Most Mendacious Yet

The Social Media Presidency, Ukraine, &tc.

Dear Friends,

There is a way of being on social media that provides a bit of distance and objectivity. One element is to be a mere observer and not a participant—when you actually participate in the keyboard conflicts about the outrages of the day, you can easily be sucked in and lose all perspective. As it happens, I have a pretty good balance of social media accounts I follow and I can watch the “battle lines” form in real time every single day. The culture wars (of which politics is, at present, a proxy) are exhausting.

And insane.

Do not assume that I am using that term euphemistically or just rhetorical hyperbole. The hard-Left bubble in this country, it seems to me, has real mental health issues. Their rhetoric is barking mad; Donald Trump is some kind of unprecedented and unique malevolent evil never before seen, and he has plans to lock up dissidents in concentration camps; he is the second coming of Adolf Hitler and threatens to destroy and dismantle our Constitutional order and install himself as a dictator.

Steady now. Keep calm and get a grip. Are there elements of truth, things one can point to as evidence of these wild-eyed theories? Well, sure, but there are better explanations than crazy conspiracy theories. Our Constitutional order is being challenged and stretched as the balance(s) of power (and balance(s) in kinds of power) in our three-branch government push and pull in various ways—as they always have and were designed to do. This isn’t an excuse to not be vigilant, but it is a plea to come to terms with reality and stop living in the dystopian fantasy world of your imagination. Please get Yuval Levin’s book American Covenant and come up to speed on how our government works, and was intended to work. This will save you a great deal of anxiety.

On the other side, the hard-Right seems equally unwell. Every word, every action of the Dear Leader is treated as some unique and unprecedented brilliance the world has never before seen. He is “Making America Great (and “Healthy”) Again.” It is, sadly, a simple fact that for a massive swath of the American right Truth, Justice, and the American Way perfectly align with whatever Donald Trump happens to be thinking and feeling at the moment. Our job as “patriots” is to acquiesce and carry out his will. This is absurd folly, positively anti-American, and rank political idolatry.

Ordinarily—in a sane world—we could just ignore the partisan, tribal social media warfare as an irrelevance. Actual mature, thinking adults with actual jobs in the real world (and therefore subject to its realities) are what matters, not the outrage monkeys screaming on Twitter. However, the lines between Twitter and actual governance are being obliterated. The guy who owns Twitter and is its chief provocateur is giving interviews sitting next to the President of the United States—who also is himself a chief online provocateur. The Administration is filled to the brim with people who drink up MAGA-world online Kool-Aid like it is their mother’s milk; they believe their own rhetoric and carefully crafted alternate reality. None of this will end well, and it can do a whole lot of damage in the process.

Just an example of how crazy-town the bubble is:

For all the high-fiving and cheering about reducing government spending and waste (along with the appallingly cruel jeering about mostly lower-level people losing their livelihoods overnight) the current Republican budget resolution plan, which President Trump will not hesitate to sign, is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to add an additional $4 Trillion to the Federal debt over the next nine years. This would increase our debt-to-GDP ratio to 126% in 2034.

Stop it. Just spare me the talk about fiscal responsibility. DOGE is theater for the seriously gullible masses.