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I've been thinking about why some people are terrified of Trump while others, like me, are more indifferent. I mostly tune out Trump news because I assume much of it involves scare tactics or misleading framing by his detractors. When my wife brings up concerns about his supposedly authoritarian actions, my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it - and if it's legal, then that's how the system is supposed to work. I have faith that our institutions have the checks and balances to deal with any presidential overreach appropriately.
This reminded me of a mirror situation during 2020-2021 with the BLM movement, where our positions were reversed. I was deeply concerned about social media mobs pressuring corporations, governments, and individuals to conform under threat of job loss, boycotts, and riots, while my wife thought these social pressures were justified and would naturally self-correct if they went too far. The key difference I see is that the government has built-in checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power, while social movements and mob pressure operate without those same institutional restraints. It seems like we each trust different institutional mechanisms, but I can't help but think that formal governmental processes with built-in restraints are more reliable than grassroots social pressure that operates without those same safeguards. Furthermore, the media seems incentivized to amplify fear about Trump but not about grassroots social movements - Trump generates clicks and outrage regardless of which side you're on, while criticizing social movements risks alienating the platforms' own user base and advertiser-friendly demographics.
Personally I think what terrifies a certain class of people about Trump is just that he seems actually interested in wielding power, and has, I dunno, 'agentic' behavior when he does it. There's clearly some objective he's swinging towards, even if he's taking actions that appear stupid.
He did it quite inartfully in the first term. The second term, there's a certain amount of focus and relentlessness that probably scares such people even more. So much happened in just the first 100 days. We're 8 months in, and every week or so another angle of attack is unleashed, and it sure looks like the legs are getting knocked out from under the activist class. Simultaneously too many targets to actually focus on, AND fewer resources to divide amongst the various causes.
I assume it feels like an existential battle for them, whether it really is or is not.
Compare it to a Romney or even Bush-like figure, who are seemingly more content to twist the dials on the administrative state a few degrees here and there and not interfere with their enemy's tactics (or disrupt their funding) so the actual 'balance of power' doesn't shift much.
For better or worse, Trump is taking steps that will actually make it harder for the dems to regroup and mount another offensive, and the one thing that is missing thus far, the one seal that hasn't been broken, is actually prosecuting and jailing the people who are best positioned to thwart his power.
And in a sense, that is the most terrifying thing of all, since that sword of Damocles will hang around for the next couple years, certain people can never feel completely comfortable that the FBI won't be showing up at their door sometime soon.
That's my take, anyway. There's the people with the symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome who aren't actually threatened by him, and then there's those whose whole raison d'etre is acquiring and wielding political power, and this current situation is threatening to remove that possibility entirely for them.
I've talked multiple times over on Tumblr — particularly this longer post about how modern liberalism (or at least the strain typified by Michael Munger in the interview linked at that post) is about opposition to exactly that. To quote Munger:
And as I put it in my post:
And I'd argue it's why so many opponents of Trump, right and left, struggle to find any vocabulary to describe why people follow Trump beyond "cult of personality" — because they've so internalized Weberian rationalization and this liberal view that they can't really even recognize actual human leadership as anything but some kind of pathology.
Yeah, I don't think that's it, unless "actual human leadership" is code for "personalist strongman". Trump is the argument by demonstration against charismatic leadership, but left-of-center people have their own favored leadership figures as well. Obama was and is highly admired, Sanders has his own faction of die hard, etc... Any argument that rounds off to "they're intimidated by how cool we are" is probably wrong.
Where they recoil from Trump is his staggering lack of character combined with his rejection of limits or accountability. It doesn't help that his loudest supporters tend to be quite reactionary and openly cheer for authoritarianism.
I feel like I'd appreciate this argument more if I hadn't lived through electing a "Constitutional law professor" who proceeded to approve of wholesale spying on the contents of almost everyone's Internet traffic --- see Snowden, et al, and Clapper lying to Congress about it. Or approving extrajudicial drone strikes on underage American citizens in foreign countries.
If anything, I don't like much about the Trump administration, but I feel like "the system" is doing a much better job making known and criticizing his actions.
That's not what Snowden showed. Like, not even close.
Clapper gave the correct, classified answer to Congress after the unclassified, televised to the public, hearing was completed.
To one Congressman, anyway, indirectly, probably. He said his staff gave Senator Wyden's staff the correct answer afterward. But, the next time I can find that he talked about it to anyone else in Congress was in an apology letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee a few months later, a couple weeks after Snowden's revelations.
This seems both still-damning (Yeah, I lied to Congress, but I did tell the truth to a staff member who said they told another staff member who should have told their boss who should have told everybody else purple monkey dishwasher!) and yet partially-exculpatory (why didn't Wyden just report the corrected answer himself, if he was confident that its classification was invalid, except that it only felt safe to get someone else to put their reputation on the line in that way?).
It's good that you're aware of who this was. Now think about it for a minute. Clapper was the Director of National Intelligence. In that role, he would have routinely given classified briefings to the Senate Intelligence Committee. I don't believe that anyone has ever claimed that he ever lied to them in any of those briefings. Those classified briefings are for the purpose of informing SSCI on what's actually going on.
This briefing was different. It was an unclassified, public briefing. The purpose was not to inform SSCI, especially not to inform them about classified matters. One might honestly wonder what the point of it even was... or whether it's even almost a contradiction in terms to have an unclassified, public briefing on covert intelligence programs. So when you think about it, you realize that the point of this briefing was not to inform SSCI about what's going on; the point of it was for the government to sort of get together and try to somewhat inform the public about what's going on. Doing so on a covert intelligence program sort of requires that everyone plays well together to inform on the things that "should" be publicly revealed, while avoiding things that "should" stay classified and secret.
Of course, the rub is that folks might have different perspectives on "should". Perhaps Wyden genuinely thought that it "should" become public. But the fact of the matter is, from Clapper's seat, it was classified. I think almost no theory of how the government should operate is such that it should be really relying on him to make that determination on his own. Yes, he has Original Classification Authority, but in reality, that's still pretty limited. For matters concerning significant programs like this, frankly, he shouldn't be out on his own in up and deciding to declassify it in the middle of a random briefing. That sorta thing should mostly be a matter for the President, possibly in consultation with folks like SSCI, with plenty of secret deliberation before pulling the trigger.
As such, Wyden was basically the turd in the punchbowl, preferring to pursue his own vision of "should" over the purpose of what those sorts of hearings are about. That's fair enough; he's a Senator. But it makes it more difficult for future such hearings to do the job as intended; if there's a real concern that even a single Senator will go rogue, I imagine they're probably going to pull back and be less informative generally.
I think the follow-on of what happened afterward is mostly just noise; again, there's no doubt that SSCI received the correct answer, both before and after this one briefing. They certainly already knew exactly what these programs were doing; they certainly had already gotten classified briefings telling them such; afterward, I highly doubt anyone had any real claim to having been misled... except of course, if you're a Senator talking the press, trying to drum up votes for yourself or trying to make something that is classified unclassified. Wyden even gave up the game with responding to it with a request for DNI to officially correct the public record (that is, put classified information in the public record).
It's hard to tell if Wyden genuinely thought it should be public, but didn't want to take the hit of actually revealing it himself... or if he was just trying to figure out a way to drum up more votes by playing the anti-SIGINT character. Whereas it's much easier to figure out that Clapper was just trying to keep classified stuff classified, play along with the supposed point of such an unclassified briefing, and then ultimately end up scrambling to perform damage control from such a bizarro event.
I can't help feeling that once you get to the point where you're telling clear, absolutely 100% barefaced lies to public representatives in public on a question of massive public interest, you're reaching 'Here be Dragons' on the map of morals. "If such programs existed, they would be classified and I would be unable to discuss the subject" is about as far as I think you can go before you're in serious danger of losing your soul.
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