Because cruelty is the point. Brutality is the tactic. And vengeance is the motive.
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In today’s ‘To the Contrary” Podcast, I talk with the Wapo’s Karen Tumulty about the fallout from Tuesday’s unpresidential address, which she wrote about here: Trump’s address to Congress was at odds with reality.
Seriously, you are the not crazy ones. So consider joining us here.
To the Contrary is a reader-supported publication.
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**
It occurs to me that this is a good time to take stock of just how deranged our politics have become — even by the standards of what we thought was totally off-the-rails last year.
People who said in October that Trump would blame Ukraine for not surrendering, that his tariffs would do massive economic damage, that he'd ensure none of his cronies were prosecuted while they ran steadily more absurd crypto scams, were told they had Trump Derangement Syndrome.
And I don't even know anyone who said in October that DOGE might cancel all our global HIV control efforts, killing more than a million people a year, because even Project 2025 didn't say to do that!
Plus RFK Jr. at HHS, Patel and Bongino at FBI, Gabbard at DNI, turning half the government over to Elon Musk, attempting to put Gaetz in at DoJ... Trump is better understood by his critics than by many of his supporters. His haters realize he means it.
And let’s be really frank about this. Biden was kicked to the curb because he was foggy, seemed slow, and his time was clearly passed. But if you saw a candidate who was roughly just as old say the things below, you’d call an asylum to see if they were missing anyone:
· The United States should buy Greenland.
· The Panama Canal is run by the Chinese Government.
· We should ethnically cleanse Gaza so we could make Trump Tower Gaza Strip.
· Ukraine started the war in which it was invaded by Russia
· We need a cryptocurrency reserve, because we want to stock up and control a “currency” backed by nothing, whose users shun international regulation of this sort.
· Let’s start a trade war with China, nevermind they buy most of the US Debt.
· Let’s fire all the meteorologists at the NOAA.
· Let’s fire IRS agents responsible for, you know, collecting revenue.
· Let’s put a perceived Russian agent who met with Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Asaad in as Director of National Intelligence.
· Let’s put a vaccine denier as the head of the agency making us safe from diseases.
The running gag of the first Trump administration was Trump telling people to do awful things and his subordinates just…not doing them. For example: Remember when Trump told a room full of people to get the Justice Department harass Time Warner, and Gary Cohn walked out of the meeting and told everyone within earshot “don’t you fucking dare” do that? Remember when Mark Esper had to tell Trump that he can’t shoot protesters in the legs?
It turns out that the “deep state” was actually just not-crazy people refusing to do crazy stuff.
But this time around, Trump is free to be his worst self.
Those who are now castigating Ukraine don’t even pretend that doing so is moral. Instead, they seem to argue for a worldview in which everyone is equally corrupt and murderous, so the US should simply divide the world up into spheres of influence, regardless of who is being plundered or murdered in the process.
Political scientist Mark Lilla recently explained the psychological state of this moral worldview in terms completely separate from the Russia-Ukraine war, through—ironically enough—one of Russia’s greatest intellectual and literary giants, novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.
“In so many of his novels we meet seemingly wicked characters who are really only in despair, their original goodness having been robbed by someone or by circumstances beyond their control,” Lilla writes. “And to cope with the trauma, they convince themselves that there is no such thing as goodness, becoming prostitutes or rakes or drunkards or revolutionaries, reveling in their baseness. But then they are undone when they meet genuinely good people and grow to hate them.”
Last month, during Elon Musk’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words, and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, people on his social-media platform, X, started posting about ketamine.
Musk has said he uses ketamine regularly, so for the past couple of years, public speculation has persisted about how much he takes, whether he’s currently high, or how it might affect his behavior. Last year, Musk told CNN’s Don Lemon that he has a ketamine prescription and uses the drug roughly every other week to help with depression symptoms. When Lemon asked if Musk ever abused ketamine, Musk replied, “I don’t think so. If you use too much ketamine you can’t really get work done,” then said that investors in his companies should want him to keep up his drug regimen. Not everyone is convinced.
The Wall Street Journalhas reported that Musk also takes the drug recreationally, and in 2023, Ronan Farrow reported in The New Yorker that Musk’s “associates” worried that ketamine, “alongside his isolation and his increasingly embattled relationship with the press, might contribute to his tendency to make chaotic and impulsive statements and decisions.”
The Progress 2028 ads are so deceptive that they tricked even Scott Manley, chief lobbyist for Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state's largest business lobby and a big Schimel supporter.
Last week, Manley posted one of the fake pro-Crawford ads on X, formerly Twitter, that said Crawford "understands that justice is more than just punishment for criminals — it's about second chances."
"New digital ad asks voters to thank Susan Crawford for her catch and release approach (to) violent criminals," Manley wrote. "Did George Soros fund this ad? Maybe (former Milwaukee County District Attorney John) Chisholm?"
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