Flooded Zone

The tipping point for this post was a required online training for work.  It was a refresher on Title IX and the Clery Act.  Two things stood out from last time I took the training.  The first was an advisory to clear my browsing history afterward.  The second was the “safety exit” button present on every page.

I suspect these warnings were meant for my colleagues on their work computers.  (I took the training on my personal laptop.)  The company administering the class is a contractor which probably operates in states other than my own.  What this tells me is that we are now at a point where workers have to be warned to cover their tracks after receiving DEI training.

The last ten weeks have been surreal.  I originally meant to write about Signalgate, then the deportations to hellhole prisons in El Salvador, then the economic whipsaw of the tariffs.  Now I’m left trying to take it all in.

Like millions of people, I have seen a good portion of my net worth vanish into the ether over the past two weeks.  After a lifetime following the conventional financial wisdom of saving for retirement by investing in equities, it’s likely that none of us will fully recoup our losses.  I’m rethinking my summer travels over concerns over being able to leave the country or return to it.  More than before, I am self-censoring.

One thing I’ve noticed is the lessened prominence of rank-and-file MAGA in media coverage.  Sure, you still see plenty of red trucker hats in the wild, but you see more reporting about Elon and RFK Jr.’s antics or the obsequiousness of public officials and media when appearing in public with the president.  (On the other hand, a student told me about an incident she saw at one of last weekend’s “Hands Off” demonstrations.  She related that a man driving a pickup truck with the obligatory Trump flag flying from the bed came to a sudden halt.  He then got out and punched the first protestor he came to before getting back in and speeding off.)

I think I can say with certainty that the “flooding the zone” approach is working.  Meanwhile, the apologists look at the pointless chaos and tell us to “trust the plan,” and that Trump is playing 4-D chess. (Honestly, I think tiddlywinks would be too complicated for him.)  They don’t notice or acknowledge that real people are being hurt, some of whom voted for Trump last November. 

I think back on the last ten years as unimaginable at their onset.  I grapple with how to explain this moment when it’s my job to do just that.  And I ponder what the world after will look like.

 

© 2025 The Unassuming Scholar

Calamities

I’ve spent the past weeks wondering which outrageous act would prompt me to write about Trump 2.0.  Keeping up with the firehose gush of ratfuckery emanating from Washington is exhausting and demoralizing.

Today’s televised White House meeting between Trump, J. D. Vance, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was the tipping point.  The meeting degenerated into a shouting match where Trump and Vance scolded Zelensky for being insufficiently grateful to Trump.

It should go without mention that Trump and Vance’s conduct was beneath the dignity of the American presidency.  But so has so much of what has transpired since January 20^th.  Elon Musk’s gang of teenaged incel tech-bros hiding behind an imaginary government agency randomly wrecking actual government agencies is probably the worst of them.  The dismantling of USAID alone will diminish our standing in the global community.  Our holding NATO at arm’s length will do the same.  Cuts to Medicaid will imperil the health of millions of economically vulnerable Americans.

Just as troubling is Trump’s slavish sucking up to Vladimir Putin.  Putin was undoubtedly the target audience for this morning’s public dressing down of President Zelensky.  This, coming on the heels of Trump’s repeated assertions that Ukraine was the aggressor in its war of with Russia, was a perverse form of virtue signaling to ingratiate himself with Putin. 

Then there are the more mundane policy proposals, particularly tariffs.  In the fantasies of the MAGA-verse, these will be a “Take that!” to our imagined rivals.  In reality, they will drive up the price of imported everyday commodities.  Tariffs will also provoke retaliatory tariffs, dampening the market for U.S.-made goods.  Then again, few in the base will believe that rising prices will be the fault not of tariffs but of—take your pick—Biden, congressional Democrats, irresponsible blue-state governors, DEI, ad nauseum.

The media are falling eerily in line this time around.  Not that they have a choice.  First, the Associated Press was banished from the White House press pool over the AP’s insistence in calling the Gulf of Mexico…the Gulf of Mexico.  Then, the White House press office wrested selection of the reporters in the press pool from the White House Correspondents’ Association.  The confrontational, occasionally belligerent demeanor of MAGA Barbie press secretary Karoline Leavitt does little to ease media relations.

The squeezing out of mainstream news services is accelerating.  Fox News Channel has long been the most-watched of the cable news nets.  Fox and the popularity of alt-right outlets appear to be incrementally taking control of the national narrative.  Really, the dominant message taking hold is little more than a string of tropes.  Here is the right’s narrative reduced to a few words: A mob of trans drag queens, along with the illegals, will descend upon Real Americans to take their Bibles and guns while grooming their kids in woke ideology.

Or maybe it is more than making the world scary for the base.  While inflation is slowing, prices are sticky.  The received wisdom since November 5^th is that voters were attracted to Trump because the Democrats had not done enough to make daily life affordable.  Sounds true.  Probably true. 

In closing, I have just one question for those non-MAGA voters who went with Trump last November.

Still worried about the cost of eggs?

 

 

© 2025 The Unassuming Scholar

Day Zero

It begins all over again tomorrow.  It seems almost a sacrilege that this inauguration day happened to fall on Martin Luther King Day.

The silver lining is that due to the mourning period for President Carter, the flags will be at half-staff.