Three Examples of Seemingly Minor Issues that Shine a Light on Trump's Misrule

Last week, Professor Dorf reminded us of "the risk of getting distracted by the relatively inconsequential nonsense emanating from Trump and his administration."  The day before, I wrote a column in which I focused on one of the most important issues of our time -- the Trump regime's dystopian deportation system -- writing that "at the very least, it is clear that the US is acting in ways that we once would have described as only imaginable under an authoritarian regime like China's."  Agreeing with the point that Professor Dorf would make the next day, I added:

People like me follow the minutiae of US news cycles, and we chase shiny objects like Trump's failing health, his obviously false promise to pay people $5000 each if Republicans win the midterms, his obsession with erecting monuments to himself, and so on.  But while all of those stories are important in their own ways, the touchstone when assessing the current government should be that the US now scares countless people to the point where they choose not to enter the country ... .

I concede in advanced that today's column could be described as focusing on three of those shiny objects, but such a description would be inaccurate.  Even though they are relatively trivial -- certainly by comparison to what is happening in America to immigrants and people who "look or talk" like immigrants (see the justifiably infamous "Kavanaugh stops") -- each of the three examples discussed below fits into the larger, frightening picture all too well.

The first example, and surely the best candidate of the three for shiny object status, is Donald Trump's announcement during his speech to the UN earlier this week that he was unilaterally changing Artificial Intelligence's name to Super Intelligence.  This received a lot of coverage, along with a great deal of richly deserved ridicule, but this is one of those situations in which the fullness of Trump's inanity cannot be captured in the two or three very short clips that made the rounds.  Here is the full transcript of that part of his speech:

There is no human right to illegal immigration, but there is a right to remain a sovereign nation, and we want to remain a sovereign nation, and so should you. The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now.

 

Hereinafter officially called superintelligence, changing the name, and that the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake. And it is not fake; it's actually amazing, but we have to be careful. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports. From this point forward, all of United States documents, and hopefully the world's, will be changed to use the much more accurate term Super as opposed to Artificial.

  

So, it's Superintelligence. In other words, welcome to the new world of Superintelligence -- SI. SI; let's see if that goes. It sounds much better; it is much better and it's much more accurate. Let's see if I have any power. Maybe I do, and maybe I don't. We're going to find out pretty soon. Superintelligence -- every major new technology brings challenges, and Superintelligence is no exception

 

Yet the very same people who said we'll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead. These are the same people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us all, that robots are going to attack us, and that everything is going to be a total disaster.

Same group of people. This is the group that came up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax; the Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine hoax; climate change; open borders. Whoever wins AI, you have to remember this. And now I say, whoever wins SI, whoever wins Superintelligence wins. That's the group that wins. And we're leading now over China by a lot and everyone else and we're going to keep it that way.

 

We're going to keep it very, very straight and very strong. I'm not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution. Many say bigger than the Industrial Revolution or the internet itself. And we will be very careful, and that's why we have a Department of Justice, and we've already used it having to do with this very subject and used it very powerfully.

 

Everything worked out very well and very quickly, and other law enforcement bodies that will rein things in if we have -- to do that, but we will only encourage superintelligence. We're going to encourage it, not rein it in. We're going to watch it closely through the Department of Justice. The United States leads the world in superintelligence and will continue to do so safely and responsibly.

That is a long quotation, 477 words that took Trump more than three minutes to ramble through.  But without reading the entire thing, it would be easy to think -- based on the clips that every TV news and comedy show played over and over again -- that he had another silly idea, tossed it off in a few seconds, and then moved on to other topics.  But that obviously is not what happened.  Imagine being a diplomat from any other country, sitting and listening to that logorrhea.  He is wasting everyone's time with a meandering set of grudges that he somehow thinks fit into his idea of why AI needs to be rebranded.

So the point is not merely that Trump dropped another stupid idea into the world -- Lake Ontario America, putting tariffs on islands inhabited only by penguins, bullying the Nobel Peace Prize winner to give the medal to him, and so on -- but also that the subject matter is possibly much less important than the way it was delivered.  The term "sundowning" has recently become a favored way to describe Trump's behavior, but one of the ways the media sanewashes him is that they simply are unwilling to devote the time or space needed to show what sundowning truly means in his case.

The second example relates to Trump's sudden decision to ban MSNow, Politico, and CNN reporters from the White House.  There has understandably been a lot of reaction to this outrage, and the coverage generally has been very good.  For example, we have learned that Trump hatched this latest goose egg when the closest thing to his White House handler was out of the building.

Similarly, there has been good coverage of various Republicans' ludicrous efforts to defend Trump.  They have tried everything possible to muddy the waters, including this from Marco Rubio: "We’re not closing CNN,” Rubio said of the ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico. “There aren’t a bunch of police officers or soldiers kicking down the doors of MSNBC or MS NOW, whatever it’s called, and arresting people and unplugging it from the grid."  This, by the way, merely copies the argument by Rubio's fellow Florida Republican, Ron DeSantis, who argued that his administration's book bans three years ago were not truly bans, "because people can still buy them." Stupid then, stupid now.

And by the way, Trump himself was asked about the ban on the three organizations but could not figure out which ban he was being asked about.  After he was reminded, he said, ah yes, "the ban on the free press."  Kind of like when his apologists tried to say that the Iran war was not a war while Trump continued to call it a war (but predictably also said that is was not a war, but rather "small potatoes"). 

Much of the coverage and commentary about this latest outrage has, in fact, been surprisingly strong.  Even so, there was a key switcheroo that Trump made in the middle of the controversy, and as far as I have seen, no one has talked about it.  What has been noted is that, at both his joint press conference with Mayor Zohran Mamdani at Gracie Mansion and in the lobby of the UN after Trump's speech, Trump snarked at the press that they supposedly said they would not longer cover him, but he knew that they could never stay away.

To CNN's Caitlin Collins at the UN press gaggle, for example, Trump said: "I'm surprised that CNN is here covering me.  You shouldn't be here, you should not ... you should not be here covering me.  You said you wouldn't cover me, you shouldn't be here covering me."  Collins pointed out that the UN invited CNN, but of course Trump talked over her.  All of the late night comedy shows that I watched showed at least one of those clips, but the anchors missed the point by treating it as just another example of Trump's adolescent petulance.

Desi Lydic on "The Daily Show," for example, responded with this:

I say this as a woman, and with all due respect to women everywhere.  But have you ever seen such a bitch. ... Yes, this man is a wannabe authoritarian, but he's also a wannabe Real Housewife.  Picking fights wherever he goes, whenever he can because he's a messy bitch who lives for the drama.

I am not saying that Lydic is off base, and certainly it was a hilarious response.  Even so, her response (and every other response that I saw) went for the shiny object.  The substantively important thing is that nobody called out Trump for flipping the story back on itself.  After the other networks boycotted the White House in solidarity with the three banned organizations, Trump somehow convinced himself that he was the victim of other people's drama.  They refused to cover me, but here they are covering me!

But of course CNN never said, as Trump would now have it, that they would not cover him.  He said that he would not allow them to cover him in the White House.  When they then did their jobs by going to news venues to which they were invited, he claimed that they could not resist covering him.  This is not just being "a messy bitch" but rather someone who cannot keep his thoughts straight from minute to minute, making up whatever self-aggrandizing claim that suits his mood.

That is no shiny object.  That is a datum in the overall picture of Trump's dishonesty and mental decline.

Finally, unlike the two examples above of stories that were covered extensively but inadequately in key ways, my third example is of something Trump said that received almost no notice.  Back on September 4, Trump threatened the Federal Reserve.  Of course, he has done that before, including having his minions gin up fake charges against the former Fed Chair and by trying to fire a current Fed Governor.  But what is different this time is the nature of the threat, because he warned the Fed that they had better do what he wants (decrease interest rates) or else.  Or else what?  From The Guardian:

Trump cited August’s strong jobs report as sufficient justification to lower rates, and warned that, if the central bank didn’t go along, he’d halt trade between the US and any nations with which it maintains a trade deficit.

“LOWER THE RATE OR I’LL STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post, aiming the appeal directly at his handpicked new Federal Reserve chairman, Kevin Warsh.

“The Fed Board, with its great new leader, must get smart - BE PATRIOTS for a change,” Trump wrote.

Did you catch that?  He is not saying that he will harm the Fed or anyone in it.  He is instead willing to harm millions of people if the Fed disobeys him.  He apparently believes that the Fed's current chair and the other voting members would (sensibly) not want him to suspend all trade with most countries in the world, so he took millions of people hostage and said to the Fed, "Hey, if they end up getting hurt, it's your fault."  Classic bully/abusive spouse behavior.

As I recounted in a column last week, Professor Dorf and I frequently -- and accurately -- described Republicans' threats to refuse to increase the debt ceiling (when a Democrat is President) as hostage-taking.  Their stated position was that Barack Obama and Joe Biden at various points could capitulate to the Republicans' demands, or the Republicans would create an economic and constitutional crisis by allowing the country to hit the statutory (and completely arbitrary) debt limit, leaving the President with no constitutional path to prevent said crisis.  That Republicans backed down every time does not mean that they were not taking hostages.  It only means that (at least back then) they were unwilling to shoot so many innocent people.

Here, Trump is saying that he will do something truly crazy unless the Fed gives him what he craves.  And unlike in the debt ceiling context, where the Republicans at least kept their demands within the realm of the federal budget -- not in a way that made any sense, but that is beside the point here -- Trump is threatening to do something harmful by changing a policy that has no connection to the Fed's policy tools.  It is, however, a deranged threat that was quickly lost in the miasma of the other crazy things that happen every day in Trump's skewed world.

In sum, the three examples discussed here are not directly related to the most pressing issues facing the country and the world: the Iran war of choice, the affordability crisis, unspeakably cruelty and outright murder by ICE and CBP, and so on.  Even so, these examples fill in and reinforce details of the larger picture.  Trump makes impetuous and ridiculous announcements and then rambles at length about them in front of the world.  He blames the victims of his jihad against the press.  And he threatens to harm millions of innocent people unless the independent central bank does his bidding.

Those are serious issues, and too many people are missing what makes them so serious. 

- Neil H. Buchanan