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You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell ... He’s just generally a loser as a person and a candidate. You can’t nominate a nutjob and lose, and expect it doesn’t have consequences ... What I see is a demagogue, somebody that has solutions that will never work, that is playing on people’s prejudices and the dark side of politics. That was Lindsey Graham on Donald Trump before the latter rose to the presidency for the first time. Over the course of the next few years (and several rounds of golf), Lindsey Graham, who died over the weekend, became a MAGA mainstay and one of Trump’s most vocal supporters. There’s a description for a person like that: A Role Model. After realizing that Trump was popular, powerful, and was remaking the GOP, Graham decided to work within the new Trumpian system, doing whatever he could to manipulate, cajole, and nudge the new boss in directions that would advance Graham’s own policies and personal political power. Sound familiar? That’s what we’ve seen from nearly the entire GOP since Trump’s first term, and during his second, they’ve been joined by corporate leaders, executive branch appointees, university heads, media apologists, and many more, all of whom either actively embrace America’s new, wholly transactional, authoritarian-curious era, or who know things are bad right now, but figure they’ll work within the new system for awhile, until things get back to normal, and then they’ll reclaim their ethics and explain they were doing it all for the greater good (if they, and/or the democracy, live long enough to make that argument.) Lindsey Graham wasn’t an outlier in this strategy; he was its ultimate exemplar. He traded in his ethics and his reputation and got a hefty return on the political policies and power he desired. He was soul-selling’s Epitomizer Bunny. He abandoned his core values and moved toward Trumpism, and he just kept going, and going, and going.
+ Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Quintessential Politician of This Era. “In 2015, Graham described Trump as a ‘race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot’ who should ‘go to hell.’ Also as a ‘nutjob.’ When Trump won, Graham understood, as did so many others, that he would have to make some important choices. For a while, he went silent. In the spring of 2016, I saw him at one of those conferences in Europe. He seemed too depressed to speak. But then, like many other Republicans—and, more important, like many other people who have lived under political occupation or experienced radical regime change—he made the decision to abandon his previous ideals, to bury the patriotism that was once so important to him, and to become, instead, a loud, opportunistic collaborator.”
+ “It’s a slow death. The surrender to despotism doesn’t happen all at once. It advances in stages: a step, a rationalization. Another step, another rationalization. The deeper you go, the more you need to justify. You say what you need to say. You believe what you need to believe. So let’s go back to the beginning. Let’s see who Lindsey Graham was before he drank the poison.” Will Saletan: The Corruption of Lindsey Graham.
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They’re Just Not That Into U.S.
“As our partners enhance their own resiliency to us, future American administrations must prepare plans for avoiding a more fundamental rupture. Whoever succeeds Mr. Trump will be the first to take office with countries around the world asking not what America can do for them, but rather seeking to do as much as possible without us. The first step to coping with the fallout is realizing just how much — and how permanently — the world has changed.” Jon Finer in the NYT (Gift Article): The World Is Cutting Ties With America. It’s Already Costing Us.
+ In some cases, we’re the ones doing the tie-cutting, and the impact has been immediate and terrible. “Gawande, backed up by recent academic studies, says that the decimation of U.S.A.I.D. around the globe has been responsible for some seven hundred thousand deaths, and that number will likely ascend into the seven figures. The policy is not only immeasurably cruel, Gawande argues; it is also stupid, badly undermining what remains of American soft power and prestige, from Africa to Latin America.” David Remnick and Atul Gawande in The New Yorker on Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and the ‘public man-made death’ that they’ve caused: The Human Cost of DOGE’s War on USAID. So if sensible people know how much damage Musk has done, why do they line up to put money into the companies that enabled him to touch trillionaire status? If Lindsey Graham were still around, he could probably explain it better than I can.
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Down on Maine Street
Another week. Another deadly ICE shooting. Another case where the officers weren’t wearing body cameras. And another set of protests take to the streets. The latest shooting killed a 26-year-old from Colombia in Portland, Maine. With the recent upheaval in the Senate race, Maine was already receiving a lot of attention. This could put that trend into overdrive. Here’s the latest from the Portland Press Herald.
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Talking About a Revolution
“Tech industry leaders have been warning for several years that as A.I. grows more powerful, it could quickly take over a large share of human work, leading to widespread joblessness. Economists have tended to greet those predictions with skepticism, noting that technological changes tend to play out more gradually than predicted by industry boosters. Some economists, however, have grown concerned that A.I. is spreading through the economy more quickly and more broadly than past technologies, and that their profession is downplaying the risks. The statement on Monday is the latest sign that such concerns are becoming more widespread. It warns that the effects of A.I. could be ‘larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame.’” Nearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. Threats. “A letter calls for policymakers to do more to understand and respond to potential disruptions from artificial intelligence.” (Is that a good idea? In normal times, yes. But these days, it depends on which policymakers we’re talking about...)
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Extra, Extra
Waterways and Means: “After more escalatory rhetoric and attacks, President Trump said the United States was renewing its shipping blockade of Iranian ports, and would charge a 20 percent fee on goods passing through the Strait of Hormuz.” Tehran’s top diplomat responds: “POTUS is absolutely right. Whoever provides secure and safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz should be compensated for this service. Iran has always been the GUARDIAN of the Strait and will remain so FOREVER. 20% is of course too much. We will be fair.” Here’s the latest from the NYT U.S. and Iran Edge Toward War Again, and The Guardian.
+ Proof of Life: With a weird newspaper-grasping photo, Mitch McConnell signaled the world that he’s still alive. He’s not the only political leader who’s been MIA. Iran’s supreme leader is dead or comatose. Everything else is smoke and mirrors. “The funeral procession became less a display of regime strength than a reminder of its uncertainty: the new supreme leader, Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, was nowhere to be seen. His absence overshadowed the entire affair.” (Makes you wonder who exactly we’re negotiating with...)
+ Subpoena Armada: “The Trump administration issued subpoenas on Friday to several journalists for The New York Times, after the news outlet reported this week on security concerns involving President Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One.”
+ Do Not Merge: “A group of states is preparing to file a lawsuit to block Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery as soon as this week, according to four people briefed on the plans, a legal challenge that would create a major obstacle for one of the biggest media mergers in history.”
+ Jive Talking: What could make all those political texts even worse? How about them asking you to continue the conversation with AI?
+ You Cannot Be Siri-ous: “At every level, from members of its technical staff to its chief hardware officer, and in coordination with business partners, OpenAI has been stealing Apple’s trade secrets and confidential information ... As a natural result, OpenAI’s nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets.”