There’s a discernible mood turn about our politics, moving from discomfort and distrust into a steadily intensifying anger and dismissal of government altogether.
Whether in social media posts, street protests, the constant public bickering, what comes across is a perceived ineffectiveness across ideological lines that borders on fear on the one hand, and the desire to strike back on the other. We’re losing the ability for straight talk everywhere, along with policies that are either unresponsive or bad to the questions at hand.
Worse, it is not limited to policy debates or even the fate of political personalities, but something felt more personally as this Trump administration seeks to control what we see, what we hear, what questions we are allowed without ridicule. It is seeping into our dealings in business and education, into feelings about economics and immigration enforcement, into the very cultural issues to which we turn to escape a sense of powerlessness with this government’s relentless pursuit of control.
Even aside from specific arguments about prices and priorities, or support for allies and institutions, we’re witnessing a build-up of explosive anger that shows first in a total dissipation of trust.
Among the latest wrinkles, you can choose to believe that Paramount/CBS just canceled “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” for strictly financial reasons, as the company says publicly, or you can conclude that Colbert’s speaking out about his employer paying what amounts to a $16 million or more bribe to Donald Trump to buy his acquiescence in a merger deal has a lot more to do with the cancellation. The cynical among us would speculate that shutting down an anti-Trump comedian might well have been among the Trump demands for squashing CBS over its editing of a Kamala Harris interview promo.
In Trump World, there is no line between opinion about the inane — the use of plastic straws — or about the most serious national security issue. Only in Trump World would we believe that the accreditation of Harvard as an acceptable learning institution would be disputed, that PBS broadcast of Sesame Street and the New York Philharmonic should be eliminated, that veterans’ health should be booted, or that a Kentucky police officer raiding the wrong home to shoot and kill an occupant should be given a “one-day” jail sentence as time served.
Never mind the stupidity of Trump saying he had persuaded company officials to favor one type of sugar for another for Coca-Cola products, why is he spending presidential time on that even as U.S. intelligence now arrives at a formal conclusion that the Iran nuclear facilities strikes were anything but obliterating at two of the three target sites?
The specific instances of brooking the law, science, and rational behavior are filling books.
The Patterns
It falls into the same trust gap that we’re seeing with nomination of Emil Bove, who has demanded that Justice prosecutors mislead courts to press Trump-forward arguments, for a lifetime Court of Appeals judgeship, or for the flailing attempt by Trump to shut down the cries from his own MAGA supporters to release details of the Jeffrey Epstein criminal investigations as if Trump himself is not involved. Each new disclosure of Trump-Epstein closeness, including The Wall Street Journal discovery of a birthday album letter by Trump, just undercuts any reason to believe any statement by the president.
There are trust issues in mass deportation, tariffs and consumer prices, the erasure of foreign aid and in our universities, all because of the egocentric needs of Trump, who believes he is uniquely and divinely empowered to imprint his personal vision on America. A small story yesterday involved an instant presidential decision to call the Energy Department to halt a wind-energy plan for agricultural areas in four states that need more electricity just because Trump dislikes wind turbines.
More tens of thousands were in the streets this week in cities across the country in protests highlighting the trampling of individual rights and the deployment of armed active-duty military into U.S. cities to support random arrests by masked Homeland Security agents of migrants with no crime other than lack of documents.
The fierce turn by MAGA voters against Trump’s duplicity over the Epstein case is surprising only because it now seems to finger Trump as part of the same “deep state” he campaigned to bring down. And our fascination with Trump’s ineptness in stopping a storyline that continues to hurtle out of control is akin to watching a car wreck, not because there are any good guys in this situation.
As harmful to personal liberty and institutional stability as the Trump program is proving to be, the Trump legacy seems to be centered around a propaganda-fueled culture of cruelty, distrust and disrespect for law and morality that is a poor fit to what we have believed America has aspired.
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