New GOP Slogans: "Ready, Fire, Aim!" & "Republicans Against Head Start"
Plus, lessons in becoming a billionaire: first, inherit a billion dollars
What I’m Discussing Today
Kareem’s Quote of the Day: What happens to a democracy when vengeance, rather than law, begins jangling the keys to the kingdom?
What Damaged Trump’s Reflecting Pool?: His Fox News-Trained U.S. Attorney Says It Was “Botched Installation.”
Republicans Against Head Start for Kids: The effort to weaken Head Start shows how quickly “local control” can become a euphemism for giving children less.
Good Genes or Good Connections?: Don Jr.’s remarkable returns raise the possibility that access to power is the best business plan.
Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America: Nick Kotz’s clear-eyed history reveals that lasting progress requires strategy, leverage, and compromise.
Glen Hansard, “The Parting Glass”: This haunting farewell reminds us that the best songs can make grief feel like a hand held across the table.
Kareem’s Quote of the Day
“Little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”
Arthur Miller (1915–2005), American playwright, The Crucible
At the dawn of the 1950s, Arthur Miller was America’s most esteemed playwright, still basking in the glory of Death of a Salesman, his Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning 1949 drama about the death of one man’s American dream. He followed it with an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 Norwegian play, An Enemy of the People, about a man who refuses to compromise his principles even at the risk of personal and professional ruin. It spoke, obliquely, to the hysteria of the times: the Red Scare causing Americans to forfeit their constitutional rights in order to keep their livelihoods. But Miller’s next play, The Crucible, was less oblique: it found the perfect metaphor for the country’s anti-Communist hysteria in the Salem Witch Trials. Based on the manufactured accusations of disturbed teenage girls, more than 200 people were accused and 20 were executed by the local government for the practice of witchcraft.
Those girls are the “little crazy children” Miller refers to in the quote above. When I look at it now, the quote seems less applicable to the McCarthy era, when craven officials like Senator Joseph McCarthy and Congressman Richard Nixon exploited the nation’s Cold War fears for political gain, than to today, when stunted and vengeful men like President Trump, Stephen Miller, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and others in or alongside the current administration seek to punish anyone who tries to defy their will or question their beliefs.
There was a disturbing yet fascinating story in this Sunday’s New York Times about the law firm Paul Weiss, which helped to lead the resistance against the first Trump administration and tried to hold Trump to account while he was out of office. Once Trump was back in the White House, Paul Weiss became one of the first targets for Trump’s retribution campaign against law firms that had opposed him, in or out of office, which would eventually be declared illegal when the policy was taken to court. But in the meantime, Paul Weiss made the decision to settle with Trump, agreeing to perform $40 million in free legal services for clients the President favored. It was a form of ritual humiliation for a firm that had long distinguished itself by defending progressive principles, including the rights to abortion and gay marriage.
Those are big, serious issues that animate the regressive, religious right wing of Trump’s coalition. But Trump is just as vengeful, if not more so, toward people whose only fault is drawing attention to his incompetence and cruelty. Two of the stories I’ll look at this week fall into those categories: one is about a man threatened with ten years in prison for accidentally demonstrating how Trump’s ego led him to waste millions of taxpayer dollars on a defective repair job to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool; the other is about a program that tries to provide help to underprivileged schoolchildren, 65 to 70 percent of whom belong to racial or ethnic minority groups.
Writer Adam Serwer summed up the thinking behind so many of Trump’s choices in a 2018 essay for The Atlantic: “The cruelty is the point,” he wrote, referring to policies like family separation at the border, the Muslim travel ban, and the persecution of the transgender community. In authoritarian countries, cruel punishments have long been considered the best way to stop people from acting in ways the government doesn’t approve of. But there’s also the pure sadistic pleasure dictators enjoy taking against groups and individuals they dislike. That seems to be what Trump hates most about the checks and balances designed to keep him at least a little bit in line with our democratic norms. He wants to hurt people. So far, our constitutional system has managed to obstruct many of his worst instincts, but 2029 can’t come soon enough.
