Kakistocracy, Foxistocracy, Nepo-cracy, All at Once.
Plus: What if we had a
crisis and nobody cared?
Dec 12, 2024
Christopher
Wray: “I’ll show myself out, thank you.”
Christopher Wray’s fight to preserve
the independence and integrity of the FBI ended — like so many other things
these days — with barely a whimper.
Even though he had three years left in
his 10-year term, Wray chose to show himself out the door. If he wanted to give
Trump a housewarming gift, he could have given him a fruitcake. Instead, he
obeyed in advance — resigning, without waiting to be fired.
And just like that, yet another
norm/tradition/guardrail simply faded away.
In a normal political universe, the
ouster of Wray to make for a rabid and vengeful MAGA enforcer like Kash Patel
would be a scandal on the level of Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre. But
as Jonathan Chait wrote yesterday, the purge of Wray is
being met with little more than a despairing shrug… the latest in the
lengthening series of shrugs as the long surrender continues.
The president-elect had been facing
the unpleasant task of firing a lifelong Republican whom he had selected
himself, inviting the national media to raise ugly questions about his
oft-confessed desire to turn the federal criminal-justice apparatus into a
weapon of political vengeance.
Instead, Wray, like so many
Republicans who couldn’t stomach Trump’s demands, decided to go gentle into
that good night. Nobody except Wray will remember where they were when
Christopher Wray resigned.
This seems like a good time to remind
you that none of this is remotely normal; and that you are not the crazy ones.
And we haven’t even gotten to Kari Lake, Lara Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Mark
Zuckerberg, or Time Magazine yet.
Where’s Laura?
We shouldn’t be surprised by the
emerging Trump Administration because knew what was coming, right? He is simply
creating a government in his own image.
What, after all, did we expect, when
America elected a rapey, seditionist, convicted felon, who trafficked in
bigotry, lied with abandon, and promised a reign of retribution?
At this point, the only thing that
really surprises me is that his bigoted, freaky BFF, Laura Loomer hasn’t
gotten a job, since every other member of his insane clown posse has landed a
plum of one sort or another. But there’s still time, and Loomer is apparently
quite persuasive with the Donald. (For some background, I refer you to my earlier post on Loomer, which for some reason remains the
single most-read post on “To the Contrary.”)
**
I apologize for pulling out the hoary
cliche about boiling frogs, but I do want to call your attention to how we seem
to have gone from outrage to numbness as Trump’s administration vacillates
between the dangerous, the absurd, and the absolutely farcical.
Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Matt Gaetz,
and Tulsi Gabbard pose a real and present danger to national security and the
Constitution. But what can we say about the news that Trump is trying to name
MAGA Queen Kari Lake — a serial liar and loser— to head the Voice of America?
What should we make of his appointment of Don Jr.’s recently dumped girlfriend,
Kimberly Guilfoyle, as ambassador to Greece?
Trump is flooding the zone with
absurdist drivel, so where do we look first?
There’s the Musk-led oligarchy/kakistocracy,
which is taking shape in broad daylight, as Trump — the Populist Tribune of the
People — stuffs his cabinet with billionaires.
Then there is the naked
nepotism. During the holiday weekend, Trump named the fathers-in-law
of two of his kids to government jobs —he appointed Massad Boulos, the
Lebanese-born dad of Tiffany Trump’s husband, as senior Middle East adviser,
and Charles Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law, as Ambassador to France
despite his prior felony convictions. Trump wants another daughter-in-law named
to the US Senate, because why the fuq not.
And, we have the
Government by Central Casting, by which, of course, we mean Fox News. By the
latest count, Trump has now named 13 current or former Fox employees to
high-ranking positions. Other members of his administration also auditioned for
their new roles by appearing regularly on the network.
In case you’ve lost track, Media Matters has kept a running tally of
the Fox-Trump pipeline:
- Monica Crowley, State Department chief of protocol
A C-list conservative commentator who spent
two decades as a Fox contributor, Crowley most notably pushed several bigoted
conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama’s heritage,
- Sean Duffy, secretary of transportation
Fox
host, and mediocre former WI congressman.
- Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence.
You
know.
- Sebastian Gorka, Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior
Director for Counterterrorism
A
bombastic, self-proclaimed national security “expert” with dubious credentials,
a proclivity for anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, and ties to foreign extremist
groups.
- Kimberly Guilfoyle, ambassador to Greece
Guilfoyle,
an undistinguished pro-Trump pundit and founding co-host of the Fox panel show
The Five, rallied network staffers to support then-Fox CEO Roger Ailes when
longtime host Gretchen Carlson sued him for sexual harassment. Guilfoyle’s 2018
departure from the network was reportedly linked to “a human resources
investigation into allegations of inappropriate behavior including sexual
misconduct”; Fox reportedly paid more than $4 million to Guilfoyle’s assistant,
who alleged “she was frequently required to work at Guilfoyle’s New York
apartment while the Fox host displayed herself naked, and was shown photographs
of the genitalia of men with whom Guilfoyle had had sexual relations”
(Guilfoyle has denied engaging in “any workplace misconduct”)
- Pete Hegseth, secretary of defense.
Fox
host and all-around chode.
- Tom Homan, “Border Czar.”
Homan
joined Fox as a contributor in August 2018, two months after his retirement as
acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (where he reportedly
served as the “intellectual ‘father’” of Trump’s family separation policy).
- Mike Huckabee, ambassador to Israel.
Huckabee,
a former governor of Arkansas, hosted a weekly Fox program for more than six
years before stepping down in 2015 to explore a presidential run.
- Keith Kellogg, special envoy for Ukraine and Russia
Fox
talking head.
- Dr. Marty Makary, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner
Makary,
a surgeon, professor, and health policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University,
joined Fox as a contributor near the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
In that role, he criticized public health officials for warning of new strains
of the virus in the months leading up to the emergence of the deadly delta
variant and criticized vaccine mandates, particularly for children, citing the
vaccine’s purported health risks.
- Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, Surgeon General of the United States
Nesheiwat,
the medical director of a chain of New York urgent care centers, joined Fox as
a medical contributor near the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. In
that role, she promoted the use of supplemental zinc as a COVID-19 treatment
and repeatedly highlighted the purported health risks of vaccination.
- Abigail Slater,
assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division at the Department of
Justice
- Michael Waltz,
national security adviser
And this list doesn’t even include
frequent guests on Fox News.
What if we had a crisis, and nobody cared?
The evidence continues to mount that
the kids are not all right.
Depression among young people has spiked, social media continues to
dumb us down, and even elite universities report that many of their students —
theoretically the nation’s best and brightest — can’t (or won’t) read books. Last week, the
Oxford University Press chose “brain rot” as its word of the year.
And the post-Covid test scores are
abysmal.
By any measure, we face an acute
educational crisis in this country. But the response? Pretty much… crickets.
Once upon a time in America, we would
have risen to the challenge — mobilizing our national will and resources to
confront the crisis. There would have been a robust debate. In those days, we
would have at least pretended to care. But that seems like a long time ago now,
doesn’t it?
In 1957, the Soviet Union shocked the
world with the launch of its Earth-orbiting Sputnik satellite. The United
States, fearful of the security risk and hoping to make the nation more
competitive with foreign powers, reacted with dramatic investments in
science-and-technology education. In 1983, “A Nation at Risk,” the report published by the
National Commission on Excellence in Education, warned of a “rising tide of
mediocrity” in American education that “threatens our very future as a Nation
and a people.”
[The report described the crisis in
grim and earnest tones. “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose
on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today,” it famously
warned, “we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”]
[Back then] the warnings helped spark
a bipartisan national effort to improve the schools, and the following decades
saw major federal initiatives such as George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and Barack
Obama’s Race to the Top program, accompanied by
major state-level reforms to boost achievement.
America is again facing an educational
crisis. Last week, The New York Times reported that American students “turned in
grim results on the latest international test of math skills.” That test, the
Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), found that
fourth graders have dropped 18 points in math since 2019, while eighth graders
have dropped 27 points. The math scores of both high-performing and
low-performing eighth graders fell. As the education reporter Dana Goldstein
notes, the coronavirus pandemic is a major contributor to the decline, but not
the only one: “In the United States, academic declines—and widening gaps
between stronger and weaker students—were apparent before the pandemic,” she writes. In
2019, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found
that two-thirds of American children could not read at a proficient level.
In math, Americans now lag behind their counterparts in places such
as Singapore, South Korea, Britain, and Poland. Only 7 percent of American
students scored at the highest levels in math—far behind the 23 percent in
South Korea and Japan, and 41 percent in Singapore, who scored at that level.
The decline in math scores is part of a much larger decline in educational
performance overall—and an exacerbation of the achievement gap between rich and poor
students. But despite the appalling numbers, the educational crisis was barely mentioned during the presidential
debates, and there is scant evidence of the political will necessary to address
it.
Any bipartisan consensus on education
has shattered; President-Elect Donald Trump and Republicans at the state level
seem more intent on waging culture wars about gender and religion than tackling achievement gaps. The
education initiative that Trump has been most vocal about is his threat to abolish
the federal Department of Education (which he is unlikely to achieve, because
dismantling the department requires an act of Congress). Meanwhile, many
congressional and state-level Democrats are reluctant to push back against
either the educational establishment or the teachers’ unions. This dynamic
appeared most notably in their failure to resist the unions’ push to keep schools closed during the early
pandemic.
Instead of alarm, the crisis has been
met with denial and attempts at obfuscation.
Some state educational bureaucracies
have responded to the decline in student achievement by simply lowering their
standards. In New York, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Alaska, for instance, education officials
adjusted their passing scores on standardized tests or changed their definition
of proficiency. And American parents continue to think their kids are doing just
fine—in large part because of schools’ inflation of grades.
The public also remains in deep
denial. American students may be lagging behind much of the world, but their
parents continue to think their own kids are doing just fine. A 2023 Gallup study found that “Nine in
10 parents believe their child is at or above grade level in reading and math,”
which was not surprising because their children’s report cards were filled with
gold stars and happy faces. “Roughly eight in 10 students in the U.S. receive
mostly B’s or better,” Gallup reported.
For decades, the consequences of
underperformance have also been masked by the influx of international students
into American higher education. A 2022 study found that foreign students made up a
majority—sometimes as much as 80 percent—of students in U.S. graduate programs
in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Meanwhile,
immigrants make up about a quarter of all workers in
STEM fields. It’s not yet clear how Trump’s massive crackdown on immigrants
could affect opportunities for foreign students, or their willingness to come
to the United States.
You can read the whole thing here (gift link.)
