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 "willfully": 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. What is in the brain of the woman photographed with a huge smile holding a sign “MASS DEPORTATION NOW”? 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 exit 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 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.