The circus monkeys are running wild

When I posted yesterday about the Trump administration having rapidly moved into chaos territory, I wondered whether I might be overstating the matter. I need not have worried. Today saw a sudden explosion of social media posts between Trump and Musk where they go at each other like two bratty children who once jointly bullied everyone else but now suddenly find themselves at each other’s throats.

I was initially skeptical that this feud was genuine. I had a suspicion that Musk was worried because his Tesla company was in free fall because of anger over his cavalier wrecking of many agencies of government. This was supposedly to cut costs and eliminate the nearly two trillion dollar deficit but now has analysts saying that at best it might cut just $150 billion in the short term and even that might disappear when the final accounting is done, while the long term costs will be considerable. Since many of the people who buy electric vehicles are doing so over concern of the environment and are thus more likely to identify with liberal politics and the Democratic party, I thought that Musk might be trying to ingratiate himself with those same people. That might still be true but the level of venom that Trump and Musk have publicly spewed forth in such a short time suggests that this is not some manufactured conflict where they are still buddies behind the scenes. It is hard to realize that just a short while ago, Trump was acting like a shill for Tesla cars, promoting them at an event at the White House.
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The double pendulum as a metaphor for the Trump administration

Trump seems to be careening ever-more erratically day by day. He started out by seeming to have some kind of plan, such as imposing tariffs, getting rid of anything that addressed the needs of marginalized groups such as DEI programs, deporting huge numbers of people for the flimsiest reasons, firing as many government employees as he could, and cutting research funding for science. While these measures were disastrous for the general well-being of the country, they were within the framework of the agenda of the extreme rightwing nutjobs who had his ear.

But then as the pushback came, as it surely would, with judges especially thwarting his efforts because of their blatant illegality, Trump seemed to go utterly berserk, responding to each and every setback with new executive orders that border on the farcical. His multiple reversals on tariffs are but one example. His war with Harvard University is not the most serious of his rampages but is emblematic. He seems to be furious with that university because they have stood up to his actions so he responds with even more absurd executive orders, such as forbidding visas for any foreign students hoping to enroll there. To issue an executive order targeting a single university is a sign of a deranged mind.
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Trump reveals his weakness with China

Trump has been boasting that the large tariffs he slapped on many countries (and then reduced, and then reintroduced, and then suspended, and then … well, you get the idea) had the effect of the heads of those countries begging to talk to him and make deals that would be favorable to the US. Maybe, maybe not. So far there have been few concrete deals announced.

But one place where that has definitely not happened is with the most important trading country of all, and that is China. They have clearly called his bluff and now it is Trump who seems to be pleading with the Chinese premier Xi Jinping to take his call but Xi is playing it cool.
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Musk’s costly trail of damage

Elon Musk and Donald Trump made grandiose promises on the campaign trail about by how much they would cut the federal budget. After starting with the preposterous figure of two trillion dollars, they later reduced it to a smaller but still preposterous figure of one trillion, a figure that Susan Glasser writes that no one who had spent a day in Washington gave any credence to. In fact, these DOGE cuts may end up costing the government more money.

Musk is leaving government (so he says) and people are looking at the wreckage he leaves behind.

The reviews of Musk’s rampage through Washington have been, deservedly, vicious: Who, during the past few crazy months, could have possibly failed to take note of his toxic combination of entitlement and ignorance, his vastly overstated claims, and his move-fast-and-break-things ethos that has resulted in wreckage that will take years to fully assess?
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In a round of exit interviews this week, Musk has sounded all the predictable notes of a naïve billionaire businessman mugged by Washington’s political reality.
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In an interview on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” he started the messy work of separating himself from the President. “I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly,” Musk admitted, given that Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor will add trillions of dollars to the budget deficit. Stating the obvious, which, these days, counts as an act of lèse-majesté among the Republican sycophants who surround Trump, Musk added that the measure “undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.”
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It’s Thursday. Do you know what the tariffs are?

One has to feel some sympathy for the people at the US borders who are tasked with storing all the goods that arrive and not releasing them until the required duties are paid. With Trump careening from one tariffs policy to another on pretty much an ad hoc and day-to-day basis, they must be feeling as if they are in a whirlwind.

The latest reversal came last evening when the New York-based court of international trade (who knew that there was even such a court?) upheld a legal challenge that argued Trump had exceeded his legal authority when he bypassed Congress in announcing his tariffs.

The ruling by a three-judge panel at the New York-based court of international trade came after several lawsuits argued Trump had exceeded his authority, leaving US trade policy dependent on the president’s whims and unleashing economic chaos around the world.

Tariffs typically need to be approved by Congress but Trump has so far bypassed that requirement by claiming that the country’s trade deficits amount to a national emergency. This had left the US president able to apply sweeping tariffs to most countries last month, in a shock move that sent markets reeling.

The court’s ruling stated that Trump’s tariff orders “exceed any authority granted to the president … to regulate importation by means of tariffs”.
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The court ruling immediately invalidates all of the tariff orders that were issued through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a law meant to address “unusual and extraordinary” threats during a national emergency.

The judges said Trump must issue new orders reflecting the permanent injunction within 10 days.

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UnitedHealth puts profit over health care

One thing that resulted from the killing by Luigi Mangione of the CEO of the health insurance conglomerate known as UnitedHealth is that it has resulted in that company’s practices getting closer scrutiny. And what is being revealed is ugly and bound to create even more anger against the company and its executives.

The whole private health insurance system in the US is systematically flawed and breeds corruption. Putting in private, profit-seeking entities such as hospitals and insurance companies between doctors and patients lead inevitably to fraud and waste and a siphoning off of resources that should go into health care into the pockets of insurance executives. UnitedHeath is by no means an outlier though it may be the most egregious offender because of its size and perhaps its greed.

The conditions for abuse within the Medicare and Medicaid system is clear. The government gives the insurance companies a lump sum, as opposed to per treatment. Whatever remains after the cost of treatment is profit for the insurance company. Hence there is a built in incentive to deny health care and UnitedHealth found many ways to do so.
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The population pendulum

We have a tendency to take any trend and extrapolate it far out in the future. This is done for both good and bad trends but bad trends tend to garner greater attention because they predict some kind of catastrophe.

One trend that is noteworthy is that of population growth. In my own lifetime I have seen fears about global populations reverse dramatically, from unchecked growth to problematic decline. In the 1970s, there were alarms that the runaway growth of population would result in a world where we would be crowded into a Soylent Green-like future with ever-smaller living spaces, where there was not enough food to feed everyone, leading to widespread violence and wars over access to scarce resources. One of the primary sources of these fears was the 1968 book The Population Bomb by Paul Erhlich, as recounted in an article by Gideon Lewis-Krauss.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, a lepidopterist, and his largely uncredited wife, Anne, published a best-seller called “The Population Bomb.” For centuries, economists had worried that the world’s food supply could not possibly be expected to keep pace with the growing mobs of people. Now there was no postponing our fate. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Ehrlich wrote. “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” This was the received wisdom of the era: a decade earlier, an only slightly flippant article in Science estimated that in November, 2026, the global population would approach infinity.

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A college student’s powerful critique of Israeli genocide

Last week Cecilia Culver delivered a speech to her graduating class at George Washington University and she took the opportunity to speak out against the atrocities being committed by Israel in Gaza, calling it flatly what it is, a genocide and Israel an apartheid state. It received a deservedly rousing reception and standing ovation from the assembled audience and is well worth listening to.


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Trump’s costly war on international students and higher education

For whatever reason, the Trump gang has decided to attack research and higher education. One form this has taken is to cut research grants and overhead charges that fund research programs and upend the review processes that go into awarding the grants. In addition, it seems to have decided that international students are undesirable and should be pressured to leave. It is doing this by harassing them with detentions and deportations and annulling their visas for the flimsiest of reasons.

It has also threatened universities with funding cuts if they do not kowtow to the administration’s demands. You would think that elite universities would hold out but one of them, Columbia University, was one of the first to buckle under with almost no protest. And yet despite its cravenness, it has still been subjected to large funding cuts.
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For Trump and his cronies, only white people matter

As if one needed evidence that Trump and his coterie only view the rights of white people as worth being concerned about, his granting of refugee status to white farmers while deporting people of color left and right, and his shameful sandbagging of South African president Cyril Ramaphosa during the latter’s visit to the White House (that seems to be be becoming a pattern of ambushing foreign leaders) springing on him photos and videos of unsubstantiated claims of discrimination against whites, should be evidence enough. Trump’s administration alleges ‘white genocide’ in that country while ignoring the blatant genocide by Israel of Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied Territories.

Sisonke Msimang gives the background to how a relatively small group of white South Africans have been successful in getting the ear of Trump and his cronies. The largely white trade union Solidarity and its policy arm AfriForum led by someone named Kallie Kriel used the claim of white genocide to garner publicity for their cause, making trips to the US during the first Trump term and talking with right wing media personalities like Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, who are always eager to feed the sense of white grievance of their audiences.
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