Saturday, January 25, 2025
Capitulation and Betrayal Are Contagious
At the height of his powers, Jay Gould was known by many names, few of them flattering. People called him the Skunk of Wall Street, the Napoleon of Finance, and Mephistopheles himself. Gould, alongside rivals such as Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller, was a captain of industry—or, as they would all come to be known, a robber baron.
These men were stupendously powerful, and ruthlessly devoted to the perpetuation of their own wealth and influence. They battled one another for control of America’s railways. They hoarded gold, manipulated markets, and exploited workers. They bribed journalists to win favorable coverage and, when that didn’t work, threatened the writers and editors who displeased them.
These threats carried weight. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil could crush a newspaper by pulling advertising if it didn’t like what it saw. Eventually Gould and Rockefeller bought or otherwise invested in newspapers, in an attempt to exert greater influence over how they were covered. Gould even bought a majority interest in Western Union, which gave him power to control the flow of vital information.
Even so, muckrakers such as Ida Tarbell took on Standard Oil. Cartoonists such as Thomas Nast and Joseph Keppler lampooned the unconstrained power of the industrialists and the corruption of Tammany Hall and its leader, William “Boss” Tweed. Tweed was fixated on the political cartoons that mocked him. “I don’t care so much what the newspapers write about me—my constituents can’t read,” he said. “But, damn it, they can see pictures.”
The brave few who stood up to the magnates of the Gilded Age came to mind this month, when Ann Telnaes, a Washington Post cartoonist, resigned over the paper’s refusal to publish a cartoon in which she skewered today’s titans of industry—Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Post, among them. After resigning, Telnaes posted a rough sketch of the cartoon on Substack, and The Atlantic is publishing it here with her permission. It shows Bezos and other tech and media giants (along with Mickey Mouse, representing his owner) kneeling and prostrating before a colossal Donald Trump. Telnaes, in explaining her departure, wrote that there have been “instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary.”
Telnaes told me that she didn’t see her resignation as courageous, merely necessary. “When a newspaper decides to turn its head away from holding government and powerful people accountable, it threatens a free press and, by extension, democracy,” she said.
David Shipley, the newspaper’s Opinions editor, has said he spiked the cartoon because he wanted to avoid “repetition” with columns that the section had published or assigned. His reasoning was unpersuasive. There have been numerous signs that Bezos, who successfully stewarded the Post through its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” years, has shifted his position on Trump. Once a champion of journalists who refuse to be intimidated by bullies, Bezos is now behaving in a more accommodating way. Last fall, he killed the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris days before the election. The day after the election, he tweeted “big congratulations” to Trump, who has vowed to imprison Americans who say or write things he doesn’t like. Bezos then traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump and Elon Musk—and had Amazon pledge $1 million to Trump’s lavishly oversubscribed inauguration fund.
The cartoon I first thought of when I read about Telnaes’s resignation was Joseph Keppler’s 1889 drawing “The Bosses of the Senate,” in which bloated monopolists totter into the Senate chamber, each top-hatted and bearing the name of his own special interest: Standard Oil Trust, Sugar Trust, Copper Trust, Coal, and so on. The cartoon was more than an ephemeral jab. Alongside journalistic investigations into these same powerful interests, “The Bosses of the Senate” helped citizens see in the clearest possible terms how the powerful put themselves and their fortunes ahead of the public good.
The suppression of her cartoon has become a symbol of spinelessness—of a once-intrepid American newspaper now too afraid to lampoon the richest men on Earth for their obsequiousness. Sycophancy has a kind of momentum. Like any form of groupthink, it is part conformity, part self-preservation. The first person to grovel is undignified, but each subsequent act of cowardice allows the next person to acquiesce more easily.
Trump promises to punish people for disagreeing with him. Lately, he’s found that such threats are sufficient to bring many of his perceived enemies in line. This was certainly the case when the leaders at Disney rolled over after Trump sued ABC for alleged defamation by George Stephanopoulos, in a case that First Amendment lawyers widely believed Disney would have won. This is one way that institutions fail: not because they are forced into submission, but because people in positions of power collapse all on their own.
Like the robber barons who preceded them, Musk and Zuckerberg seem less interested in the public good than in their own personal enrichment. Musk, in particular, has built a platform designed to advance his political goals and discredit his opponents. But Bezos, too, has gone so far as to write a column in his own newspaper blaming its journalists for public distrust in them. Somehow, he managed to leave out any mention of Trump’s years-long campaign to cast them as “enemies of the people.”
Plenty of Americans can still see all of this quite clearly— those who believe in truth, and who know that freedom of speech and freedom of the press are God-given rights, not granted to us by the government, or Elon Musk, or anyone else, but rights that we are born with, and that many of our fellow Americans have died for.
Sycophancy, as we see, has momentum, but so too does courage. Ida Tarbell, in her investigation of Standard Oil, documented a pattern of bribery, fraud, and monopolistic business practices. She described a culture in which “business is war” and “morals have nothing to do with its practice.” But she also implored her fellow citizens: “What are we going to do about it? For it is our business. We, the people of the United States, and nobody else, must cure whatever is wrong in the industrial situation.”
There is much talk of the institutions that protect democracy, and how crucial they are to the American project. But those institutions work only because of the individuals who make them work. For every powerful person who capitulates, there are among us many more who see the world as Tarbell did, and as Telnaes does, and are willing to act on their principles.
Friday, January 24, 2025
Trump's Drive to Cut the Social Safety Net Could Harm His Voters
In his first term as president, Donald J. Trump targeted what many Republicans consider blatant welfare waste — a rule that gives food stamps to millions of people with incomes above the usual limit on eligibility.
His proposed change would have saved billions but hurt low-income workers making the bootstraps efforts that conservatives say they want to encourage. Advocates for the needy resisted and the effort to shrink the program died during the pandemic, but it illustrates a challenge Mr. Trump may face as he pledges to cut spending in his second term while courting the working class.
Republicans are mulling deep cuts in safety net spending, partly to offset big tax cuts aimed mostly at the wealthy. But some programs they propose to cut reach not just the poorest Americans but also struggling working class voters, many of whom helped elect Mr. Trump in November.
“The Republican Party’s support is increasingly coming from people who would be hurt by standard conservative policy.”
How much the Republicans will cut is unclear, with many forces in play. Reasons to expect deep reductions start with Mr. Trump’s first term, when he sought wholesale cuts in food stamps, Medicaid and housing aid, and nearly repealed the Affordable Care Act, which provides health insurance to 44 million Americans.
With more than half of the budget likely off-limits (Social Security, Medicare, defense, and interest on the national debt), programs for the needy are especially vulnerable.
“This is probably the deepest peril the safety net has been in for at least three decades,” said Robert Greenstein of the Brookings Institution, a longtime advocate for programs to reduce poverty. . . . Business lobbies, like hospitals and insurance companies, have stakes in safety net spending, and governors may resist changes that shift costs to states.
Among the uncertain forces are the views of the working-class voters Mr. Trump wants to maintain. Programs like Medicaid reach higher up the income scale than in previous eras, but whether voters of modest means would punish Republicans for cuts is unclear.
Here is a guide to some of the programs Republicans may seek to cut:
Health Care
The most significant battles may involve health care, given the cost. Federal spending on Medicaid, which provides health insurance to the needy, tops $600 billion a year, nearly 10 percent of the budget. Subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans have exceeded $125 billion.
The aid has reduced the share of Americans without health insurance to a record low, but critics call the cost unsustainable and say that government control stifles innovation.
Some Republicans would go much further by capping federal funds, which grow automatically as people qualify. That would save large sums, but fundamentally alter the program by giving states an incentive to reduce enrollment or care. The caps proposed by the Republican Study Committee, which includes most House Republicans, would cut spending by more than half.
The A.C.A. has also brought Medicaid to the working poor. With federal funds covering most of the cost, 40 states and the District of Columbia cover adults up to 138 percent of the poverty line — about $43,000 for a family of four. Republicans fought the expansion, and some would reverse it by cutting the subsidies.
Nutrition
Mr. Trump has long called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — food stamps — a source of dependency and fraud. As president, he sought to reduce eligibility, expand work rules and partly replace benefits with food boxes.
Republicans may be especially eager for cuts after the Biden administration raised benefits by more than 25 percent, in what critics called an end-run past Congress. Benefits reach about one in eight Americans and cost about $100 billion a year.
Many conservatives argue there is room to cut without imposing hardship or losing political support. . . . . more than three million people could lose benefits, many of them workers with high rent or child care costs.
He has also supported firmer SNAP work requirements. They apply to less than 10 percent of the caseload — able-bodied adults without dependent children — but those affected are poorer and more vulnerable than others on food stamps.
Housing and Homelessness
Each of Mr. Trump’s White House budgets sought cuts in housing aid, which is already limited. Only one in four eligible households receives help, and waits last years. Mr. Trump proposed to reduce the number of Housing Choice Vouchers, the main assistance program, by more than 10 percent. The House Appropriations Committee last year voted to do the same.
While seeking cuts in housing aid, Mr. Trump has promised a tougher approach to homelessness. In a campaign video, he called the homeless “violent and dangerously deranged,” urged cities to ban sleeping in public, and pledged to place unhoused people in camps with services.
He did not mention housing costs, which many scholars blame for record-level homelessness.
Other
Amid the promise of budgetary “shock waves,” other cuts could be coming. Project 2025 called for eliminating Head Start, the 60-year-old preschool program, and labeled a summer meals initiative for children a “federal catering service.”
Though Mr. Trump said he had no ties to Project 2025, he chose one of its authors, Russell T. Vought, as White House budget director, a job he held in the first Trump term.
The administration is likely to renew efforts to discourage legal immigrants from receiving aid. The “public charge” rule issued in Mr. Trump’s first term, but blocked in the courts, would have penalized immigrants who get benefits like Medicaid or food stamps by making it harder for them to become permanent residents.
The Trump [child tax] credit remains, but expires this year. Its fate will be part of the looming tax debate, and some Republicans appear willing to make it more generous to low-income households.
Doing so might answer critics who call Republican tax cuts a sop to the rich and strengthen Mr. Trump’s working-class appeal. But Republican support for a credit expansion for the needy is uncertain, and the politics are hard to predict: Democrats wonder why their expansion produced few political dividends.
All so that those who already have more than they will ever need can pay even less in taxes.
Thursday, January 23, 2025
Trump and the Right Attack Washington's Episcopal Bishop
The bishop leading the inaugural prayer service on Tuesday urged President Donald Trump to "have mercy" on his constituents, specifically naming LGBTQ people and immigrants.
The sermon by the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, was part of a larger post-Inauguration Day interfaith ceremony at Washington National Cathedral. Trump was seated in the first row alongside first lady Melania Trump, Vice President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance during the service, a tradition undertaken by presidents of both parties.
“In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” said Budde, who was looking directly at the president. “There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families. Some who fear for their lives.”
She added: "They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues."
Early Wednesday morning, Trump responded to the sermon in a post on Truth Social, where he called Budde a "so-called Bishop" and "Radical Left hard line Trump hater."
“She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way,” Trump said. “She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart.” A spokesperson for the Trump administration did not return a request for additional comment.
Budde's remarks came a day after Trump was sworn in and signed roughly 100 executive actions, some of which included policies affecting LGBTQ people and immigrants.
Regarding LGBTQ people, Trump signed a sweeping executive order proclaiming that the U.S. government will recognize only two sexes, male and female, and a second order ending “radical and wasteful” diversity, equity and inclusion programs inside federal agencies.
The Trump administration also removed LGBTQ resources from government websites, including a page formerly on the State Department's website dedicated to advancing LGBTQ rights around the world.
On immigration, Trump signed a flurry of executive actions, including ones that sought to end birthright citizenship, halt all refugee admissions and send the military to the southern border.
Several of Trump's orders are likely to be subject to extensive legal battles. A coalition of over a dozen Democratic attorneys general sued Tuesday to block the birthright citizenship order, which critics have said violates the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
Tuesday's sermon was not the first time Budde, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, has criticized Trump. In June 2020, she wrote an op-ed for The New York Times criticizing the then-president for clearing Lafayette Square, near the White House, amid the George Floyd protests and then posing for photos on the grounds of nearby St. John's Church while holding a Bible.
"The God I serve is on the side of justice. Jesus calls his followers to emulate his example of sacrificial love and to build what he called the Kingdom of God on earth," she wrote in the op-ed. "What would the sacrificial love of Jesus look like now?"
Christ's gospel message is an unknown (or hated) concept among the self-anointed "godly" folk who have made Trump their golden calf.
Wednesday, January 22, 2025
Trump Invents an Energy Emergency
The misuse of power under Donald Trump is to be taken for granted. Monday ’s list of executive actions on behalf of the fossil-fuel industry was entirely expected—this time around, there is no hesitation about withdrawing from the Paris climate accord (a decision that took four months in his first term), nor about opening up new lands for drilling, nor about rolling back regulations that have encouraged the production of electric cars. In fact, consider them all promises kept—in April of 2024, in a closed-door meeting soon uncovered by the pre-traumatized Washington Post, Trump laid out the terms to industry leaders:
You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
The executives responded. A fracking king named Harold Hamm (who had originally supported Ron DeSantis in the primaries) took the lead, working the phones assiduously. “Harold can just stick his finger in the ground, and oil will come up,” an admiring Trump explained at one event. But in this case he stuck his finger in his phone and what came up was money.
As I say, no one seems to shake their head at any of that anymore. It’s corrupt, but a kind of corruption legalized by the Supreme Court, in Citizens United and other decisions; we’re beginning to take it for granted that government power will be used on behalf of the highest bidder.
Trump—a master at directing the focus where he wants it to be—also used Monday’s signing sessions to declare a “national energy emergency.” This, one aide says, will “unlock a variety of different authorities” that let him make these changes more easily—but the main effect is simply to muddy the waters. Because there is no energy emergency. America has been producing oil and gas at record levels—indeed, oil-industry players have been pointing out, in the past few weeks, that they don’t really want to see more drilling, as that would drive prices down.
This energy emergency supposedly stems from a need to provide more power to data centers, so that we can beat China in developing the grail of artificial intelligence. . . . . But—all doubts about the utility and urgency of developing A.I. aside—if this were the new Administration’s real goal it would actually want to leave fossil fuels behind. At the end of 2024, a Silicon Valley team that included researchers from Stripe, Anthropic, Tesla, and elsewhere produced a report showing that solar microgrids are by far the fastest way to build the power that data centers need. . . . . The tech is mature, the suitable parcels of land in the US Southwest are known, and this solution is likely faster than most, if not all, alternatives.”
The actual emergency, obviously, is with the climate. The past two years were the hottest ever recorded. In 2023, Canadian fires filled American skies with choking smoke; 2024 saw Hurricane Helene devastate southern Appalachia; 2025 dawned with the Los Angeles inferno.
So now we find ourselves at an Orwellian moment, almost a Seussian one. Our leader has declared a fake emergency about energy, so that we can do more of something—drilling for oil and gas—that causes the actual emergency now devastating our second most populous city. It’s entirely possible that Trump’s gambit will succeed in confusing voters, and it’s almost certain that it will confuse much of the media, which has a history of following whatever squirrel he lets out of the cage.
But it’s unlikely that he will fool the Chinese, who are building renewable energy faster than anyone. And it is almost certain he will fail to confuse the planet’s glaciers and ice caps, which will go on melting, or its forests and grasslands, which will go on burning, or its seas, which will go on rising. When we want to describe the folly of our leaders, we often invoke the example of King Canute, smiting the sea with his sceptre to hold back the waves.
Trump, of course, is delivering the opposite of that pious and humble message. He confuses attention with reality (just as Biden sometimes confused reality with attention). It’s an emergency all right.
Tuesday, January 21, 2025
Trump and the New Gilded Age
Eight years ago, with his “American carnage” speech, Donald Trump delivered what was likely the darkest inaugural address in U.S. history. During his second inaugural, he tried for a slightly more uplifting message. . . . . “The golden age of America,” he declared, “begins right now.”
Perhaps it would be more aptly called a Gilded Age. Trump was joined in the Capitol Rotunda by many of the nation’s richest and most powerful men, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg. The attendance of the business titans was rendered conspicuous by the small space. . . . . Their presence also added a strange dimension to Trump’s complaint that “for many years, the radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens.”
This was the first time since Grover Cleveland’s second inauguration, in 1893—during America’s first Gilded Age—that a president was sworn in for a nonconsecutive second term. And many of the policies and ideas in the speech evoked the late 1800s more than any recent presidency.
The speech was saturated with 19th-century imperialism. Trump announced that he would order the name of America’s highest peak to be changed from Denali back to its old name, Mount McKinley, and he extolled the 25th president’s use of tariffs. . . . . Trump also said he would rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America,” and he promised to “pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars,” invoking the controversial slogan of expansionism. Picking up an idea he had voiced in recent weeks, he also vowed to seize the Panama Canal from Panama.
Senator Amy Klobuchar, the chair of the Inaugural Ceremony Committee, heralded America’s “peaceful transfer of power” in the same building where it was disrupted on January 6, 2021. A few minutes later, Trump stood face-to-face with Chief Justice John Roberts, who granted him broad immunity in a ruling last summer, and took the same oath of office that he flagrantly broke at the end of his first term. His mood was not only celebratory, but messianic.
Historically, presidents have used their inaugural addresses to pivot from the blue-sky promises of the campaign trail to the more sober language of governing. Rather than dwell on campaign vows they may struggle to keep, they reach for gauzy and unifying language. This, however, is not Trump’s forte.
Nor did Trump make much effort to reach out to or reconcile with the voters who don’t support him, although he promised that “national unity is returning to America.” He boasted about his (very narrow) margin in the popular vote and victories in seven swing states. “My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and indeed their freedom,” he said.
Instead, Trump delivered something akin to his stump speech: a meandering laundry list of policy promises of varying degrees of plausibility. He called for a huge expansion of oil and gas extraction. “We will drill, baby, drill,” he said. He promised to impose major tariffs. He said he would deploy U.S. troops to the Mexican border, expand immigration enforcement inside the country, and declare drug cartels foreign terrorist organizations. He also signaled an executive order that will continue the attacks on people who don’t conform to traditional gender norms.
[M]uch of the speech was devoted to things that are almost certainly never going to happen. He vowed to beat inflation but didn’t say how. He said he’d establish an External Revenue Service to handle the money he claimed tariffs would bring in, but this would require an act of Congress, as would the Department of Government Efficiency he claims he’ll create. . . . This was all a warm-up for Trump’s most audacious promise. “Our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable,” he said.
But the world already knows what four years of a Trump presidency looks like. Serenity, peace, and predictability were not the hallmarks of his first term, and they are unlikely to describe the second any better.
Monday, January 20, 2025
Turn the Channel on the Inauguration
[J]ust know that you are under no obligation to watch the second inauguration of You-Know-Who. You’ve undoubtedly heard insistences from well-meaning crusaders like The Lincoln Project’s Ryan Williams, who rang the shame bell for all to hear last Monday. . . . Williams posted on Bluesky. “Don't you dare turn your eyes away from history, even the awful, scary parts. If you don't watch it with your own eyes, you rely on others to tell you what you saw. We must all bear witness to what's coming.”
Do we, though? We’re about to be flooded in four years of covfefe, if not more. Withstanding the onslaught will require us to protect our energy whenever we can. So instead of donating your attention to a man who thrives off ratings, use those hours to fortify yourself with knowledge or rest.
Monday is also Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, don’t forget. . . . . If you subscribe to Paramount+, you can watch “Selma” for no additional cost. Also highly recommended are “I Am Not Your Negro” on Hulu; “Rustin” or “Amend: The Fight for America” on Netflix; and a trove of options from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. via PBS.org or one of its apps. “Reconstruction: America After the Civil War” is stunning and might wake people up to the truth that America’s been here before. It’s available via the PBS Documentaries app on Prime Video.
Sunday, January 19, 2025
What’s Really Behind the GOP Anti -Trans Jihad
What did people care about in the lead-up to the 2024 Presidential election? Last fall, Gallup ran a poll and asked. The economy was first on the list; most voters rated it as “extremely important.” Majorities of respondents also named a slew of other issues as either “extremely important” or “very important” to their vote: democracy in the U.S., terrorism and national security, picks for Supreme Court Justices, immigration, health care, gun policy, taxes, abortion, crime, income and wealth distribution, the federal budget deficit, foreign affairs, energy policy, race relations, and so on. In fact, only two issues on the list were not considered at least “very important” by a majority of voters. One was climate change, which half of those surveyed voted as “somewhat important” or “not important.” The other was transgender rights, which came last.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that transgender issues seemed less salient than the other topics. (As for climate change, tell that to a melting Greenland.) Only around one per cent of American adults identify as transgender, Gallup reported last year. . . . . “How many transgender athletes are you aware of?” Durbin continued. “Less than ten,” Baker said. That’s less than .002 per cent.
But the drive to ban transgender athletes from sports has never been about numbers. In 2023, Ohio’s House of Representatives passed a bill banning trans girls from competing in girls’ sports as early as kindergarten. It was called the Save Women’s Sports Act, conjuring an image of barbarians at the gate. But, when the journalist Pablo Torre went looking for these girls who were, purportedly, breaking all the records and stealing all the opportunities, he found that, when the efforts of the measure began, there was one trans varsity athlete in Ohio: a backup catcher. (She wasn’t very good.) When the governor of Mississippi signed a bill in 2021 barring trans athletes from competing in sports according to their gender, supporters of the bill didn’t present evidence of trans athletes at public schools in the state. . . . no one could cite any problematic instances of transgender participation. Many of the bills’ biggest advocates did not know whether there were any transgender athletes in their states at all.
And yet, as the election neared, Donald Trump’s campaign doubled down on attacking transgender rights and trans athletes. He started talking about them all the time, even when there was, in reality, not much to talk about. . . . ads for the Ohio Senate race that mentioned transgender issues in sports were aired almost twenty-seven thousand times by Election Day. Trump’s campaign went even further. AdImpact found that his campaign spent more than nineteen million dollars last fall on two television ads alone that centered on transgender-rights issues, and that the ads aired nearly fifty-five thousand times in a span of two weeks or so.
Given how vanishingly few transgender athletes there are, and how many voters pointed to other policy issues as greater priorities, a rational person might have been confused. . . . The ads were zero-sum, too—them versus you.
There are people who want to “save” women’s sports who don’t like women’s sports. A new study in the Sociology of Sport Journal reviewed survey data collected between 2018-19—before the issue was highly politicized—and found that opposition to transgender participation in sports was correlated with idealized views of female attractiveness and traditional gender norms. . . . But there are also people who want to narrowly define women’s sports on a natalist basis who care very much about women’s sports. Some of them are, or were, élite athletes themselves. They see the gains of women’s sports as hard-won and dependent on biological differences—differences that are real, however difficult to define.
But all these bills are not really about fairness. They do not distinguish between dodgeball and ice hockey, between Ultimate Frisbee and Division I shot put. They target kindergartners as well as Olympians. . . . people are tribal. We define ourselves in terms of our groups—the allegiances we are born into, and the allegiances we choose. Sports fandom can be a powerful experience of belonging to a group, and of loathing other groups, too.
It's all about fanning hatred and loathing and causing division.
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