WEEK 10

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 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.