Amazing Grace
Once again, amid the loss of his fellow Americans, the President claims to be the beneficiary of divine providence.
The photos of devastation and damage along the Guadalupe River in this AP gallery are simply shocking.
On President Trump’s visit to Kerrville, Texas on Friday to meet with first responders and the families of those affected, he described the aftermath of the July Fourth disaster as “a hell of a situation”. With national media mostly barred from a roundtable with Texas politicians, the New York Times reported that he turned his anger on a local reporter who tried to ask about whether flood warnings had come in time.
“Only a bad person would ask a question like that,” Mr. Trump said. “To be honest with you, I don’t know who you are, but only a very evil person would ask a question like that.”
In contrast, Columbia Journalism Review’s Bill Grueskin had praise for one local journalist, Louis Amestoy of the Kerr County Lead, for his exhaustive coverage of the aftermath of the disaster, a stark indication of the practical difficulties in rising to such a tragic challenge.
Amid growing scrutiny of the response by officials at local and federal level – the New York Times reported on why the Federal Emergency Management Agency fell short in answering calls to its helplines – however last week’s events are framed, they should be a warning to the whole country.
Politico reports that many local governments’ efforts to respond to extreme weather are already strapped by limited resources, a situation not helped by the current administration’s cutting back on key personnel and local projects designed to protect neighborhoods from flooding, hurricanes and other disasters.
Jon Allsop wrote at CJR that finding and distributing accurate and timely information about climate and weather-related risks to communities is inevitably becoming more difficult. The administration’s cuts, he says, “are part of the bigger-picture story here, even if the specifics of that intersection are complicated and still coming into full view and should thus be covered with due care and nuance.”
And this is part of a bigger, ongoing story, Allsop argues:
“As Bill McKibben wrote for CJR in November, the climate story was all but missing from coverage of last year’s presidential election—in both its terrifying facets (a rapid intensification of temperature rises) and its more hopeful ones (leaps forward in solar energy, for example)—when it really ought to have been central to framing the choice that election offered. Since Trump returned to office, that lack of visibility has mostly continued, at least at the highest levels of the news cycle, even as Trump has taken a blowtorch to federal climate science.”
A paper last year for the Brookings Institution examines different perceptions of news coverage of climate change. Parker Bolstad and David G Victor write that:
“A durable strategy for action on climate change will depend on many factors, but central is the ability to sustain a broad and durable political coalition in favor of action. A logical extension of this argument, implicated by our study, is that it remains extremely important to link climate change to other actions that local communities care about, such as improving resilience, generating employment, and reducing local air pollution. In time, the broad public may become so concerned about climate change that the nation will be able to adopt policies, such as carbon taxes, that most analysts love but tend to carry a lot of political baggage.”
Whether or not, as many believe, Artificial Intelligence becomes a primary predictive tool in weather forecasting, we should all probably be prepared for more front pages like this one:
And regardless of our political perspective, we should also be conscious of the possibility that fact-based analysis, as well as free speech, could end up being swept away.
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‘You Can’t Spell Tariffs Without FFS’
As the FT’s Robert Armstrong has famously observed, the President’s approach to tariffs has been, at its heart, consistently unpredictable. Heading into a new business week, the latest incarnation of the approximation of a concept of a strategy is no exception.
As PBS reported, “Trump has now extended the deadline for [trade] negotiations to August 1 and tinkered with his threatened tariffs, leaving the global trading system pretty much where it stood three months ago — in a state of limbo as businesses delay decisions on investments, contracts and hiring because they don’t know what the rules will be.”
Within a series of “letters” posted to his social media he also threatened a further 30 percent tariff against the EU and Mexico.
A Washington Post editorial on Friday said that “Because Trump keeps changing course, businesses can’t predict what their input costs will be in the future. It’s hard to know whether to open a factory, launch a new product line or switch suppliers when costs could double — or fall by half — next month.”
“Reversing all the Trump tariffs would be the best course. But the president appears unlikely to change his unorthodox views on trade barriers, which have been a consistent feature of his policy agenda. He also appears determined to use the threat of much higher levies to compel other countries to offer the United States trade concessions. Yet the costs promise to increase from here, at which point the politics of protectionism might shift.”
Heather Stewart at The Guardian calls what’s happening “a historic shift for the global trading system”, noting that the dollar has suffered its worst first-half in 50 years, “despite the textbook response to tariffs being a stronger currency.”
“Aside from the hit to the currency, there is scant evidence of a significant impact on the US economy, however, with jobs data coming in well above expectations last week, for example.
“But experts believe that may not last. “We’ve seen a lot of resilience in the data to date, but I think a lot of that is down to front loading – people trying to get in ahead of the tariffs, and boosting activity as a result,” says Ben May, the director of global macro research at Oxford Economics. “We’re now at the point where that’s going to be fading. The fact that we haven’t seen that weakness yet doesn’t mean it’s not going to come.”
Compounding the economic uncertainty will be the impact of the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” Republicans passed last week. Its impact and perception among voters will largely determine the direction of both the economy and the Trump presidency between now and next year’s midterms. While The Economist called the legislation “profligate and insubstantial”, Fox News rolled out Peter Navarro and others to amplify a giddy White House line.
It was Vice-President JD Vance, though, who in an unexpected moment of candor before the Bill passed, stressed the administration’s reasoning for why the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history was not just necessary, but existential.
It is, of course, all about immigration. And money for immigration enforcement. As the Marshall Project outlines:
“The most visible shift is the law’s commitment of about $170 billion to immigration enforcement over the next decade. That includes a 265% annual increase to the national immigration detention budget, according to the American Immigration Council, an immigration advocacy group. The administration plans to rapidly double immigration detention space to hold about 100,000 people, largely by paying private prison companies to reopen currently shuttered facilities.”
After a federal judge attempted to restrain immigration raids on suspected undocumented workers in California, the President gave “total authorisation” for ICE agents to use any means necessary to protect themselves.
A recent study showed that the mass deportation of California’s undocumented residents “could slash $275 billion from the state’s economy, eliminate $23 billion in annual tax revenue, and severely disrupt key industries such as agriculture, construction and hospitality.”
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Welcome Back, My Friends, To The Show That Never Ends
In the latest theatrical episode of the great Presidential quest for a Nobel Peace Prize, visiting Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu adroitly tapped into the “newest way to influence Trump”.
Mohamed Bazzi wrote at The Guardian that the Israeli leader is playing his US counterpart in order to prolong Israel’s war in Gaza.
“It’s absurd, akin to nominating one’s drug dealer for the Nobel prize in medicine. But there’s a cynical logic behind Netanyahu’s publicity stunt: he is exploiting Trump’s need for flattery to prolong Israel’s brutal war on Gaza and to continue attacking other countries in the Middle East, including Iran, Lebanon and Yemen. Before Netanyahu showed up for dinner at the White House on Monday with a copy of his Nobel nomination letter, Trump was eager to announce a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas this week.
“Taken aback by Netanyahu’s gesture, Trump backed off on pressuring the Israeli leader to reach an agreement with Hamas.”
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Garbage In, Garbage Out
Not content with more potential problems for his potential third party in a society where a third of the country didn’t vote in last year’s election, Elon Musk launched the latest model of his Grok chatbot, which he called “the smartest AI in the world”, but ended the week having to apologise for the “horrific behavior” its users experienced.
But it was one particular – and particularly prurient – story this week that saw MAGA-world turn on itself amid a media feeding frenzy that obviously rattled the White House. I’m not even going to mention the dude’s name here, but the story that has become indicative of what we have put in charge of ourselves is not going away anytime soon.
Among Donald Trump’s armory of increasingly panicked distractions was an unhinged personal attack on Rosie O’Donnell. So you know it’s serious.
Joking aside, though, David French at the New York Times writes that the moment is politically significant because:
“It allows us to peer into the future of MAGA and see its potential crackup. After Trump is gone, this movement could tear itself apart. Its very existence is premised on a series of fantastical assertions about America and American government.
“This means that MAGA influencers are constantly deceiving themselves, one another and the right-wing public. It’s an ecosystem that operates in a constant state of crisis and grievance, and MAGA supporters are so convinced that the worst possible stories are real that they’ll turn on anyone not named Donald Trump who dares to tell them the truth — or who deviates in the slightest bit from the stories they tell themselves.
“Once Trump leaves office, there will be no one left to end the internal arguments and direct everyone to fall in line. If the Democrats have a problem of too many purity tests, Republicans will soon experience the consequences of putting together a coalition that may have too few. In red America, you can believe anything so long as you support Trump.”
It’s entirely possible that we could be entering the stupidest, most disgusting, manner of power destroying itself since the Republic on which America was modeled.
More popcorn.
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As always, thanks for reading. I aim to write a baseball-related post midweek – the most recent was about the upcoming All-Star Game – and then a politics wrap at weekends.
Trust me, one is usually much less nuts than the other. I’d love it if you follow along.
You can find a full States of Play archive here.
Definitely agree that Trump is to MAGA what Tito was to former Yugoslavia. Remove the figurehead and it'll all fall apart.