Predatory Tariffs

 What disgusts me so much about Trump's recent threat to impose 25% tariffs on our two neighboring North American trade partners and allies, Mexico and Canada, is not only what a pointlessly idiotic and destructive policy act it would be—but also what a crude abuse of lopsided economic power. After all, even the people defending the policy can characterize it in no other terms. 

The host of Wall Street Trump apologists who have come out of the woodwork in recent weeks—since anyone in power will eventually find people willing to rationalize their actions—all make some version of this same argument (Bessent foremost among them): Trump won't really impose such completely ruinous and self-destructive tariffs, they say; he's just using this as a "bargaining tactic." 

The Phantom Public in 2024

 A friend was catching me up to speed on the latest Ezra Klein podcast. According to his recap, one of the key arguments of the most recent guests was that Democrats are falling short electorally due to a failure to swiftly and efficiently implement their own policies. Laws like the CHIPS and Science Act or the IRA are popular, these speakers argued—but heaps of the money allocated for them have simply not yet gotten out of the door. If Democrats could implement more effectively their own legislative achievements, they might not have lost the election (or so the argument went). 

I have to say I'm skeptical. I have to say that, deep in my cynical soul, I find it far more plausible that Biden could have delivered any number of billions of dollars in grants for American semiconductor manufacturing—and still have lost the election. Why? Because, even if Democrats had spent every penny that was allocated for these purposes, large numbers of people would never have heard about it. And among those who did, even fewer would have cared. 

Memory Criticism

 I don't know why I experience such a shock of recognition every time I read a Nicholson Baker novel. It may be that, in his microscopic observations of human mental processes, he has managed to tell the truth about all-but universal facts of human consciousness that had hitherto escaped notice and gone unrecorded (which is clearly his goal). Or, it may be that he and I are obsessive freaks in exactly the same way, and I just happened to find the books of the one other human being in history who thinks the way I do...

I specifically have in mind his 1991 book about John Updike—U and I, which I was reading last night. And perhaps this is not really a "novel"—it is ostensibly an essay or a piece of literary criticism; but I would class it really as a sequel to Baker's first two books: The Mezzanine and Room Temperature. Like these two volumes, it is really an attempt to chronicle as closely, minutely, and accurately as possible the thought processes of the narrator. Those thought processes just happen in this case to be the ones that occur in his brain as he thinks about and tries to write an essay about John Updike. 

Spring and Fall

 My sister was telling me this afternoon about her recent efforts to clean the house. When she decided to give away a pair of old sandals, she was surprised by the level of resistance she encountered from my nephew. "Mom," he said, "you can't get rid of your sandals!" He retrieved them from the give-away box, and proceeded to shed tears over the prospect of losing them. 

This struck some deeply familiar chord in me from childhood. I immediately thought of all the inanimate objects whose loss similarly grieved me at his age. One might say—but they weren't even his sandals! But I distinctly recall feeling similarly heartbroken for days as a child when my parents decided to replace the carpet in one of our rooms; and it was not even my own. 

The Tarpeian Rock

 Reading Anatole France's classic historical novel of the French Revolution, The Gods Will Have Blood, one is astounded to realize that here, in a novel published just a few years before the First World War, is a prophecy of all the madness and delusion of the century of revolution that would follow it. Of course, it is no original insight in me that the Bolsheviks ended up recapitulating all the errors and obscenities of the Jacobin Terror. But it is astounding to see just how closely the parallels ran—and how much suffering humanity might have avoided if they had heeded the lessons of France's great novel—instead of proceeding to re-enact all of its bloodiest events, just a few years after it was published. 

In France's fanatical protagonist, Évariste Gamelin—who turns himself into a mass murderer and metaphorical parricide, all through the purest of Rousseauian intentions—we find all of the sophistries that the twentieth century's own revolutionaries would later use to acquit themselves of their own atrocities. He tells himself—we are killing the enemies of the state in order that it may one day be possible that the state will no longer have to kill. We are executing for the sake of ending capital punishment. One is reminded of that absurd quotation attributed to Lenin: that he and his fellow Revolutionaries were deploying coercion only so as to bring about the abolition of all coercion...

Cricket

Friends, I won't lie to you—this week's news has been sickening. Over the last eight years, we've watched as Donald Trump steadily purged the Republican Party of anyone who had an ounce of integrity. And now that he is poised to seize power again, the only people left are the ones who have passed through that strainer. As a result, Trump's cabinet picks this week have been a kind of sycophant olympics. The people who were willing to divest themselves of every lingering shred of self-respect are now, perversely, the only ones in a position to reap the rewards. 

There are Trump's downright incendiary picks: like his proposal to install Tulsi Gabbard at the head of the nation's intelligence community—despite (or because of) the fact that she is mostly known for her eerie sympathy with America's adversaries and for being Russian state media's favorite American politician (after, perhaps, Donald Trump himself). There are the picks that smack of sheer MAGA trollery—such as proposing Matt Gaetz as the next Attorney General, or installing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the head of the nation's public health agencies. 

Jolly Escaped Asses

 One of the grossest things about this post-election week is how exuberant the U.S. stock market has been at the result. Trump campaigned on threats of mass deportation and destroying the Earth's climate—and now the country's richest seem positively gleeful about that fact. 

From a certain perspective, of course, all this makes sense in terms of crass self-interest. A Republican victory in the election almost certainly means the extension of Trump's tax cuts when they expire next year. Plus there's deregulation and all the rest of it. 

The Authoritarian Personality

 Now that the worst has happened and Donald Trump is definitely coming back to the White House, we are all experiencing the temptation to try to normalize him. It's hard to do otherwise. We have to get on with our lives, after all. Most of us don't plan to leave our native country just because a bully wins an election and threatens us. So we look desperately for any signs that might tell us: "meh, this will be survivable. He won't be so bad—or at least, no worse than he was during his first term." 

A New York Times article expresses a hope that's been on many of our minds: maybe Trump will somehow mellow out. Now that he's won the ultimate prize he sought, maybe he won't be so anxious to follow through on his threats of revenge. Maybe he will just bask in being the center of attention and forget his worst plans. "After all," Peter Baker writes, "he has essentially gotten everything he wants." But he adds: this take is almost certainly underestimating the depths of Trump's rage and resentment.

The Blood in the Streets

Truly, as Brecht once said, we live in dark times. In Amsterdam this past week, soccer hooligans mounted a series of antisemitic riots and attacks, in a city where some residents are still old enough to recall the Nazi occupation. There is a particularly disturbing resonance to the fact that this violence is coming so close to the anniversary of Kristallnacht this weekend...

Any of us who live near university campuses or major cities have probably seen similar displays of antisemitism over the past year. Many have not been as egregiously violent—but people have been threatened for wearing the Star of David or accosted for waving Israeli flags. And, at many Gaza-related protests, signs that appear to endorse the atrocities of October 7 have been more the default than the exception. One could find a "Glory to the Martyrs" banner at just about every one. 

Actually, Harris Did Everything Right

 I have no appetite for the intra-party recriminations that have dominated the conversation on the Left this past week—the "blame game," as one New York Times article put it. For one thing, it seems to me this conversation is completely unproductive. For another, it mostly seems to help Trump. Turning on our own leaders and institutions in a moment of defeat is an all-too-common left-wing vice, and I don't see how anyone benefits from it except the Right. 

But most importantly of all, I just don't think any of the recriminations ring true. Let's take them one at a time. 

Deontological

 The New York Times ran a piece today noting that social media—a landscape that was full of calls to action and the budding Resistance after 2016—is now eerily quiet, in the wake of a second Trump victory. The article quotes one influencer on one of the platforms who has observed this phenomenon: "I’ve seen posts from multiple people I follow, people who are like, ‘I literally used to have so much to say, and I have nothing. I got nothing today.'"

It's partly that we've used up the rhetoric of warning at this point. We've spent eight years saying: you have to take Trump's threats seriously! He wants to become a dictator! Look at his behavior! Listen to his words!" And still, people didn't listen. Or, more troubling still—maybe they did listen, and they liked what they heard. So now, what else is there to say? We've shot our bolt. We have no more warnings to add. "We've talked our extinction to death," as Robert Lowell once wrote. 

Never Give Up!

 I dutifully tuned in to Kamala Harris's respectful and conciliatory speech yesterday conceding the election. For the most part, I was still too numb to take it in at an emotional level—except, there was one moment when "my heart was shaken with tears," to borrow a phrase from Siegfried Sassoon. 

This came when Harris repeated the simple line: "Never give up. Never give up." It wasn't so much the familiar phrase that got to me. It was the way that Harris's voice frayed and cracked slightly on the line—reflecting the strain of weeks and months on the campaign stump. My heart swelled and broke in that moment. It was shaken with tears. 

Falling

 I dropped off to sleep around midnight with a glow of last-minute hope in my belly. I thought: "Harris is still going to win this. They just haven't counted all the absentee ballots in the Blue Wall states yet. Once they do, the numbers will shift in her favor." And I was chanting to myself "don't believe the red mirage... don't believe the red mirage..." as my eyes closed for the night. 

Then my eyes flew open again around three in the morning. And I made the mistake of checking the news. I couldn't help myself. I refreshed the New York Times homepage—to discover that Trump is now just one vote away from taking the electoral college. J.D. Vance is already on stage kissing the ass of the man he once called "America's Hitler," calling it the "political comeback" of the century.