Donald Trump has always made his fortune ripping off the gullible rubes.  And it appears that there is not a more gullible set of rubes than the ones on Wall Street.

What Is It About Ultra-Nationalists and Treason?

 This one isn't even thinking outside the box.  It is a widely observed phenomenon.  

In the first half of the twentieth century, a wave of extreme rightwing movment arose all across Europe.  Invariably, their claim to legitimacy was in their nationalism.  They mocked the liberals with their universal human rights and the socialists with their international brotherhood of labor as unreliable and not truly devoted to their country.  When the chips were down, could these groups really be counted on to stand up for their country, or was it only the far right who could be trusted.

And then Hitler showed up, and the far-right nationalists all proved to be a pack of traitors.*  

For a while, we might dismiss this as a historical curiosity, something unlikely to repeat.

And now here we are.  Another rightwing nationalist movement is sweeping Europe, and the US.  And once again, they are turning out to be a pack of traitors.  As Orban's cronies frantically shred documents to conceal the full extent of their collaboration with the Russians, we really need to give some thought as to why this keeps happening.  Because at some point it starts looking less and less like a coincidence and more and more like something innate to the ideology.

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*One might make a exception for Lindberg's America First movement that looked like a potential pack of traitors but ultimately rallied to the Allied side during WWII.  On the other hand, one can also argue that America First never became traitors because they never had the opportunity.

Everyone Makes Mistakes

 

Me oh my!  Looking back at my November 30, 2025 post on which would be a worse President, Trump or Vance, I gave the advantage to Vance in most categories, but not all.*

The main categories that I saw as advantage Trump were weaponization of government (Trump has been too personal and petty; Vance would be more competent), immigration (Trump might be willing to carve out exceptions; Vance will not), and foreign policy.  Obviously, I was wrong about foreign policy.

My assumption was that Trump's foreign policy was based mostly on impulse rather than any ideological principles.  If his foreign policy has the practical effect of favoring authoritarianism over democracy, it is not because Trump has any principled preference for authoritarians, but just because they bribe and flatter him better.  Vance, by contrast, seemed to have a firmly principled opposition to liberal democracy and a principled preference for rightwing dictatorships.

My focus was on Europe in general and Ukraine in particular.  Given the choice between Vance, who appeared to have the goal of placing Europe under Russian control, either by puppet governments or outright military conquest, and Trump who seemed to be working for a similar outcome more by accident than by design, I preferred Trump, who might accidentally oppose Putin over Vance who was firmly committed against such a thing.  While I generally wanted to see Trump have an incapacitating stroke or wig out so badly that even his Cabinet saw no choice but to invoke the 25th Amendment, I sort of hoped that could wait until things got better for Ukraine.

And things did.  In fact, I am beginning to wonder whether Trump actually did Ukraine a favor in cutting off US aid.  His actions had the result of (1) pressuring Europe to step forward sufficiently that our actions matter much less; (2) forcing the Ukrainians to innovate, and (3) removing whatever restrictions we placed on the Ukrainians.  All of this seems to have rebounded to their favor.  Withdrawing support erratically and inconsistently proved useful because it gave both Ukraine and Europe time to adapt.  So, we just may have reached the point where we can safely turn over European policy to Vance.**

In the meantime, Trump has made a massive blunder starting the war with Iran.  While he has agreed to an indefinite ceasefire and clearly wants out, he also appears to be doing everything he can to make meaningful negotiations impossible.  Vance, in the meantime, had the sense to oppose the war and would be a basically normal negotiating partner who would at least not blow things up with erratic behavior that left no one knowing what his actual negotiating position is.  

So, on foreign policy advantage Vance.  And that alone is reason to say advantage Vance overall.

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*To say nothing of the numerous categories where it was really hard to say. 

**Or we may not. If Vance is really determined to see the Russians win, he has a few cards left to play.  He can cut off intelligence sharing with the Ukrainians.  I have no idea whether the Europeans would be able to fill the gap.  It is also my understanding that the clear turning point in Ukraine's favor was Elon Musk denying the Russians access to Starlink, while allowing it to Ukrainians.  Vance's strongest card is probably to pressure Musk to reverse course.

Umberto Ecco on Trump

On the same topic, I am reminded of Umberto Ecco's piece on the characteristics of "Ur-Fascism."  Ecco grew up in Italy under true Fascism and acknowledged that it may not duplicate in full detail.  He nonetheless presented 14 characteristics of "Ur-Fascism" that he said to look out for.  A sufficient number is at least somewhat fascistic, and even one can allow fascism to "coagulate around it."

Some of Ecco's traits may be present among certain rightwing influencers, but seem too intellection for Trump.  I do intend to go over them at length some time in the future, but at present the third one seems the most important:

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.

Bingo!  This was a major failing of GW Bush.  It is also a major failing of Donald Trump.  Seeing the same flaw repeated so closely in both administrations makes me think it is endemic to the rightwing outlook.*

And that is a serious problem.

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*At least in the US.  I can't speak so much for other countries.

Contempt for Experts/Contempt for Facts

So, negotiations with Iran have failed, purportedly over the nuclear issue -- the US team wanted Iran to give up all uranium enrichment and Iranians refused.  Trump's negotiations with the Iranians have consistently failed, at least in part, because Trump's team lacks the nuclear expertise to know what will and will not actually be an adequate safeguard to keep the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons. 

But can we face facts here?  Donald Trump doesn't want a deal that meets the technical standards needed to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons.  He wants to be able to boast that he held firm and never made any concessions.  Or if we absolutely must come up with a deal, he wants a deal that he can sell to people completely ignorant of the technical details (Trump, say) as something that can ensure Iran will never get a nuclear weapon.  They will never trust anything that rests on technical fine points that Trump and company don't understand.

And this leads to a major failing of Donald Trump and, indeed, of the Republican Party and rightwing politics in general.

I previously wrote about someone who described GW Bush as:

• More egotistical than Johnson
• More vindictive than Nixon
• Stupider than Ford
• Less competent than Carter
• Lazier than Reagan
• Less honest than Clinton.

In the clear light of hindsight, this was grossly unfair to GW Bush, who was not particularly egotistical or vindictive.  (Also to Ford, who was not stupid).  Instead, GW Bush's capital flaw (which was related to laziness and incompetence and made him appear dishonest) was that followed his gut-level instincts and treated facts and evidence as optional.  

And that, in turn, is an extreme version of a longstanding tendency among right-wingers toward anti-intellectualism and distrust of expertise.  And I can sort of understand it.  It is certainly annoying to be told "I know better than you."  When an expert is telling you something based on highly technical knowledge that you are not qualified to evaluate, you are being asked to rely on blind trust because you have no way of telling whether the person is being truthful or not.  Not to mention experts' frustrating tendency to disagree with each other, and not to be as infallible as they claim.  

And yet, in a society as complex as what we have now, there is really no choice but to rely on experts for many things.  

Furthermore, right-wingers let a somewhat understandable distrust of experts and expertise turn into a general distrust of learning, and a distrust of learning turn into a distrust of all knowledge, and a distrust of knowledge turn into a contempt for facts and evidence in favor of gut-level intuition.  And yes, I do understand that experts who focus on an exceedingly narrow specialty can develop a sort of tunnel vision.  Sometimes an outsider perspective and offer new ideas a specialist never thought of.  And (as I understand it), an inspired guess is recognized as a sometimes being a scientifically valid approach.  But the inspired guess is one made by someone familiar with the data, and has to be empirically tested to see its validity.

GW Bush and his supporter missed this critical part and relied on their gut-level intuitions that Saddam Hussein just had to be an intolerable threat, and removing him just had to work out well.  Wrong and wrong!  GW Bush lost all standing in the conservative movement as a result.

Unfortunately, the lesson that right-wingers took away from the Iraq debacle was not that gut-level intuition is no substitute for facts and evidence, but that GW Bush's gut level intuition was not good enough, and that they needed someone with better gut-level intuition.

So they chose Trump.

Trump Has Been Trumped!

 

Well, once again I don't have anything very original or in-depth to say about the war, but I do feel the need to post about it so here goes.

No TACO jokes

Yes, I have made a few myself, but in the end the point of TACO jokes is to goad Trump in persisting in a course of action that hurts him more than it hurts us -- tariffs, for instance.  This war is a different matter altogether.  While it would be good to have a leader with basic common sense, failing that I would rather have a leader who makes disastrously bad decisions and then backs away when they don't work out so well than a leader who makes disastrously bad decisions and keeps doubling down.

I will also say that when I fearfully peeked at the news over Tuesday, I came away with the distinct impression that a whole lot of people expected a TACO.  The markets were unhappy, but by no means panicked.  The top story on AOL was about Samantha Guthrie.  All sorts of normal news was being covered as if no disaster was at hand.  

The JCPO (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action)

There has been a lot of talk about Obama's Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JPCOA) -- the nuclear deal he struck with Iran, which reduced Iran's uranium enrichment, shipped most of its enriched uranium out of the country, and allowed intrusive inspections to ensure compliance.  Did it pave the way for war, or did abrogating it make war inevitable.  I don't think either.

Look, I am just going by my memories here and not doing extensive research.  But my clear memory is that the usual suspects -- Netanyahu, John Bolton, and the other warmongers -- were warning that Iran was on the verge of nuclear weapons, making cataclysmic predictions about what would happen, and loudly calling for large-scale bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities as the only option.  Admittedly they did sometimes distinguish between bombing and war by saying they were not calling for ground troops.  I even heard a revival of the old 1979 song, "Bomb Iran."

Then Obama and John Kerry came up with a proposal to actually keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons and they were outraged. I thought then and think now they were angry that their war was thwarted.  Of course, they gave other excuses like that the JCPOA did not make Iran give up missile or support for armed proxies and included some sanctions relief.  And they were outraged when Obama responded to their criticisms by defending the agreement instead of immediately conceding they were right and backing out.  But above all, they were outraged by the suggestion that rejecting the deal made war more likely.  How dare anyone call them warmongers just because they had been demanding war until the deal was struck?  

So, no, I don't think war was inevitable when Trump abrogated the deal.  We managed to get by for quite a few years with neither the deal nor war, and without Iran developing nuclear weapons.  But I do think that critics of the deal wanted war all along. Certainly that was the view of  Netanyahu, who proclaimed that it was Munich 1938 and that avoiding war now would only lead to a worse war later.

A different WWII analogy

Netanyahu may have thought the JCPOA was Munich and WWII must necessarily follow.  His decision to launch this war put me in mind of another WWII analogy -- Japan's actions.

My father likes to say that the Japanese got into a land war with the world's most populous country and found they couldn't win, so they started a naval war with the world's richest country.  Put that way, it sounds crazy.  But the Japanese blamed their inability to subdue China on interference by the US.  They thought that by bombing Pearl Harbor they could knock the US out of the war and finally beat China.  Needless to say, they seriously underestimated the US industrial base!

Well, in case nobody noticed, Netanyahu reduced Gaza to a pile of rubble and killed some 50,000 people out of a population of 2.3 million -- over 2% of the total -- and still couldn't root out Hamas.  Neither their brilliantly executed decapitation of Hezbollah, nor pounding much of southern Lebanon into rubble managed to root out Hezbollah.  Netanyahu blamed this on Iranian backing and thought he would go to the source.  It does not appear to have occurred to him that if he couldn't uproot an entrenched militia in a territory of 2.3 million people right on Israel's border, it might be even harder to root out the entrenched government of a country of 92 million people hundreds of miles away and well outside the reach of Israeli ground or even naval forces.

Trump was trumped

Up till now, Trump has run is foreign policy on the "madman theory."  If you act crazy enough, people will be afraid of you and stay out of your way.  It helps if you really are crazy.  Well, this time Trump ran into someone even crazier than he is.  It didn't go well for anyone.

We don't know why he backed down

It could have been outcry by MAGA influencers like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones.  Or rumored reports of military lawyers pushing back against Trump's plans to focus on civilian targets.  Or rising gas prices and a falling stock market.  Or fear of the cycle of escalation that could follow any attempt to take down the Iranian power grid.  Or maybe he just got bored and wanted to move on.  

Am I the only one who suspects Trump sent Vance out of the country to keep him from invoking the 25th Amendment?

What next?

My guess is that Trump is thoroughly tired of this war and wants out.  And if he wants out, we will get out.  It is also clear that the cease-fire is operating sort of like the Gaza ceasefire or the ICE drawdown in Minneapolis -- extremely slow and incomplete, sometimes more a reduce-fire than a ceasefire, but ultimately a significant decline in violence.  It was also clear even before the ceasefire that Iran was quietly tiptoeing away from blocking the Straits of Hormuz into something more like controlling which ships it allowed access and charging for passage.  I may be over-optimistic here, but I do think all sides are exhausted and this will slowly sputter out into an uneasy truce with only sporadic violations.  I do not share the insane optimism of Wall Street, which thinks everything is back to normal now.  There has been real physical damage to oil infrastructure.  I certainly couldn't predict how long it will take to repair, but it seems safe to assume, not overnight.

In terms of proposals, the two sides seem hopelessly far apart, each making wholly unreasonable demands.  This is not great but not necessarily fatal.  Negotiators can keep fruitless talks as long as they want so long as the shooting stops, or at least substantially diminishes.

In terms of domestic politics, once we get out of the war, I imagine it will be soon forgotten by friend and foe alike, and Trump's approval ratings will improve somewhat.  But probably not by a lot, given that gas prices will probably take some time to come down.

Bad, Bad Leroy Brown

It's a strange thing, but when my fears and anxiety about Trump and our country's future were at their strongest, one of the things that most seemed to calm me down was endlessly watching the video of "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown."  I never quite understood what seems so soothing about the song, but now it finally comes to me.  In some corner of my mind, Leroy must have represented Trump, and the song was reassuring because eventually Leroy is defeated.  (Not that the man who beat him was necessarily any better).

Sherlock Holmes: A Scandal in Bohemia

 

Things have been anxious lately, so what do I do to be calm?  Read through the complete works of Sherlock Holmes, of course.  

We have gotten through Arthur Conan Doyle's first two novels -- A Study in Scarlet and Sign of the Four.  Next comes The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a series of short stories.  In fact, although Doyle wrote a few more novels, he appears to have decided that the short story was truly his medium.

The first short story is A Scandal in Bohemia.  It introduces a character who has fascinated many later writers of adaptations -- Irene Adler.  For all that her character is played up in later adaptations, she appears in only one work, a short story.  Moreover, she and Holmes do not know each other.  They meet only three times, briefly, each time with one party in disguise and the other unaware.  Adler marries another man and the story ends with her flight.  She apparently dies some time later offstage under uncertain circumstances.  Watson refers to her as "the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory."  We do not find out what happened to her.  The story takes place in 1888 and she was born in 1858 making her 30 years old at the time, so she died prematurely.  Watson also emphasizes the Holmes never loved Adler.  Holmes knew love mostly as a motive for crimes.  But he did respect and admire her and refer to her as "the woman."

I suspect that Doyle first tried to end the series at the end of the last novel by marrying Watson off and having him move out.  It must be emphasized how much of an improvement this is in Watson's life.  When Watson first met Holmes, his health was in ruins and he was living on a military invalid pension, not knowing anyone in London, too ill to go out and with no one to visit him.  Watson had nothing to do but observe his roommate and learn about him.  With his marriage, Watson acquires not only a wife, but his own household.  Presumably he begins building a social circle.  He also returns to the practice of medicine.  In short, he has his life back.  But he can still drop in on Holmes.

Holmes' latest client calls himself a Bohemian nobleman, but Holmes recognizes him as the king.  (We are not told how, but he is six feet six inches tall, which must be distinguishing).  In this case, there is no murder and no mystery.  There is, I suppose, a crime, or several.  The circumstances are plain.  The king had an affair with an opera singer (now retired) named Irene Adler and was so indiscrete as to allow himself to be photographed with her.  He is now to marry a Scandinavian princess.  Irene Adler is threatening to reveal the photograph when the engagement is announced.  Paying blackmail is hopeless -- she doesn't want money; she wants to ruin him.  So blackmail is a crime, except that this is not exactly blackmail.  At least some of the king's attempts to get the photograph back also sound like crimes.  He has had people break into her house twice, diverted her luggage once, and waylaid her twice.  Hm.  The photograph is portrait sized and framed, so it is not something Irene Adler would hide on her person.

So, there is no mystery as to what happened.  The only mystery is how Holmes will find the photograph.

He disguises as a stable groom and mingles among the other stable grooms in the neighborhood to pick up the latest gossip about Irene Adler.  He also follows her when she goes to the Church of St. Monica and learns that she has gone there to marry her lawyer, Godfrey Norton!  The matter is so hasty and so secretive that the clergyman insisted on having a witness, and Holmes was the first person at hand to serve!  The marriage is secret, and the parties go their separate ways.  Holmes comments that the photograph is now a double-edged weapon.  Irene Adler presumably no more wants her husband to see it than the king wants his prospective wife to see it.  That the marriage takes place just as Holmes begins watching her seems like an extraordinary coincidence, but let that go.  Holmes still wants to find the photograph.

To do so, he enlists Watson in a obviously staged seen outside Irene's house.  A few street louts get into a fight just has Miss Adler steps out of her carriage.  Holmes, now dressed as a clergyman, rushes to her defense and falls to the ground, fake blood streaming from his face.  The brawlers run off, and some bystanders persuade Irene Adler to take Holmes into her sitting room.  He gestures her to open the window.  Watson waits outside with a smoke bomb to throw in.

I do not know whether he was seized with compunction at that moment for the part he was playing, but I know that I never felt more heartily ashamed of myself in my life than when I saw the beautiful creature against whom I was conspiring, or the grace and kindliness with which she waited upon the injured man. And yet it would be the blackest treachery to Holmes to draw back now from the part which he had intrusted to me. I hardened my heart, and took the smoke-rocket from under my ulster. After all, I thought, we are not injuring her. We are but preventing her from injuring another.

Watson throws the smoke bomb and cries fire.  A commotion ensues, in which Holmes escapes.  As they walk home, Holmes explains that when a woman thinks her house is on fire, she will reach for whatever she values most -- in this case, the photograph.  It was behind a sliding panel by the bell-pull.  Holmes did not take it because the coachman was watching him.  As they arrive home, an unknown passer-by said good night, and Holmes thinks the voice sounds familiar.

Early the next morning they summon the king and let him know of the situation.  The king is still clearly in love with Miss Adler.  He responds with jealousy when he hears about her marriage and insists that she cannot love her new husband.  Holmes points out that if she does, she will no longer have any reason to be jealous of the king's prospective marriage or to break it up.  They head to her house at 8:00 a.m., assuming she will not be up yet and they will be able to take the photograph.*  Upon arriving, however, they find that she has fled and taken the photograph with her.  Instead, she leaves a letter, in which she explains that the mysterious passer-by was her, in male disguise.  Recognizing how dangerous Holmes could be, she and her husband have fled with the photograph, which she will not reveal, but will keep as insurance if the king ever bothers he again.  In place of the photograph of herself and the king, she leaves a photograph of only herself.

The king assures them that they have nothing to fear, her word is inviolate.  Again, his admiration for her beauty, her intelligence, her resourcefulness, and her resolve make clear that the king is still in love with her.  "Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a pity that she was not on my level?”  Holmes responds that she does, indeed, appear to have been on a very different level.  And he asks to keep the photograph and cherishes it in honor of the only woman to outwit him.

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*What sort of hours did people keep in London at this time?  In the upcoming story The Speckled Band, Watson is awakened at 7:15 and thinks it outrageously early.