Of all of Trump’s many corruptions, among the most brazen is his suit against the IRS claiming personal damages because an IRS contractor leaked his tax returns during his first term. This amounts to Trump just reaching into the Treasury and helping himself to the People’s money, because he can. And considering that presidents since Richard Nixon have made their current tax returns public, it seems to me that claiming he was “damaged” by the leak amounts to an admission of guilt, that there is something in the returns that would damage him if it became public. But let’s go on.

The original claim was for $10 billion. Then late last week ABC News reported that Trump had decided to settle with Trump for $1.7 billion — $1,776,000,000 to be exact. And this money wouldn’t go into Trump’s pocket, according to Trump. Trump’s Justice Department would set up a slush fund managed by Trump appointees who can be fired by him at will, and this slush fund would be used to pay off people Trump wants to reward for doing him favors. In particular, he wants to be able to compensate people who face legal consequences for breaking the law in his behalf. Or, as David Kurtz puts it, “to pay out ‘damages’ to his allies who purport to be victims of the Deep State, including the Trump-pardoned Jan. 6 defendants.” This is just the thing to possibly compensate a volunteer paramilitary of Brownshirts set on bullying whomever Trump wants bullied.

I also like the way the New York Times puts it:

The Justice Department said that it had created a $1.8 billion fund that could compensate supporters of President Trump who contend they were mistreated by Democratic administrations. The announcement came as part of a settlement with President Trump of his $10 billion lawsuit against the I.R.S.

The new “settlement” was filed in advance of a court deadline. The judge hearing the original suit wanted the “defendants” to explain how they are not just an extension of Trump. No responses had been filed yet. And here’s a twist that I just learned about this morning, Again, David Kurtz at TPM:

Trump’s latest filing is a notice of dismissal with prejudice, meaning the case cannot be refiled, but most importantly it contends that the right to dismiss the case is not subject to judicial review under the procedural rules since neither the IRS nor the Treasury Department had yet filed an answer or other responsive motion to the lawsuit.

“Accordingly, voluntary dismissal under Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) is available as of right, and requires neither leave of Court nor the consent of any party,” Trump’s lawyers argue. They go farther in a footnote, in telling the judge that they are filing a notice of dismissal, not a motion to dismiss, because she has no say in the matter under appeal court precedent: “dismissal is self-executing, terminates the action upon filing, and divests the district court of jurisdiction.”

The bulk of the notice is dedicated to telling Judge Williams to back off: “Upon the filing of this Notice, no judicial analysis is appropriate, and any ‘subsequent order purporting to dismiss ‘all claims’ . . . [would be] a nullity,’” it contends, citing case law.

I wondered last week if a court would have to sign off on Trump’s settlement with Trump, and I couldn’t find an answer. So the answer seems to be, I guess not.

And today the DoJ announced the establishment of the “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

Yet this isn’t over. Today House Democrats filed an amicus brief with the original judge, asking her to put a stop to this blatant exercise in self-dealing. Rep. Jamie Raskin has been arguing that the creation of the slush fund is unconstitutional, since only Congress can appropriate funds to be used by government (in this case, the DoJ). So there may be a court challenge after all, although who knows how that will turn out.

And if you (like me) are struggling to remember what was learned from Trump’s tax returns, see Key takeaways from six years of Donald Trump’s federal tax returns from CNN and 18 Revelations From a Trove of Trump Tax Records from the New York Times.

Trump has been back from China for several hours now, and as near as anyone can tell he came back empty-handed. He claimed he had made some trade deals, but so far these claims have been unconfirmed by China. Maybe the Chinese will be buying soybeans and Boeing jets, and maybe they won’t.

See Franklin Foer, Xi Jinping Was Only Humoring Trump. It begins,

Spare a moment, please, for the lame-duck superpower. It calls itself the leader of the free world, but the free world no longer believes it. When it extends its hand, nobody rushes to accept. When it threatens, nobody trembles.

Foer’s piece argues that Trump, the lame-duck president, is turning the U.S. into a lame-duck superpower.

After President Trump arrived in Beijing this week, Xi Jinping showered him with pomp befitting a summit of great powers. Yet the Chinese leader permitted potshots at his guest to go viral on his country’s internet rather than suppressing them, as some observers expected he would during a state visit. Xi answered Trump’s lavish praise by sternly lecturing him about meddling with Taiwan. In the end, Xi offered nothing of great substance—no solutions to the war in Iran, no sweeping trade deals, no promises of access to rare earth minerals. Xi used the visit to humor the lame-duck president, waiting for his time to pass.

Xi believe the U.S. is in a decline from which it will not recover.

During the first Trump administration, foreign leaders flattered and accommodated the president out of deference to American power. They feared it; they relied on it. During the second administration, and especially since the beginning of the Iran war, their calculus has quietly shifted—not because the strategy of obsequiousness has failed, but because it’s no longer worth the trouble. Like many of his counterparts around the world, Xi has begun to assume that it’s not just Trump who is term-limited; it’s also his nation.

Trump’s war in Iran was meant to showcase American power. It did the opposite. In the course of failing to remove a much weaker regime or eliminate its nuclear threat, the United States blew through its arsenal—so much so that allies in the Pacific reasonably wonder whether enough munitions remain to protect them. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon is now worried that it lacks the firepower to execute contingency plans for defending Taiwan.

Trump really is running the U.S. the way he ran his businesses. He was a terrible businessman also. But Trump’s biggest problem is that he can’t bully the whole world. Nobody is afraid of him any more. And Trump’s folly in Iran has shown the world our military limitations, which are becoming more limited by the hour. Both China and Iran, Foer says, are not interested in cutting deals; they are just waiting us out.  It’s a bleak assessment, but I can’t say he’s wrong.

Regarding Taiwan, do keep in mind that Taiwan has a near-monopoly on the production of the advanced semiconductor chips that are essential to pretty much all the technology you can think of. If this production capacity fell into China’s hands, this could create a situation worse than what’s going on in the strait of Hormuz.

Trump has complained that Taiwan “stole” the U.S. semiconductor industry, but that’s not true. What happened, as much as I understand it, is that beginning in the 1970s Taiwan invested considerable money and resources into developing ways to mass produce chips precisely and efficiently. They don’t design the chips themselves but produce chips for other companies. It’s less expensive for other companies around the world to have Taiwan make their chips than to make the chips themselves.  The Taiwanese didn’t “steal” anything. They did something very smart that paid off for them.

Several months ago Congress approved the sale of $14 billion in arms, including missiles, air-defense systems, and anti-drone equipment, to Taiwan. This has been waiting for Trump’s sign off. Now Trump is saying he’s withholding approval in order to use the arms sale as leverage to force China to make a deal. It doesn’t seem to be working. Chris Buckley in the New York Times:

Taiwan’s government has been waiting for months for Mr. Trump to sign off on a $14 billion package of missiles, anti-drone equipment and air-defense systems intended to fortify the island against Beijing’s military threats.

Mr. Trump himself had pressured Taiwan to spend more on its own defense. Now he is using the very arms his administration had pushed the island to buy as leverage with China, the United States’ main adversary.

Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One after leaving China on Friday that he had discussed the weapons package with China’s president, Xi Jinping, during their summit this past week in Beijing. He was asked in an interview with Fox News whether he would approve the Taiwan deal.

“No, I’m holding that in abeyance and it depends on China,” he said in the interview, which was recorded in Beijing but aired after he left. “It depends.”

“It’s a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly,” he said. “It’s a lot of weapons.”

He did not go into details about what he wanted in return, but Mr. Trump has pushed China to make major purchases of American airplanes, ethanol, soybeans, beef and sorghum.

It’s not working, dumbass. Just sign off on the sale. Assuming we still have the weapons to sell and haven’t burned them out in Iran already.

If I could draw, I would draw a cartoon showing Trump as a Chinese peasant kowtowing to Emperor Xi Jinping. The usually imperious Trump appears to be playing the role of eager supplicant in China. And I can’t believe I’m agreeing with Bill Kristol:

In the Great Hall, Xi greeted the American president politely but professionally, calling on the United States and China to be “partners, not adversaries.”

Trump responded much more personally. “I have such respect for China, the job you’ve done. You’re a great leader. I say it to everybody, you’re a great leader. Sometimes people don’t like me saying it, but I say it anyway because it’s true.” Trump also liked the ranks of Chinese children the state assembled to greet him with forced enthusiasm, telling Xi: “I was particularly impressed by those children. They were happy, they were beautiful. Those children were amazing.”

It’s a kowtow, twenty-first century style.

Xi has warmed Trump about Taiwan being “handled poorly” could lead to a dangerous situation.  WaPo:

“The Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-U. S. relations,” Xi said, according to the Foreign Ministry readout. “If it is handled properly, the bilateral relationship will enjoy overall stability. Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy.”

In the meeting, Trump did not respond to Xi’s comments about Taiwan and moved on to the next topic without acknowledging them at all, according to a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive closed-door meeting.

Per Business Insider, here is the complete list of people accompanying Trump in China.

• Apple CEO Tim Cook
• BlackRock CEO Larry Fink
• Blackstone CEO and co-founder Stephen Schwarzman
• Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg
• Cargill CEO Brian Sikes
• Citi CEO Jane Fraser
• Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins
• Coherent CEO Jim Anderson
• GE Aerospace CEO H Lawrence Culp
• Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon
• Illumina CEO Jacob Thaysen
• Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach
• Meta president and vice chairman Dina Powell McCormick
• Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra
• Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon
• Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk
• Visa CEO Ryan McInerney

Also Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who was not on the official list but is joining according to a Truth Social post. Even better, Eric Trump — who is running the Trump family business now — is there also,  “The Trump Organization has said Eric Trump is traveling to China only to support his father, and there is no indication he will pursue business while there,” says the New York Times. Sure.

The Times article says Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tagged along also. Why is Hegseth there? That’s very weird.

And I don’t entirely understand what these people expect to accomplish in China that relates to, you know, the United States.  One might think that all these people going to China could be looking for business opportunities for themselves. Considering that China is providing critical economic and technological support to Iran to help Iran survive Trump’s war — mostly buying Iran’s oil and helping them make missiles — it seems a bit surreal for Trump to be undertaking a friendly diplomatic visit to China now. And Trump has been so addled lately there is genuine concern that any deal he might make with Xi Jinping would involve a promise not to interfere if Xi invades Taiwan. 

At this point, everything about the Trump 2.0 Administration has failed; it’s all a shambles. The tariffs have been a disaster. Inflation is up more now than it was when Trump took office. the Iran War is turning out to be an even bigger mistake than Dubya’s invasion of Iraq, if that’s possible. And Trump himself exhibits little interest in fixing any of it. He has mentally retreated into his pet projects like the ballroom. Trump may have invited all these people along to China just so he doesn’t have to deal with anything himself.

And do see Paul Krugman, The Apotheosis of Willful Ignorance.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup begins one month from today. And right now it’s shaping up to be one of the greatest busts of all time. Over a million tickets to games are still available. And the hotels that had expected a windfall are not seeing it yet. It looks like a whole lot of soccer fans have decided to sit this one out.

I spent yesterday in New York City with my children and grandchildren. My son and daughter-in-law have jobs that tie into tourism and events, including sports events. Tourism is way down; people aren’t traveling. I take it people are backing off of plane travel lately. And hotels are not getting the reservations for the FIFA games they expected, including for the final match on July 19. Some companies had hoped to cash in by reserving blocks of luxury hotel rooms and arranging special amenities, like hospitality suites, for the deep-pocket ticket holders. Now those companies are trying to get out of their contracts with the hotels because not enough people are buying their packages.

Part of the problem is FIFA, which way overpriced the tickets. I’m reading lots of North American soccer fans who were really exited about going bailed out when they learned that even a nosebleed seat would set them back a few hundred dollars. One fellow found that even with the cheapest tickets, taking his whole family of four children to a game would have cost him $1,600. Taking his whole family to the U.S. opening game would have cost him $6,700, minimum. Category 1 tickets are being offered for as high as $32,970. It’s also being said that FIFA’s seating categories are hard to understand, so that ticket buyers may be confused about what seats they are buying.

Soccer fans also have been frustrated by the way the tickets have been sold. I understand that for a time you couldn’t just buy tickets. You had to enter a lottery for a chance at winning a time slot to buy a ticket. It appears FIFA has been deliberately making tickets hard to get — creating artificial scarcity — to justify the prices. See World Cup ticket prices for ‘Dallas Stadium’ games top $1,000 as FIFA accused of creating artificial scarcity, dated just two days ago. But see also World Cup ticket resale prices are falling, including for USA opener vs. Paraguay.  There could very well be a ticket fire sale at the last minute to fill up seats. FIFA insists that ticket sales have been great, of course.

And then there’s the Trump factor. CNN did a story last month about soccer super-fans overseas who go to every World Cup but are boycotting this one. All the news stories about ICE have them spooked. CNN interviewed a German super-fan who has traveled to every World Cup since 2006. He said he always felt safe in every country. But this guy is half Korean and is afraid of ICE.

“You see the ICE people going around and just pulling people from the streets just because they look foreign and you don’t get the feeling that anybody would protect me, you know?” he says.

CNN also reports that lots of people overseas have been organizing boycotts, although only of the games to be held in the U.S.A. And this is mostly about disgust with Trump. Some overseas soccer fans have vowed to not even watch on television. And “Trump’s travel ban on 39 countries — mostly non-White, African or Muslim-majority countries — also excludes huge groups of international soccer fans.”

When FIFA awarded Trump its bogus peace prize last year, it may have assumed this would help fire up enthusiasm for their games. But are MAGAts soccer fans? The hard core, probably not. Soccer is still a game for foreigners to them. Latinos do tend to be soccer fans, but they may fear that ICE is going to be deployed around the stadiums waiting to snatch people away.

Between now and the first game it may be that most of the seats will fill up, but right now the 2026 World Cup is looking like a massive fail.

Chris Hayes gives a retrospective account of Trump’s war dispatches from Mars. You’ll want to watch this.

The big news today is that the Virginia Supreme Court surprised everybody and threw out the redistricting referendum of a few days ago. So no redistricting in Virginia after all. All the pundits are saying this is going to make it harder for Dems to take back the House. I am not a math whiz, but I don’t think taking back the House is out of reach. It’s so close now, and I am skeptical all the redrawing is going to work in the GOP’s favor as they believe it will. Also there is talk from Albany about New York redistricting, but there is very little time left now so I don’t know how they’re going to pull it off.

And to catch up on the mess going on in Tennessee, just read Evan Hurst at Wonkette. The state legislator seems determine to bring back Jim Crow in all its non-glory. So much for the alleged post-racist society.

I believe I’ve said earlier that we haven’t hit bottom yet with Trump and MAGA. And I don’t think we have, but that doesn’t mean the way down isn’t very painful and upsetting.

Going back to Trump and Iran, do see Trump Is ‘Bored’ With the War He Started by Jonathan Lemire at The Atlantic. He thought it would be an easy win, and now that it’s dragging on he’s just plain lost interest.

Trump never thought it would turn out like this. After the impressive military operation to snatch Nicolás Maduro from Caracas, the president set his eyes on Iran, telling confidants that it would “be another Venezuela,” a pair of outside advisers told me. They, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy. Trump believed that the U.S. military was unstoppable, and that he had a chance to topple Tehran’s theocracy, a prize that had eluded his predecessors. He was redrawing the world’s maps and expected a victory to come in days, a week or two at most. 

Not exactly how it’s turned out.

Patience is not Trump’s strength. One outside adviser, who speaks with him regularly, told me the president is “bored” with the war.

Chris Hayes also said something about Trump being bored last night. In some of those photos where he appears to be asleep in the Oval Office he might just be bored. He wants to talk about his ballroom and other desecrations of the White House and grounds and National Mall, because that’s a comfortable subject for him. The presidenting thing is frustrating and confusing him, obviously.

Trump always assumes complex issues or projects are simpler than they are. Trump doesn’t like to confer with people; he wants to act unilaterally. And if events aren’t giving him instant gratification, he gets bored. It’s widely reported he’s looking for some “magic bullet” that will allow him to leave Iran while calling it a win, because he must realize it’s making him look bad. But he’s not able to do the real work of understanding the issues and working with others to mitigate the damage. He wants a gimmick that will give him a quick fix. Trump in a nutshell.

I saw a meme the other day that said “The aim of the war is no longer regime change. The aim of the war is now to convince people it wasn’t a mistake in the first place.” Yes, and that’s been the only true aim since about the day after Trump and Netanyahu started the bleeping war.

Sunday Trump announced that our naval assets were going to be used to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz. On Monday it was claimed two U.S. flagged ships and a Danish ship made it through the Strait. I was not happy about U.S. naval personnel risking their lives to save Trump’s political ass.

But then Tuesday Trump announced the project was being “paused.” “Trump, in a Truth Social post, said the decision was based in part on ‘the fact that Great Progress has been made toward a Complete and Final Agreement’ with Iran,” CNBC reported. CNBC continued,

Project Freedom “will be paused for a short period of time to see whether or not the Agreement can be finalized and signed,” Trump wrote.

Stock futures rose following Trump’s announcement, which raised hopes for a peace agreement that would end the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran and reopen the economically vital strait.

It also represented a surprising about-face from the Trump administration, which just hours earlier had framed Project Freedom as a matter of life or death for thousands of civilian sailors.

The Trump administration has said that nearly 23,000 sailors on vessels representing 87 countries have been stranded in the Persian Gulf because of Iran’s de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Today we’re learning that Trump was forced to shut down the plan after Saudi Arabia suspended the U.S. military’s ability to use its bases and airspace to carry out the operation. Trump, in true Trump style, didn’t bother to confer with allies whose cooperation he would need before going ahead with the project. The Sunday announcement caught the Gulf States off guard. By all accounts Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was massively pissed off about it. MBS barred the U.S. military from using Saudi air space and also from using Prince Sultan Airbase, which our planes previously had been using. I understand that today the U.S. is allowed *some* use of Saudi air space but still is blocked from Prince Sultan Airbase.

Maybe Trump should have asked first. Today the White House is claiming that allies were “notified,” but since the Gulf States were all clearly caught off guard, maybe the emails all went into “spam.”

But I liked the part about how stock futures rose after Trump announced new talks that may or may not be happening. According to several news outlets, stocks surged to new highs when Trump announced the project was paused. And as in previous such shifts, there is a strong appearance that somebody was engaged in insider trading.

So are there talks going on, or not? I don’t think so. You might remember that Trump stopped Kushner and Witkoff from going back to Pakistan for more talks a couple of weeks ago. This was hardly tragic, as sending those two clowns to negotiate is worse than sending nobody. But as near as I can determine no formal talks are taking place. Some news stories indicate there may be some backchannel communication going on. Whether this communication rises to a level above “yeah, you stink worse” I do not know.

News stories say that the U.S. is waiting for a response from Iran on an American proposal to end the war. Iranian officials said yesterday that they were reviewing the proposal and would respond through Pakistan, not directly to the U.S. Trump keeps saying the Iranians are desperate to negotiate, while the Iranians seem a whole lot less desperate than Trump.

Do see U.S. intelligence says Iran can outlast Trump’s Hormuz blockade for months at the Washington Post. Also at the Washington Post, see Iran has hit far more U.S. military assets than reported, satellite images show.

What is in this proposal? It’s a one-page memo, which means it’s probably short on detail. Axios:

The White House believes it’s getting close to an agreement with Iran on a one-page memorandum of understanding to end the war and set a framework for more detailed nuclear negotiations, according to two U.S. officials and two other sources briefed on the issue.

The big picture: The U.S. expects Iranian responses on several key points in the next 48 hours. Nothing has been agreed yet, but the sources said this was the closest the parties had been to an agreement since the war began.

Among other provisions, the deal would involve Iran committing to a moratorium on nuclear enrichment, the U.S. agreeing to lift its sanctions and release billions in frozen Iranian funds, and both sides lifting restrictions around transit through the Strait of Hormuz.

Many of the terms laid out in the memo would be contingent on a final agreement being reached, leaving the possibility of renewed war or an extended limbo in which the hot war has stopped but nothing is truly resolved.

So it’s all very provisional. Regarding the 48 hours, this Axios story was published yesterday.

Trump has also been promising that gas prices will fall very quickly once the war that he has declared over several times already actually is over. But nobody who knows anything about petroleum markets is saying that. They’re saying gas will stay high for months no matter what happens.

And I believe that catches us up on the status of Trump’s war.

Paul Krugman wrote a must-read piece for his substack site titled Maga Will Kill Many Americans. He begins with some of the nonsense currently coming out of the DHS Department as run by RFK the Lesser. But he goes on to document that there is a very clear correlation between right-wing politics and lower life expectancy. People die a lot sooner in Red states than Blue ones. And I believe I previously mentioned that during the latter days of the Covid pandemic the hospitalization and death rates were significantly higher in counties that voted for Trump in 2020 than in counties that voted for Biden. Biden people were more likely to get vaccinated and wear masks. Imagine.

But even in Blue states we don’t seem to be keeping up with other industrialized nations, health-wise. “Most Americans appear to be unaware of the fact that life expectancy in the United States is substantially lower than in other advanced countries; we’re on a par with poorer nations in Europe like Albania,” Krugman writes. He doesn’t mention that for worse outcomes we’re still spending far and away more per capita on health care than any other nation on the planet. Hmmm. Well, don’t get me started.

But right on cue, here’s another news story from ProPublica about increasing numbers of new parents who are refusing to allow their newborns to receive a standard vitamin K shot. And some babies have died as a result. A bleeping vitamin K shot. It’s not even a vaccine or some kind of newfangled pharmaceutical invention. It’s vitamin K. We all have some in our bodies. It occurs naturally in food, especially in the dark green leafy things like spinach and kale  But it’s kind of hard to get a newborn to eat spinach or kale.

I take it some babies are born with a K deficiency that makes them susceptible to hemorrhaging easily. One of the things K does for us is help our blood to clot. A shot at birth has been a standard preventative measure for some time. But that makes it suspect to some people.

A lot of the anti-medical science culture in the U.S. is being fueled by people pushing “alternative” cures. Krugman:

The role of greed in the anti-vaccine movement may be less obvious, but the fact is that quack medicine is big business. Right-wing radio and social media have long relied on peddlers of snake oil for a large part of their revenue. So much of the attack on medical science can be seen as financially motivated.

Which is not to discount the role of willful ignorance driven by ideology. The modern U.S. right is, to a large extent, an alliance between oligarchs and white Christian nationalists — and the latter are deeply hostile to Enlightenment values, modern science very much included.

Anti-intellectualism goes back a long way in American history, long before there was MAGA. See Richard Hofstadter, for example.  But now it’s being allowed to craft our health care policies. So stay well.

I’ve been thinking about Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) lately. He came to my attention right after the 2024 general election, as Nehls accepted Trump as the leader of the Republican Party.

“So now he’s got a mission statement. His mission, his goals and objectives, whatever that is — we need to embrace it. All of it, every single word,” Nehls told Capitol Hill reporters in a clip that aired on MSNBC.

“If Donald Trump says, ‘Jump three feet high and scratch your head,’ we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That’s it,” he added.

Yeah, the heck with representing your constituents and protecting the Constitution. But seriously, why even bother with a Congress?

This morning I read a post at Public Notice by Tom Schaller call The Vanity Presidency. Trump is “turning the whole country into a tacky branded property,” Schaller says. It begins this way —

Following the failed attempt on President Trump’s life at the White House Correspondents Dinner, lapdog Republicans and their media allies rushed to capitalize by arguing that the episode proves his very unpopular White House ballroom project has always been about presidential safety, not a self-glorifying tribute to himself.

“Everyone thought this was Trump making a monument to Trump. This is a vanity project,” the reliably smarmy Sen. Lindsey Graham snorted at Trump’s critics. (Graham wants to spend taxpayer dollars on the ballroom project, which he describes as “very national security-centric.

At this point Trump is little but a walking freak show, albiet one with a big military. His power comes from the fact that so many others prop him up and protect him. And in a lot of ways that’s the real story here.

The social psychologists tell us that political conservatives tend to value loyalty much more than liberals. You can find groupthink all along the political spectrum, but righties are more likely to assume all goodness emanates from the Right and the Left is just evil and possibly insane. Political lefties tend to be more willing to criticize their own and can give credit to conservatives who appear to be rational.

Some of this is baked into the emotional and psychological impulses that tilt people toward conservatism or liberalism. And I’m not saying there have never been political conservatives who are capable of critical thinking. Of course there have been, but where are they now? MAGA has zero tolerance for independent critical thinking. Instead we get variations of Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas).

Do see Historical Roots and Psychology of Liberals, Conservatives by Gina Simmons Schneider, Ph.D., at Psychology Today.  Liberals and conservatives really are wired differently. Liberalism is aspirational; conservatism is defensive. Studies have shown that conservatives tend to be far less tolerant of ambiguity than liberals, and more likely to be fearful of change or unfamiliar circumstances. They like certainly and consistency. And this is why conservatism, taken to extremes, becomes reactionary.

I tend to think that admitting to not-knowing is the beginning of wisdom. If you know you don’t know, you can learn. If you can’t recognize not knowing, you automatically fill in the blank spots with whatever is available at the time.  Humans are wired to connect mental dots to understand the world, but if we aren’t careful we often connect the wrong dots. The truly wise are people who can refrain from dot-connecting without sufficient knowledge.

So in a lot of ways political liberals and conservatives are approaching politics and issues from very different perspectives. But the knee-jerk conformity and denial of reality on today’s Right is giving Trump room to function, and screw up, and hurt people. And while there’s always been some of that, it’s worse now.

I can remember the Republican party fifty years ago. There was a spectrum, everything from the patrician, anti-progressive Old Right to Rockefeller Republicans to the segregationist Dixiecrats. Now they’re more like the Borg Collective. Nearly the entire party is prepared to jump three feet and scratch their heads on command.

And I believe this assimilation to the Borg predates MAGA. I think it’s something that’s been happening for a while. Back in the 1950s there was McCarthyism and the House Committee on Un-American Activities and a lot of craziness generally. But there was also Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican. I didn’t agree with everything he did, but he was psychologically normal and not a fearful sort of person. So while that tendency has been on the Right possibly since there has been a Right, the Republican party (which used to be the more liberal party, remember) had a big enough mix of people to be able to function as a party. Now it’s just Borg.

Trump is not going to last forever. A lot depends on the midterms, but I question whether he’s going to stay in office for the entire second term. But how can the current Republican party move on? Back when Nixon resigned there were several strong personalities in the party who had not been Nixon yes-men. These included Nelson Rockefeller, Barry Goldwater (I didn’t say I liked them), and John Anderson. Ronald Reagan was governor of California by then, I believe. Gerald Ford wasn’t necessarily a Nixon guy in spite of being his veep, briefly.

But — just speculating here — if Trump were removed from office next year, taking whatever Trumpism is with him, who among the spineless sycophants in the Republican party will be able to reconstitute a viable political party out of the wreckage of the GOP?

If you missed last night’s brief post, please do read the interview of Paul Krugman by Greg Sargent that I wrote about there if you haven’t already.

Today the New York Times had a front-page article headlined Trump Faces the Complicated Reality of a Costly, Unpopular War in Iran, by Zolan Kanno-Youngs.  (I decided to not burn one of my limited number of gift articles for the month on it. but if someone can contribute one, please do.) What really struck me was the headline. Trump isn’t “facing” anything. He wants to hold out until he can find something he can call a win. But none of the options he wants are viable now, and he’s refusing to accept reality. As Krugman said yesterday, “A guy who can’t admit that he lost a presidential election to Joe Biden is not going to be able to admit that he lost a war to the mullahs of Iran.” but he really has lost.

And now for something completely different — I had found an online U.S. history forum that appeared to be interesting at first. Then someone posted a question that in effect asked which of a group of politicians would have been the best person to serve as president during the Cuban Missile Crisis. John Kennedy was one of the choices, but so was Richard Nixon. And to my astonishment, one respondent after another chose Nixon. Nixon was, in fact the “obvious” choice, they all said.

This was disorienting, I thought most of the die-hard Nixon supporters were dead by now. These appeared to be young people. And at one point I actually asked, is there some kind of right-wing propaganda push going on to rehabilitate Richard Nixon?

And yes, folks, there is indeed a right-wing propaganda push going on to rehabilitate Richard Nixon. I found a news story about it. See The Campaign to Make Richard Nixon Great Again at NBC News, from November 2025. This effort has some of the usual suspects behind it, such as Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager, but they’ve actually gotten some of their disinformation into real public schools. It’s a real assault on history.

In the right-wing alternative history universe Nixon was a rock of unwavering defiance against the nefarious forces of Communism. John Kennedy — who actually did handle the Cuban Missile Crisis pretty well, as I remember — was a pretty boy fluff head compared to Nixon.  Watergate was a setup by the Deep State; Nixon didn’t do anything wrong. Oh, and Nixon won the Vietnam war, according to the group participants. I’m serious; he won it. News to me, and I remember the Vietnam war pretty darn well.

I knew you’d want to be advised. Oh, and at some point I was blocked from that forum. Works for me.