In the Interests of Dialogue

My response to a reader's critique

Photo by Carl Tronders on Unsplash

My essay comparing Trump and Biden to Hitler received mostly positive comments plus a bunch of shares and restacks (Thank you!). However one reader—Dave—pushed back with commentary and questions I suspect would resonate with the many who are appalled by the activity of Trump 2.0, who view his tactics as cruel and his aims an overreach of executive power—an unprecedented dictatorship emerging on U.S. soil. So in the interests of engaging critique and promoting dialogue I want to take this opportunity to reply to Dave’s comment (which you can read unparsed, here). For ease of writing flow, I’ll employ the same format as in my reply last fall to Sweeper698’s post-election tirade against Trump voters. I appreciate and thank Dave for his challenge and his civility; his words will be in bold.

Interesting exercise - it appears Chat GPT isn't yet incorporating the actions we are seeing in Trump's second administration.

I wondered about that. It’s not clear to me that Chat is definitively leaving out Trump’s 2025 actions, but I intend to test out that question. I’d like to see if I can get it to assess Trump 2.0 against the accusation of authoritarianism and how it would (so far) compare to Biden’s regime. Stay tuned . . .

How would you have responded had Biden placed a billionaire into a Doge-like position, fired all the independent roles established by congress to look for fraud, accepted millions in shady crypto deals, replaced all the generals with personal loyalists, etc.?

Do you actually mean “independent roles established by congress to look for fraud”? Because if there were any such anti-fraud roles, I’d say they’ve failed so spectacularly that they deserve to be fired and replaced with people who will get the job done. In the event that you actually meant: How would you have responded had Biden placed a billionaire into a Doge-like position to look for fraud, fired all the independent roles established by congress . . . etc., I would say: if you’re referring to the firing of unelected bureaucrats, a.k.a. civil service, then my answer is that I would have supported Biden because I likely would have voted for him.

In every presidential election since I was eighteen I have voted for the candidate who promised to cut spending and reduce the size of government. It has taken forty years to finally get one willing to follow through. So for me, DOGE is a dream come true. While I can be anxious about the potential of digital tech to subvert our humanity, finally here I see a profoundly beneficial use for it. The fact that Elon can deploy algorithms to find, expose, and terminate the fraud, waste, and abuse of our tax dollars hidden in the Byzantine depths of that black hole we call the federal bureaucracy is a welcome, miraculous gift, in my book.

Also in regard to firing “independent roles,” the original intent of the civil service notwithstanding, it is a myth that federal workers are a body of neutral, apolitical bureaucrats who faithfully and impartially carry out the agenda of the chief executive regardless of his party. In fact, federal workers in most departments overwhelmingly support Democrats. Their overt #Resistance during Trump 1.0 is clear evidence they are not nonpartisan employees disinterestedly fulfilling their assignments. So I reject the idea that a president, ushered into office by the vote of the people, should tolerate a bureaucratic rebellion organized to thwart the agenda that won at the ballot box. It’s a ludicrous ask and anti-democratic on its face.

Regarding “shady crypto deals” you’ll have to be more specific. I tried googling “Trump accepts millions in shady crypto deals” and also “Elon accepts. . .” but nothing came up for either of them about accepting any deals, much less shady ones. I’ll take this opportunity, though, to respond to the Left’s outrage over Elon heading up DOGE. Ever since he teamed up with Trump, legacy media has gone out of its way to cast Elon as a power-crazed grifter, the genius gone rogue. Meanwhile, people like me have for years watched Bill Gates cosplay a medical expert on the global stage, fawningly cited and celebrated by media despite all manner of suspect deals, associations, and motivations. Isn’t it interesting how a billionaire messing around inside the halls of power isn’t a pearl-clutching catastrophe until the tech bro leans Right? At least Elon doesn’t lobby government leaders to stomp on civil liberties.

I also reject this nouveau Trump-era rule that a president should keep disloyal generals in the ranks. Not only does it defy common sense, anyone who buys into it seriously does not know their U.S. history. For kicks I asked ChatGPT to give me the total number of U.S. presidents who have “changed military leadership upon assuming office.” Here’s what it gave back (bold emphasis mine):

Almost every U.S. president has made some changes to military leadership upon taking office, whether by appointing new Joint Chiefs of Staff, replacing key generals, or shifting military strategy. Given that the president is the commander-in-chief, leadership transitions are common.

If we define "changing military leadership" as replacing key military figures (such as Joint Chiefs of Staff or major theater commanders), then the vast majority of the 46 U.S. presidents (including Joe Biden) have done so. While there is no official count readily available, an estimate would suggest that at least 40+ presidents have made significant military leadership changes upon assuming office. Some may have retained existing leaders for continuity, but turnover is typical due to differing military strategies, policies, and global circumstances.

According to journalist Chris Bray, the trend began with Thomas Jefferson in 1800 who inherited an entirely hostile command and went to great lengths to curtail them.

So I propose we reject this knee-jerk notion that whatever Trump does it’s de facto a “threat to democracy” and Not How Things Have Ever Been Done!!!!! It’s beginning to sound like “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf, Wolf, Wolf, Wolf, Wolf!”

The Biden era is over yet the focus of MAGA supporters seems to be looking backward rather than applying any kind of critical lens to what is happening in real time.

From where I’m standing that seems a misperception of the energy on the political Right. What I see are people demanding that false narratives and the crimes they covered up be exposed. I see people seeking accountability for the multiple serious abuses of institutional power. They want the injustices acknowledged, punished where possible, and the historical record set straight—starting with the Soviet-style, police-state prosecutions of January 6th protestors.

For anyone still believing justice was served against J6ers, I’d encourage wider and deeper investigation, beyond trusted Left sources (which include legacy and institutional media, of course). There is primary source material, like the entire video footage of the Capitol building available to watch here, or personal stories like those that can be read here or here. There are numerous videos investigating the coverup of federal agency involvement in the “insurrection,” and exposing the flagrant weaponization of the government against citizens, available here. The scope and scale of civil rights abuses, of fundamental violations of the Constitution by government actors is staggering when you dig into the facts and stories beneath the official false narrative. About as unAmerican an episode in our government’s history as it gets.

Also among the MAGA right is an expectation that the wall of lies and manipulated “science” that upheld the Covid narrative will be officially dissected and dismantled. Trump 2.0 voters, including the myriad who were lifelong Democrats—Trump 1.0 haters, even—all of whom were red-pilled by the medical harms, falsehoods, and gaslighting imposed after 2020, want the sainted Anthony Fauci unmasked. They want him revealed for the corrupt despot and liar that he is.

In a nutshell, Trump supporters want justice to finally prevail. There is no justice without truth, and no truth without deep and wide investigations uncovering the buried facts. The only way to move forward is for fraudulent narratives to be exposed and their perpetrators discredited.

When it comes to the current moment, I’d say it’s not a fair statement to suggest Trump supporters aren’t applying “any kind of critical lens.” Every person’s filter will be determined largely by a their priors—what they’ve seen and experienced, and who they trust for information and perspective. My guess is that you and I both perceive ourselves applying a critical lens but I’ll bet we’re seeing two very different pictures. That’s because I trust information sources you likely wouldn’t, and you trust ones I likely wouldn’t. It’s definitely a growing problem that Americans . . . Westerners in general . . . are living in barely connected political realities. I don’t know what to do about it other than try to keep reading, watching, speaking, reaching across party lines. Stay curious.

Do you find nothing objectionable about the way Trump and his people are going about their work?

The short answer is yes. The longer answer is complicated.

I can’t speak for MAGA enthusiasts as I would call myself a reluctant Trump supporter. I admire and trust people who lead by example, who speak with humility and act with courage . . . which is why I always said that if RFK, Jr. ever ran for president I’d vote for him. (I tried.) So I can honestly sympathize with those who find Trump detestable. Because his manner and energy seem churlish, vengeful, thin-skinned. I can see he presents as reactive rather than thoughtful, childish and self-obsessed rather than wise and humble.

It’s a profound irony then, that I have grown convinced he’s the only viable leader for this American moment. Because despite his undeniably glaring weaknesses, Donald Trump is the only person anywhere on the political scene with the willingness—the audacity and tenacity (the balls, to put it indelicately)—to fully stomp the brakes and yank the wheel hard enough to spin us away from the financial and cultural cliff we’ve been accelerating towards. (Presuming we haven’t already crossed the point of no return.) As the keen political analyst N.S. Lyons wrote of Trump’s 2024 victory (bold emphasis mine):

Trump’s reelection represents a genuine popular mass hunger for systemic reform, and in particular for a robust reassertion of democratic power, and the democratic spirit, over managerial oligarchy, its unelected state, and its many social pathologies including “woke” ideological madness. If harnessed correctly, this popular reaction has the potential to instantiate a real rollback of managerial control – and not only in the United States but worldwide. But this energy will go nowhere without an intense and coordinated effort to organize it, direct it, and wield it to overcome the inevitable resistance of the managerial state, for whom the stakes are dire.

I wish I had absolute faith Trump has what it takes to create that intense and coordinated effort, but I don’t. His unusually shrewd political instincts have served him remarkably well so far, as illustrated by his miraculous comeback from what should have been political death in 2020. But he’s up against a deeply entrenched security state. According to JFK files recently released, the CIA was already morphing into a rogue operation, a “state within a state,” sixty years ago. From the New York Times reporting on new disclosures (bold emphasis mine):

An aide to President John F. Kennedy worried that C.I.A. officers stationed in embassies around the world were undermining the State Department’s authority, according to a newly unredacted portion of a 1961 memo to the president.

Most of the 15-page memo, titled “C.I.A. Reorganization,” was already public. It was written by a special assistant to the president, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., shortly after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and raised concerns about the spy agency’s autonomy and power, saying it had “many of the characteristics of a state within a state.”

But one section of the document was always redacted — until now.

Over about a page and a half, which was released on Tuesday in a trove of documents related to Kennedy’s assassination, Mr. Schlesinger describes how roughly 1,500 supposed State Department employees were actually undercover C.I.A. officers who sometimes operated at odds with U.S. ambassadors. He wrote that nearly half of the political officers at U.S. embassies, who were responsible for understanding and advising on their host countries’ politics, were working for the C.I.A.

The new information suggests that early in the Cold War, U.S. leaders were concerned that the agency had too much independent power in secret operations abroad, and that this could erode the authority of the president.

When the C.I.A. was established in 1947, some officers went undercover by posing as State Department employees, a practice that was supposed to be temporary and limited. But it persisted because it was cheaper, easier and ensured a “pleasanter life for the C.I.A. people,” Mr. Schlesinger wrote.

In Paris, for example, 128 C.I.A. officers were based at the embassy. The spy agency even sought to cut the State Department’s contact with some politicians, including a key leader in parliament, according to the memo.

If that’s what the CIA was already doing six decades ago, a mere fourteen years after its creation, it’s worth pondering the depth and breadth of its power today. They have the most cutting-edge technology and surveillance tools at their disposal and a population well-conditioned to accept their secrecy and assume their integrity. One can only imagine the extent of their machinations inside the global halls of power at this point, including our own federal bureaucracy. I have zero doubt that over these past sixty years they’ve been running rampant, managing “democracy” everywhere by whatever means, and subverting any American president trying to exercise his Constitutional authority in a direction they oppose. As was, quite evidently, the case with JFK, until he was assassinated. Conveniently.

In addition to the open question of whether Trump can succeed in reasserting his presidential authority against a Deep State committed to co-opting (or ignoring) it, I’m concerned about a basic law of physics: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I do get why Trump is moving fast and furiously, plowing forward with his policy objectives at full speed; after most of his agenda was derailed during 1.0 by a coordinated #Resistance, was thwarted by entrenched bureaucrats and managerial elites posing as Republican advisors and allies, his 2.0 tactics seem focused on keeping heads spinning, keeping the opposition off-balance, the counter-energy scattered.

But I anticipate a reaction. Because there is no denying that people inside the system are fully invested in clinging to the status quo. Their (understandable) attachment to it is also the reason, unfortunately, why there is no possible way to downsize government that will be felt by them as kind or accepted by them as necessary. It’s the reason reductions have been discussed and promised endlessly, but no one has ever volunteered to sacrifice their federal job or department, and no president—until Trump—has ever exhibited the political will to prevent the government’s perpetual expansion. Much less attempted to reverse it.

As much as I sympathize with the reality of federal workers who don’t want their jobs cut (who would?), I see their pain as unavoidable if the U.S. is going to have a prayer of escaping financial collapse. We simply cannot continue without severe cuts well beyond the clean up of the systemic waste and fraud being uncovered daily by DOGE. Our budget and deficit are too astronomically out-of-control for a gentle reining in, a mere trimming around the edges. Maybe if we’d gotten serious about fiscal responsibility decades ago we could have afforded a minimalist approach. But now it’s too late.

And that said, I don’t like how abruptly office workers are being forced out—given twenty minutes to pack up their things and leave. My analytical brain can understand that’s likely a strategic move to prevent people having time to organize and resist—a twist on the “better to ask forgiveness than permission” approach to bold action. I can imagine they see it as necessary to maintain momentum towards the goal. But the collateral damage to the lives of fellow Americans feels sickening. I hate the heartache and shock, the fear and uncertainty for the workers who have faithfully carried out their duties as civil servants, whose lives are being upended through no fault of their own. And I don’t like knowing it’s all adding to the physics equation that will manifest, eventually, as a reckoning. I really wish this drastic upheaval was not necessary for our economic survival, that our only way out was not through.

While it's a stretch to compare the liberties taken by past administrations (of both parties) with what Trump is doing, it should be clear by now that, in the name of exorcising ideological authoritarianism of one kind, we have invited in a more virulent form of authoritarianism.

It’s not at all clear to me that Trump 2.0 is a more virulent form of authoritarianism. Nobody’s civil liberties are being threatened (much less abridged), no one in Trump’s administration is colluding to censor inconvenient truths on social media, or to prosecute political rivals on brazenly trumped-up charges. Yes, this president is making bold use of his Constitutional authority, as did others, like FDR, Lincoln, and Jackson. Trump is indeed leaning hard on Article II, but let me point out that it opens with this succinct statement (bold emphasis mine):

“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

It’s not a generic line. It’s a clear definition of authority. So what constraints district judges (whose courts are not even mentioned in the Constitution let alone vested with Executive oversight) can impose on his power, and to what extent Congress can mandate Executive spending will all be sorted out by SCOTUS, likely sooner rather than later. But in the meantime, I’d say it’s a painful stretch to call this chief executive a virulent authoritarian. Literally Hitler is literally overdone.

Is it only authoritarianism if the actor pursues things about which you disagree?

In answer to this question I want to share a relevant story I read this week. It’s an overview of a Washington Post piece, and since I don’t have a WaPo subscription from which to share direct quotes, I’ll just cut and paste the overview:

In 2015, Harvard ran a judicial experiment. Thirty-five federal judges participated in a workshop. They were asked to review a 1990’s appellate case about Balkan war crimes. They each had one hour to decide whether to reverse the trial judge’s decision to convict the defendant.

The researchers slightly tweaked each judge’s package, in two ways. First, they varied the emotional resonance: sometimes the defendant was described as a villain, and sometimes described sympathetically, such as by saying he’d expressed “deep regret at all bloodshed in this tragic war.”

Second, the packets flipped the legal strength. Some packets included prior cases suggesting the defendant’s conviction was legally flawed, while other packets included legal precedent hinting that the conviction was valid.

The all-too-predictable result was most judges based their decisions on the bleeding-heart, emotional factors—and not the law. The legal precedents didn’t seem to matter at all. Instead, the judges’ decisions were strongly correlated with whether the defendant was shown sympathetically—even though the judges wrote that their decisions were solely based on the law.

That was the 2015 study (published in 2016). But this week, Eric A. Posner and Shivam Saran at the University of Chicago Law School released a new paper in which they repeated the 2015 experiment, but this time used they Chat GPT to evaluate the cases.

Unsurprisingly, they found the exact opposite of the 2015 study. Chat GPT’s likelihood of overturning the conviction was “unaffected by whether the defendant is portrayed as sympathetic or unsympathetic.” Rather, “GPT follows precedent more consistently, demonstrating a higher likelihood of affirming when the precedent supports affirmation and a lower likelihood when precedent supports reversal.”

Chat GPT was completely unpersuaded by the emotional factors. In the 2015 study, almost all the human judges who got “sympathetic defendant” packets reversed the conviction. But GPT didn’t take the bait. It affirmed the conviction in all 25 cases.

Posner and Saran wrote that the artificial judge “is a true formalist: it neither refers to nor bases its rulings on sympathy and avoids policy considerations” when explaining its decisions.

The researchers didn’t just leave it there. They pressed onward. They specifically asked GPT to re-evaluate the cases, this time accounting for human elements.

But it didn’t work. “While AI often acknowledges the defendant’s sympathetic traits,” they wrote, “it ultimately disregards them as irrelevant to the outcome of the case.”

So my response to your question is: Ask ChatGPT. I was just reporting its answers.

America can only hope to be a shining light if we get past looking for a "ruler" and get back to seeking "leaders" who at least try to be wise and just.

I agree, and I also think those qualities are to some extent in the eye of the beholder. I know people who think Biden was a benevolent grandpa of a leader, a steady, trustworthy president carrying us through a terrifying global ordeal. And I know many people who, like me, voted for Trump because they perceive in him a commitment to justice under the law—for J6ers, Covid victims, every American. His imperfections notwithstanding, we view him as an incisive and strong leader who will champion American interests, who wants to help American families thrive in a strong economy with a solid foundation of efficient government. And we think that’s wise. And honorable.

More than anything, to be a shining light I think we need to look at each other directly rather than through the distorting lens of algorithms, stereotypes, and perpetual outrage porn. We need to look beyond our discordant perspectives to see our shared humanity underneath. Because most of us want the same things for ourselves, our families, our communities, country, and the world: hope and kindness, peace and justice, health and prosperity. There are real and artificial forces working to divide us, whether intentional or incidental, and our role as citizens and souls must be to reach out. To keep in touch. To refuse to lose sight of one another.

And if we can’t always lift each other up, at least we can wish each other well.
Final answer.