Everyone Who Was Supposed to Protect You From This Failed Miserably

 

Everyone Who Was Supposed to Protect You From This Failed Miserably

Trump is president again. It was a top-to-bottom collapse and failure by every major institution that got us here

By Asawin Suebsaeng

January 20, 2025

WASHINGTON — Everybody in a position of power failed to protect you from this.

Many of those same people and leaders are now cashing in, paying millions in protection money, or laughing about what has happened. Others are pretending there was nothing they could do to stop it — and preemptively surrendering now. 

On this cold Monday afternoon in the nation’s capital, a twice-impeached convicted felon was inaugurated in the very building where his attempt to steal an election four years ago left pools of blood. Donald Trump beat the damning federal criminal cases against him because the Supreme Court, and then will of voters, snuffed out any possibility for those historic trials to commence. He was elected, this time with a plurality of the popular vote, on a platform that is somehow more rancidly authoritarian and anti-democratic, proudly corrupt and abusive, and ethnic-cleansing-prone than his and his party’s platforms were in 2016 and 2020. His personality cult and iron grip on the GOP only grew in the years since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that he instigated, as it did in the years since his first administration produced a four-year-long arterial spray of scandal, barbarism, and abhorrent mismanagement, including during the mass death and economic implosion of the coronavirus pandemic.

He and the Republican Party now have trifecta control of the federal government. Trump retakes the White House with a largely demoralized Democratic Party as his opposition, and a far-right Supreme Court supermajority entrenched. The country is theirs, and we will be ruled by the meanest nerds and most nihilistic dorks, who now pretend to speak for a working class they despise. Every cultist, clampdown zealot, and deliriously boring psycho who Trump appoints to perches of seniority and influence are leering at the American people the same way the protagonists in Natural Born Killers looked at patrons of a diner in the middle of a desert.

To them, this is all very funny. The day before his swearing in, Trump held a “victory rally” party for his super-fans at the Capital One Arena in the Chinatown neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Kid Rock performed, and everybody bawitdaba’d. Several middle-aged, MAGA-merch-donning ladies bopped and sang along to Kid Rock’s 2022 song that features the lyric “a whole generation is mentally ill.” Kid Rock charmed the crowd with the line about how “the mainstream media can suck my dick,” though he sheepishly self-censored the best word. 

The “Girls Gone Bible” podcast duo revved up the arena audience by honoring Trump’s “love and devotion,” praying for “angelic protection” of the 47th president and the punishment of his foes, and thanking Jesus Christ for his second term in office. Trump-adulating Oscar winner Jon Voight showed up on-stage, as the words “DREAM BIG AGAIN” were displayed on arena screens. Trump lieutenant Stephen Miller hit the stage to deliver canned applause lines in his scarringly irritating voice about “sending the illegals home” and about how gender is decided by the Almighty. Megyn Kelly came out to AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long,” then made fun of Jennifer Lopez’s marital record. She also stressed that Trump’s people had the right to “annoy” others, which, yes, accurate, no notes there. 

UFC CEO Dana White practically declared that Donald Trump is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being he’s ever known in his life. Lara Trump claimed that her father-in-law will save “the entire world.” And after Lee Greenwood performed his requisite “proud to be an American” tune, Trump walked out to spike the football, give a shout-out to some “beautiful ladies” in the arena, riff on his hysterical xenophobia, and introduce a perennially awkward Elon Musk. Trump promised his voters they’d “have a lot of fun watching television tomorrow.” 

As a grand finale to Trump’s victory-rally address, disco group Village People burst onto the stage to perform their hit “Y.M.C.A.” song, which had become Trump’s campaign jingle, as the former and new president mostly wiggled and stood there next to the costumed bandmates during the performance. A large number of attendees rose, way more enthusiastically than they did for the rally’s pledge of allegiance or national anthem, to do their own versions of Trump’s “Y.M.C.A.” hand-dancing from the campaign trail. This gesticulating and hand-pumping to Village People melodies is now a partywide cultural ritual in the age of Trump, and this inauguration week in D.C. is no different.

(This Rolling Stone reporter tried to cover the rally as best he could, but he kept involuntarily scribbling “this is hell, we live in hell, I’m in Hell” over and over.)

The jubilant Village People aside, this is a scenario that we were raised and taught in our schools to believe was not practically or legally possible in our time. This is, we were assured at school, something that occurs in Europe, especially in bygone decades of empire, world wars, and global cold war. Maybe it’s something that unfolds during the democratic backsliding of Latin American nations, particularly the poorer ones. The Middle East. The Philippines. Other places we can’t locate on a map without cheating or a hint, and in countries and regions we can barely deign to pronounce correctly. 

Not here. At least that’s what we were told again, and again, and again, and then again.

In a sense, a moment like today’s should not shock the mind, given that there are so many citizens alive right now who experienced America when it was not in any meaningful sense a democracy at all. And yet, if you rewound the clock a decade, and told virtually any Republican or Democrat that a president could do exactly what Trump did in his final year in office and not only escape justice, but be lavishly rewarded for it and sent back to the Oval Office, each one of them would have told you that you were out of your mind.

Openly working to steal a presidential election you lost and then causing American civilians to die in the process was once considered universally, permanently disqualifying in modern America. Now? What can you do but laugh. It’s clear to everyone willing to honestly examine the thought that the American ideal came with a massive and unspoken asterisk. From now until the end of time, we will never not be the country that allowed the host of Celebrity Apprentice to bring us to the brink of democratic and constitutional hemorrhage.

When Team Trump crows on and on about how their guy mounted the “greatest political comeback” in American history, they are not entirely wrong — though there is a casual depravity to talking about it, like it’s part of a Friends-replacement TV show that Trump used to star on, instead of the abomination that it is. 

But no matter how venal or fascistic Trump is, he was never the sole author of this violent tragicomedy that we’ve endured for a decade, and will continue to endure for years. One morally vacant aristocrat could not have accomplished today on his own.

This is all happening because everyone — every one — who was supposed to protect the American people from this failed in the most miserable, unforgivable ways. It was a catastrophic top-to-bottom failure that many millions of people at home and abroad will be living with, now and long after Trump is no longer leader of a nominally free world. 

Every institution you may have believed had value revealed itself to be for-sale or out-to-lunch.

The highest court in the land, and its right-wing supermajority that Trump cemented, can just decide that laws aren’t real if they inconvenience the larger and more important agenda of keeping Trump out of prison and above the law so he can be president again.

The elite news media — yes, I am aware that includes me; I’ve always been open to the idea that I am part of the problem — that craves the decadence and the mammoth ratings and readership that President Trump previously unleashed has found itself with diminished audiences and a rebellion by former subscribers who see us for what we too often are. That is: ineffective at best, and giddily abetting at worst.

President Joe Biden defeated Trump, including in the key battleground states that Trump swept this time, on his ambient vows to “restore the soul of America.” Central to that promise — and to the formation of his political legacy — was making Trump go away and reducing his fanatically bloodlusting MAGA movement to a footnote in history. Presumably, this did not involve selfishly committing to running for a second term when apparently his own Democratic Party insiders, not to mention the American public, could already tell that he very visibly wasn’t up to the task of beating Trump. History reduces all important people to a single sentence or phrase, and it is difficult to see President Biden as anything more than an abject failure to accomplish his explicitly central goal. By his own actions, it appears Biden had determined his own ego was worth more than the cost of the nation’s entire soul.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Democratic Party leaders (if you can call them that) have settled for now on a strategy of noble pre-surrender to Trump and his goons. “In the history of wrongdoing, both alleged and proven, few — if any — crimes by a public official have reached this level of gravity,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said, following this month’s release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on Trump’s 2020 attempted coup. “Moving forward, each generation of Americans has a responsibility to work to preserve our republic.”

… Thanks.

Elsewhere, the idea that federal law enforcement — which is billed as an institution ostensibly designed to serve and protect you from criminals, such as ones who illegally attempt to overthrow American democracy — was ever going to shield the public and the electorate from Trump’s wrath was always a ludicrous notion. This is primarily because this is the United States of America, which has a richly documented track record of letting our brazenly lawless presidents get off scot-free. But for this one moment in our recorded history, Trump’s actions on multiple fronts were so uniquely shameless that briefly a consensus began to form that something had to be done. That moment was shambolically squandered to the point that even President Biden reportedly regrets appointing Attorney General Merrick Garland, because he moved too slowly and prioritized supposed norms in an appallingly abnormal juncture. It’s a country of liberty and justice for all, though not if doing so feels like too much of a headache for those with institutional authority.

And it truly goes without saying and comes with vanishingly little surprise that American’s corporate titans — who just once made a big public-relations spectacle of frowning over Trump’s Jan. 6 coup attempt and his obvious threat to a fragile democratic order — have lined up around the block to shovel obscene sums of their cash into Trump’s coffers and war chests. “The second Trump inaugural fund is on track to be the most lucrative yet,” The Wall Street Journal reported late last year.

And it almost feels too easy to blame the upper crust of the GOP and conservative movement, even though Trump will forever be their fault. All of them — from Mitch McConnell on down — who knew he would tear out the guts of the country if they let him, well, let him.

Days before Trump’s 2025 inaugural festivities, Rolling Stone spoke to one of the conservative Republicans who didn’t want this to happen, and watched as her party spent the last four years actively purging, punishing, and blackballing those who weren’t comfortable co-signing Trump’s autocratic game-show personality cult.

“I knew there was value in the American people hearing from a former Trump staffer, particularly the fact I was a spokesperson for him and I was willing to say this man violated his oath of office, and does not deserve to set foot near the Oval Office ever again,” says Sarah Matthews, who was one of Trump’s deputy White House press secretaries, including on Jan. 6, 2021. 

Matthews became a pariah in elite Republican circles largely over her public testimony before the select House committee that investigated Trump’s plot to cling to power.

“It’s one of those things where I want to be able to look my future children in the eye and be able to tell them that when history called for it, their mother did the right thing. That she stood up,” she adds. “I wonder if those Republican elected officials who chose to roll over and take it and let Trump walk all over them, all in the name of power, [if they ask themselves]: Is it worth it? Losing your dignity? They’re the ones who have to wake up every morning and look themselves in the mirror… If I hadn’t spoken out, having to carry that on my conscience and living with that far outweighed any fears I had about [Trump] coming after me, or losing friendships, or career opportunities. I have no regrets about my decision.”

The fact that Trump is being sworn in on Martin Luther King Jr. Day is another small, cruel joke, as if to punctuate the last decade of American life with: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward the bad guy winning, getting away with it, then getting everything he desires.

Everyone failed. This afternoon is proof of that, and there is nothing else polite to say. The story of the coming years and eras will likely be not a morality play of undoing the frenzied damage done, but a tragedy where we’re picking up the pieces of what’s left.

THE SCUM CONTINUES TO RISE

 The goal of all these orders is not to implement policy, but to generate outrage, report the spasms of liberal apoplexy to the MAGA faithful, and then, when necessary, go to court. And why not? The president now has a politically sympathetic Supreme Court majority that worked hard to keep him out of prison while he was a candidate, and has functionally immunized him against almost any challenge now that he’s back in office. Trump’s people know that they cannot actually shake the Constitution like an Etch A Sketch and make birthright citizenship disappear, but why not give it a shot, especially if a trolling executive order makes the base happy?

 

Departing the New York Times

I left to stay true to my byline

Paul Krugman

Jan 28, 2025

As many people reading this know, last month I retired from my position as an opinion writer at the New York Times—a job I had done for 25 years. Despite the encomiums issued by the Times, it was not a happy departure. If you check out my Substack, you will see that I have by no means run out of energy or topics to write about. But from my perspective, the nature of my relationship with the Times had degenerated to a point where I couldn’t stay.

Charles Kaiser has written a fair-minded article in the Columbia Journalism Review about my departure. What I want to do in this post is add more context. Let’s be clear: I am not planning to have a running feud with the Times: I came, I saw, I felt I had to leave, and I moved on.

But I believe that the story of why I left says something important about the current state of legacy journalism.

The background: until 2017 or so, I felt extremely happy with my role at the Times, for a couple of reasons.

One, I felt that I had finally cracked the code of opinion column-writing. When the Times hired me at the end of 1999, I was an economics professor who wrote occasionally for a broader audience. And crafting 800-word plain-English essays for readers with no background in economics is, shall we say, a bit different from writing 5000-word academic journal articles full of equations and diagrams for a small professional community. For a while, I struggled with the transition.

But eventually I figured it out. I actually took pleasure in the craftsmanship, in boiling an argument down to its essentials, expressing it in ordinary language, and making it interesting. Furthermore, I believe that my writing affected the national discourse, especially over issues such as George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security, the march to the Affordable Care Act (despite Obama’s initial reluctance), and the unjustified fiscal panic of the early 2010s.

During my first 24 years at the Times, from 2000 to 2024, I faced very few editorial constraints on how and what I wrote. For most of that period my draft would go straight to a copy editor, who would sometimes suggest that I make some changes — for example, softening an assertion that arguably went beyond provable facts, or redrafting a passage the editor didn’t quite understand, and which readers probably wouldn’t either. But the editing was very light; over the years several copy editors jokingly complained that I wasn’t giving them anything to do, because I came in at length, with clean writing and with back-up for all factual assertions.

This light-touch editing prevailed even when I took positions that made Times leadership very nervous. My early and repeated criticisms of Bush’s push to invade Iraq led to several tense meetings with management. In those meetings, I was urged to tone it down. Yet the columns themselves were published as I wrote them. And in the end, I believe the Times — which eventually apologized for its role in promoting the war — was glad that I had taken an anti-invasion stand. I believe that it was my finest hour.

So I was dismayed to find out this past year, when the current Times editors and I began to discuss our differences, that current management and top editors appear to have been completely unaware of this important bit of the paper’s history and my role in it.

Two, previous Times management and editors had allowed me to engage in the higher-level economic debates of the time. The aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis led to a great flowering of economics blogs. Important, sophisticated debates about the causes of the crisis and the policy response were taking place more or less in real time. I was able to be an active part of those debates, because I had an economics blog of my own, under the Times umbrella but separate from the column. The blog, unedited, was both more technical — sometimes much more technical — and looser than the column.

Then, step by step, all the things that made writing at the Times worthwhile for me were taken away. The Times eliminated the blog at the end of 2017. Here’s my last substantive blog post, which gives a good idea of the kind of thing I was no longer able to do once it was eliminated.

For a while I tried to make up for the loss of the blog with threads on Twitter. But even before Elon Musk Nazified the site, tweet threads were an awkward, inferior substitute for blog posts. So in 2021 I opened a Substack account, as a place to put technical material I couldn’t publish in the Times. Times management became very upset. When I explained to them that I really, really needed an outlet where I could publish more analytical writing with charts etc., they agreed to allow me to have a Times newsletter (twice a week), where I could publish the kind of work I had previously posted on my blog.

In September 2024 my newsletter was suddenly suspended by the Times. The only reason I was given was “a problem of cadence”: according to the Times, I was writing too often. I don’t know why this was considered a problem, since my newsletter was never intended to be published as part of the regular paper. Moreover, it had proved to be popular with a number of readers.

Also in 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive. I went from one level of editing to three, with an immediate editor and his superior both weighing in on the column, and sometimes doing substantial rewrites before it went to copy. These rewrites almost invariably involved toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence. I would rewrite the rewrites to restore the essence of my original argument. But as I told Charles Kaiser, I began to feel that I was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless.

One more thing: I faced attempts from others to dictate what I could (and could not) write about, usually in the form, “You’ve already written about that,” as if it never takes more than one column to effectively cover a subject. If that had been the rule during my earlier tenure, I never would have been able to press the case for Obamacare, or against Social Security privatization, and—most alarmingly—against the Iraq invasion. Moreover, all Times opinion writers were banned from engaging in any kind of media criticism. Hardly the kind of rule that would allow an opinion writer to state, “we are being lied into war.”

I felt that my byline was being used to create a storyline that was no longer mine. So I left.

That’s my story. What are the broader implications?

“Words,” John Maynard Keynes once wrote, “ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.” That was always my attitude toward opinion writing. Newspaper columns should be controversial, rubbing some people the wrong way, because the main point is to get people to rethink their assumptions. I used to say, only half-jokingly, that if a column didn’t generate a large amount of hate mail, that meant that I had wasted the space.

Yet what I felt during my final year at the Times was a push toward blandness, toward avoiding saying anything too directly in a way that might get some people (particularly on the right) riled up. I guess my question is, if those are the ground rules, why even bother having an opinion section?

Maybe there was a time when readers would sit still for sober, dull opinion pieces — history’s most boring headline, “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative,” was the title of a Times op-ed — because they were seen as representing the views of The Establishment. And I have the feeling that Times management still thinks it’s living in that world. But in today’s wide-open information (and misinformation) environment, boring writing just vanishes without a trace.

On a somewhat different issue, it became clear to me that the management I was dealing with didn’t understand the difference between having an opinion and having an informed, factually sourced opinion. When the newsletter was canceled, I tried to point out that I was almost the only regular opinion writer doing policy. Their response was to point to other writers who often expressed views about policy, economic and otherwise. I tried in vain to explain that there’s a difference between having opinions about economics and knowing how to read C.B.O. analyses and recent research papers. It all fell on deaf ears.

So that’s the story of my departure from the Times. Despite the difficulties of the last year, I remain deeply grateful to the Times for hiring me and giving me decades of freedom to express my views to such a large audience. And I feel sorry about abandoning loyal readers who still rely on legacy media and who may not follow me to Substack. But my situation had become intolerable, and I haven’t felt a moment’s regret over the new direction and recovering my freedom.

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN ON A.I. FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Artificial Intelligence Embeds Across Sectors Without Heed to Its Human Impact 

AI is becoming a part of of our everyday lives, whether we like it or not. 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

JAN 28, 2025

Senior education officials, regulators, and media mavens all over the world have been focused for some time on the issue of how teachers will be able to distinguish between materials written by students and those created by technologies driven by artificial intelligence. Interestingly, the majority of educators who work in the field every day with students don’t think this is much of a concern. They know their students, they know their respective abilities and capacity, and frankly they only wish their students were smart, motivated and talented enough to try to accomplish such a feat of prevarication.  

Another interesting discussion is taking place in the work world. It’s everywhere. Consider the controversy from the movies, which are now all a twitter (no pun intended) about the AI-based voice enhancement technology used to improve the authenticity of the Hungarian voices in The Brutalist movie. Then there’s the magazine world: the not-too-distant but humiliating discovery in 2023 that articles in Sports Illustrated were actually AI-written and attributed to non-existent authors. Which, by the way, also had headshots. No one complained about the content of the stories, they were just apparently horrified by the process of computers replacing copywriters.

All these concerns stem from fears arising in two different areas. First, there is anxiety across industries about job elimination through automation and A.I. implementation. And, second, the increasingly prevalent idea that we are all less able to tell the difference in so many ways between men and machines.

Plenty has been written about job losses, but we’re just beginning to realize how exposed and how unaware we are of the extent to which our expanding and encroaching technologies have subtly and unobtrusively invaded and subsumed so many aspects of our day-to-day lives. One of the most simple and obvious examples is captchas. We now take for granted and unironically that it’s become our daily job to repeatedly prove to computers that we are real human beings before they permit us to get on with so many different activities and transactions. For the moment, it seems that we’re all stuck with technology, when all we really want is stuff that works.

Real-World Insight

The problem is that our technology development work is so completely focused on the future that we seldom, if ever, look backward. As a result, rather than learning from mistakes, we are doomed to keep repeating them and forgetting the lessons that we should have painfully learned by now. As a result, we quickly come to depend on these new modes of assistance and support. At the same time, we become fearful because we know that there are aspects of their operation and abilities that we can’t entirely control. I’m not talking about Skynet and Arnold. But some more subversive undertakings are superficially attractive, clearly less threatening at the moment. These are designed to replicate, impersonate, and deal directly with other machines and computers “as if” they were human.

With the announced and accelerating rollouts of agentic tech, I believe that we’re on the cusp of another deep technology rabbit hole which we’re largely unprepared for and ill-equipped to deal successfully with. What we never seem to appreciate is that when we develop new disruptive tools and technologies, we immediately seize on the initial implementations and put them into action before we remotely understand them in their entirety. Much less consider their unforeseen and consequential longer-term effects, or even appreciate how long and costly a process will be required to understand how to best put them to use. Every new technology is a package deal, which brings its own negativity right along with all its benefits.

The recent unveiling by OpenAI of its new agentic offering called Operator is the latest clear step forward, for better or for worse. Incorporating computer-using agency, along with the ability to interpret and act upon handwritten lists and other images, Operator – for all intents and purposes – looks to other computers like a human operator who is using both a keyboard and a mouse. Already connected to Open Table and Instacart among other apps and services, Operator can seamlessly book tables and reservations, order tickets, select groceries, and initiate regularly scheduled tasks with very limited, if any, human intervention once the process is set in motion. Only at the final moments and specifically when payment information and confirmation is required does the system pause and ask for approval before proceeding. It’s only a short further step to complete autonomy and reaching the point where, as the late great singer-songwriter Jim Croce sang in his version of his hit Operator, “There’s no one there I really wanted to talk to.”

AI Anxiety

If this prospect doesn’t recall the frightening scenes from Fantasia where the unstoppable brooms carrying buckets of water marched ceaselessly forward and step right over poor Mickey, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, then you’re simply not old enough or a fan of classic Disney movies. Embedded in this fantasy is a real warning which has even more direct and important application today. It’s not difficult to imagine even more sophisticated and fully automated onslaughts launched against ticket sellers or new and more convincing scams and frauds using data and imagery extracted by these new tools.

A photo of a handwritten shopping list – as used in the Operator demo video – seems innocent and harmless until you realize that you’ve provided the digital world with the ability to readily replicate your cursive signature. This may matter less as we move forward, and the schools completely abandon any effort to teach our kids how to sign their names on documents or even write properly and settle instead for block printing.

Bottom line: Here we go again on a wild chase into the future without any clear end in sight or a sufficient understanding of the risks involved or how they might be limited or circumscribed. We’re buying the ticket, closing our eyes, and taking the ride. As the late Hunter Thompson used to say: “There is no honest way to describe the edge because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”