Lake Ontario, $5K Giveaways, and Bestiality: Are We Being Distracted by Trump's Inconsequential Craziness?

My latest Verdict column was published on Tuesday. It addresses President Trump's proposal to pay every adult U.S. citizen $5,000. To summarize: Trump has no power to do this without congressional authorization; such authorization would be a very bad idea because injecting over a trillion dollars into the economy would fuel inflation that would likely eat up any benefits; the giveaway would be regressive because inflation is felt more by the poor than by the wealthy.

The new column follows on the heels of my previous Verdict column, accompanying essay on this blog and then a follow-up essay on the blog on Trump's renaming of Lake Ontario. In the Trump-is-stranger-than-fiction category, my first blog post on the Lake Ontario issue was titled When Will Trump Try to Change "New Mexico" to "New America?" The answer turned out to be six days later.

It is no doubt entertaining to ponder the legal and policy questions posed by some of Trump's most outlandish ideas. It's also fun to delve into the absurdities from the team of sycophants and hacks who fill the top ranks of his administration. For example, much of the media attention paid to FBI Director Kash Patel's appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this week focused on exchanges about the Bureau's recent decision to no longer disqualify job applicants who have previously engaged in bestiality. Funny, right?

I even thought about writing an essay for this blog with the title "Kash Patel is Wrong About Almost Everything, But He's Right About Bestiality." That's because Patel's explanation actually made sense. Prior to the policy change, the FBI told applicants that "Engagement in prostitution or bestiality" was an automatic disqualifier. My first thought was that this had to be limited to people who were convicted of crimes involving prostitution or bestiality, but that turns out not to be so. Here's the old FBI FAQ page that quite clearly identifies felony convictions as a separate category. One could literally have "engaged in prostitution or bestiality" in the sense of having been forced into it and nevertheless be disqualified. So the prior rule was grossly unfair.

If I were to write that full essay on Kash Patel and bestiality, I might quibble with the notion that someone who is forced to do X has "engaged" in X. The word "engaged" can--and in this context undoubtedly should--connote some voluntary act. But Patel nonetheless had a point. Even if the FBI in screening applicants would not disqualify someone who had been trafficked against their will and forced into prostitution or bestiality, an applicant who had been the victim of trafficking could read the FAQ page and think they'll be automatically disqualified and so not even apply.

But do you see what I did there? Even in an essay on the risk of getting distracted by the relatively inconsequential nonsense emanating from Trump and his administration, I got distracted enough to write three paragraphs (four if you count this one) about Kash Patel and bestiality without getting into the main concern one should have about his leadership of the Bureau: he has purged experienced agents and politicized the use of federal law enforcement resources.

Thus, I worry that I am being distracted by the flood of amusing but ultimately stupid actions by Trump and his administration and thereby failing to focus sufficient attention on the more consequential outrages that they are perpetrating. A short list of those consequential outrages would include: the multi-pronged effort to thwart U.S. democracy; censorship of criticism; the disastrous war of choice with Iran that has caused numerous civilian and combatant deaths, undercut the security of the U.S. and its allies, and led to shortages of fuel, fertilizer, and other essentials in the developing world; multiple policies that seem designed not only to cut back on efforts to slow global warming but to accelerate it; likewise not merely ending efforts to combat disease but spreading it; rampant corruption; blithely ignoring the risks posed by AI; and of course, tariffs, more tariffs, and still more tariffs.

In my own defense, I'll say that I haven't been ignoring any of the foregoing serious actions by Trump and his minions. I've addressed all of them in some form or another, in many instances multiple times, on this blog, in my Verdict columns, in my scholarship, in public testimony, and in a considerable amount of pro bono consulting I've been doing with lawyers litigating against the administration in various respects. So, on a personal level, my defense, I suppose, is that I'm doing my bit but I need a little comic relief now and then.

However, in raising the distraction question, I don't really mean to be asking whether I personally am falling for the shiny objects of outrageous but ultimately clownish nonsense and thus taking my eyes off the prizes of democracy, human rights, a livable planet, and the like. I'm asking for the society and culture at large.

With respect to a great many people, however, the question doesn't make sense. That's because they simply aren't paying attention to any political or policy news. According to a reliable survey the results of which were released earlier this week, more than a third of Americans cannot name all three branches of government.  More evidence from an earlier survey: "1 out of 3 people can't name their governor, 4 out of 5 can't say who their state legislator is and roughly half don't know whether they have a uni- or bicameral legislature."

Meanwhile, it's safe to assume that some substantial fraction of the people who are minimally familiar with the operation of government nonetheless aren't following political or policy news closely. From Bill Clinton's "it's the economy, stupid" to the contemporary focus of politicians on issues of affordability, sophisticated political actors apparently have concluded that voters care almost exclusively about pocketbook issues.

Of course, many voters do stay informed about a wide range of subjects, so one still might worry about distracting them with stories about Trump renaming bodies of water and making outlandish campaign promises or about his FBI Director, Secretary of "War," and Health and Human Services Secretary beclowning themselves by, respectively, talking about bestiality, requiring service members to meet his weight and grooming standards to be seen on camera, and working out in jeans. If only some of the news is going to filter to the mass of the public, shouldn't it be all more serious stuff?

Maybe, but we all need and want entertainment too. Moreover, at least some of the less serious but amusing stupid things Trump and his administration do can help reinforce the more serious matters. In the latest NY Times/Siena Poll, both registered voters and likely voters said the label "elitist" was a better fit for Republicans than for Democrats by a margin of 10 percentage points. That's a shift from 2022, when the numbers were essentially tied and represents an important opportunity for Democrats--whom Republicans have for years been trying to characterize as elitist. Not every story of lesser consequence reinforces the message that Trump and the Republicans are elitist and thus out of touch with voters, but many do.

Thus, stories about Trump's effort to rename things either for himself or simply because he believes he is entitled to decide everything for everybody, reinforce the (very accurate) image of Trump as egotist who thinks of himself as above the People and the law. So do his building projects. These and other stories of Trump as rich guy who occasionally pretends to care about ordinary people but obviously doesn't dovetail very nicely with more serious matters--such as his rampant corruption and weaponization of the Justice Department and other aspects of the federal government.

Admittedly, not every story of Trump or someone in his administration acting as a relatively low-stakes buffoon reinforces the instances of his more consequential and nefarious actions, but almost every such story can be made to fit into the frame of one of the many serious threats Trump and Trumpism pose. Take, for example, Trump's absurd reaction to the Fed's unanimous and clearly correct decision to raise interest rates this week in the face of increasing inflation fueled by Trump's tariffs and the Iran war he started. Obviously, Trump wasn't going to accept responsibility for the economic conditions that led the Fed to raise rates. Nor was he even going to acknowledge that a rate hike was the right call; he thinks the Fed's benchmark rate should be 1 percent (which is plainly nuts).

Ridiculing Trump as an economic ignoramus is easy enough, but it turns out that even this story fits nicely into the frame of Trump as self-centered egomaniac unconcerned about others. His main reaction to the Fed rate hike was to make it about himself: “The problem they have is that we have the greatest economy in history … so they’re raising that only for political reasons, and that’s a raise against Trump.”

Bottom line: Enjoy the random acts of stupidity from Trump and his ship of fools; they're entertaining and perhaps helpful in arousing the People to the much greater harms this mad king inflicts.

-- Michael C. Dorf