earlier: some hundreds thousands of government employees who will have lost their jobs.
Internal dissensions. If the economy takes a downturn, dissensions will flourish. The role of Musk may be the first object of contention. The Trump-Musk alliance cannot be stable, so a conflict between them, with Vance on the side of Musk, is likely to erupt. I am not sure who would win.
Note that I have no hopes about the Congress or the courts, so my hopes concentrate on the mid-term election. Here come my fears.
The Democratic Party is extremely unpopular and it is divided about which strategy to adopt. But suppose that a majority is willing to vote for Democratic candidates, just to oppose what is going on. A small shift is sufficient to change the control of the House and only a slightly larger one of the Senate. So I return to the questions that haunt me: Are the people around Trump willing to hold a clean election? If not, what can they do to assure themselves of victory no matter what?
We have not seen political repression yet but it may be "yet." Patel has not been confirmed as of today and the Department of Justice is still ridden with dissensions by brave public prosecutors who resist its political instrumentalization. But once Patel assumes office and cleans the FBI of anyone who might be disloyal and once the DOJ is purged to serve Trump's political objectives, these institutions will be ready to launch repression of political opponents, individual and institutional. Repression, however, may not be electorally sufficient. Congressional elections are local, so one must conjure what may happen at the local level. I do not know enough about US electoral politics, so these are just uninformed fears: gerrymandering, selective disqualifications of categories of potential voters, violence at the polls exercised by local militias, outright fraud in vote counting condoned by local authorities. Their combinations may just work. Note that the pardon of those convicted of violent acts of January 6 is a signal that the administration will not persecute political violence in its favor.
This is where I am today. Not reacting to the news, which are replete with disasters, but thinking about the future. I grew up under a dictatorship but could never imagine I would die under one. Today I entertain this possibility.
Friday, February 21
Writing these notes is becoming too depressing. Moreover, it is freezing and gray outside. But there are some harbingers of hope.
Opinion polls. According to the latest Gallup poll, Trump's overall approval margin (approve-disapprove) is at -6 points, on immigration -6, on foreign affairs -9, and on the economy -11. CNN reports that the difference between "gone too far" and either "about right" or "not far enough" is 5 points about "Using the power of the presidency and executive branch," while the difference in favor of "not enough" is 77 points about "Trying to reduce the price of everyday goods." According to 538, as of yesterday 48.2 of respondents had an unfavorable and 46.5 percent favorable opinion of Donald Trump. Another poll: 84 percent of respondents, including 79 percent of Republicans, say that the Trump administration should follow federal courts rulings.
I was going to continue about positive signs but then this left me speechless: A letter dated February 17, 2025 threatening Representative Robert Garcia for something he said in a CNN interview, signed by Edward Martin Jr., US Attorney for the District of Columbia, gave Mr. Garcia a week to respond to the charge of threatening "Mr. Musk -- an appointed representative of President Donald Trump."
So I am obsessively wondering about the same: Which is the harbinger? Falling support or increasing repression? Or perhaps both?
I am beginning to understand what is happening with the NIH grants. According to Nature, yesterday, they are still frozen. A separate article explains how the government can evade court orders without defying them openly:
"To gain approval, research-grant applications are considered in two steps, by two separate panels at the NIH. The first is a study section, which is a group of independent scientists who convene to score applications. The second is a meeting of the agency's advisory council, which is a separate group of external and internal scientists that acts as a final check on an application before a funding decision is made.
To run either of these grant-review sessions, the agency must post its meeting plans at least 15 days in advance on the Federal Register, which is the official daily publication of the US government. Trump's team has barred NIH officials from making these posts, according to e-mail correspondence that Nature has obtained. The NIH has posted zero notices on the Federal Register since Trump took office; during the same period in 2024, there were more than 150 notices posted by the agency."
Saturday, February 22
Every time I promise myself to lead a normal life, I fail. Today I was going to read a novel and watch some soccer. But the pace of news is overwhelming. I cannot keep up
I am just copying some headlines. The bombshell is the replacement of the Joint Chief of Staff. In all, six Pentagon officials were fired, including Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy; Gen. James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force; and the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force. Patel was confirmed. The Dow took a plunge of 700 points. Spouses of the military lost their jobs. Democrats expect the inflation to rise but Republicans do not. Trump to shut down all 8,000 EV charging ports at federal government buildings. Trump Plans to Use Military Sites Across the Country to Detain Undocumented Immigrants.
A conversation I had yesterday about the potential scenarios:
(1) Trump does whatever he wants. His popular support does not decline. Republicans win both Houses in 2026.
(2) Trump does whatever he wants. The economy tanks. Public opinion turns against the Republicans. Republicans win both Houses in 2026.
(3) Trump does whatever he wants. The economy tanks. Public opinion turns against the Republicans. Dissensions within the government flare up; Trump enters into an open conflict with Musk. Republicans lose at least one House in 2026.
The odds?
With a warning from Olen Steinhauer (The Cairo Affair): "he was primed to find connections where others wouldn't be looking, and his enthusiasm sometimes meant that he found connections where they didn't actually exist." Hitler yearned for lebensraum, wherever he could find it. Mussolini wanted to conquer Ethiopia. Trump is after Greenland, Panama, Gaza, and Ukrainian natural resources. Coincidence or pattern?
I am wondering what will happen in the stock market on Monday. If it continues falling, it will be a signal Trump understands. Is the stock market the place where the opposition first becomes visible?
Sunday, February 23
I had a long discussion over zoom with two friends. They both believe that institutional barriers, systems of separation of power whatever they are, cannot prevent an executive who seeks to monopolize power from succeeding. I was reminded of something the late Guilllermo O'Donnell said forty years ago in a seminar we taught together: "One cannot stop a coup by an article in the constitution." But if this is true, why are "executive takeovers," autogolpes in Spanish, so rare? Why do chief executives restrain themselves in their quest for power? Why do they respect institutional norms?
This is a theme about which I thought many years and wrote several articles, ranging from game-theoretic models to exegeses of texts by prominent theorists of democracy. Indeed, during recent years it has become somewhat of an obsession for me. My gut intuition is to invoke "need for cooperation." This need is twofold: all rulers need compliance on the part of people whose actions implement government policies and the cooperation on the part of people whose actions determine the success or failure of government policies.
All rulers must delegate, so they must choose their agents. In this choice they confront a trade-off between loyalty and competence. Loyal agents are not necessarily the most competent ones. In China, where this choice has been the subject of an extensive literature, it was summarized as "Red versus expert." "Reds" blindly execute orders. Example: the Secretary of Agriculture just cancelled a conference on biodiversity because "diversity" is DEI related. But sometimes they need to make decisions, which they are incompetent to make. Relying on loyalty alone generates bad performance.
Even "predatory rulers," those who seek to maximize rents from holding office, may be better off with a smaller share of a larger pie than a larger share of a smaller one. Hence, they need to induce cooperation of all those who contribute to make the pie larger: bankers and firefighters, scientists and bricklayers. And to induce it, they must restrain their predatory instincts. They have to moderate themselves.
These are the barebones of why, I think, most rulers, democratic and autocratic, stop short of a quest for absolute power. As all theories, my explanation may or may not be true. But the question that it poses is "Why now?" Whatever one thinks of the US institutional system, it has survived 250 years. So has something broke down now? No more "need for cooperation"? Or have these people just gone crazy?
I have no answers to these questions but it may have something to do with the dominance of the tech bros. I am told that they believe that medical research is not necessary because drugs can be invented by using AI, on the basis of what we already know. This would certainly explain the dismantling on the NIH. Perhaps the technocrats believe that the cooperation of the bankers and firefighters, scientists and bricklayers is no longer necessary. They are self-sufficient.
Enough theorizing. I am promising myself to stick to the news.
Monday, February 24
The chaos is becoming overwhelming. Musk issued a dictat requiring all government employees to list in five bullet points what they did last week, with a deadline tonight under the threat of being fired. The DoD, HHS, State Department, Veterans' Administration, and the FBI instructed their employees not to respond. The DOJ joined somewhat later. Looks like the beginning of a power clash.
The victory speech of the prospective German prime minister, Friedrich Merz, stopped everyone's breath: "I am communicating closely with a lot of prime ministers and heads of EU states and for me it is an absolute priority to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible, so that we can achieve independence from the United States ...." Coming from a France it would have been a yawn, but from Germany it is an epochal shift. There go eighty years of the Atlantic alliance. On the same theme, the US voted against the UN resolution demanding Russia to withdraw from Ukraine. The vote for 93 for, 18 against, 65 abstain. On a lighter note: Cuba abstained, so now Trump can increase the sanctions because it is not sufficiently pro-Russian.
A lesson from Poland. Once everything becomes politicized, restoring democratic institutions becomes difficult. When Law and Justice (PiS) was in power in Poland, it stuffed all institutions, including the courts and the media, with its supporters. When it lost the election, everyone was partisan, so finding non-partisan competent people was difficult, and the new government again could only fill all institutions with its supporters. When loyalty becomes the only criterion, even competent people become partisan.
I am beginning to think that Trump forgot that he has to govern. He seems to be playing golf, delivering long speeches about himself, and spewing inane messages on his website. His mind races in disparate directions. It must be difficult for his acolytes to guess what he truly wants. So far, the governing is all done my Musk. But the time is arriving soon to adopt a budget, raise the debt ceiling, and avoid government shutdown. These issues require some coherent approach. Is he capable of it?
Stock market: S&P down 0.5%, Nasdaq down 1.2%, Dow up 0.08%. Looks jittery.
Tuesday, February 25
From Politico: "A group of prominent military contractors, including former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, has pitched the Trump White House on a proposal to carry out mass deportations through a network of "processing camps" on military bases, a private fleet of 100 planes, and a "small army" of private citizens empowered to make arrests." Armies of private citizens scare me the most.
Yet another interpretation of Trump is that he is ruling the country as if it were a private domain. The term "partrimonialism" is due to Max Weber and its application to Trump to a book by Hanson and Kopstein. Removing everyone in position to monitor corruption is certainly evidence in favor of this view.
Stock market: S&P down 0.47%, Nasdaq down 1.35%, Dow up 0.37%. I follow stock indices because I still have the intuitions that the first effective opposition may come from stock markets.
Wednesday, February 26
The House passed a budget resolution. The vote was 217-215, with one Republican voting against. The budget calls for 4.5T in tax cuts and 2T in expenditures cuts over 10 years. So now the big issue is the debt ceiling. It may be more difficult to pass and we may have a government shutdown. Coming in two weeks.
The person who is in charge of the DOGE, the Acting Administrator, is Amy Gleason, described as having a background in consulting and the medical field. This is all I could learn about her. About a third of DOGE personnel resigned in opposition to the cuts of federal personnel.
I am finding it difficult to understand the deal about Ukrainian rare earths, the details of which I could find thus far only in the Polish sources. I suppose that the Ukrainian idea is that if the US has an economic stake in Ukraine, it will defend its property against Russia. But all this is still too vague to figure out.
From Bloomberg: "America is in the midst of a record-breaking bird flu outbreak that's affected dozens of cattle herds along with poultry flocks nationwide. While human cases have been rare, the virus has caused deaths in the past, and experts are concerned it could become more transmissible and dangerous. Some recent developments do not bode well. But on Wednesday, it was revealed that the Trump administration has decided to reevaluate a $590 million contract for bird flu shots the Biden administration awarded to Moderna, known for its highly successful Covid-19 shot."
From Bloomberg: "Measles Is Killing Americans Again."
Thursday, February 27
Today I feel exceptionally scared.
An addition to yesterday's news: the FDA meeting scheduled to determine the 2025-26 influenza vaccine composition was cancelled.
Between the bird flu, measles, and influenza, the specter of a health disaster becomes tangible. Indeed, some biologists and epidemiologists I follow on social media are in a panic. The government is dismantling all institutions the role of which has been to prevent or control epidemics. Scary.
Last week I cited a plan to have a "'small army' of private citizens empowered to make arrests" (of immigrants). An article in today's Guardian reports that some Republicans are afraid to come out publicly against Trump because they fear violence against themselves or their children. Jackets bearing the ICE sign are a best-selling item on the Amazon.
I may be just paranoid, having read too much history and having lived through some dark moments, but what scares me most is the specter of decentralized violence. Threats of violence against Congressional representatives opposing Trump's budget proposals, people buying ICE jackets, organized para-military militias are at this moment only vague indications. But history bodes badly. Decentralized private violence was used by Fascists in Italy and Nazis in Germany to squash all opposition, before repression became institutionalized. The fasci di combattimento and the S.A. (Sturmabteilung, literally "Storm Division" or "Storm Troopers") played an important role in electoral victories of the Fascists and the Nazis. What will happen in the elections two and four years from now? Will violence decide their outcomes if public opinion turns against Trump?
Between the specter of an epidemic and of violence, this is not a good day.
Friday, February 28
I was going to stay away from theorizing, but cannot resist. Four years ago I published an article which began with "The puzzle entailed in erosion of democracy by backsliding --- a process in which the incumbent government takes every opportunity to reduce citizens' ability to remove it by democratic means --- is how a catastrophic situation can be gradually brought about by steps against which people who would be adversely affected do not react in time." The analogy is with a frog which is placed in water the temperature of which increases gradually, until the frog is boiled and can no longer jump out. There were actual experiments with it but the frogs did jump out before it was too late. Why wouldn't we?
The structure of this situation is one in which it is too early now but too late when we would think the time has come. It may be too early because resisting the newly elected government may appear anti-democratic. I recall something said by John McGurk, the chairman of the Labour Party, in 1919: "We are either constitutionalists or we are not constitutionalists. If we are constitutionalists, if we believe in the efficacy of the political weapon (and we do, or why do we have a Labour Party?) then it is both unwise and undemocratic because we fail to get a majority at the polls to turn around and demand that we should substitute industrial action." In essence, "If you participate in elections and lose, you do not go to the streets to protest the policies of the electoral winner." There are obvious counter-arguments: the election did not give the winner the mandate for the policies it adopts; the winner is violating norms, not only constitutional but also customary. Certainly, no election gives the winner the mandate to undermine democracy. But all this implies that the Democratic Party must tread carefully. Opposing some of the policies of the new government is normal in a democracy. But when to oppose it outside the institutional framework, on the streets and by other forms of civil disobedience, is a difficult strategic decision. It may too early now and at some time it may be too late.
Some Republicans also oppose some of Trump's policies. Their problem is that whoever sticks her or his head first may be targeted by punitive sanctions. Hence, everyone waits for someone else to move first and no one does. And by the time everyone would be willing to join, it is too late. This seems to be the calculus of the potential Republican opponents of Trump's budget proposals, but also of the universities trying to avoid becoming the targets of the administration, and of the media which settle frivolous suits against them which they would have won.
Saturday, March 1
I had to interrupt writing the Diary because I participated in a small meeting of political scientists. I learned some interesting facts: (1) College students are willing to tolerate restrictions on the freedom of speech if the speech harms Blacks, Jews, or Muslims. While protecting Blacks is most widespread, Jews and Muslims should enjoy equal protection according to students. (2) Before the election, Republican primary candidates at local levels, expected on the average to lose about 11 percent of the vote if they spoke against Trump. (3) Faced with a candidate of one's own party who violates some democratic norms, voters are more likely to abstain rather than switch parties. The effects, however, are quite small: partisanship matters much more than observing democratic procedures. (4) There is a quack going around the country spreading conspiracies about election fraud. His audiences consist of those already convinced but their mobilization makes the work of election officials next to impossible. So I feel I learned a lot. It was a fruitful meeting.
A propos the college student survey: DOJ is sending task forces to 10 universities to investigate antisemitism.
Sunday, March 2
The fiasco of the meeting between Zielinsky and Trump made it apparent to the Europeans that they must do something. A Polish journalist, Sŀawomir Sierakowski entitles his column "America is Gone. Europe Must Replace it." A Bulgarian journalist, Ivan Krastev, writes "Europe should hijack Trump's revolutionary plans for the world." But the conundrum is, in the words of the Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, that "Today, the matter is complicated because while standing on Ukraine's side in the interest of our national security, at the same time we, Poles, are staunch supporters of the closest possible alliance between Poland, Europe and the entire West with the United States." Trump's anti-Europe and anti-NATO rhetoric appears to leave Europeans no choice but whether Europe can stand militarily on its own is doubtful. Le Monde reports that President Macron wanted to convince Trump that abandoning Ukraine would be a "huge strategic mistake" for the US and that "it is in his interest to work with the Europeans at this time." "If you let Ukraine be taken by Putin, Russia will be unstoppable for the Europeans [because it] will take back Ukraine and its army, which is one of the largest in Europe, with all our equipment, including American equipment." He failed. So what now? The decision, to be made perhaps within the week, will be historic. It may reshape the world for decades to come.
According to Fortune, "The Atlanta Fed's GDP tracker now indicates that the economy is headed for a 1.5% contraction in the first quarter, after showing 2.3% growth just days earlier. That also marks a sharp reversal from the fourth quarter, when GDP expanded by 2.3%. Several economic indicators have been raising alarms as consumers and businesses brace for Trump tariffs and federal job cuts." The late economist, J.K. Galbraith once remarked, "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable." So they should be taken with a grain of salt. But this is the first rumbling about an economic downturn. Between predictions of persisting or even increasing inflation and now this forecasts about GDP downturn, the obvious question is why would they pursue policies that will make the economy tank. Are they not afraid of electoral effects?
In a similar vein, I just cannot understand why the government is dismantling the National Institute of Health. They want to cut government expenditures, by reducing federal employment and eliminating some programs. If they cut support for theoretical physics, one could just think that they have no faith in science and do not understand that basic science has potential downstream effects. But health? Are they not concerned about their vulnerability to cancer, about the health of their spouses, children, or parents? According to The Hill, NIH supported 354 out of 356 drugs approved from 2010 to 2019. Every dollar spent in publicly funded research yields $8.30 after 8 years. I calculated that if the financial geniuses who are cutting these expenditures returned 10 percent every year, and none of them do, the return in 8 years to a dollar invested today would have been $2.14. And yet, they are targeting the NIH. Perhaps I am wrong: they are not targeting anything but using the chain saw indiscriminately, with no view, not even an analysis, of the consequences. A joke from communist Poland seems perfect: A rabbit is running in a panic. Another rabbit asks why. The first one exclaims, "The Planning Commission is coming! The Planning Commission is coming! They cut every fifth leg." "But we have only four legs," the second rabbit observes. "Yes, but they cut first and count later."
The question whether the US will hold competitive elections erupted on Bluesky, with political scientists willing to place bets on either side.
Monday, March 3
According to the New York Times yesterday, IRS is being pressured to reveal the identity of about 700,000 tax payers who have a Tax Payer Identification Number but not a Social Security Number. These are immigrants who have been paying taxes, many with the hope that it would facilitate their legalization. Releasing their identity would contravene the current law.
Musk on X: "The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges."
English to be the official language of the United States. Perhaps inconsequential but the first time in 250 years.
Trump just announced that there is no room for negotiations left and the 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico will go in effect as of tomorrow. Being Trump, he may still change his mind. But the Dow went down 650 points, -1.48%, S&P -1.76%, Nasdaq -2.64%. All the headlines attribute the plunge to the announcement of tariffs.
The translator of Mein Kampf into French, Olivier Mannoni, on similarities between Hitler's and Trump's rhetoric (in Le Monde): "the use of incoherence as rhetoric, of extreme simplification as reasoning, of accumulations of lies as demonstration, of a reduced, distorted, manipulated vocabulary as language."
Tuesday, March 4
Suppose that Trump reduces the federal government to "functions related to public safety, immigration enforcement, or law enforcement," in the language of Executive Order of February 11 on "workforce optimization." Everything else is gone: no weather service, no vaccines, no health research, no income support for the indigent, no nuclear safety, no consumer protection, perhaps no public retirement insurance. Even neoliberals think that the government must enforce contracts. Even Chicago economists think it should regulate natural monopolies. Even Harvard economists think it should undertake investments complementary to private investment. And almost all economists think it should correct for market failures: externalities, public goods, and infrastructural investments. I cannot imagine what the country would look like, so I have been searching for novels that conjure this dystopia, but could not find one thus far.
Trump ordered a pause to all military aid to Ukraine. Europe just committed itself to spend 800 billion Euros on military expenditures. But is it to spend it on buying arms from the United States? Europe has no capacity to produce 800 billion worth of arms.
All my intuitions lead me to expect massive political repression. Still, I am surprised that it could be so naked. Here is Trump a few minutes ago at @realDonaldTrump: "All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested." When David Cameron, then the UK Prime Minister, repressed protests, he took care of declaring first that protests are legitimate under democracy and only then condemned them as "violent." Trump did not bother to say even that. I remember arriving at the Warsaw airport a few weeks after transition to democracy in 1989 and seeing a sign at the customs that specified some rules and then announced "All violators will be punished and prosecuted." I took it as an indication that the Poles did not yet understand that punishment can result only from prosecution. It is hard to see one's nightmare scenarios coming to life.
The only way I can escape from the bombardment of terrifying news is to watch soccer. Fortunately, there are Champions League games today, so I went to a bar to watch Arsenal. For the first time ever, my friends talked politics during the game. There is no escape any more.
Stock markets took another tumble today.
Wednesday, March 5
Trump's two-hour rally in the Congress was exceptionally aggressive, both internationally and domestically. The lines picked by the media focus on the Panama canal -- "We're taking it back" -- and Greenland -- "I think we're going to get it, one way or the other we're going to get it." But the line that struck me most was domestic: "The media and our friends in the Democrat party kept saying we needed new legislation, we must have legislation to secure the border. But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president." I interpret it as saying "Who cares about the Congress?"
Trump's performance is not going to affect public opinion one way or another. But I wonder about the price of eggs. Trump had one line about it: "Joe Biden especially let the price of eggs get out of control. The egg price is out of control, and we're working hard to get it back down." But how? I have been trying to understand the economic vision of the government. Trump did spell it out to some extent. Here are some excerpts from his speech: (1) "A major focus of our fight to defeat inflation is rapidly reducing the cost of energy." (2) "To further combat inflation, we will not only be reducing the cost of energy, but will be ending the flagrant waste of taxpayer dollars." (3) "I want to do what has not been done in 24 years: balance the federal budget. We are going to balance it. With that goal in mind, we have developed in great detail what we are calling the gold card, which goes on sale very, very soon. For $5 million, we will allow the most successful job-creating people from all over the world to buy a path to U.S. citizenship." (4) "And the next phase of our plan to deliver the greatest economy in history is for this Congress to pass tax cuts for everybody." (5) "If you don't make your product in America, however, under the Trump administration, you will pay a tariff and in some cases, a rather large one."
I am yet to read or talk to anyone who thinks that reducing energy prices will lower the price of eggs, who thinks that cutting government waste and selling US residence permits for $5 million dollars will cover the additional deficit generated by the tax cut, who thinks that tariffs would not increase inflation. The most one can find are people who want to just wish it away: here is Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase: "If it's a little inflationary but it's good for national security, so be it. I mean, get over it." So the question is whether Trump believes what he said. The numbers just do not add up: 4.5 trillion in tax cuts, 2 trillion is savings and additional revenue, leave an enormous gap that will have to be deficitary. Even eliminating Medicaid, Pell Grants, food stamps, foreign aid, and some smaller programs altogether will not cover the gap. Did he ever use a calculator?
I have to digress about calculators, because using them seems above the skills of the DOGE cutters. According to the NYT today, "Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has deleted hundreds more claims from its mistake-plagued 'wall of receipts,' erasing $4 billion in additional savings that the group said it had made for U.S. taxpayers." Billions and millions have the same number of zero's for them. They do not know the computer code for missing data and interpret it as fraud. They claim to have eliminated programs that expired long time ago. They double- or even triple-count the same items.
The effect of increasing deficit, combined with the tariffs, must be increased inflation. About this much, I believe, all economists will agree. One can still, however, envisage several scenarios. In one, the economy will be growing with inflation persisting or accelerating. In the second, the economy will take a dip, demand will fall and inflation will subside. In the final one, the economy will take a dip and inflation will persist: stagflation. I pushed some economist friends to make predictions but all I got was "Who knows?"
To finish, we need to get back to politics. It may be that the people around Trump truly believe that their policies will generate growth and reduce inflation, so they do not need to be concerned about electoral constraints. But it may be that they just do not care about elections.
WEEK 4
Thursday, March 6
I am asked by some friends why I am keeping this diary. My original motivation was to prevent the omniscient retrospect. In retrospect we will not only know what had occurred but we will also understand why it occurred. In retrospect, the United States in 2025 or 2026 will become just a data point to be included in historical analyses. and we will be able to calculate how likely it was that things would have turned out the way they did. But if we would be so wise ex-post, why are we so uncertain ex-ante? If we had a good theory, we would not have to wait for the conclusion until the current events become the past. But we are uncertain what the future will bring. At this moment, we are not even certain what the retrospect will be. It may be that Republicans will lose an election and peacefully recognize its result. It may be that they will decide to rule without holding competitive elections, by force. It is unlikely, but possible, that they would keep winning competitive elections indefinitely, so the retrospect will never come. Ex-ante we cannot tell which of these possibilities would materialize.
We do know something. Historical patterns show that a collapse of democracy is extremely unlikely in a country with the income and the history of democracy of the United States. So if democracy does collapse, one can just conclude that it was a highly unlikely random fluke. Alternatively, one can think that our statistical analyses do not consider all the possible combinations of the factors that shape the outcomes and the current combination of them was extremely unlikely, perhaps unique. But one can also consider the possibility that all the historical patterns we discovered depend on something we have never considered. Some people, however, think that the historical patterns will hold and democracy will not collapse in the United States.
There are also theoretical analyses which lead to the conclusion that democracies survive only if results of an election do not make a big difference for the winners and the losers. Given the revolutionary scale of Trump's policies, this conclusion leads to the pessimistic prediction that democracy will collapse.
On a different topic but important for the prospects. I could not envisage any federal law that would tilt elections in favor of Republicans. But it seems that I was wrong. These is a bill pending in the House, the SAVE Act (H.R. 22) that would require all Americans to provide a birth certificate, passport, or one of a few other citizenship documents every time they register or re-register to vote. According to survey data, more than 21 million American citizens don't have these documents readily available. I did not think this bill would skew the electoral chances in a partisan direction because I was thinking in terms of income and education, not in terms of gender. The bill would disproportionately affect voters who changed their name, which means predominantly married women. Survey data on voting by gender and marital status are not very reliable -- the proportions vary from survey to survey -- but they agree that married women are somewhat less likely to vote Republican than men, married or not. Hence, while the effect of disenfranchising married women who changed their name and cannot provide the required documentation may not be large, it may still matter.
Something a friend said over lunch struck me as profound: Western Europe was the first wealthy part of the world in history that was not militaristic. In the past, wealthy countries -- from Ancient Rome, through the UK, to the US -- relied on military strength. But the European Union was formed to avoid all future wars. This was perhaps possible because, through NATO, the European countries could rely on the military capacity of the United States for their protection. But no one imagined the possibility of yet another war on the European continent, so the culture that developed was oriented toward welfare not warfare. If this is true, then Europe is experiencing a "watershed," "defining moment," "breakthrough," "turning point," as various headlines have it. President Macron's speech last night and the Russian response to it, explicitly recognized the possibility of war, for the first time since Krushchev. A collapse of democracy in the United States is difficult to imagine but the prospect of German troops marching through Poland to fight against Russia is beyond imaginable.
On a humorous note. Asked on C-SPAN why the stock market tumbled this week, Trump responded "I think it's globalists that see how rich our country's gonna be and they don't like it."
Friday, March 7
Federal employees are fired and rehired. Federal building are put for sale and withdrawn from the market. Numbers about Musk's cuts are announced and corrected. Tariffs are solemnly proclaimed and postponed the next day.
First rumblings about dissensions. According to Politico yesterday, Trump told his Cabinet that they, not Musk, are in charge of their departments. Musk is empowered to make recommendations but not make decisions on staffing and policy.
Malleability of public opinion. I was shocked already in 2016 how Republicans turned on a dime from free traders to protectionists. Support for same-sex marriage fell from 55 to 24 percent among Republicans in the last four years. 48% of Republicans now agree that "women should return to their traditional role in society," up from 28% in 2022. The support for Ukraine among Republicans tumbled within a few recent days. Are the Republican supporters so manipulable? Don't they have any stable values?
A rally "Stand Up For Science" is planned for today in several US cities. Protests are a complicated issue. General protests against a government can be interpreted as anti-democratic and they are interpreted as such by governments. Governments are in office because they won an election and, as long as the current losers are not denied a chance to compete in the next one, they must accept that they lost. But in elections voters have only one instrument, the vote, to decide between entire packages of policies. It may well be that, faced with a dichotomous choice, a majority of voters supports a combination of policies offered by a party but a majority still opposes a particular policy. So it is only normal that people would want to signal their support or opposition to a particular policy, such as with regard to science.
The data on demonstrations we have show that countries persistently differ in their propensity to hit the streets. Demonstrations are rare in Norway and frequent in France, rare in Costa Rica and frequent in Argentina. In Paris demonstrations used to take place almost every Saturday, sometimes just with a handful of people but sometimes with millions marching from the Place de la Republique. Few demonstrations result in changes of government policy but some do. If one thinks in game-theoretic terms, one would expect that governments would change their policies in response to protests if they fear that otherwise they would suffer electoral costs. But governments can also successfully repress protests: Nixon, for example, was successful in appealing to "hard hats" with the argument that the protesting students are just spoiled brats and squashing their demonstrations by force with a majority support.
Support for science seems quite high in the United States. Among the 68 countries where people were asked whether they have confidence in scientists, the US came ninth (from an 2025 article in Nature; surveys conducted between November 2022 and August 2023). According to the most recent survey by Pew, 76% of Americans had "fair or great amount" of confidence in scientists. According to 2024 article published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science), "Confidence in science is high relative to nearly all other civic, cultural, and governmental institutions for which data are collected...." So this may be the issue where even a majority of Republicans disagree with Trump's policy: Pew reports that 66% of Republicans have confidence in scientists. Obviously, the electoral effect depends on how salient this issue is relatively to other issues. Prices of eggs may be more salient. But if any protests against Trump's policies can be successful, "standing up for science" is a good candidate.
About prices of eggs. As a French journalist Florence Aubenas astutely observed, having talked to people who participated in the Yellow Jackets protests, "they watch the prices at the pomp in the same way as rich people follow the stock market." I am always struck by the prominence of stock market indices in the US media. This is the only economic indicator that is omnipresent, the only indicator of the state of the economy which people get on a minute-to-minute basis. Even a three-minute news summary on the radio always contains an update on the stock market. Now, while over 60% of Americans own some stocks, top 1% own more than half of all stocks and bottom 50% own less than 1%. So prices at the pomp affect economic welfare of most Americans more than prices of stocks. Yet according to political science research even people in the bottom 20% of income recipients read the state of the economy by looking at incomes of the top 20% during the six month preceding an election.
Executive Order issued yesterday:
"By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:
Section 1. Purpose. The dishonest and dangerous activity of the law firm Perkins Coie LLP ("Perkins Coie") has affected this country for decades. Notably, in 2016 while representing failed Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS, which then manufactured a false "dossier" designed to steal an election. This egregious activity is part of a pattern. Perkins Coie has worked with activist donors including George Soros to judicially overturn popular, necessary, and democratically enacted election laws, including those requiring voter identification."
Saturday, March 8
The attack on Columbia -- immediate freeze of government grants -- is patently illegal. I wondered yesterday whether "the Constitution and the laws of the United States of the United States of America" give the President the authority to move against a law firm that acted against him in an electoral campaign. Interestingly, in some executive orders Trump cites the laws which he thinks enable him to take the particular action but in some he does not. I suppose it is because there are no laws he can cite.
There seem to be over 100 legal cases against the government, with several injunctions. (A great website, JustSecurity.org, traces them.) To my best knowledge the government has ignored most if not all of the court rulings. Lawyers are sounding alarms. More than 500 law school deans and professors, law firm partners, and former judges have signed a letter calling on all government officials --- including President Trump --- to obey judicial decisions. I thought that the crunch would come with regard to the NIH, but the government seems to have gotten around the court decisions. But the crunch will come with regard to something and we will have a "constitutional crisis," which is as far as lawyers' imagination goes.
To ward it off, the government is trying to make it more difficult to sue it. According to Reuters (March 6), "President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order aimed at imposing potentially steep costs on parties that seek to block his policies in court. The order said U.S. Justice Department lawyers must now ask judges to require plaintiffs to pay the government's costs and damages if it is forced to hold off on implementing a policy that is ultimately found to be lawful. The money would need to be posted up front as a bond, the order said."
There is a sense of intimidation in the air. People I know are removing all personal information from the web. NPR fears losing all federal funds. ABC closed its site tracking presidential approval, 538. Several media outlets are settling frivolous suits. According to Wall Street Journal, "Fear of Trump Has Elite Law Firms in Retreat." Columbia University decided not to contest an obviously illegal action of the government in the courts. Given that the government disregards laws and shows no apparent concern over future elections, this is perhaps the safest behavior.
Today is the International Women Day. Trump wants women to celebrate it from the kitchen.
Sunday, March 9
I think the situation is too dangerous for us to be diverted by moral outrage. Outrage is cathartic but rarely productive. I just read an opinion piece in The Guardian comparing Trump to a mafia boss. It made me feel good but it would have been useful only if it helped us to predict Trump's actions, and it does not. Outrage is a popular reaction: "How terrible is this or that action of Trump!" Yet while moral outrage can motivate us, it should not guide us because without an impassioned analysis it leads to actions that are counterproductive.
All this just says that I do not know what anyone can do. The Democratic Party cannot act because it is not a party but a bunch of individuals. Street protests, like the one yesterday defending science, may have an effect if they are directed against specific policies. At this moment, I believe, the breaks on Trump are most likely to arise from the stock market and from internal dissensions. But there is little I see that we, "we," can do. I began this Diary with Haffner's sense of the futility of resistance. I share it.
Peter Hayes, a Northwestern University historian, while rejecting some parallels with fascism, still finds that Trump "has made repeated statements against the 'enemies within' who must be eliminated from the body politic, and he displays, like Hitler, an absolute certainty about his own genius, coupled with a ruthless determination to eliminate any obstacle to the achievement of his aims. And, lately, he has combined extreme nationalism with an appetite for expansion that he had not shown before." "An absolute certainty about his own genius, coupled with a ruthless determination to eliminate any obstacle to the achievement of his aims" may be the key to understanding Trump.
There is a growing movement to boycott American products in Europe. In Sweden, where the Model Y was the most purchased car in 2024, sales of Teslas fell by 44% in January, compared to 2024. In Norway, they fell by 38% and by 70% in February. In France, 68% of survey respondents are disposed to boycott US firms and products, with a majority across the entire political spectrum.
Listening to the NPR, I was reminded that this is not the first time the functions and the size of the federal government are being reduced. According to the Wikipedia, in March 1993, President Bill Clinton stated that he planned to "reinvent government", declaring that "Our goal is to make the entire federal government less expensive and more efficient, and to change the culture of our national bureaucracy away from complacency and entitlement toward initiative and empowerment." Headed by Al Gore, the National Partnership for Reinventing Government eliminated over 100 programs, cut 250,000 federal jobs, and consolidated over 800 agencies over four years. It was broadly viewed as a success. The Congress played an active role in the reforms, invalidating some of executive actions and passing some enabling legislation. The reform was based on the New Management ideology, according to which employees of bureaucracies, private and public, should not blindly follow rules but should be given discretion and be guided by incentives. The difference between then and now is thus not the intention or the scale but the manner in which the reform is implemented. The current reform is delegated to a private actor, without congressional authorization or oversight.
Monday, March 10
A Lysenko moment? Kennedy launches a study of the relation between vaccinations and autism, long refuted by science.
The kidnapping by ICE of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia Palestinian student, is a qualitatively new step. Firing government personnel, eliminating government programs, withdrawing money from selected universities, targeting law firms raise all kinds of legal issues but do not effect physical integrity. This is different. Khalil is a green card holder, hence a legal resident in the United States. He enjoys all the rights of citizenship except the right to vote, including habeas corpus, the foundation of the rule of law. As of this moment, he was taken into custody and disappeared. Moreover, Rubio announced that "We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported." While the State Department can revoke visas, stripping someone of a green card is done by DHS (not the State Department) and requires filing formal charges alleging a violation of immigration law and a removal hearing in front of an immigration judge.
Department of Education announced today that 60 universities are currently under investigation for "antisemitic discrimination and harassment." When only a few of them were targeted, I feared that other universities would use this opportunity to steal their faculty and students. But if 60 universities are attacked, they may have no choice but to present a united front.
All stock market indices are tumbling. Trump announced that it is only temporary. The question is how long will his supporters believe it.
Tuesday, March 11
Eggs are up, stock market down, federal employees lose jobs, several agencies rendering services to citizens are eliminated, universities are under fire, and all this before budget cuts. All I can think is that Trump believes that his base is safe. He may be right. Earlier surveys showed that many people thinks he is doing too much in some areas and not enough about the economy, but his general support remains steady. March 4 Reuter/Gallup poll show that 44% approve of Trump, the last 538 aggregation had his approval at 47.6%, and The Economist poll reported 46% in favor and 50% against. He is generating many enemies but these numbers do not indicate any erosion of his support among Republicans.
I just read a review of the new book by Richard J. Evans, Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich, about the support of ordinary Germans for Hitler. I found it frightening but have no nerve to go there.
Correction: Having read https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/131-five-questions-about-the-khalil, I see that I may have been too cavalier about the legal status of the Khalil case. As often, the law is more ambiguous than I imagined.
Wednesday, March 12
According to Karoline Leavitt, Trump's spokeswoman, "We are in a period of economic transition. We are in a period of transition from the mess that was created by Joe Biden and the previous administration. Joe Biden left this country in an economic disaster." How long will this be credible among Republicans?
Recent polls show that Trump's overall approval is at 45%, with 54% disapproving. Only his immigration policy is supported by a majority but approval for most other policies hovers just below 50%. I was struck by the headlines: CNN's title is "Americans are negative on Trump's handling of the economy," Fox title is "Americans have clear opinions on Trump's performance in his first 50 days. Americans appear divided on the job President Donald Trump is doing in the White House, according to the latest polls." So basically, public opinion does not move and neither do the spins on it. I wonder though what we will happen when the measles epidemic explodes, as I am told by people who know, it will.
Trump on Fox: "Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I'm concerned. He's become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He's not Jewish anymore. He's a Palestinian." I was going to dismiss it as inane but then started to think it reveals something. Is "Palestinian" an epithet for an enemy? Is it a signal to Republicans that if Schumer votes against the Continuing Resolution, it is because he has become a "Palestinian"? So much of what Trump spurts out seems just inane but it still has effects Trump intended. He is highly effective in orienting his base and attaching epithets to enemies is one of his methods.
WEEK 5
Thursday, March 13
What strikes me is that the WSJ joined the ranks of enemies. Bloomberg is aggressively anti-Trump, now so is WSJ. These are the mouthpieces of the American business establishment. Trump's anger seems to be spinning out of control. I am still desperately trying to see some strategy in his actions and I just fail.
Just in on @realDonaldTrump: "No person who has inflicted the violence and terror that Kamala Harris has inflicted on this community can EVER be allowed to become President of the United States." If this means what it says, it is the most ominous signal of his intentions to date. Imagining nightmares is not good for one's sanity, so instead of thinking about it I am going to watch a soccer game.
Friday, March 14
The item that attracted my attention in the ultimatum issued by multiple government departments to Columbia University is this: "Begin the process of placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years. The University must provide a full plan with date certain deliverables, by March 20, 2025, deadline."
All this is too much to bear, so I am going to take a plunge. Here is the nightmare: Trump declares emergency, justifying it by the invasion of the country by immigrants allowed in by the Biden administration, with vaguely specified powers but authorizing actions against people responsible for the "violence and terror" inflicted on the country. The Congress either remains mute or approves: the German Reichstag in 1933 and the French parliament in 1940 consented to extraordinary powers demanded by Hitler and Petain. Some federal judges somewhere object to no avail. Department of Justice persecutes people who served under Biden, those who "betrayed" Trump during his first terms in office, members of Congress who are vociferous in opposition, and federal judges who rule against it. The midterm election is either postponed or Republicans prevail by a combination of violence and fraud. The Fat Lady sings.
This is obviously on a limb but the question I am asking myself is who or what can prevent it from happening. Everyone I talk to or read has given up on the Congress and the courts. The scenario in which they put hope is that the public opinion would turn sharply against Trump and either he would moderate or lose the midterm election. I read what he said about Harris, the threats against judges who rule against him, the threats against Congressional representatives of both parties, suits against newspapers, what he is doing to Columbia as revealing his intentions. As someone observed, Trump's proclamations may not predict what he will do but they do reveal what he wants. I think he wants absolute, unconstrained power and I do not see what can stop him.
Post-script. Trump speaking at the DOJ about an hour ago: "I believe that CNN and MSNDC [sic], who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democratic Party. And in my opinion, they are really corrupt and they are illegal. What they do is illegal." In my nightmare scenario, this is a prelude.
Saturday, March 15
All the news pale in importance after I spelled out my nightmare scenario. I am still trying to persuade myself that it will not materialize. My bet is on internal implosion. The Trump-Musk alliance cannot be stable given the ego's involved and the negative view of Musk and his role in the public opinion. At some time, Musk will become a convenient scapegoat. Moreover, the relation between Trump and the oligarchs seems tenuous and potentially conflictive. As I noted before, both the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are aggressively hostile to Trump's economic policies, the stock market has a downward tendency, and tariffs are intensely divisive. Once the signs of economic failure become palpable, mutual blaming will erupt. Hence, the executive may become incapacitated by internal conflicts. This is my hope.
Having said this, the support of Democratic senators for the budget bill has been extremely controversial. I trust Warren and do not trust Schumer but I could not make up my mind about what Democrats should have done. Some sign of opposition from the Democrats is desperately needed. But the timing is problematic: it may be too early now and by September it may be too late. It looks like a classic backsliding dilemma of how to oppose backsliding. It may also well be that Democrats cannot pursue any strategy. The late Italian sociologist, Alessandro Pizzorno, once remarked that "organization is a capacity for strategy." They may just not have this capacity: Republicans, disciplined by Trump, are a party; Democrats are a coalition.
“The Wizard of the Kremlin,” a novel by Giuliano da Empoli, is a fictionalized biography of Vladislav Surkov. Surkov was the leader of the sloviki ("canaries") faction within the Kremlin, fighting for influence against the siloviki faction. "Canaries" wanted to persuade. Siloviki believed in using force, "sila." But the originality of this book comes from its portrayal of Putin as someone who sees his mission as restoring the "rightful historical place" of Russia in the world. His obsession is to Make Russia Great Again, to recuperate from the debacle of the early 1990s, for which he blames on the United States. If this portrayal is accurate, it is difficult to see Putin stopping short of restoring the borders of the Soviet Union. His ultimate goal is unswerving. I am thinking of this because it implies that any kind of a compromise over Ukraine that Trump may achieve will be only temporary.
Sunday, March 16
Trump issued an Executive Order which invokes the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify detaining and deporting without legal proceedings members of a Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. It makes me wonder why an EO, long and elaborate, is needed to order something so narrow in scope. My suspicion is that it may be a trial balloon for using the 1798 much more broadly in the future. If the courts, up to the Supreme Court, rule this EO to be legally valid, with all the complexities spelled out by Steve Vladeck, the floodgates will be open.
The executive just closed the Woodrow Wilson Center, established by an act of Congress in 1968. The Center played an important role in thinking about bringing down dictatorships. In November 2022, the Russian government labeled it an "undesirable organization" and prohibited it's activities in Russia. Now it is undesirable here.
A shock. I was listening to a radio story about technologies that recover unreadable old manuscripts. Suddenly it hit me hard. There are fascinating scientific discoveries, there is music, poetry, paintings, novels; truth and beauty. And I am mired in a world of barbarism. Is there a way to escape it?
Monday, March 17
In an article published in 2001, Georg Vanberg argued that there are two conditions for government to obey court rulings: "(1) There must exist sufficient public support for the court generally (or for its particular decision) to make an attempt at noncompliance unattractive. (2) Voters must be able to monitor legislative responses to judicial rulings effectively and reliably." I have been wondering for some time what will be the issue with regard to which the Executive will openly disobey courts. Originally I thought it would be the NIH funding but it seems that the current leadership of the NIH found ways to avoid an open confrontation without quite complying. Now it seems to be arrests and deportations of immigrants. One can expect, however, that if this issue goes to the Supreme Court, it will prevaricate, given that this is the issue where public opinion supports the government. I am sure such a moment will come but cannot think over what and with what consequences.
Here is a more complex issue, which I must introduce by admitting my limited competence about it. There is a proposal to limit the power of federal judges in issuing staying orders that extend beyond their districts. Under different political circumstances I would have favored it: I always thought that the power of any of the seven hundred plus federal judges to paralyze actions of both the legislature and the executive made governing next to impossible. But given the current political context, such a limitation would greatly extend the period of time during which the executive could act with impunity, until the Supreme Court pronounces itself one way or another.
Support for the Democratic Party is at its lowest since 2007.
I did not know: 85% of federal employees are located outside the DC region. Every Congressional district has at least 3,000 federal government employees.
Tuesday, March 18
The word "disappeared" has entered the American political vocabulary. It means what is says: people are just disappearing and their families desperately try to find out what happened to them and where they are. Perhaps no other word can be as chilling. The numbers of "desaparecidos" added up to thousands under the military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. I had friends among them and, from the safety of being abroad, participated in campaigns to save them, in several cases unsuccessfully. Until today, their families search for their disappeared children and spouses.
On "too early now, too late then." Questioning the legitimacy of a government newly elected in clean elections appears to be, and is, anti-democratic. Still, when public opinion turns sharply against it, say the approval ratings fall below 40%, it becomes clear that the government no longer enjoys majority support. But by that time, the government would have taken measures which render its tenure in office independent of public support. It is too late. This seems to be a generic dilemma of the opposition against backsliding governments.
A striking survey answer on Ezra Klein show with David Shor: 78% of respondents think that "Delivering change that improves American lives" is more important than "Preserving our institutions."
Wednesday, March 19
I am off to France and England this afternoon, curious about reactions to our turmoil.
I may try to get away from daily news and take a pause.
WEEK 6
Thursday, March 20
I am in Paris. I hoped to feel lighter and to some extent I do. France is just a normal country. It has problems of its own but the scale is not the same. Here are some items on the national, 8:00 pm, news. One was a new regulation saying that if someone is being transported to a clinic for an out-patient visit, a service included in health insurance, the driver can make a detour of up 25km to pick someone else. Some people complained about it, which is why it made the news. Another was the complaint that the speed bumps, which are ubiquitous in France, are not supposed to exceed 110cm in height and some of them do. Obviously, not all issues that divide the French society and turn many people against the government are so trivial. At this moment, the country faces a big choice, namely, whether to rearm at the cost of increasing the budget deficit, already large, or at the cost of reducing government services, a taboo in France. Trump has forced the French political parties to take clear positions. Some parties try to prevaricate but the choice is stark and they have to come for or against, swallowing all their other preferences.
I was going to stop or at least interrupt this Diary but just suffered another jolt to my quest for tranquility. A French scientists was not admitted to the United States because some anti-Trump messages were found by border guards on his phone. I know of a French teenager who was interrogated 40 minutes while entering the US, again including an inspection of the phone and the computer. Germany and the United Kingdom issued warnings about traveling to the US. Yet perhaps even more ominous is the warning of some US universities advising their green card holding faculty not to travel abroad.
It looks like all the knives are out in the conflict between the executive and the courts, individual judges. Following Justice Robert's rebuke of Trump and his outbursts against federal judges who rule against him, several of them have been physically threatened. The threats include pipe bomb hoaxes, "swatting" attacks, and anonymous pizza deliveries with the message "We know where you live." Spouses and children are also subject to attacks. On the legal side, some House Republicans want to impeach judges, others want to limit their jurisdiction to their districts.
Friday, March 21
The question about abolishing the Department of Education is whether any of its programs will be saved. The DOE was always small but some of its programs mattered: funding for children with disabilities, school lunches, and the Pell grants. The latter subsidize college education for over 5 million people.
Saturday, March 22
Columbia yielded on all points, including those patently illegal. Will Trump go after other universities or was this sufficient to intimidate them? In the words of Lee Bollinger, former Columbia president, "It's very, very frightening."
Paul Weiss's legal firm pledged $40 million in pro-bono legal services for Trump. In a Memorandum dated March 21, 2025, the President accepted the bribe and lifted sanctions against the firm.
To continue with frightening, here is an excerpt from a Memorandum issued by Trump today: "I hereby direct the Attorney General to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States or in matters before executive department and agencies of the United States."
Thus, the targets already include legacy media, universities, laws firms, individual attorneys, and green card holders. Intimidation generates a collective action problem for the potential targets. They face a dilemma between laying low in the hope of not becoming a target or risk exposure. This dilemma has been studied with all the possible shades but its original conclusion by Thomas Shelling, written decades ago, still holds: until the opposition reaches a "tipping point" the safest strategy is to remain silent. This is the strategy everyone has followed thus far.
You may have noticed that I do not reveal names or even attributes of my interlocutors or correspondents. I grew up under communism, when the rules were "Never of the phone," "Never in correspondence," "Cautiously in conversations." I discovered that it is instinctive, comes to me naturally. I just never expected that my instinct would become useful again. I am old and I do not care but this is now about "The Life of Others," in the title of a film about East Germany.
Sunday, March 23
Columbia University was established in 1754. This is from Wikipedia: "As of December 2021, its alumni, faculty, and staff have included 7 of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America; 4 U.S. presidents; 34 foreign heads of state or government; 2 secretaries-general of the United Nations; 10 justices of the United States Supreme Court; 103 Nobel laureates; 125 National Academy of Sciences members; 53 living billionaires; 23 Olympic medalists; 33 Academy Award winners; and 125 Pulitzer Prize recipients." And yet its very survival is now fragile. The silence of other universities left Columbia alone in facing the onslaught. Its trustees appear to be more concerned about their individual fortunes than about the survival of this great university. The President has no power. The university chose not to resist, obviously hoping to appease Trump. I think it made a strategic mistake, because it will not tame his vengeance. The last person I would like to be at this moment is the President of Columbia.
Because I am going to take off for a few days, this is a moment to reflect. I began this Diary with the question whether democracy is now fragile in the United States. I have a "minimalist" view of democracy, stripped down to the condition that the incumbent government does not foreclose the possibility of being defeated in elections. Most people, as well as the civics courses, attach to democracy all kinds of lofty ideals. Some people, particularly in the United States, also include in their understanding something they refer to as "the rule of law." In my view democracy is just a method of processing in relative liberty and peace whatever conflicts that may arise in a society, by elections rather than force, regardless of their results. Given that Trump won an election and is implementing the program he announced, I thought two months ago that one should be careful not to disqualify the US as a democracy just because his program is more radical than any in the past I could think of. But I am no longer willing to suspend belief. As I see it, there is every signal that this government is preparing to rule regardless of what may or may not happen in elections. It is "backsliding."
The revolution Trump is leading combines a blatant disregard of the electoral consequences of his policies with rapidly mounting intimidation of his political opponents. His support in the polls does remain almost unchanged. But it is hard to imagine that it would not erode. All the economic forecasts concerning inflation and growth, whatever they are worth, are pessimistic. Federal employees lose jobs, in every congressional district. People who survive because of federal programs are about to experience their elimination. The closing of practically all regulatory agencies cannot but generate havoc in various aspects of everyday life. The measles epidemic is spreading. I do realize that all these effects on people's lives can be explained away, that they can be cast as a transitory cost of the revolution that will make the country great again, that they can be attributed to actions of enemies, internal and external. But some people who voted for Trump will react to the price of eggs and withdraw their support. Then what?
The "Then what?" question terrifies me. Again, a lot of people I talk to or read think that nothing dramatic will happen: either Trump will moderate his policies fearing to lose elections or Republicans will lose at least one house of the Congress and will be tempered. I do recognize that all the historical experience speaks in favor of their hopes. But why does Trump pursue policies that appear electorally suicidal? He may believe -- I think he does -- that he is infallible and will be followed no matter what. But what if his approval ratings fall below some threshold and it becomes clear that a majority is against him? Repression will become his only tool. The public opinion firms that report results unfavorable to him can be silenced. Institutions, groups, and individuals opposing him can be intimidated, harassed, or persecuted. I think this is what we are already witnessing. Erdogan, Modi, Maduro, Ortega, and Orban succeeded in monopolizing power by mixtures of popular appeal and blatant repression. Why wouldn't Trump?
Monday, March 24
In a NYT opinion piece entitled "It's Trump vs. the Courts, and It Won't End Well for Trump," J. Michael Luttig, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush and served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006, thinks that "Chief Justice Marshall's assertion that it is the duty of the courts to say what the law is will be the last word." This is the faith in US institutions in its most naive version.
Senator Schumer on Meet the Press believes it as well: "I believe that if Donald Trump should defy the courts, the public will rise up." Interestingly, in a classical article by Barry Weingast, published in 1997, popular uprising against the government that violates the Constitution was treated as an out-of-equilibrium threat that induces governments to comply. I am sure Weingast never imagined that this threat would come to test.
Tuesday, March 25
I am traveling to give a talk at the King's College London.
Here is an excerpt from Adventures of a Bystander, by Peter Drucker, without a comment because it speaks for itself:
"[S]everal weeks after the Nazis had come to power, was the first Nazi-led faculty meeting at the University. Frankfurt was the first university the Nazis tackled, precisely because it was the most self-confidently liberal of major German universities, with a faculty that prided itself on its allegiance to scholarship, freedom of conscience, and democracy. The Nazis knew that control of Frankfurt University would mean control of German academia altogether. So did everyone at the University. Above all, Frankfurt had a science faculty distinguished both by its scholarship and by its liberal convictions; and outstanding among the Frankfurt scientists was a biochemist of Nobel Prize caliber and impeccable liberal credentials. When the appointment of a Nazi commissar for Frankfurt was announced around February 25 of that year and when not only every teacher but also every graduate assistant at the University was summoned to a faculty meeting to hear his new master, everybody knew that a trial of strength was at hand. ... The new Nazi commissar wasted no time on the amenities.... [He] pointed his finger at one department chairman after another and said: 'You either do what I tell you or we'll put you into a concentration camp.' There was dead silence when he finished; everybody waited for the distinguished biochemist. The great liberal got up, cleared his throat, and said: 'Very interesting, Mr. Commissar, and in some respects very illuminating. But one point I didn't get too clearly. Will there be more money for research in physiology?' The meeting broke up shortly thereafter with the commissar assuring the scholars that indeed there would be plenty of money for 'racially pure science'."
Wednesday, March 26
I have to skip a few days.
WEEK 7
Thursday, March 27
I had conversations with academics from several European countries. No one seems clear about the feasibility of the rearmament plans, either at the level of the EU or their countries. But what struck me were frequent references to "We, Europeans." Trump may have succeeded in generating an identity which has been problematic for several decades. There is a clear feeling that "We are all in this together, facing the same threats and needing to find a joint response."
Friday, March 28
The President issued an Executive Order regulating national elections. In my understanding, he has no authority whatsoever over the conduct of elections. This prerogative is reserved to the states and can be overridden by the Congress only if states violate the Constitution. Why, then, would he do it? One possibility is that this is an instruction to the state legislatures controlled by Republican. Another is that he believes that he has power over everything, that his will is the law.
The fact that Trump withdrew from nominating Republican House representative Elise Stefanik as the UN representative, thanking her effusively, goes against my belief that Trump is not concerned about the support in the Congress and the midterm elections. I noticed that several of my interlocutors raised in the US have a sanguine view of what is likely to happen, namely, that Republicans will be defeated in the midterms and will have to moderate as a result. In turn, people raised abroad tend to place their hopes not on elections but on internal dissensions within the government. The sign that Trump is concerned about the support in the House, albeit the first I detected, speaks in favor of those who place their hope in the resilience of American institutions.
Saturday, March 29
I am traveling. Reading numerous accounts of actions directed against foreign students. Academics in Great Britain, by the way, expect to benefit from the influx of foreign students who have been heading to the United States.
The position of the President of Columbia turned out to be untenable, as one would have expected. The new interim President is a co-chair of the Board of Trustees, a journalist with no Ph.D. and no academic background. I wonder if this is the first time ever that such a person became the President of a major university.
Sunday, March 30
I am not surprised that many people, from members of Trump's cabinet who threw nasty epithets at him in the past, to researchers fretting about their grants, to some public media are actively collaborating with the repression. It is not because I am clairvoyant but because I have seen it in my youth under communism. Some supporters of the communist regime were authentic communists. But a large majority were just opportunists. Lisa Wedeen made an interesting distinction between complicity and duplicity. Some people collaborate with whoever is in power for purely opportunistic reasons. But some have to give reasons to themselves: "I will be more effective in tempering regime abuses from within than from without" was the standard message of my childhood friends who joined the Communist Party. "Yes, the Party is doing some things that are evil but it is also doing things that are good" was another popular tune. "It makes no difference what I do, so I am not doing much harm" was perhaps the most desperate one. My reading of both Italian history under fascism and German under Nazism is that, with the big exception of Jews in Germany, neither regime was exceptionally repressive. They did not need to be because most people fell quietly in line: opportunism combined with fear is sufficient to generate ostensible support.
Another memory of communism. There always was, and in China still is, something called the "Party Line." It was a set of explicit instructions as well as implicit understandings of official views, on whatever topic, from biology to music. Deviations from the Party Line, even if they were dictated by specific circumstances, threatened careers of both Party and government officials: there are several academic papers about it. The Executive Order about the Smithsonian Institution is a Party Line. It could have been issued by the Chinese Communist Party, even if I wonder if it would have been as crude.
A lot of people attribute Trump's support, polarization, and the general rise of the right-wing to fake news. This is not something I know much about but I wonder whether the case is fake news or no news. By every account, many people who support Trump are just woefully uninformed, not following any news, not even X or Truth Social. Their support must be due to mechanisms other than fake news.
Analyses of the effects of tariffs focus on inflation. But their ostensible purpose is to promote investment in the United States. My basic background in economics tells me this is a futile expectation. Investment requires some certainty: who will invest in fixed costs with a perspective of several years if announcements of tariffs vary from day to day? Getting behind the tariff barriers can be profitable if the barriers are expected to last. But if the announcements are just opening salvos for negotiations, the uncertainty is too large.
Monday, March 31
Another jolt: Stories about an invasion of a Quaker Meeting House, street detention of an entire family by masked men using an unmarked van, handcuffing at a subway station of a woman who inquired about an intervention by undercover agents. Is what "could not happen" happening?
A vignette of university atmosphere: A visa holder is unexpectedly absent from an academic meeting. Texting reveals that this person is ill. There is a general relief: the fear was that this person would be in a Louisiana prison.
Tuesday, April 1
Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French right-wing party, Rassemblement National, was rendered illegible to run in the forthcoming presidential election by a decision of a court. She was convicted for diverting funds she received as a deputy to the European Parliament, about 2.9 million Euros, to support her party in France. The Right already claims that the conviction was made by "Left-wing judges." That she was guilty there is no controversy but how much discretion the judges had, given the law for which she had herself voted, is controversial. The issue for me is whether courts should have the authority to remove someone from electoral competition. I raise this issue because it has become a subject of controversy in Turkey, Brazil, and the United States. In Turkey, a court ordered the arrest of Erdogan's leading opponent on charges that are transparently frivolous and politically motivated, with hundreds of thousands protesting. In Brazil, the supreme court ruled that Bolsonaro can be prosecuted for an attempted coup following his electoral defeat. In the United States, Trump was actually convicted of felony in one of his trials but his role on January 6 and his attempt to steal votes in Georgia were not adjudicated before he won reelection. Should voters be able to vote for someone convicted on criminal charges? Should they be able to vote for someone who attempted to undermine democracy? Clearly, normative and legal considerations lead to the conclusion that such persons should be, at least temporarily, removed from electoral politics. Moreover, there is also the argument that punishing such acts would dissuade others in the future. But if such offenders represent a significant portion of the electorate, the danger is conflicts would spill outside the institutional framework, to the streets, and perhaps become violent. I cannot make up my mind: Turkey is clearly a case of politically motivated prosecution by a President who controls the courts; in contrast, Brazil may be a case of a triumph of the rule of law which will not have disastrous political consequences. Somehow I wish that the French judges would have found a way to punish Le Pen without suspending her political rights, just to avoid yet another conflict. And I find it difficult to imagine what would have happened in the United States had Trump been illegible to run in 2024.
As I read about Trump actions, the words that occur most frequently are "target," "dismantle," "cut," "eliminate," "fire," "expel," "bar," "deregulate," "eliminate" and other near synonyms of "destroy." Where are "create," "build," "construct," "develop," "establish"? Revolutions must destroy but they are successful only if they offer some project, some vision, of a common future of peace and prosperity. Hate is an ingredient of every revolution but hope is necessary for it to succeed. What is the future offered by Trump? Most I could find was in his first Executive Order, where he claimed that dismantling everything would release the creative power of American citizens. The idiocy of releasing creative power by destroying scientific research is glaring. But I think the ideological poverty of the project to Make Great Again goes deeper. People are sometimes, perhaps often, willing to suffer costs but only if they are convinced that these costs are necessary to reach a glorious future. They may tolerate high prices of eggs but only if they believe that eggs will become abundant once the ideological project is accomplished. I think Trump's ideological project will fail because it is oriented toward destruction rather than construction.
Dow Jones is -2.75% over the last month, S&P is -4.07%, Nasdaq -5.73%. Pharma stocks fell sharply last Friday.
Columbia was left hanging on its own when it became the target. But now it gained a powerful companion, Harvard. Both Harvard and Yale were trying to defuse the attack by dismantling their Middle East centers. It did not work. I used to joke that Harvard's Department of Government was in fact a department of government. So becoming a target must be a profound shock for this institution. Will it finally solve the collective action problem of the elite universities or will they surrender one by one? The government has so many instruments with which it can destroy them: cutting research funds, taxing endowments, putting visa restrictions on full paying foreign students, all the way to withdrawing accreditation and criminal persecution for "harboring" students who dare to speak out. If Trump, or Vance, really want to destroy universities, they can. Hence, I am not surprised that they all cave in. But will they survive? What will be left of them?
The Wisconsin Supreme Court election is today. Tomorrow is the tariff day.
WEEK 8
Wednesday, April 2
The electoral results are in. I do not think that the reduction of Republican margins in the two Florida districts means anything. But the state-wide Wisconsin result may be informative. Trump beat Harris by 0.8 percent in Wisconsin, so a 10 point margin, 55% to 45%, in favor of the Democratic candidate looks like a meaningful swing. It is not clear whether this was a reaction against Trump or only Musk. In either case, I am most curious what, if any, will be Trump's reaction. It should indicate whether he is concerned about electoral constraints.
I still do not understand why the government is dismantling the NIH and the CDC. Members of the administration do take medicines and, I suspect, they are vaccinated against most contagious diseases. The economic evidence that investing in biomedical research has high returns is overwhelming. The total NIH budget was about 47 billion, so even eliminating it completely would not make a dent in the federal deficit. Some people interpret it as a revenge for Covid but it would take suicidal blindness to react in this way. Moreover, Trump subsidized Moderna did during his first term. Why condition biomedical funds on the decision of a university with regard to its Middle East Center? It just does not make sense.
Thursday, April 3
We have been Liberated. Why imposing a 15% tariff on Papua New Guinea "liberates" the US leaves me befuddled, but semantics aside, the new tariffs look like an opening salvo for massive negotiations. I do not trust economic models that calculate their effects, in part because they are all over the place, but it is hard to believe that they would not reduce incomes. One estimate, by Niven Winchester in The Conversation of today, is that tariffs will reduce average income in the US by $1,188 if they are not reciprocated and by $3,487 if they are. According to the same model, their impact will vary greatly across countries, with some, namely the UK, benefiting from tariffs if it does not reciprocate.
There is no economic rationale for the particular numbers. They resulted from applying a simple formula: subject to a 10% minimum, divide the US trade deficit with a particular country by the value of this country's exports to the US, and you will get the tariff rate. This is the way Papua New Guinea got its 15% rate. With a few exceptions, the rate is the same whether the imports are bananas or computer chips. What are the economic consequences for the US of imposing this rate on this country no model can calculate but obviously the downstream consequences of increasing the price of imported bananas are not those of the chips. So this is just a giant plunge into the unknown.
It is also an opening salvo of a trade war. This war can develop in different ways. One extreme would be that the affected countries remain passive, absorb the economic consequences of the tariffs, and the US stops. The other extreme is that they reciprocate blindly, imposing the same tariffs on US products as the US imposed on them. Neither extreme is plausible. The affected countries will try to soften the blow but they are too smart to react mechanically. The immediate reaction of the EU appears to take things calmly: not to escalate the conflict with a blanket response but to use political leverage by precisely targeting the US imports produced in electorally marginal states and congressional districts. One can expect that Trump will double down on any retaliatory moves, some compromises will be made, and a new tariff system will stabilize. Wars always generate collateral damage, so some countries, such as Papua New Guinea, may be unable to escape the damage. It is hard to imagine how the US can negotiate on a bilateral basis with more than one hundred countries. WTO -- it still exists -- was an attempt to establish norms and procedures at the world scale but the Trump administration is averse to any multilateral frameworks and institutions. Hence, it seems that it will have to punt on a case-to-case basis.
The tariffs are also divisive internally, as is apparent from the reactions of different sectors and their lobbies. New York Times of today quotes National Retail Federation, National Association of Manufacturers, and National Restaurant Association as opposed to the tariffs and the American Iron and Steel Institute as well as Southern Shrimp Alliance as in favor of them. Even when new policies increase efficiency, there are winners and there are losers, so compensation becomes the center of the political game. But, given that there are no signs of any compensatory policies, it will be just an all-out conflict. The tariffs are a massive boost for the lobbying industry.
Finally, the political project of replacing taxes with tariffs is just not feasible. The estimates of the revenue from tariffs vary between $250 and $600 billion. The 2024 deficit was $1.83 trillion. These numbers cannot be squared.
A note on the irony of history. A French left-wing politician was reminded by a radio interviewer that this party opposed globalization in the past. Remember the massive anti-WTO protests in Seattle some years ago? Then the Republican Party was fully committed to free trade, while the Left was in favor of protection. The tables turned. But now the Left cannot invoke benefits of free trade against the tariffs. The French politician was caught disoriented, with no arguments. Is this the predicament of the Left in general?
Friday, April 4
A daily jolt, reported by nola.com: "While on his way to work on Monday, the 73-year-old grandfather was picked up by immigration enforcement agents near his Lafayette home. He sits today in an ICE processing center in Pine Prairie, a village in rural Evangeline Parish."
Harvard political scientists Ryan D. Enos and Steven Levitsky published a courageous and exceptionally well argued letter calling for Harvard to resist Trump's demands. The generic question is what will be left if universities cave in. They will not be able to decide what departments and programs to have. Their student admission policies and faculty recruitment will have to conform to "federal law and policy" (from the letter to Columbia). Their presidents will have power to suspend or expel students without any process (from the letter to Columbia). They will have no foreign students, at least not from some countries. They will have to "end ideological capture" (from the letter to Harvard). Their research will have to conform to government norms, which exclude several topics and even words. No wonder that universities are divided internally whether what would be left is worth defending. Some faculty, like the "liberal" from the Frankfurt University in 1933 whom I quoted earlier, care only whether they would be able to do their research. I am imagining writing a grant proposal, something I did several times decades ago: How can I avoid that the title and the abstract would not direct it immediately to a waste paper basket? How do I make it ideologically balanced, given that to do it I would have to cite obvious nonsense? Oops, I just said "unbiased," as in BLUE ("best unbiased linear estimator"), and this word is on the NSF prohibited list published a few weeks ago. The shadow of censorship hangs above every sentence I write: I have to be careful about what may tip "them" off, what will pass unnoticed, and what "they" make actually like. I am not saying I would not do it: one learns how to play new games and lives with it. But then I put myself in a classroom. Can I teach that tariffs cause inflation? Can I present research showing that immigration is economically beneficial? Can I say that American institutions are captured by oligarchs? What kind of students will universities that surrender generate? What kind of future researchers will they form? Are they worth preserving?
Here is something I need to admit. At the moment, some government grants are being extended on the condition that they remove plans for DEI that were required by the previous administration. Indeed, statements of DEI were required in almost all interactions with the government. DEI sensitivity training was compulsory at several universities. Democrats also had a party line. I remember Stanford threatening sanctions against a student who read a book by a book burner, Hitler. As the DEI ideology became institutionalized in bureaucratic hierarchies -- the University of Michigan had 241 DEI employees -- those newly occupying places of authority exercised it with a vengeance. Transgressions were dangerous: one could be fired as a journal editor, as a university professor, even as a radio announcer. Moreover, repression, as always, had a distributive effect. White male Ph.D.s were handicapped in finding jobs or in advancing their careers, while other people were favored. I say all this because what we are facing now is a counter-revolution, revolution against a revolution.
I do not know enough US history to figure out when and how it happened, but the politicization of universities did not begin with Trump. His administration is driven by hatred, by revenge. Its policies, its uses of language, its repressive instincts are exceptionally brutal. They weigh on everyday life, not only on universities. Politics was never absent from research and education: I remember joking some 50 years ago that one can write "class" and one can write "conflict" but one cannot write "class conflict." But I do not understand how the ideological life became so totalitarian, yes, totalitarian.
Saturday, April 5
All this is just too hard to bear and I have to pause. I will go for a walk to admire spring blossoms, watch soccer, and read a novel.
Sunday, April 6
Demonstrations took place yesterday in about 1,300 locations around the country, from all the large cities to some small towns. The slogans included a full range of demands, with the dominant theme of "Hands OFF, " listing schools, NATO, Veteran benefits, libraries, Social Security, science, civil rights, and human rights.
Academic literature on protests is huge, so I wondered if it illuminates the consequences of what happened yesterday. One lesson on which it converges is that numbers matter for the subsequent dynamic: large protests mobilize, small protests dwindle. Were the demonstrations "large"? 100,000 is the number cited by the press for New York and Washington, 8,000 for Boulder, "the largest ever" for Minneapolis, 500 in some small localities. Assuming the average size to be 1,000, about 1.5 million people participated all around the country, but if the average size was 2,000, this would mean that almost 3 million did. The organizers think it was in the range of 3 to 5 million. These are huge numbers. Given the history of midterm elections, my best guess is that about 110 million people will vote in 2026, so 3 million would be almost 3% of the electorate. The difficult question is whether they were large only in localities that vote Democratic or did they signal a warning also in some that voted predominantly Republican. This question cannot be answered without systematic data.
Most of the academic literature focuses on the effects of protests on the beliefs and on subsequent actions of the current non-participants. There seems to be a consensus that violence dissuades people from participating in the future and the demonstrations of yesterday were peaceful everywhere. Other conclusions are intuitive, perhaps with the exception of an article by Shadmehr and Bernhardt (2011) who argue that if the participants in a current protest are only people who are most militant, the effect on subsequent participation is negative. But even if the number of participants was only 1.5 million, they must have included many people with moderate views. Hence, one should expect protests to grow.
What I could not find in the academic literature is an analysis of the conditions under which democratic governments change policies in reaction to protests. Studies of the effects of protests focus on those that take place in non-democratic regimes, with the question whether they do or do not result in regime change. This is not, perhaps not yet, the context of the resistance to the Trump administration. Can Trump be made keep Hands OFF as a result of people coming to the streets? The list of subject protesters want Trump to desist from is large. For some protesters it also includes immigrants, Gaza, and Ukraine. There is a trade-off here: to mobilize large numbers, everyone who finds intolerable any aspect of Trump policy must be included; to achieve a specific policy change, protests must focus narrowly on some particular aspects. The demonstrations defending science were focused but they were miniscule; yesterday's demonstrations were large but their demands were diffuse. I know from personal experience that negotiations among different groups about which slogans should be permitted in a demonstration can be endless and sometimes fail. Yesterday's demonstrations did not have a disciplined strategy; they were opened to all. Their purpose seems to have been to signal the concern that Trump is destroying democracy and to express generalized opposition -- many slogans were directed personally at Trump and Musk -- rather than to effectuate a change of a particular policy. Perhaps the way to see them is as a signal to institutional actors -- legislative representatives and courts -- that the opposition to several aspects of Trump's policies is massive, so they must oppose them in their self-interest. They may be successful.
Finally, I wonder what Trump's reaction will be. He may just keep golfing and ignore the streets. He may organize street demonstrations in his support. He may also take repressive measures against the organizers and some of the participants. Nixon used the last two strategies with considerable success. But the Trump people do not seem to care much about public opinion. So what happens next?
Monday, April 7
Some people lost a lot of money on the stock market last week. Bank shares tumbled, technology shares (Apple, Nvidia, Tesla) plummeted, exporters to China (Boeing, Caterpillar) were hit. According to a Bloomberg poll of economists, the effect of announcing tariffs is that 93% of respondents revised downward their expectations of GDP growth, 87% revised upward their predictions of inflation, and 92% increased the odds of a recession. As I observed several times, the organs of business -- Bloomberg News, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times -- are united is their opposition to tariffs, at least as they are implemented. How can any government is a capitalist society govern without the support of business? I once asked the then President of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, what he saw as the most important obstacles to his policies. He easily dismissed the public opinion and the Congress: his answer was "the markets." Why doesn't Trump fear the markets? My long held beliefs are again in question: I had always thought that any government in a capitalist system must anticipate the effects of its policies on the reactions of private firms; this is "Structural Dependence of the State on Capital" (an article I coauthored with the late Michael Wallerstein in 1988). Is it because Trump believes that they will come around because of his tax policies? The Senate just passed, and the bill is on its way to become law, a major tax relief for the wealthy. Still, markets tumbled and forecasts turned sharply negative. Obviously, business does not like taxes but the market reaction seems to indicate that it dislikes even more the prospect of lower pre-tax profits. All I can think is that this is not the normal life of a capitalist society. One of the slogans in Saturday's demonstrations was "Bring normality back again." Is this what business wants and what Trump upsets? How long can the chaos last? Can business adjust to uncertainty, which just exploded?
Tuesday, April 8
Back to tariffs. Economic decisions are supposed to be rational, in a well defined sense. An "agent" (this is the economics word for anyone who acts) is rational if he, she, or it chooses a course of action that maximizes her objectives given exogenous conditions and the expected actions of everyone else. Suppose that the objective of the government is to maximize "social welfare," or the rate of economic growth, or some other goal for the country as a whole, say employment. The government is then rational if it examines the expected consequences of its potential courses of action and chooses the one that maximizes this objective. Rationality requires looking forward at the consequences. Reacting to the past is not rational.
Economists have difficulties in explaining why millions of people voted for Trump if he would make them worse off economically. Reacting to inflation -- the prevalent explanation of Trump's victory -- is not rational because it is backward looking. To defend their way of thinking, economists must believe that Trump voters did believe they would be better off even if economists do not believe they will. There are some puzzles which economists can unravel only by making heroic ad hoc assumptions.
What does it mean about the tariffs? Rational tariffs would consider the effects of the totality of the new tariff system on the economy. The calculations would have to answer what is the effect of imposing a 20% tariff on cheeses, the effect of imposing 64% on chips, a 10% on copper, a 20% on pharmaceuticals, and so on, wherever these items come from. Economic consequences do not depend on whether the particular drug comes from Europe, India, or China but on the consumption of this drug in the US and the capacity of the US to produce it at a particular cost. Such a calculation would require a complex, well calibrated, general equilibrium model of the US economy. The existing models are not perfect but they are the only tool available to calculate the consequences. There is not even a hint that the Trump administration thought about the consequences.
Most likely it did not because the announced tariffs are not intended to stay but only to initiate negotiations. Now we are no longer in the realm of general equilibrium, in which one omniscient "command planner" makes decisions to maximize welfare given that no one else reacts, but in the realm of game theory, in which the US government must expect that its decisions would cause other actors to react in ways that will affect the US economy. This requires the US government to have a strategy, for example, "If the government of Costa Rica retaliates with increasing the tariff on American cars, we will double the tariff on Costa Rican bananas" or "If Costa Rica accepts the tariff on their bananas, we will call it quits." The general way of thinking in this way is to calculate that if we pursue a particular strategy and the Costa Ricans will respond with a particular strategy, we should do what is best for us given the expected response of Costa Rica. But given that Trump imposed tariffs on more than 100 countries and territories, including some uninhabited islands, the Department of Commerce would have to employ thousands of economists to play this game on a bilateral basis and they would have to coordinate their games.
No wonder then that the tariffs are an intractable mess. The economic uncertainty index skyrocketed and markets plunged. How to make economic decisions in a world in which it is impossible to calculate? The CEO's must be going nuts.
The Supreme Court just decided, by a vote of 5 to 4, to vacate the temporary restraining order issued by Judge Boasberg with regard to arresting immigrants on the basis of the Alien Enemy Act. Reading daily commentaries by Steve Vladeck, I realize how little I understand of the legal complexities. But suppose that the Court is not bound by the laws and is only pursuing a political strategy. I thought some time ago that the Court may play a strategy of invalidating minor actions of the government but yielding to it on big issues. Now I changed my mind. The strategy of the Court, or at least of its pivotal members, may be to avoid an open conflict with the administration, in particular the risk that the administration would openly disregard its decisions, by finding technicalities that can be used to validate government actions without yielding on the principles. The Court did not rule that the administration can use the 1798 law to send people to Salvadorean gulags but only that the case was not properly made, with details I do not understand.
The government is revoking visas of foreign students. According to Marco Rubio, 300 visas had been affected as of March 27, and the number is growing. It is impossible to figure out who are the targets.
384 books, including some novels, were removed from the US Naval Academy Nimitz Library. I am about to see an exhibit on "Degenerate Art" at the Picasso Museum in Paris. It reproduces to the extent possible the 1937 exhibition in Munich, which showed art that would not be tolerated under the Nazi regime.
Dr. Katrina Armstrong, the deposed President of Columbia University, was interrogated by a House committee. She did not return to her previous post as the Dean of the Medical School but took a year off. The vengeance does not stop.
Trump is putting $45 billion into building gulags. This was about the entire budget of the NIH. This world is not just uncertain; it is insane.
WEEK 9
Wednesday, April 9
There are some rumblings by the oligarchs against tariffs. Koch came out against them, as well as Ken Langone from Home Depot.
The IRS will share data with ICE. I always thought it was illegal for the IRS to share data with any other government agency. The secrecy was supposed to induce people to report their incomes. Poor immigrants who have been paying taxes in the hope that it would ease their legalization.
Watching Leavitt makes me the feel that I am in Moscow or Beijing.
According to the Economist/YouGov polls, the overall margin of approval of Trump declined from -3 to -8 last week, from +6 to 0 among men, from -12 to -16 among women.
Thursday, April 10
The events of the last two days are too depressing to think about them, so I just list those that attracted my attention.
Kristi Noem (Secretary of Homeland Security) posted in X a picture of herself dressed in ICE garb and holding a machine gun. Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence) on X: "I urge the DOGE and FBI to investigate all current and former federal employees whose net worth appears suspiciously high relative to their modest salaries, irrespective of political party affiliation, beginning with Biden, Obama, and Clinton."
From Bloomberg: 90% of Venezuelans sent to El Salvador have no criminal record. "One of Trump's top immigration officials, Robert Cerna, after conceding many had no criminal record, responded in a legal filing that their lack of a record shows they are 'terrorists'."
From mediaite.com: "President Donald Trump directed the Justice Department to investigate former Homeland Security official Miles Taylor over his 'anonymous' essay and book hammering Trump during his first term. Trump went so far as to accuse Taylor of committing treason, a capital offense, for writing about what he saw during Trump's first term. Trump also ordered the DOJ to investigate Chris Krebs, Trump's election security director during his first term. Trump wildly suggested Krebs was part of an effort to steal the 2020 election as Krebs repeatedly said there was no evidence of fraud that he could find."
From Science about Columbia: "Yesterday, NIH raised the stakes: At the behest of its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH will not only block new funding for the university, but also stop paying investigators working on all existing NIH projects." Cornell was hit with a cut of $1 billion, Northwestern $790 million, Brown $510 million. Federal investigations were launched against more than 50 universities. There is an interesting article by Iveta Silova in the April 9 conversation.com, entitled "Universities in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union thought giving in to government demands would save their independence."
This was predictable: Trump postponed most tariffs by 90 days. He also intimated that some US firms and farmers may be excluded. Stock markets jumped up as soon as the announcement was made. China was excluded from the postponement, so now the question is who will blink first. Europeans are worried that China will flood European markets with products it cannot sell in the US.
Friday, April 11
Have the courts stopped anything? Mahmoud Khalil is still languishing in prison, Kilmar Abrego Garcia remains in El Salvador, ICE arrests whomever it wants, no university recovered its federal grants, federal employees were fired, several government agencies were dismantled and others experienced budget cuts, several law firms were disabled from appearing in federal courts. There are lots of temporary disabling orders issued by federal judges and the Trump administration never openly defied a court ruling but no court ruling has stopped it from doing what it wants. Am I missing something?
From the New York Times article entitled "An Advance in Brain Research That Was Once Considered Impossible": "The efforts to map a whole mouse brain are supported by funding from a long-running National Institutes of Health program called the BRAIN initiative. But the future of the endeavor is uncertain. Last year, Congress cut funding to the BRAIN initiative by 40 percent, and last month President Trump signed a bill cutting support by another 20 percent."
There is a huge economics and political science literature saying that "import substitution" is a bad policy and "export orientation" a good one. The US Treasury Department stood behind it and the World Bank published volumes about it. Argentina was a failure because it stuck to import substitution, South Korea was a success because it abandoned it early in favor of export orientation. Tariffs are an import substitution strategy.
Saturday, April 12
On a deeper note. The picture of Kristi Noem brandishing a machine gun had 6.2 million views and 40 thousand likes when I looked at it. Trump's approval declined somewhat but it hovers well above 40%: as of April 9 his average approval in the polls weighted by their quality was 45.9%. The hard-core base remains large and solid. The twists and turns on tariffs are not popular but his anti-immigrants posture is approved by a majority. Moreover, on March 23, 76% of Republican respondents agreed with the statement "the Trump Administration should continue to deport people they view as a risk despite the court order...." All this makes me realize again how insular is my knowledge of the US society.
I am not inclined to seek psychological explanations in which people are seen as being pushed from behind rather than as looking to consequences or in which people are so close-minded that they never update their beliefs. (There is interesting work by Andrew Little on different priors versus biased updating.) There is no conceivable evidence that would persuade Robert Kennedy and his followers that vaccinations do not cause autism. randy@thephatic.bsky.social commented on my puzzlement about dismantling the NIH: "As someone who grew up with the type of evangelicals who now run the US govt, @adamprz.bsky.social diaries seem almost willfully blind? they are gutting Science bc it is a source of authoritas outside their ken: outside that of their god, of their Dear Leader, of their various and sundry grifts." One private comment I received said "They do not need medicines; they pray." They may be right but I am not blind "willingly": I just cannot muster the empathy that would make understand such frames of mind.
I can engage in asking "What is it that people must want if this is what they do and they are rational?" But so many postures of Trump's base are motivated by a blind instinct of revenge, against universities, against women, against anything done by Biden, against particular countries, against particular individuals. Their language is vitriolic, hateful, brutal, cruel. I still believe that people do not like to see prices of eggs going up but it may not change any of their fundamental beliefs. I stare at a picture of a woman holding a sign “Mass Deportations Now.” What is in the brain of this woman? I can stare and stare. I see that the vision of mass deportations gives her a blissful euphoria, but I just cannot imagine what she thinks. I know that I should stop searching for rationality but then I am left with no tools to understand anything.
I ended my 2019 book on Crises of Democracy with "This crisis is not just political; it has deep roots in the economy and in society. This is what I find ominous." How can conflicts be processed peacefully when a large part of the society never changes their beliefs, even when their welfare is at stake? What worries me most is that these people do not seem prepared to lose an election. Following Milan Svolik, there is by now a large body of research trying to estimate the numbers of people who are willing to give up democracy, or various aspects of it, in exchange for different policy outcomes they desire. If I read it correctly, the conclusions are quite pessimistic for the US. I wonder how many of them are willing to engage in violence.
One aspect which is manifestly relevant but which I think nobody, myself included, understands is "masculinity." Here is a puzzle that appears immediately. The general picture of Trump's base of support that emerges from exist polls is one of "family men" of middle age, white, religious, married and with children, with family incomes between $30,000 and $100,000. The puzzle is that on prior grounds, one would not expect that such people would be prone to risk, that they would support radical policy turns, or that they would place policy outcomes above institutional stability. Yet this is the core Trump's constituency.
The entire topic of support for Trump is a muddle. Already in 2016 I did not understand how religious people, who entered into politics to defend "family values," could vote for someone who was thrice divorced, who openly vaunted his sexual aggressions, who was manifestly non-religious, and visibly dishonest? I remember some stories in which religious leaders admitted Trump's flaws but saw him as chosen to implement God's will. The opportunistic motivation was that he would pack the courts with opponents of abortion, which he did. So the support of churches for Trump was a result of a strategic calculus dressed up in theological language. I was also puzzled that the Republican Party, which was the standard bearer of free trade, turned around on a dime, but this is a topic apart.
I tread the topic of masculinity with apprehension because the it is replete with doubtful psychological assumptions. It is true that Democrats discriminated against white males: the animus against DEI is against women and people of color. Is this what drives the feelings of revenge? Here are some facts. More women enrolled in colleges already as of 1979. By 2020 women comprised 58% of all college students. As of 2021-22, women received 58.5% of BA degrees, 62.6% of MAs, and 57.0% of doctorates. The median hourly wage of women was 82% of that of men, only slightly higher than 80% in 2002. This ratio was about constant for educational levels through the BA. Fathers work slightly more hours that childless men, mothers slightly fewer hours. The big difference is between occupations, some predominantly female, other predominantly male.
If I am going on a limb, I may as well be blunt: Trump and many people around him behave just as boyish thugs. Portraits of accomplished women are being systematically removed from government buildings, high rank women were purged from the military. One of the remarkable political moments a few years ago was when the response to Biden's State of the Union address was delivered by a woman from her kitchen. I am not certain this is "misogyny," which a dictionary defines as "contempt for or ingrained prejudice against women." For all I know, it may be not contempt for of women, but fear of them. "Associative mating" was a phenomenon in which educated men chose educated women as partners. But given the current numbers about annual college enrollment of high school graduates, if all male college entrants married female college students, 20% of males who did not enroll in college would have to marry women who did. And given the educational wage premiums, these males would probably not earn incomes higher than their spouses. Indeed, Pew reports that in 16% of US households women earn significantly more than men and in 29% about the same. Contrast these patterns with "Again," as in MAGA. What is to be restored here is a pattern in which men earned a "family wage" while women stayed in the kitchen and raised children. The evidence of rapid change of household structure is overwhelming. So are the glimpses of new behavioral patterns of young people: increasing isolation, steeply climbing frequency of anxiety, lower frequency of sexual relations. The role models for young men, the norms of their relations with women, their career patterns all seem to be in flux. I imagine that it must be very difficult to be a male these days. I entered this topic, on which my competence is miniscule, because I think that these patterns may explain why so many males are attracted by the model of aggressive masculinity, guns and all, predatory sexual behavior, worship of money, and absence of any concern over others. At the least it is a clear role model in a world of confusion.
Sunday, April 13
Trump claimed that he was only agreeing to lift most of the tariffs because the leaders of 75 countries supposedly called "kissing my ass" begging to make deals. But NBC reported when it followed up on that claim that "The White House will not release the list of 75 countries that have reached out on trade deals, despite requests from NBC News." Some obviously did: Vietnam is one. But how many?
Financial markets are a world of its own, so I can detect only flagrant signals. The recent one is the climbing rate on 10-year US T-notes, which reached 4.25%. This is a measure of the credit worthiness of the US economy, so its rise indicates increasing doubts about it. It may also well be that China is no longer buying US debt as a retaliation against tariffs. The effect is that US debt is becoming more expensive to finance. The deficit which the US incurs each year and the total debt would have been unsustainable for any other country but in the past the US could get away with it unpunished. It made sense to incur debt when the cost of borrowing was lower than the rate of growth. Now the House Republicans just voted to increase the deficit but this time it may not go unpunished.
Trump used to sell Bibles, basketball shoes, and watches. Now he is into bigger items. We no longer remember that presidents used to divest from controlling their assets and make their tax returns public. Trump's finances and those of his family are completely hidden from public scrutiny. Announcing tariffs with the knowledge that stock prices will decline, buying stocks, and then proclaiming a 90 day postponement can be a hugely profitable operation. Trump may or may have not done it deliberately: we just do not know.
Trump just blinked about China: iphones and computers are excluded from tariffs.
The US now has 712 confirmed cases of measles, a 17% increase over last week in an outbreak that has left two unvaccinated children dead.
Monday, April 14
As Tom Pepinsky incisively observed, "Life in authoritarian states is mostly boring and tolerable." I know from experience that this is true. Dictatorships do collect garbage, regulate traffic, issue dog licenses, and fill street holes: they govern. In turn, people in dictatorships do not incessantly live under the shadow of dramatic historical events; they lead everyday, routine, lives. They learn the rules, they learn how to go around some of the rules, they accept that some of their aspirations and desires are futile. Some decide to collaborate actively while many remain politically quiescent. They are happy when their kids get good grades, they enjoy nice weather, worry about the health of their parents, watch their diets, celebrate birthdays. There are some films they cannot see, some books they cannot read, some things they cannot say and hear in public but these absences are not a source of an acute deprivation. Life goes on.
All this is true only once a dictatorship settles down. The road to dictatorship is filled with dramatic events. It took Italian fascists about six years, from 1919 to 1925, before the system of preventive repression became sufficient to intimidate all their enemies -- some from within the fascist ranks -- and ordinary life became possible. It took much longer in the communist Soviet Union and China, where only the deaths of Stalin and Mao ushered in the possibility of leading ordinary lives. In Nazi Germany, with its persecution of Jews and intense preparations for war, such a moment may have never materialized
So what does it take for life under dictatorship to become boring? There are some academic articles about the sequencing of "backsliding" but the sequences vary from case to case, so this is just a list:
(1) Repressive agencies must be organized and tightly disciplined.
(2) Courts have to be packed, intimidated, or rendered irrelevant.
(3) Given that they are likely to be sites of resistance, universities must be subjected to direct government control.
(4) Potential political opponents, including adverse media, must be neutralized. After some "enemies" are visibly eliminated, preventive repression should be sufficient to silence them.
(5) Some rules must be formally adopted, so that routine life could go on. As Alredo Rocco, the Fascist Minister of Justice, said to the Italian Senate in 1925, "we need to constitute a new legality to enter into legality."
Can these steps be accomplished in the United States? Does the MAGA crowd have the capacity to effectuate them? My views are unstable, changing with different conversations I have. No one says I am out of my mind but most of my interlocutors find me excessively pessimistic, and their arguments sway me. Even if the MAGA revolutionaries would want to establish a stable "ceasarist" regime, do they have in them to pursue it? Do they have the capacity to get it done? Why the oligarchs who line behind Trump, himself and his family included, wouldn't be satisfied with deregulation and tax cuts? Will the Congress and the Supreme Court awake? Fears are not predictions, so this is the place for me to stop.
If it were not a tragedy, it would have been a comedy. The formula with which the Trump administration justified the tariff rates on particular countries used Greek letters, as economists do, so it pretended to be serious economics. But then the product of the two Greek letter was set to 1.00 and it became a rule of thumb: the ratio of a country's trade surplus to the total value of US imports from this country. It looked like a mid-term exercise for Economics 101. Timothy Ryback's book on Hitler's rise to power, Takeover, opens with a byline from Berlin by Frederick Birchall, dated August 10, 1932: "The world's greatest poker game is being played here." The tariff game is played by people who are totally incompetent with consequences that are disastrous.
Becoming monotonous? @realDonaldTrump about 60 Minutes: "They should lose their license. Hopefully, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), as headed by its Highly Respected Chairman, Brendan Carr, will impose the maximum fines and punishment.... CBS is out of control...."
Tuesday, April 15
Two events which indicate that conflicts are coming to a head.
The less complicated one is the Trump-Bukele show. They were just mocking the courts. It was brazen and cynical. The question is what happens next. The Abreu Garcia case returns to the federal judge today and then it will return to the Supreme Court. Lawyers have an almost unlimited ability to make distinctions -- "facilitate" versus "effectuate" is one -- but, from all I read, SCOTUS may have come to the limit of prevarication. It may be forced to decide one way or another: "the prerogatives of the executive over foreign relations override other considerations" or "the government is acting illegally." If the decision is in favor of Trump, the entire system of judicial overview of rights is gone. If the decision is against Trump, the executive will have to decide whether to comply or to openly defy a ruling, not just by one of several hundred of federal judges, but of the Supreme Court of the land. I thought earlier that if the executive is willing to disobey the SCOTUS, immigration is the best issue to do it. But it looks that public opinion on immigrants has shifted in the meantime. As long as the issue was abstract -- "immigration" -- a majority supported Trump's policy. Three weeks ago, 76% of Republican respondents agreed with the statement "the Trump Administration should continue to deport people they view as a risk despite the court order...." But now, as the policy became embodied, with pictures a father of three who has been in the country for years, the support margin for Trump on immigration turned negative. So it seems that disobeying the courts is no longer an electorally optimal strategy. And when we start getting stories about inhuman conditions in the Salvadorean gulags, the shift of opinion will turn even sharper.
The complicated issue is Harvard. I think of it as a game. The government (G) made specific demands either (1) because it believed Harvard (H) would accept or (2) because it knew H would reject and it wanted H to reject. H rejected either (1) because it could not accept or (2) because it thought it would win. If it is (1.1) -- G was so intoxicated by its success with Columbia that it was sure that H would accept anything -- G clearly made a mistake. If it is (2.1) -- G thinks it will win, H has no options other than heroic defeat -- then Harvard's defiant resistance is doomed to fail. The interesting possibilities are (1.2) and (2.2) -- namely, that both G and H believe they win will. Many years ago, when the University of Chicago was threatened with some government suit, the then President of the University and subsequently the Attorney General, Ed Levy, dismissed it with "We have better lawyers than they do." As one reads the government letter to Harvard, the same is obvious. Moreover, Harvard has not only better lawyers; it has a powerful constituency within the legal establishment, among the economic elite, and more broadly among its graduates. I think the government overdid it: the blackmail issued to Harvard goes well beyond the conditions accepted by Columbia and it was impossible to accept, even to bargain about. Harvard was given no choice but to stand up. And, overnight, Harvard is not alone: suddenly even Columbia joined in what now will become a chorus. Here is an excerpt from the statement by the interim President of Columbia, issued today: "But we would reject heavy-handed orchestration from the government that could potentially damage our institution and undermine useful reforms that serve the best interests of our students and community. We would reject any agreement in which the government dictates what we teach, research, or who we hire. And yes, to put minds at ease, though we seek to continue constructive dialog with the government, we would reject any agreement that would require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy as an educational institution." The terms of conflict have been defined, the actors involved have taken clear sides. Being able to pick targets one-by-one gave the government a huge advantage. But now the conflicts is between the government and probably almost all universities, even those not yet directly affected, namely Stanford. The government controls the money but the intellectual resources universities can muster are also powerful. So this conflict will continue.
WEEK 10
Wednesday, April 16
A title in the Financial Times -- yes, Financial Times -- "Trump is halfway to making America a police state." Perhaps my pessimism is not crazy.
Almost every day I go for walks to a park, never as magnificent as at this moment of the year. Huge trees are blooming in colors. Flowers are exploding, birds are singing, and bees are buzzing. This is the world at its most beautiful. And yet I cannot stop thinking about "A song on the end of the world" by Czesław Miłosz (www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49451/a-song-on-the-end-of-the-world). It is difficult not to be morose. Watching soccer, exercising, and doing math were always my ways to escape reality in difficult moments and they are still effective. But I yearn for a respite from the bombardment of calamities, for glimpses of hope, perhaps just for some frivolous moments.
I followed a post entitled "Against the Doomsayers," looking for something that would lift my spirits. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Not giving up to fears is not the same as raising illusory hopes.
Thursday, April 17
The uncertainty whether the Supreme Courts can and wants to stop the government from doing whatever it wants is approaching resolution. The issue may be sending random people to El Salvador, it may be eliminating some government agencies and programs, it may be cutting funds to universities, it may be tariffs. These issues are progressing through the federal courts and they will have to be resolved one way or another, probably not all resolved in the same way.
Deputy Assistant to the President Sebastian Gorka declared (on NEWSMAX) that anyone advocating for due process for Kilmar Abrego Garcia could be viewed as "aiding and abetting a terrorist" and be federally charged. As of yesterday, his potential targets were joined by AFL-CIO, which demanded that "They need to quit wasting time and bring our union brother home NOW!."
The opposition to some government actions now includes almost everyone I can think of. The optimistic scenario is that at some time Trump will moderate. This would require rationalizing and reducing tariffs, restoring some government programs that served the poor and people with disabilities, restoring some research funds to universities, subjecting immigration cases to due process, and abandoning some tax reductions for the rich. The only group I can see which could force this turnaround are Republicans in the Congress, whether because they fear electoral consequences, or because they are ideologically steadfast against increasing debt (remember the Tea Party), or because they are committed to the rule of law. People like Gorka, Neom, Biondi, Patel are opportunists, so they would be willing to follow Trump wherever he leads them. But then there are people like Miller, true ideologues, and some people who are just insane, like Kennedy. I doubt that these people would be prone to compromise, so they would have to be purged. All this is not a likely scenario, so conflicts can only intensify.
Friday, April 18
Trump's sycophants are racing to please their Boss. Some want to withdraw tax free status from Harvard; some want to withdraw its accreditation; some want to prevent it from having foreign students; slash-and-burn. I cannot imagine how Harvard, and other universities, can bargain with the administration. Absent exogenous enforcement, promises of parties to a bargain must be credible, meaning each party must believe that it is in the best interest of the other party to adhere to the terms. Bargaining with the Trump administration seems impossible because different agencies and different individuals appear to act separately. Will the Department of Homeland Security stand behind promises made by the Department of Education, the White House behind those made by the Department of Justice, etc.? How can one negotiate with a motley?
I am getting lost following the Abrego Garcia case. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to return him from El Salvador. The government appealed to the Supreme Court, which ordered the government to "facilitate" his return. District Judge Paula Xinis demanded the government to provide evidence about why it hasn't sought his return. The Trump administration asked a US appellate court to halt this order. The appellate court ruled that the Justice Department must abide by the order. What now? I am not a lawyer so the entire process looks to me like going around in circles. I just fail to see why the issue is so complicated: either the government can keep anyone in the Salvadorean gulags or it must return everyone whom it sent there without due process. If this decision cannot be unequivocally made by the Supreme Court, then what is "the rule of law"?
This is new and, I think, deep. From a letter dated April 14 sent by Edward R. Martin, Jr. US Attorney for the District of Columbia, to a medical journal CHEST: "It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST journal are conceding that they are partisan in various scientific debates...." This is followed by a series of "Have you stopped beating your wife?" questions and a two-week deadline for a response. So now medical journals are going to be scrutinized for "partisan scientific debates." What could it mean to have a "non-partisan debate"? Is there is a pro- and anti-MAGA medical science?
Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet biologist who claimed that the theory of natural selection and Mendelian genetics were incompatible with Marxism. He also maintained that all science is political, "class-oriented," so that his scientific adversaries were political enemies of the Soviet Union. In 1935 he received the support of Stalin and until 1953 his theories were the official doctrine of the Soviet government. Lysenko became a favorite of the Soviet propaganda machine, which overstated his successes, trumpeted his faked experimental results, and omitted any mention of his failures. According to the Wikipedia article on Lysenkoism -- well worth reading -- "More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents."
Harvard's defiance is a big event. I think it goes beyond universities. Law firms caved, media outlets and tech oligarchs tried to bribe Trump. Princeton resisted but until Harvard it was alone; Columbia caved. Congressional Republicans are muzzled; court rulings change nothing. So the Harvard response is a clarion call. Intimidation works when everyone is intimidated. If someone resists and gets away with it, gates to resistance are opened. I think, by the way, that Harvard had no choice but to resist: no university can survive with political commissars overseeing every one of its units and this is the condition demanded by the administration. But it also means that the outcome of the Harvard conflict will be hugely consequential.
I cannot stop thinking about my youth. Under communism, every organization -- from coal mines to government offices to army units -- had political commissars overlooking the conduct of their nominal heads. But at least when I was a student at the University of Warsaw, not university departments. Each department had a Party Secretary but he was not a commissar and had little power. In Poland at least, the police could not enter the campus without permission of the Rector. This norm that was violated in 1968 but it was a norm. I do not know if this was true in the Soviet Union.
Saturday, April 19
Now it is a slapstick. In my list of agencies with which Harvard would have to negotiate I did not include the anti-Semitism task force and, lo and behold, it turns out that the latter to Harvard was sent without its authorization. The letter to Harvard was sent by Josh Gruenbaum, who signed as Comm'r of the Fed..Acquisition Serv. General Services Administration, Thomas E. Wheeler, Acting General Counsel. U.S. Dept. of Education, and Sean R. Keveney, Acting General Counsel. U.S. Dep't Health and Human Services, the last one a member of the anti-Semitism task force. Yet Harvard lawyers committed a malpractice taking it seriously: New York Times quotes May Mailman, identified as the White House senior policy strategist, saying "It was malpractice on the side of Harvard's lawyers not to pick up the phone and call the members of the anti-Semitism task force who they had been talking to for weeks." Just imagine that the entire Trump nightmare would be a joke
Unfortunately, I am persuaded by a comment made by someone in Bluesky. Harvard was ready to capitulate on the original list of demands -- in fact, it already took steps demanded by the government of Columbia -- and this letter was intended to be fired as the second round. The person referred to as a "strategist" is a strategist and the letter was a part of a strategy. So the signers of the letter just jumped the gun. If this is true, yielding to government demands only incites it to push farther. But a rival interpretation is that the letter resulted from infighting within the MAGA crowd, which is incapable of pursuing any credible strategy.
SCOTUS, by a 7-2 decision, ordered the government to temporarily halt sending to El Salvador any of the individuals slated for deportation. The decision is dated today, on a Saturday, so there is a sense of urgency. Reading Steve Vladeck, I again realize how little of the legal situation I understand but it is clear that the decision refers only to the small group of people detained in a particular place in Texas.
AARP published six suggestions which senior citizens returning from a trip abroad should follow at the Immigration.
According to Mississippi Today, the state is set to lose $137 million earmarked for literacy, math, mental health, construction and technology. This is the poorest state in the country, where Trump won 60.9% of the vote in 2024.
Sunday, April 20
I was going to take a deep breath again, asking how all this can end up. But the zigzags of the MAGA motley with regard to the tariffs, sending people to the El Salvador jails, and now the universities are such a mess that I could not put my thoughts in any order. There is something structural about this. I was struck reading about Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao that their loyal subordinates had to guess their minds. No dictator can spell out the details of what he wants, so their subordinates have to engage in some guessing. All of the four adopted a posture of letting conflicts among their lieutenants come to a boil and intervened only when necessary. Moreover, some of them, Hitler in particular, were lazy and capricious. A general view of historians about Nazi Germany echoes Richard J. Evans, according to whom it was a "mess of competing institutions and conflicting competencies...." Mussolini, quoted in a book by Sabino Cassese, complained "If you could imagine the effort it cost me to search for a possible balance in which you could avoid collisions between antagonistic powers touching side by side, jealous, distrustful of each other...." The same may be going on with Trump. He is exceptionally vocal but hard to predict and his sidekicks may be just trying to outguess one another what would please him. The barrage of threats against Harvard -- withdrawing tax exempt status, withdrawing certification, depriving it of foreign students -- sure looks like it. And now the revelation that the Harvard letter was sent prematurely provides evidence that his sycophants are jealous and distrustful of each other.
There are 1.1 million foreign students in the US. They contribute $44 billion, slightly less than the past NIH budget.
I listed to Ezra Kleine's podcast with Asha Rangappa, who came through as exceptionally knowledgeable. What I drew from it is that if Klein is scared then everyone is not a MAGA supporter should be scared. Klein has been trying to maintain a middle-of-the-road, measured position and suddenly he could no longer hold it. The same is true of John Stewart.
Monday, April 21
I am again trying to place Trump in history. He won an election; he controls both houses of the legislature: nothing unusual about it. What is unprecedented is the magnitude of economic, social, and cultural change associated with the electoral outcome. I pored over history looking for similar instances. Several winners of elections wanted to effectuate changes of the same magnitude but they were unable to do it. Only Milei may be coming close. Thatcher, who wanted to privatize, deregulate, and destroy unions, is another candidate but she was constrained by dissensions within her Cabinet and then had to worry about losing elections. Allende, who wanted to nationalize, did not have a majority in the Congress. Mitterand's program was more limited and, anyway, he gave up within a year of assuming office. I am not listing the "backsliders" -- Erdogan, Modi, Orban, Kaczyński -- because their goal has been to monopolize political power but not to radically alter the role of the State in the society. Chávez is the only exception I can think of. The backsliders understand well the Polish proverb -- "Law is like a telegraph pole. You cannot go through it but you can go around it." -- and Trump is, thus far at least, a backslider rather than an outright dictator. But the MAGA program is revolutionary. It affects everyday life of millions of people, from the NIH researchers to school kids in Mississippi. This is not what democratic elections have ever generated. Democracy entails respect for political rights and following some procedures, but most importantly not making the lives of electoral losers intolerable. My academic work led me to believe that democracy cannot survive when the electoral winners foreclose the possibility of losing elections in the future and when they make the lives of losers excessively miserable. So now I am stuck with the prediction that the Trump historical episode will end in costly, likely violent, conflict. I hope I am wrong.
From an introduction to a book by Uwe Wittstock, entitled February 1933: The Winter of Literature, "Whoever browses history books today can well say that one would have had to be crazy not to have understood in 1933 what Hitler meant for them... If the phrase according to which Hitler's crimes were inconceivable has any sense, it applies above all to his contemporaries, incapable to imagine -- they could at most feel -- what the Führer and his men were capable of. It is probably in the very nature of a breakdown of civilization to be difficult to imagine it." The book raises again the question of who should have expected what when. Even ex-post, historians disagree about the inevitability of Hitler. Robert Gerwath, the author of a book on Germany in 1918, thinks that the Weimar Republic was not doomed to fail. So did Amos Alon in a book entitled The Pity of It All. Eric Hobsbawm recalled in his "Memoirs of Weimar" article published in 2008 that "it was clear to those of us who lived through 1932 that the Weimar Republic was on its deathbed." But Fritz Stern thought that "By 1932, the collapse of Weimar had become inevitable; the triumph of Hitler had not." Hence, those Germans who could not imagine the unimaginable were not mentally deficient. Timothy's Ryback's Takeover day-by-day story of the intrigues that ended up with Hitler's coming to power powerfully conveys the message that no one knew how they would end. Wittsock's book on the perceptions of the evolving situation by prominent German writers also conveys the uncertainty. I am reading contemporary accounts of the period surrounding March 1933 to get an intuition of that it took to understand what was happening. But it is the last sentence of the passage from Wittstock that I find most profound: perhaps we just cannot imagine what is ahead of us.
Tuesday, April 22
House Oversight Chair Rep. James Corner is referring Andrew Cuomo to the DOJ for criminal prosecution for allegedly lying to Congress. Federal Housing Finance Agency referred NYS Attorney General Letitia James for criminal prosecution over allegations of mortgage fraud.
A Wisconsin man received an email from the DHS telling him that his parole had been terminated and he needed to leave the US. He is a natural born US citizen. A Connecticut woman received an email with the first sentence "It is time for you to leave the United States." She was born in the US. A California man was warned "Do not attempt to remain in the United States -- the federal government will find you." He was born in the US. These are clearly administrative errors but we already know what happens when the government commits, even admitting them, administrative errors.
Trump: "We cannot give everyone a trial...."
Wittstock, in February 1933, tells a story which illustrates how quickly the understanding of Hitler's repression evolved. It concerns Heinrich Mann, brother of Thomas Mann, himself an extensively published writer and at the time the president of the poetry division of the Prussian Academy of Arts. On February 14, he was urged by a friend who already installed himself in France, Wilhelm Herzog, to leave Germany because of threats to his safety. He refused. Yet as soon as one week later, Mann had his partner take his luggage to the strain station and walked there holding only an umbrella. To avoid suspicions, he purchased a ticket to Frankfurt, there bought another ticket to Karlruhe, and only there another ticket to a border town, Kehl am Rhein. He crossed the border on foot, carrying his suitcase and his umbrella. He never returned to Germany. A few days after his escape, his apartment was visited by the SA and partner was taken to the police station.
WEEK 11
Wednesday, April 23
The sensitivity of the stock market to Trump's pronouncements is startling. Every time he opens his mouth, the Dow goes 1,000 points up or down. One would expect that market movements would be driven by economic fundamentals but the uncertainty seems so overwhelming that investors are just reading his lips.
Thursday, April 24
In the light of the Executive Order entitled RESTORING EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY AND MERITOCRACY, the target is no longer anti-Semitism but anti-discrimination policies based on race and gender. I do not know whether the authority vested in the President includes repealing or amending the regulation for Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as the EO asserts. But the reference to it shows that the intentions of the government are far reaching: the target are not just the policies of the Biden administration with regard to the DEI but the role of the government in preventing discrimination on any grounds.
I was always of two minds about DEI: Why was it required of theoretical physicists to submit statements about DEI? My experience with compulsory "sensitivity" training at NYU was abysmal: mindless people were spewing banalities. The serious question is whether remedial policies should be targeted by some fixed identities. France still refuses to target its policies this way. An article in the NYT some time ago proclaimed that "French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas --- specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism --- are undermining their society." Are these ideas "progressive"? It is obvious that there are enormous disparities --in income, morbidity, access to practically everything --by skin color, both in the United States and in France. Taking a few minutes subway ride in NYC or the RER from the Luxembourg station in Paris, moves one to neighborhoods in which life expectancy is shorter by six years. It is also obvious that these disparities are due to various forms of discrimination. Should remedial policies be targeted to groups defined by identity or should they be formulated in universalistic terms, such as "Everyone must have equal access to medical care"? "Affirmative action" policies have complex and often unclear effects, so I do not have fixed views about them, but I instinctively react against the divisions they perpetuate. The long-term cost of identity-based policies is that they reinforce these identities, they fragment the society into antagonistic groups and solidify divisions. Still, eliminating the role of the government is preventing discrimination -- on any grounds -- can only exacerbate inequality, however one conceptualizes it.
An article in The Atlantic is entitled "Pete Hegserth's Patriotic Duty Is to Resign." Isn't it a pity that "patriotic duty" sounds hollow these days? I am thinking about James B. Donovan, a Republican lawyer who defended a Russian spy because he was committed to the ideal of the rule of law. (See his memoir, Strangers on a Bridge, or the film, Bridge of Spies.) Where are such Republicans today?
Totally minor but intriguing. The bag stolen from Kristi Noem contained $3,000 in cash. Why would anyone carry $3,000 in cash these days?
Friday, April 25
For me, this is the most significant anti-democratic move to date. President's Memorandum of yesterday, entitled "Investigation into Unlawful 'Straw Donor' and Foreign Contributions in American Elections," directs "the Attorney General, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury, to use all lawful authority, as necessary, to investigate allegations regarding the unlawful use of online fund-raising platforms to make 'straw' or 'dummy' contributions or foreign contributions to political candidates and committees, and to take all appropriate actions to enforce the law." The target is ActBlue, the main Democratic fund-raising platform. I have always thought that the defining feature of democracy is that governments remain vulnerable to the possibility of losing elections. This possibility incentivizes the current opposition to wait peacefully for its turn. And, as James Madison already observed, it forces the current government to listen to the voice of the people, to anticipate electoral consequences of its actions. Hence, throughout the past 10 weeks I was repeatedly surprised that the Trump administration appeared oblivious to the electoral effects of its policies. I entertained the possibility that Trump believes that his actions would be electorally successful. But my dark thought has been that he does not care because he is planning to repress the Democratic opposition by force. Now, in a cliché, the cat is out of the bag.
I stayed away from the labeling which engages a lot of people on the media: Is the US still a democracy? I considered that Trump won an election and that he is pursuing his announced program, so the question does not arise. Constitutionalism, "rule of law," may be at stake, I thought, but not democracy. But denying the opposition the possibility to compete in competitive elections is a flagrantly anti-democratic, "backsliding," move. It places Trump in the company of Chàvez, Erdogan, Modi, and Orban. The only question now is how far will he go.
I saw the exhibit on "Degenerate Art" at the Picasso Museum in Paris. The art to be banned, in Hitler's words, "portrays cripples and malformed cretins, women who can evoke only disgust, men closer to beast than to man." But why was the justification of banning works of art couched in the language of "degeneration"? The concept of degeneration was popularized by Max Nordau in a book published in 1892-3. In his conception, degeneration is everything that undermines the social order created by nature and it is perpetuated only by people who are in some ways psychologically crippled. Hence, everything that threatens politically defined "normality" should be politically repressed. In Nazi Germany, "degeneration" acquired a racial connotation, because it was deemed to occur when naturally unequal races mix. To my best knowledge this word was not a part of the Soviet vocabulary, so it is ironical that while a close synonym of "degenerate art" in Germany was "Cultural Bolshevism," the Bolsheviks banned the same art that the Nazis did. I find it particularly puzzling that both regimes banned purely abstract art, rather than consider it unpolitical, but both did.
I comment on this because "degenerate" is a word prominent in the vocabulary of Putin. In his 2013 speech at Valdai, Putin attacked the "degeneration" of the West. Russia was a moral bastion against the decadence, sexual license, pornography and gay rights of the West. In a 2021 speech, he contrasted the ideology of the West with Russia's "healthy conservatism" that repudiated revolution and pursued organic forms of development. There are only two genders and they are determined biologically at birth. Homosexuality is an offense against nature. Traditional family roles are the mainstay of society. "Genderism" is a mortal threat to national survival. Western culture is degenerate: it contradicts nature. As such it is doomed to fail.
Keeping an eye on measles and other potential health disasters: according to the NYT, "Measles Surge in Southwest is Now the Largest Single Outbreak Since 2000."
Saturday, April 26
This touches a raw nerve in me. Now the target of the administration's hatchet man, Ed Martin, is the Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the most valuable intellectual resource of the internet era. I still own lots of expensive math and stats textbooks, which I bought before 2000, but I never open them and nobody wants them even as a gift because we can look up in Wikipedia almost everything we want to learn. It opens access to general knowledge. It is an irreplaceable research tool. I use it to read biographies, I have used it to generate data sets on political events, I use it to read up on films and novels. I use it almost every day. I have long thought that it should have been a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, because it is a sum of what we know today as a humanity. That it would be attacked by semi-literate hacks makes me too angry to go on.
Sunday, April 27
Back to my obsession: Why many Germans did not predict Hitler's dictatorship? I am just trying to figure out how to think. Suppose that among the potential outcomes one is certain to transpire: the Nazis will come to power and establish a dictatorship. People are still uncertain what the outcome will be if they do not have full knowledge. They may still guess wrong entertaining false hopes. But the outcome is predictable and the errors are due only to human failings. Suppose, however, that the outcome may be one of three possibilities which are equally probable: the Weimar Republic may survive, a right-wing dictatorship may materialize, the Nazis may come to power. Now, as Diakonis and Skyrms point out in Ten Great Ideas about Chance, the outcome is still determined: if we knew the original position and the force applied to a coin, given the laws of physics we would predict correctly the result of each toss. But if this information is not accessible, all we know is that the two outcomes of a toss of an unbiased coin are equiprobable. This means that guessing correctly where the coin will land is just a matter of luck, as is the correct guess of a winning lottery number. Not being able to predict correctly is then due to conditions, not to cognitive deficiencies.
The 1930-33 period in Weimar was like a coin toss. By 1930 there was not a single precedent of a democratic regime that had lasted 11 years and fell. History could not have been a guide. But by now we have a lot of history behind us: this is why I, among many others, was able to conduct statistical studies of breakdowns of democracy. And the lesson of history was that the probability that democracy would fall in a country like the United States was practically zero. So perhaps now lessons from history only mislead. There is a Polish proverb which says "Pessimism is but informed optimism." But informed by what?
Now I need to put on the garb of a political scientist. There are, I think, three ways to confront the failure of the statistical results. One is to shrug shoulders: extremely unlikely events are not impossible and they may occur, so the US is just a fluke. The second one is to suspect that all the statistical models we have been using are conditioned on something we did not include or observe. The third one is that we have correctly identified the conditions that matter but have never encountered their particular combination that occurs now in the US. I lean toward the last possibility. When I regress breakdowns of democracy on per capita income, the number of past partisan alternations in office during the current spell of democracy, and income share of the top 1% recipients, I predict that the probability of it breaking down in the US is of the order of 1 in 2.6 million country years. When I introduce the interaction of the three variables, this probability jumps to 1 in 263 country years, by the order of 10,000. It is still very low but no longer as surprising: I would not want to get into a plane that has a 0.0038 chance of crashing. The exact numbers depend on the period under consideration, data sources, and the estimators so they indicate only orders of magnitude. But my intuition is that what is happening in the US is a consequence of an extremely rare, perhaps never encountered before, combination of historical conditions. This is why lesson from history fail and why we, as observers of the ongoing developments, are unable to predict where they will end.
Monday, April 28
This is difficult to make sense of. All the most recent public opinion polls indicate that Trump's approval has declined and that majorities oppose his handling of particular issues. According to the ABC/WashingtonPost/Ipsos poll the margin of Trump's approval is now -16%: 39% approve, 55% disapprove. This is the lowest ever observed after 100 days in office, lower than Trump's in 2017. Several other polls converge to the same conclusion. But the support for Democrats is abysmal. Trump is seen as being "out of touch" by 60% of respondents but Democrats in Congress by 69%. Trump is particularly week on his handling of the economy, where he gets confidence of only 37% of respondents, but Democrats in Congress get 30%. Still, the recent NYT/Siena poll has Democrats leading 47% to Republicans 44% in vote intentions. Interestingly, the Democratic advantage seems to be totally due to young women. There is no evidence that Trump's base is eroding: among those who voted for him in 2024, 91% still approve of him.
The low support for the Democratic Party is likely due to the fact that it is deeply divided, unable to generate a unified opposition and even less so a coherent alternative. Other than opposing this or that, it is not easy to see what the Democrats stand for. Defending democracy requires more than opposing whatever the government is doing. The opposition must be more than an expression of ire. Defending democracy requires a positive, future-oriented program to reform it. This is not an easy task. Being against something unites, while being for something divides. When different groups opposing violations of democratic norms attach different values to democracy, the rejection of backsliding may command majority support while any given proposal for reform attracts only a minority. Perhaps this is the predicament of Democrats.
Last night I watched an old film by Ettore Scola, Una giornata particolare, with Loren and Mastroianni, which takes place during Hitler's visit to Italy in 1938. Mastroianni plays someone who is rejected, at the end of the film arrested, by the regime as "degenerate" because he is homosexual. This is not a good time to watch films like this one.
Tuesday, April 29
The occupation I would want least these days are school or small town librarians.
There is a new Executive Orders on accreditation of colleges and universities. The entire system is so complicated that I cannot make sense of it. The closest parallel that comes to me is the French wine certification system, which is conducted by regional associations of producers, not centralized at the national level, and independent of the government, yet honored throughout the country, "honored" at least by prices. Now Trump wants to control the network of accreditation, with the same ideological demands it made of universities. Is there any institution the MAGA crowd can keep its hands off?
A step farther, this time concerning State and local officials. Today's Executive Order: "The Attorney General shall pursue all necessary legal remedies and enforcement measures to enforce the rights of Americans impacted by crime and shall prioritize prosecution of any applicable violations of Federal criminal law with respect to State and local jurisdictions whose officials:
(a) willfully and unlawfully direct the obstruction of criminal law, including by directly and unlawfully prohibiting law enforcement officers from carrying out duties necessary for public safety and law enforcement; or
(b) unlawfully engage in discrimination or civil-rights violations under the guise of 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' initiatives that restrict law enforcement activity or endanger citizens."
Inflation is what everyone fears as a consequences of tariffs. What about empty shelves? I just saw a graph showing that the total cargo of ships arriving at US ports has been higher during this year than during the past two. But according to several sources the number of vessels from China expected to arrive during the week of May 4-10 is expected to fall sharply and their tonnage will be about one half of that of last year. The sense I make of these data is that some importers have been stocking in anticipation of the tariffs and that the current volume is imports from China is already falling. It looks like the time to buy Christmas toys is now because there will not be any on the shelves when Christmas comes. But for many products the shelves may be empty much earlier: some estimates are for mid-May.
I am trying to imagine what it is like to be an undocumented immigrant who has lived and worked in the US for years. The closest I can come up with is the Passenger, by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, a novel about a Jew in Germany 1938. He cannot remain home because he would be detained, he is afraid to install himself elsewhere because he would be found, so he keeps taking overnight trains from one random place to another and back, with a predictable end. He is a German citizen, a wealthy bourgeois at that. But suddenly, he has no place where he can hide.
Former French president François Hollande proposed establishing a status of a "scientific refugee," in the mode of "political refugee." All over Europe there are initiatives to provide funds for receiving researchers moving away from the US. The main obstacle are salary differentials: with some differences across countries, European researchers earn between 1/3 and 1/4 of the American ones. Hence, even if the US researchers are willing to take large salary cuts, to some extent compensated by free access to health and education, they would still be earning more than the local ones, which is not a tenable situation. Another obstacle is that European scientific institutions remain hierarchical, while US researchers enjoy autonomy. Unless Europe is willing to invest more in scientific research in general and to restructure its research institutions, these initiatives are doomed to have only minor effects.
WEEK 12
Wednesday, April 30
It is 100 days since the inauguration.
Many years ago I participated in a small meeting organized by the then newly elected President of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. He sought advice, among other subjects, on whether to pursue a "honeymoon" or a "momentum" strategy. The honeymoon strategy is to do everything as quickly as possible, during the first 100 days. The momentum strategy is to proceed in steps: begin with items that are politically easy, demonstrate power, and then gradually move to more difficult items. Trump clearly opted for the honeymoon: as of April 24, he signed 139 executive orders, 37 memorandums, and 39 proclamations. His subordinates delve into practically everything. Repression, however, may follow a momentum strategy: the government started with undocumented immigrants, for which he had majority support, then proceeded to legal visa holders but, in the light of Trump's comment on "homegrown", it may move to green-card holders, naturalized citizens, and then US born citizens.
The date is only symbolic but it provokes taking stock. Here is how I see the situation now. These are neither judgments nor predictions, just facts.
(1) Courts.
There are lots of temporary disabling orders issued by federal judges and the Trump administration never openly defied a court ruling but no court ruling has stopped it from doing what it wants. Mahmoud Khalil is still languishing in prison, Kilmar Abrego Garcia remains in El Salvador, ICE arrests whomever it wants, no university recovered its federal grants, federal employees were fired, several government agencies were dismantled and others experienced budget cuts, several law firms were disabled from appearing in federal courts. Nothing has changed. The Supreme Court appears to be trying to avoid an open confrontation with the administration.
(2) Dismantling the government.
Several agencies were abolished, most prominently USAID, but including minor institutions such as the Wilson Center at the Smithsonian. In several cases, the agencies were not formally abolished, as this would require legislation, but their personnel was reduced by 99%. I could not get a full list of them anywhere, even using Chatgpt. I know they include Voice of America, US Interagency Council on Homelessness, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Office for Civil Rights and Liberties but this is just a small part. Many other agencies were gutted. Again, I have only examples, which include Federal Housing Authority, Health and Human Services Department, State Department, Federal Aviation Authority, and whatever is the agency that provides weather forecasts. The elephant is the Department of Education: it is still unclear whether it will be formally abolished or just disabled. Numbers of people who lost federal jobs are difficult to determine because some are fired and then rehired.
(3) Medical research funds.
The budget for NIH is to be reduced by 44%. I mention NIH separately, because reducing federal funds for medical research is the least popular government policy according to a recent poll: the margin between supporting and opposing cuts is -56%.
(4) The economy.
Stock markets are exceptionally volatile but with a clear downward trend. While Dow Jones soared 1,500 points when Trump was elected, it fell 8.89% since January 21 and 5.17% during the past month. Consumer confidence is sharply down. Both professional economists and the general public are highly pessimistic about inflation and GDP growth. Tariffs are almost universally expected to increase inflation. Some economists fear that deregulation of the financial system will generate a major crisis.
(5) Actions against universities.
Sixty universities are subject to government investigations. The original charge against them was anti-Semitism, now the charges are more focused on DEI. The government never attempted to explain why these charges justify freezing biomedical research. Several universities were subject to total or partial cuts of federal funding. They are threatened not only with cuts of research funds, but also with withdrawing accreditation, losing their tax-exempt status, a tax on income from endowments, and being deprived of foreign students. Some universities are yielding, some resisting.
(6) Selective actions against law firms.
Law firms that represented Trump's adversaries, political and non-political, are subject to sanctions which would disable them from appearing in federal courts. Again, some yielded, some are resisting in courts.
(7) Selective threats against non-government institutions, organizations, and private individuals.
They include interference into medical journals, prosecution of Wikipedia, Trump's pronouncements against ABC, CNN and MSNBC. Some former Trump aides are accused of treason; others lost their government protection.
(8) Elections.
A bill is being processed through the Congress that would require specific documents proving citizenship in order to register to vote. The Department of Justice was instructed to initiate actions against the main funding platform of the Democratic Party, ActBlue. Public opinion polls show declining support for Trump: most recent polls show that his approval rating is the lowest any president had after 100 days, including his first term. The confidence in the Democratic Party, however, is even lower than in Trump or the Republican Party.
(9) Republicans in the House.
Trump established complete control over Republicans in the House, where he cannot afford to lose votes. Even those Republicans who in the past vigorously opposed government deficits and debt are mute.
(10) Resistance.
Following Harvard, several universities are resisting measures that would eliminate their autonomy. Some law firms also defy the administration. Street protests two weeks ago had a reasonably high participation and new demonstrations are planned. They are not led or coordinated by the Democratic Party. Only Bernie Sanders and AOC address themselves directly to the public.
(11) Wars.
Children are still being bombed and die in Ukraine and in Gaza.
Thursday, May 1
More on the 100 days. In a recent poll, 66% of respondents think that Trump's performance is "chaotic," 59 % that it is "scary," and 42% that it is "exciting." "Chaotic" is probably due to the zigzags on tariffs. I wonder if "scary" is due mainly to the prospect of increasing inflation or the threat to democracy.
Interesting from an April 29 Substack post by Ben Ansell: "You cannot directly purchase respect. You can of course purchase lots of things that might invoke respect from others - be it cars, clothes, housing, weird golden sprayed trophies. But the thing you really want, you cannot buy wholesale." Respect is something one may earn as a consequence of some actions or achievements but not when their purpose is to generate respect. In Jon Elster's view, which Ansell quotes, it can be only an unintended by-product. Ansell is thinking of the tech bros but I wonder whether it does not apply to Trump himself. He is incessantly touting himself and his achievements. "Respect" is a word he uses often, even if in his mouths it sounds mafioso.
Some weeks ago I quoted a sign posted at the Warsaw airport in 1990, warning that "Violators will be punished and prosecuted." When I saw it at the time, I interpreted it as an indication that, having just emerged from 45 years of communism, Poles needed to learn that governments must prosecute before they could punish. Yet this is the generic legal posture of the Trump administration. It applies to immigrants, to law firms, to universities. The guiding principle is simple: those guilty should be punished. The guilt of those being punished is obvious, so they do not deserve due process. I already quoted Deputy Assistant to the President Sebastian Gorka saying that anyone advocating for due process for Kilmar Abrego Garcia could be viewed as "aiding and abetting a terrorist."
Friday, May 2
"Backsliding," I thought, has two dimensions: one is protecting oneself from the possibility of losing office through elections, the second is extending discretion in policy making beyond established institutional limits. Project 2025, which is faithfully being implemented by the Trump administration, makes me think of the second dimension in a narrower way, namely in terms of an ideological project to radically increase or reduce the role of the State with regard to the society. There are several backsliders on the first dimension -- monopolizing power -- who have no revolutionary project. There have been some democratically elected governments that had revolutionary projects but which did not try to monkey with the electoral mechanism. I can think only of three who had revolutionary projects and did everything possible to disarm any political opposition. Here is a table with some names:
Revolutionary
Yes No
Yes Chàvez, Morales, Trump Erdogan, Modi, Orban
Power grab
No Allende, Mitterand, Milei Most
Allende was going to lead Chile to socialism but he had deep respect for democratic norms. The electoral program of Mitterand's coalition was to "Change Lives" (Changer la Vie) but Mitterand did not have any ideological beliefs and he was prepared to subject himself to the verdict of elections. I also include Milei in this category because, while he has a radical neo-liberal project, at least thus far he has stayed away from trying to manipulate elections. Thatcher and Reagan probably belong in the same category. In turn, Erdogan, Modi, Orban, and several others have done everything possible to protect themselves from the possibility of losing office, including sizeable political repression, but they have no ideological projects. So the list of governments which both try to hold onto power by any means and to use it to implement an ideological project has only three names. I tried to find more and I pushed some friends who should know to give me other examples, but we could not come up with any more. The events we are living through are historically rare.
Saturday, May 3
Here is something truly grotesque. Chris Krebs, a former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, had his Global Entry withdrawn. Presidential Memorandum of April 9 was dedicated exclusively to him, as "a significant bad-faith actor." What follows in the text is inane: "Krebs, through CISA, falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, .... Abusive conduct of this sort both violates the First Amendment and erodes trust in Government, thus undermining the strength of our democracy itself." What puzzles me is how the administration succeeds to act on such minute details. The order to go after Mr. Krebs comes from the very top of the administration, the President. But I doubt that the President personally ordered to withdraw Global Entry clearance from anyone: he probably does not even know about the existence of this program. Someone in the White House must have thought about Mr. Krebs, must have contacted the US Customs and Border Protection and ordered it to take this particular action. Do they have some young people within the White House whose job it is to make life difficult for people Trump does not like? Still, this must have been the least consequential action ever taken by any chief executive: now Mr. Krebs will have to wait in line 10 minutes longer to reenter the US. When revenge is entailed, the attention span of the administration is unlimited.
Just for the record. The offensive to destroy science continues: NSF stopped awarding all funding as of April 30, "until further notice." The offensive to subjugate media continues: funds for NPR and PBS were cut.
Sunday, May 4
I asked a friend, someone who has a very good record of predicting political events, what he thinks these days. His response was "It depends on the weather." I may be more persistently pessimistic but my fears and hope also oscillate widely. Today it is sunny, so I am asking myself which of the imaginable atrocities are not possible in the United States. Specifically, which of the repressive measures used by various dictators could not be implemented in the US?
The first candidate is not holding an election, which has no precedent in the history of the US. Elections were held even during the Civil War.
The second candidate is massive incarceration of political opponents. The precedent is the Sedition Act of 1918, which extended the Espionage Act of 1917 to speech and opinion critical of the war and of the US government. According to Wikipedia, some 1,500 persons were prosecuted under this Act and more than 1,000 were convicted. Notable among them was the Socialist leader, Eugene Debs, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison, of which he ended up serving two. This Act was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1919 but it was repealed in 1920. The article in Wikipedia ends on a positive note: "Subsequent Supreme Court decisions, such as Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), make it unlikely that similar legislation would be considered constitutional today."
The third one is the use of any branch of the Armed Forces against US civilians. This is the essence of the Posse Camitatus Act of 1878. The escape clause in this Act is "unless authorized by the Constitution or an act of Congress," but it still seems highly unlikely.
Continuing elections, no gulags, no Tiananmen Squares is all that comes to my mind. Perhaps this is already a lot if one's vision of the future is truly bleak: Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao committed these atrocities. But it still has the feeling of gallows humor.
Monday, May 5
I am taking the day off. It is my 85th birthday. I lived through all kinds of hell. Bombs were falling on my head when I was four. I grew up under a repressive regime, violent until I was 13, then more tolerant. I am a refugee and an immigrant. I had my share of US visa problems. I was deeply affected by the coup in Chile, where I lived just before it. But I was still unprepared that in my very old age I would be entertaining the possibility of the end of democracy in the United States. I am not going to spoil my birthday thinking about it.
Tuesday, May 6
The President of the EU Ursula von der Leyen announced yesterday that the Union will spend 500 million Euros to attract non-European scientists to European institutions, while President Macron pledged that France will spend 100 million. It is difficult to think that these announcements are more than a fanfaronade, pure show. The US government cut 736 million dollars, 651 million Euros at the current exchange rate, from Columbia University alone. The total cut in the budget of the NIH projected in the current budget proposal is about 21 billion and many more billions are cut from other government funding agencies.
In 2024, the US spent 3.59% of its national product on research and development, about 1 trillion dollars. In Europe, R&D expenditures vary significantly across countries: Sweden spent 3.41% of its GDP, Germany 3.13%, UK 2.90%, France 2.23%, Spain 1.44%, and Italy 1.39%. These percentages are equivalent to US$ 180 billion spent by Germany, 95 billion by the UK, and 68 billion by France. Hence, the scale of the Choose Europe for Science program, which is how Macron dubbed it, is just miniscule. Even for France, which has been starving science and scientists during the recent years, 100 million is just 0.0015 of the current spending on R&D.
The opportunity Europe is missing is huge. According to numbers cited by the Hill, a dollar invested in biomedical research in the US generated $8.30 in eight years, implying a 30.2% annual rate of return. A March 2023 careful study of rates of return to R&D in the OECD countries, by Frontier Economics, concludes that the median rate at the level of countries is 15% while the mean rate is 36%. I find these numbers hard to believe but even if they were much lower, they would still be much higher than any other investment. Moreover -- now I am just speculating -- the difference in economic growth rates between the US and Europe may be attributable to the under-investment in R&D by European countries. Hence, the opportunity of attracting top US researchers is unprecedented. The obvious problem is that almost all European countries already engage in deficitary spending and the push toward rearmament puts an additional burden on fiscal deficits. This is why, I think, the steps taken by Europe are so timid.
What would it take to attract researchers now located in the US? The salary differentials between the US and Europe are large. Here is a comparison of the ranges of gross annual salaries by academic levels (all the numbers are in thousands of US dollars transformed at today's exchange rates):
Level US Germany France Netherlands UK
1 60-130 57-68 32-54 51-73 51-64
2 70-160 68-85 62-90 60-77
3 90-300+ 79-113 43-90 73-124 80-160
Taxes are higher in Europe but so are social services. The effective net incomes are impossible to determine and the nominal comparisons may over-estimate the differences. The numbers we do have show that the top US researchers at level 1 would suffer a salary cut of between 44% if moving to the Netherlands and 58% if relocating to France and at level 3 between 47% if moving to the UK and 70% if relocating to France.
Many US researchers may have no choice but to move because they will be unable to do any kind of research if they remain. Some need only paper, pencil, and a waste paper basket; some, as a former President of Princeton once remarked, don't even need a waste paper basket. But some need expensive equipment. The typical annual research grant in the US includes between $250 and $500 thousand in direct costs and between $500 thousand and 1 million with indirect costs. Hence, even if US researchers were willing to take salary cuts, each would still require some sum between $250 and $500 thousand per year to conduct their research, plus the indirect costs.
All the numbers I used are approximate and not all can be compared but the glaring conclusion is that the movement of US based scholars to Europe will be at best a trickle.
WEEK 13
Wednesday, May 7
A frequent comment in the social media is "This is not legal." So what?
A friend commented on my belief that democracy collapses when the electoral winners make the life of the losers intolerable, by observing that Trump is making the life of his supporters miserable. According to the Substack by Don Moynihan, the net effect of the proposed changes of expenditures and taxes will be that the bottom quintile of income recipients will lose about 5% of their incomes, while the second bottom quintile will lose about 1%. So my friend seems to be right. I am not persuaded, however, that this will have political effects. Some people go to the gallows singing hymns in praise of their hangman. Is this what Trump is banking on? He has become exceptionally religious since his approval took a downturn: May 1 was proclaimed to be the Day of Prayer and a Religious Liberty Commission was established by an Executive Order. Can ideology beat the economy? No economist thinks so but this is their professional bias. Abraham Lincoln did not think so and he was not an economist. The MAGA people seem to think so. It was always a puzzle why so many people would vote for someone whose program they should have been expected to make them worse off economically. When pressed, my economist friends could come up only with the explanation that people were reacting to the post-Covid inflation but were unable to formulate forecasts. The question remains whether, perhaps only how long, will people support Trump when their economic conditions deteriorate.
The government will impose a 100% tariff on foreign films. According to @realdonaldtrump, La Dolce Vita is incompatible with MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.
Thursday, May 8
We forgot. We face the specter of a calamity that will make life on earth impossible, Trump or not Trump. Trump did make a contribution to accelerate its advent. But the tragedy is that everyday events are so pressing that we no longer think beyond the present moment.
I am dumfounded. I asked Chatgpt how it can happen that higher per capita income and a larger number of past alternations in office increase the probability that democracy survives while interaction between them decreases this probability, which is what I find when I do statistical analyses. The first answer was:
"1. Complacency and Overconfidence: Wealth + history of peaceful power transitions might lead to the perception that democracy is "consolidated."
This can:
Reduce vigilance against authoritarian backsliding.
Encourage elites or leaders to test limits, assuming institutions will hold.
Lead to weaker public resistance to democratic erosion."
I found it brilliant. I have read some technical stuff on how the AI works but I cannot even imagine how it came up with this answer, within seconds. Other answers were more shaky but this was the first possibility that came to me and it sounds plausible. So now I can be replaced by an algorithm.
The US was ranked in the 57th place, between Sierra Leone and Gambia, on press freedom by Reporters without Borders. Here is the justification of this placement in the 2025 by the World Press Freedom Index: "In the United States (57), Donald Trump's second term as president has led to an alarming deterioration in press freedom, indicative of an authoritarian shift in government. His administration has weaponised institutions, cut support for independent media, and sidelined reporters. With trust in the media plummeting, reporters face increasing hostility. At the same time, local news outlets are disappearing, turning vast swaths of the country into 'news deserts.' Trump also terminated federal funding for the US Agency for Global Media, which distributes resources to vital international media organisations, affecting audiences and outlets worldwide."
Friday, May 9
There goes item 3 of my list of atrocities impossible in the United States. This is from the Executive Order issued on April 28:
"Sec. 4. Using National Security Assets for Law and Order. (a) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate, shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist State and local law enforcement.
(b) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Attorney General, shall determine how military and national security assets, training, non-lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime."
I see no echoes of this EO in the media but I find it exceptionally ominous. Just a few days I thought that using the armed forces against US civilians is impossible. It no longer seems so.
I have received an enlightening comment via Substack from Kunheo on my recurrent puzzlement about why Germans did not anticipate Hitler. His analysis is that the German bourgeoisie did fear Hitler but feared the Communists even more. Between the two, they rationally opted for Hitler, choosing the lesser evil. When this explanation is transported across countries it implies that the falling support for Trump does not predict much as long as the electorate dislikes the Democrats even more.
Saturday, May 10
I have stayed away from corruption, for which there is rapidly growing evidence. I must admit that I do not care much if Trump is getting rich, just because for me his enrichment pales in importance in comparison to what he is doing to the country and the world. There is a Polish proverb: "It is not the time to lament the roses when forests are burning." When big disasters hit, everything else recedes in importance, even the defeat of my favorite soccer team. Still, he may be electorally vulnerable on this issue.
When I talk to foreigners, the first question they invariably ask is "Where is the opposition?" I have no answer. The Democratic Party seems completely adrift. It has no program, no leader, no strategy. It does not even make the news. With some individual exceptions, it is just mute.
Montesquieu (1748) thought that if any power succeeded to violate fundamental laws, "everything would unite against it"; there would be a revolution, "which would not change the form of government or its constitution: for revolutions shaped by liberty are but a confirmation of liberty." In this tradition, Weingast (1997, 2015) argued that if a government were to conspicuously violate the constitution, cross a "bright line," citizens would coordinate against it and, anticipating this reaction, the government would not commit such violations. Fearon (2011) thought that the same would occur if a government were not to hold an election or commit flagrant fraud. A combination of separation of powers and popular reactions would make democratic institutions impregnable to the "encroaching spirit of power" (Madison 1788), the desire of politicians for enduring and unlimited power. Are such beliefs just false?
Sunday, May 11
Stephen Miller floated the idea of suspending habeas corpus. Textually, "The writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So I would say that's an option we're actively looking at." It may refer only to immigrants, because in the view of the administration their guilt does not require any due process. When I played soccer in Chile 55 years ago, my nickname was Perez, from the first three letters of my name. I am trying to imagine what my life would have been like today if my name were in fact Adán Pérez.
I just read an informative post by Scott Galloway on the contribution of federal funding to the economic success of the US. He lists the internet, GPS, mRNA, Siri as products of government conducted or government sponsored research that led to the growth of the most successful private companies.
Over the years and across different ranking systems, US universities have been consistently ranked as best in the world. The QS 2025 ranking has MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and CalTech among the top 10. Times Higher Education ranks MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, and Yale in the top 10. I wonder how many US universities will be in the top 10 by 2028.
Back to my persistent puzzlement: Why would the administration cancel grants to study cancer to a university that has a Middle Eastern Center?
By a Proclamation issued on May 9, Trump decreed May 11 to be Mother's Day: "NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim May 11, 2025, as Mother's Day." Nothing can occur in the country without being authorized by the Leader. In fact, Mother's Day has been a national holiday since 1914.
Monday, May 12
Jeanine Pirro is the 23rd former Fox employee appointed to the administration. Their skill is preaching to the faithful. Loyalty over competence is the criterion of Trump's recruitment. Because the loyalists compete for Trump's attention, the government frequently makes an impression of an uncoordinated chaos. But it also means that it leaves no stone unturned. Its attention to detail is impressive. They withdraw Global Entry permits from particular individuals, they make disappear climate data collected over decades, they act against specific programs at particular universities, they censor particular books. My general impression is that the administration has a detailed blueprint but it fumbles frequently implementing it. It has a program but not the cadre to implement it competently. This may mean that its animus will fizzle away but it also means that some of its random slashes are exceptionally destructive and perhaps irreversible. There was an article in the New York Review of Books some years ago pointing out that the people who were disloyal to Trump during his first administration were not the "deep state" but a "shallow" one: those he appointed to the top positions. Now, I think, those people are intensely loyal. I am wondering, however, how the competent people left over from the previous administration will act in a system in which the incentives are to be loyal. Will they be willing to act against their expertise or will they sabotage inane ideas? How solid is the "deep state" against the barrage of incompetent loyalists?
I have only a vague memory of having read a game-theoretic paper in which the government makes a large unpopular move, then goes back a part of the way, and gains popularity with its retreat. The assumption must be that people react only to most recent changes, to the "slopes" in mathematese. They do not compare their welfare under the original status quo with their welfare after the retreat, which is lower, but only to the improvement resulting from moderating steps. Such reactions do not appear rational but strangely this seems to be the way the stock market reacts to news about tariffs. If the public reacts the same way, Trump's retreat from some tariffs will increase his support.
Henry Farrell writing on DOGE on May 12 deserves being quoted verbatim: "Be aggressive, prizing speed over efficiency. Who cares if you make mistakes? You are not looking to achieve perfection, but victory! Aim to achieve complete domination, before your enemies can crush you. Take them by surprise, bypassing their defenses. Keep them perpetually on the back foot, as you move from one aggressive action to another, so that they are always reeling and off balance. Work with a small team, which is deliberately insulated from the bigger organization, and not accountable to it. That is, very much, the story of the last four months of DOGE. It hasn't succeeded in reshaping the federal government around its mission, and it almost certainly won't. But like the original blitzkrieg, it has absolutely created large scale devastation."
Tuesday, May 13
I have run out of steam. From time to time I wanted to abandon this Diary because following the news every day is depressing. Now I want to abandon it because I just cannot keep up. This is a tsunami. It floods everything indiscriminately. Every day some government agency or program is dismantled, some funds are cut, some institution or individual is targeted by a variety of sanctions, someone is arrested, an illiterate letter is sent by some Department Secretary, some scientific data accumulated over decades disappear. If it were not tragic, it would have been boring. But, worse, I can no longer contain my anger. I have been controlling my emotions because I believe that outrage blinds. Now I am frequently just outraged. I may post something if I think I have something to say but I can no longer keep the Diary on a daily basis. I am going to still do some research, watch La Dolce Vita, read novels, take walks, and follow soccer.
Given that I am about to quit, this is a time to collect my thoughts. As I see it now, there are three, roughly distinguished, possible prospects: (1) Trump will moderate and the animus will fizzle away because the MAGA crowd is incapable of governing effectively, (2) Trump will moderate because Republicans will lose the House in 2026 or even earlier because some House Republicans will fear losing in 2026, (3) Nothing will stop the MAGAs from doing whatever they want, including establishing a de facto dictatorship.
The question I have been repeatedly asking myself is how do we go about attaching probabilities to such outcomes. The "we" is obviously different for the political elite, economic elite, intellectual elite, and ordinary people. In Germany, the political elite incorrectly believed until February 1933 that they would control Hitler even if he were to become the Chancellor. The economic elite feared communists more than Nazis, so it rationally opted for Hitler even if it preferred an army dictatorship. The intellectual elite, in turn, kept changing its expectations very rapidly as the events unfolded. (There is a very good book about it, Uwe Wittsock, February 1933).
People with whom I interact divide. Some think that (1) is most likely, many that it is (2), while I think it is (3). Is there any way to resolve such disagreements? Do we differ only because of our psychological predispositions? Unprecedented events are unlikely by construction if one thinks inductively but if they occur it means that thinking inductively is misleading. We all had thought that a breakdown of democracy in the US is next-to-impossible, which is what the data say. The essence of the question, as I see it, is how one attaches expected utilities to unprecedented events. This is a twofold question: (1) How bad one expects the imaginable but unprecedented outcome to be? (2) How does one attach probabilities to unprecedented events? Note that answers to these questions have consequences for actions. Should one just wait, expecting the danger to fizzle away; should one engage in actions that may prevent it; should one prepare to emigrate, as did many Germans?
As I confessed earlier, my views are unstable. They change depending on who I interact with last. I often have a gnawing feeling that my pessimism is excessive. Perhaps the economic consequences of Trump's policies will be so disastrous that Republicans will suffer a defeat in 2026, so resounding that it will be impossible to avoid. This, I think, is the primary hope of MAGA opponents and it seems quite plausible. Mobilizing for it is crucial even if the state of the Democratic Party is dismaying. Still, my fear is that Trump will prevail in 2026 either because his base will remain solid or because of repression and fraud or both. And if Republicans retain the control of both Houses in the mid-term election, Trump will be liberated to do whatever he wants. So we will not know for eighteen months.
finding this really interesting and thoughtful--also, I wonder if you are keeping it elsewhere? The internet is ephemeral and if the US is headed in a dire direction, I have to wonder about the stability of these platforms or their willingness to oblige or resist those in charge--we've already seen most platforms be happily supportive of the regime...
I appreciate your work to document your intelligent reflections as things occur. It may be grandiose for us to aspire to provide primary sources to future historians, but the process is nevertheless instructive. Thank you.