Tag: Trump

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The Shutdown Deal

Ezra Klein (N.Y. Times), What Were Democrats Thinking?

As far as I can tell, the headline is intended to be read in a straightforward way—“WHAT were Democrats thinking?”—not in a sarcastic tone of voice—“What were Democrats THINKING?” 

In any event, as per usual, Ezra Klein has a dozen or so really interesting things to say—some of which might not have occurred to you and me—and it’s best to let him speak for himself. 

But as a preamble, two brief comments from me. First, some of the eight senators who joined the Republicans are political heavyweights, and people not known for an inclination to wimp out. So, before your knee jerks and you hurl criticism at them for wimping out, please think twice.

Second, among the really interesting things one might say about this putrid mess, the most interesting, IMHO, is that Republicans are now set up to cast spectacularly unpopular votes to screw a large portion of the public on the health insurance costs. 

Ezra Klein writes, 

Back in September, when I was reporting an article on whether Democrats should shut down the government, I kept hearing the same warning from veterans of past shutdown fights: The president controls the bully pulpit. He controls, to some degree, which parts of the government stay open and which parts close. It is very, very hard for the opposition party to win a shutdown.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that Democrats were winning this one. Polls showed that most voters blamed Republicans, not Democrats, for the current shutdown — perhaps because President Trump was bulldozing the East Wing of the White House rather than negotiating to reopen the government. Trump’s approval rating has been falling — in CNN’s tracking poll, it dipped into the 30s for the first time since he took office again. And last week, Democrats wrecked Republicans in the elections and Trump blamed his party’s losses in part on the shutdown. Democrats were riding higher than they have been in months.

Then, over the weekend, a group of Senate Democrats broke ranks and negotiated a deal to end the shutdown in return for — if we’re being honest — very little.

The guts of the deal are this: Food assistance — both SNAP and WIC, I was told — will get a bit more funding, and there are a few other modest concessions on spending levels elsewhere in the government. Laid-off federal workers will be rehired and furloughed federal workers given back pay. Most of the government is funded only until the end of January. (So get ready: We could be doing this again in a few months.) Most gallingly, the deal does nothing to extend the expiring Affordable Care Act tax credits over which Democrats ostensibly shut down the government in the first place. All it offers is a promise from Republicans to hold a vote on the tax credits in the future. Of the dozen or so House and Senate Democrats I spoke to over the past 24 hours, every one expected that vote to fail.

To understand why the shutdown ended with such a whimper, you need to understand the strange role the A.C.A. subsidies played in it. Democrats said the shutdown was about the subsidies, but for most of them, it wasn’t. It was about Trump’s authoritarianism. It was about showing their base — and themselves — that they could fight back. It was about treating an abnormal political moment abnormally.

T he A.C.A. subsidies emerged as the shutdown demand because they could keep the caucus sufficiently united. They put Democrats on the right side of public opinion — even self-identified MAGA voters wanted the subsidies extended — and held the quivering Senate coalition together. You shut the government down with the Democratic caucus you have, not with the Democratic caucus you want.

The shutdown was built on a cracked foundation. There were Senate Democrats who didn’t want a shutdown at all. There were Senate Democrats who did want a shutdown but thought it strange to make their demand so narrow: Was winning on health care premiums really winning the right fight? Should Democrats really vote to fund a government turning toward authoritarianism so long as health insurance subsidies were preserved?

And what if winning on the health care fight was actually a political gift to Donald Trump? Absent a fix, the average health insurance premium for 20 million Americans will more than double. The premium shock will hit red states particularly hard. Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s longtime pollster, had released a survey of competitive House districts showing that letting the tax credits expire might be lethal to Republican efforts to hold the House. Why were Democrats fighting so hard to neutralize their best issue in 2026?

The political logic of the shutdown fight was inverted: If Democrats got the tax credits extended — if they “won” — they would be solving a huge electoral problem for Republicans. If Republicans successfully allowed the tax credits to expire — if they “won” — they would be handing Democrats a cudgel with which to beat them in the elections.

This is why Senator Chuck Schumer’s compromise, which offered to reopen the government if Republicans extended the tax credits for a year, struck many Democrats as misguided. Morally, it might be worth sacrificing an electoral edge to lower health insurance premiums. But a one-year extension solved the Republicans’ electoral problem without solving the policy problem. Why on earth would they do that?

In any case, Republicans were not interested in Schumer’s offer. Trump himself has shown no interest in a deal. Rather than negotiating over health care spending, Trump has been ratcheting up the pain the shutdown is causing. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers have been furloughed or fired. The administration has been withholding food assistance from Americans who desperately need it. Airports are tipping into chaos as air traffic controllers go without pay.

More than anything else, this is what led some Senate Democrats to cut a deal: Trump’s willingness to hurt people exceeds their willingness to see people get hurt. I want to give them their due on this: They are hearing from their constituents and seeing the mounting problems and they are trying to do what they see as the responsible, moral thing. They do not believe that holding out will lead to Trump restoring the subsidies. They fear that their Republican colleagues would, under mounting pressure, do as Trump had demanded and abolish the filibuster. (Whether that would be a good or a bad thing is a subject for another column.) This, in the end, is the calculation the defecting Senate Democrats are making: They don’t think a longer shutdown will cause Trump to cave. They just think it will cause more damage.

If I were in the Senate, I wouldn’t vote for this compromise. Shutdowns are an opportunity to make an argument, and the country was just starting to pay attention. If Trump wanted to cancel flights over Thanksgiving rather than keep health care costs down, I don’t see why Democrats should save him from making his priorities so exquisitely clear. And I worry that Democrats have just taught Trump that they will fold under pressure. That’s the kind of lesson he remembers.

But it’s worth keeping this is perspective: The shutdown was a skirmish, not the real battle. Both sides were fighting for position, and Democrats, if you look at the polls, are ending up in a better one than they were when they started. They elevated their best issue — health care — and set the stage for voters to connect higher premiums with Republican rule. It’s not a win, but given how badly shutdowns often go for the opposition party, it’s better than a loss.

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Are We Drifting into Authoritarianism—Or Maybe Drifting into Chaos?

When I was three years old, I had to learn by experience what are the consequences of sticking the table knife into the electric socket. Apparently, large numbers of our fellow citizens need to learn from experience that it is unwise to pick as your airline pilot someone suffering from severe mental illness, who lacks common sense, and who is quickly becoming senile and demented. Such a pilot is likely to fly the plane into the ground. It’s a shame the passenegers didn’t know that before the picked him. 

The Markers of Authoritarianism

I think the New York Times did a good job laying out twelve markers of authoritarianism. (See the immediately preceding post.) That said, I also think some context is badly needed.

What Trump Doesn’t Know

Trump doesn’t know how to do second-order thinking. He cannot accurately grasp the consequences of his actions, or the consequences of the actions of others.

Trump doesn’t know how to think long term. Witness, for example, his thoughts on the filibuster.

Trump doesn’t know how to use any tools to achieve his goals, apart from bribery and threats, including threats of violence. 

It is a constant surprise to Trump that, while some people will succumb to bribery and some will succumb to threats, others will not. In fact, for many, the threats will, from Trump’s perspective, be entirely counterproductive. 

As a sociopath lacking all empathy, Trump is unable to appeal to others’ empathy, because he does not know that most people are empathetic, at least to some degree. 

Trump doesn’t know how to construct a plausible argument. Thus, on the rare occasions when his positions have some merit, he cannot make a logical argument. 

In fact, Trump is unaware that some arguments are backed by facts and logic, and some are just bullshit. To him, legal disputes are just a matter of which side screams the loudest. Because he is unaware that some legal positions are well founded and others are not, and because he cannot accurately predict the consequences of his actions, and because he is incapable of second order thinking, he has ordered the prosecution of Letitia James and James Comey even though the prosecutions will fail, and he and his legal team will be revealed as the idiots they are. 

By contrast, a rational proto-fascist would have known that ordinary prosecutions of his enemies would fail, and he would do better to encourage violent action against them, outside the formal legal structure. 

But Trump is the President

So, he can do a lot of mischief and cause a lot of chaos. 

Trump’s Popularity is Headed South

From The Economist this morning:

Inflation and Criminal Immigrants

Trump’s slender margin of victory in 2024 was based on inflation and fears of criminal immigrants. 

A rational proto-fascist would have kept his promise to try to lower inflation. A rational wannabe dictator would have realized that policies that tend to promote inflation will in fact increase inflation. Someone capable of second order thinking would have realized that higher inflation would decrease his popularity and make it harder for him to achieve his authoritarian dreams. Someone not blinded by grandiosity would recognize his loss of popularity when he sees it.

A rational nascent Nazi would recognize that if he has made inroads into the Latino community by promising to round up criminal immigrants, then he should round up criminal immigrants, not terrorize the whole Latino population. 

And What About the Supreme Court?

The Supreme Court is slow walking Trump’s emergency application to invade Illinois. On Wednesday of this week, they’ll hear oral argument on Trump’s tariff power grab. Other issues will follow in due course. 

They game of Trump v. Justice is under way, but there are more innings to play. In the last game of the World Series, the Blue Jays were ahead at the end of eighth inning, but the Dodgers won the contest. Let’s let this game play out.  

Yeah, But What if Trump Just Defies the Courts?

Well, as someone once said, aye, there’s the rub.

Let’s say Trump doesn’t want to obey a Supreme Court order and directs [insert name of police unit, National Guard, Army battalion, etc. etc.] to act in contravention of the Court’s decision, will the people making up that official body obey Trump or will they obey the Supreme Court or will law and order just break down?

I put it to you that it’s hardly a foregone conclusion that the … police, National Guard, Army, etc. … will just jerk their knees and do exactly what Trump tells them to do. 

But Because I Can Do Second Order Thinking, I Post the Next Question

If the official organs of state power refuse to obey illegal orders, will Trump just call out the Proud Boys and the other hooligans?

Answer: I don’t know, but he has done it before. 

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Go Ahead, Clown, Make Our Day

John Marshall of Talking Points Memo makes a persuasive case for letting Trump bully the Republican senators into deep-sixing the filibuster. Marshall writes,

As you’ve probably already heard, Donald Trump went on Truth Social …  and announced that the time had come for his senators to pass a clean “continuing resolution” to reopen the government with a simply majority vote by abolishing the filibuster. The only proper response to this is “bring it on.” It’s never good to cower, of course. “Give it your best shot” is always the proper posture. But if Trump is able to accomplish this (I’m skeptical — more on that in a moment), that’s great news.

This is such an important point that is worth itemizing the reasons why this is so. 

First, the senate filibuster is a core reason for the decline of trust in government over the last quarter century. The evolution of its use helped severe the tethers connecting election results and governmental action. A party wins an election and its promised actions never happen. The filibuster is both the cause of and excuse for gridlock.

Second, the filibuster provides an overwhelming structural advantage for Republicans, a big reason to be skeptical it will happen. (More on that in a moment.) Republicans want tax cuts and judicial nominations, neither of which the filibuster affects. To the extent Republicans want non-budget/tax legislation, it’s generally stuff like a national abortion ban that Republican leaders are happy for an excuse not to touch. They’re no more likely to pass something like that post-filibuster. The Democrats’ agenda is always legislation focused — actual laws that institute reforms, create services, safety nets, anything. It’s in the nature of being the party of government. The senate filibuster is a permanent bar for any Democratic legislation Republicans oppose, regardless of which party is in the majority. Remember that Obamacare only passed in 2009-10 because two successive wave elections had briefly — for about six months — given Democrats the now unimaginable margin of 60 senate votes. Anyone who tells you the filibuster affects both parties equally is either lying or has been sleeping for the last 30 years.

Third, because the filibuster is a permanent bar on any Democratic legislation, any reforms to protect the republic against Trumpism are all ruled out in advance. As long as the filibuster exists, it means any future Democratic presidency or trifecta is simply a replay of the Biden presidency, a short breather before the further advance of Trumpist autocracy.

None of the above is new. It applied in 2021-22 when Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refused any effort to limit or abolish the filibuster. These are the longterm, structural reasons why opposing the filibuster should be a litmus test for every Democratic senator. But there are also short-term and immediate reasons why, from the Democrats’ point of view, the timing is great.

Democrats refused to give their funding support for Trump’s autocracy and draconian cuts to health care. They’ve hung about as tough and as long as anyone imagined. That has inspired new confidence in their voters and prospective voters. It has also dramatically raised public awareness about the crippling cuts to health care Republicans chose to fund their mammoth tax cuts. It’s provided a monthlong spectacle of Republicans digging in, insisting on keeping the government shut down rather than just allowing people to keep their coverage. From a messaging and political standpoint it’s been a disaster for the GOP. In a revealing update this morning, the DC insider sheet Punchbowl pondered how it can be that voters don’t realize that the whole thing is Democrats’ fault and Democrats should take the blame. Their bafflement is a good reminder how much DC remains wired for the GOP. 

At this point it seems clear that Trump not only doesn’t want to compromise but doesn’t even want to engage. It’s less a hardball negotiating stance than a lack of focus. He’s consumed by his ballroom and domestic military deployments and foreign trips and barely seems aware the government is shut down at all. We’re also now days away from the new Obamacare price hikes being locked in. I’m certainly not saying Democrats should throw in the towel. My point is that they have already gotten most of the political gains they can get from this.

Indeed, if you’re inclined to be cynical you could say that in narrowly electoral terms it’s almost the best of both worlds for them. There was a debate leading up to the shutdown about whether it made sense for Democrats to demand that Republicans repeal or soften their health care cuts. Those cuts will be causing pain across the country throughout 2026. Voters will be looking for someone to blame. Why should Democrats use their political capital to save Republicans from the electoral consequences of their own awful actions, the argument went. And in narrowly political terms it was a pretty good argument. If this ends now with Trump forcing the abolition of the filibuster, Dems won’t have had to choose. They’ll have fought, never given in and also be in a position to reap the political backlash against Trump’s taking health care coverage from millions and hiking the rates for millions more.

Democrats don’t need to pine or anguish over what the moral choice is here: political benefit vs getting people back their health care. The choice is abstract and purely notional. Trump and Senate Republicans are either going to do this or not. Democrats have no input on the decision. I’m only noting that in political terms, it leaves them having their cake and eating it too.

Which brings us back to my skepticism that this will even happen. Senate Republicans know better than anyone that the filibuster is their secret weapon. Trump doesn’t give a crap about any of this stuff. But these senators care a lot and they have a longer time horizon than the next three years. We say that Trump gets everything he wants from the GOP. But that’s not entirely true. When there is concerted GOP opposition to something, he doesn’t get his way, at least not in more than a superficial way. That’s especially so here because the entire thing just isn’t something Trump cares much about. Tariffs, soldiers in cities — those things excite him. This is just his tenth idea for how to force the Democrats’ hand, along with DOGE 2.0, which mostly didn’t happen, threats to cut SNAP funding, hammering Dems over hating the military and a bunch of other things they’ve tried and failed over the last month. If anything this latest gambit should be a reminder to the gullible — which includes most of official DC — that those constant claims that this was actually all going great for the White House maybe weren’t true after all.

The key points remain the same. Trump will likely have a much harder time getting Senate Republicans to abolish the filibuster than most people imagine. But if he does, it’s a good thing. No good future for the American republic is possible with the filibuster in place. And the short-term politics are pretty good too. So go ahead, clown, make every thinking Democrats’ day.

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Cowardice, Moral Relativism, Values, and the “Rectification of Names”

Earlier in the day, I wrote about the behavior of the big law firms vis-à-vis Trump, which looks like “cowardice.” 

I followed up, with a post about the Wall Street Journal’s courageous condemnation of “moral relativism.”

Now for a little commentary of my own.

Molière is said to have taken great pains to find le mot juste. Confucius heavily emphasized the harm that can arise when elites don’t understand the situation they are in—and don’t use accurate language to talk about it. See Analects !3:3, which reads in part, “When a ruler doesn’t understand what he’s talking about, he should remain silent. When names aren’t correct, language doesn’t accord with the truth of things. When language doesn’t match reality, nothing can be carried out successfully.”

In the spirit of Confucius and Molière, I would like to suggest that our elites have not been afflicted with a bout of cowardice, nor has their thinking suddenly become infected by morally relativistic fallacious reasoning.

They aren’t cowards, and they aren’t irrational. Instead, their problem is that same problem that elites always have—their values. 

What they value is acquiring wealth and exercising power. In pursuit of those values, they are both courageous and rational. 

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Connoisseurs of Irony Will Enjoy the Wall Street Journal’s Manful Condemnation of Moral Relativism

Gerard Baker, editor at large of the Wall Street Journal, writes Trump Accelerates Our Decline Into Moral Relativism: As is often true, he wasn’t the first but is the worst to use others’ wrongs as an excuse for his own: 

Moral relativism is enticing. It enables me to establish the moral value of everything I do by reference to the behavior of others. It allows me to avoid censure by judging my intentions, choices and actions not on the basis of whether they are intrinsically right or wrong, but by the lesser standard of whether someone in a similar position might have done something similar. 

Moral relativism is hardly new in public life. Self-exoneration through false moral equivalence by public figures is as old as time itself. But when it becomes the controlling ethical architecture of public behavior, we are in serious trouble. Its effect is to give leaders permission to do just about anything they want, unconstrained by guilt, shame or political sanction. Moral relativism and the ratchet effect will ensure that there is always some precedent close enough to persuade people to shrug even when confronted with some evidence of genuine turpitude on their own side.

We’ve been descending this spiral for a long time, but as with just about everything to do with the gargantuan figure of Donald Trump, his behavior has accelerated the descent. 

His corrosive effect on norms of ethics, language and, for that matter, conservatism, has been amplified by the eager acquiescence of the Republican Party in the process.

The party that once liked to think of itself as committed to values and principles has become the most cynical exponent of the idea that everything is relative. A cheerleading chorus of so-called conservatives in the media eased the way. Every time they are confronted with evidence of some new infamy by their president, many on the right will choose to avoid the unrewarding path of moral consistency and opt instead for the tactics of least resistance: misdirection, “whataboutism,” or simply reaching for the blinders. All of these relativist tools have been on display in the last week. 

Take the pardon for Changpeng Zhao, the Binance cryptocurrency exchange founder, convicted of money-laundering offenses. This after his firm had been involved in a lucrative financial partnership for the president and his family that helped contribute to the $4.5 billion in wealth they have generated this year alone. Morally equivalent precedents: Hunter Biden? The Clinton Foundation? Hardly on the same scale. What we have seen this year is new levels of graft and grift. We seem to be moving rapidly toward a justice system in which the president essentially gets to decide who should be in prison. If you’re a political enemy, we’ll come up with a crime to fit your punishment. If you’re a friend, we will annul your crimes. 

Then there is Mr. Trump’s grandiose plan for the East Wing of the White House. There has been a lot of nonsense about this. I don’t doubt that the left’s hysteria is overdone. It seems certain that, legally and constitutionally, the president could, if he wanted, tear down the whole executive mansion and replace it with a giant casino—and there’s certainly plenty of presidential precedent. This much is grounds for legitimate moral equivalence.

But there is the legitimate question of how it’s paid for. Usage has by now dulled us to the question “What would we say if a Democrat did this?” But some of us remember when Bill Clinton had wealthy donors for sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom, and for weeks Republicans and their supporters in the media treated it as if he were selling the sacred space to the highest bidder. Now we have a president who is literally selling the place to the highest bidders, all justified on spurious comparisons with some changes Barack Obamamade on a much smaller scale. 

Misdirection is a convenient tool of relativism. Look at the latest mind-numbing assault on sanity of the president’s new tariffs on Canada. The obvious legal, political, moral, diplomatic and economic monstrosity of a president unilaterally imposing a tax on imports because he was upset by something that a Canadian provincial government decided to show on television is literally without precedent. Yet a lot of people on the right have spent the last week explaining how Mr. Trump was essentially right to say Ronald Reagan “loved” tariffs more than those wicked Canadians claimed. (He didn’t, but truth is another casualty of moral relativism.)

And never mind that the president is making personal laws and dispensing arbitrary justice, have you seen the tattoo on the chest of that Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine? My God, the Democrats have a Nazi problem.

It should be possible—and it is essential to a well-ordered society—to call out morally reprehensible behavior by your own side as well as by your opponents. That it no longer seems to be leaves us all morally degenerate.

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Doctors and Lawyers

Doctors

The Hill, Major medical organizations become resistance force under RFK Jr.

Politico, Doctors ‘fight like hell’ against a second Trump admin: ‘Elections do matter for your health’

AMA: Congress moves health care in wrong direction

AMA statement on Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices

The Guardian, RFK Jr to urge Americans to eat more saturated fats, alarming health experts

The majority of them are pissed, bigly, and upping their political contributions to Democrats. 

On the other hand, RFK Jr.’s positions on food choice are popular in some quarters:

Version 1.0.0

Lawyers

Above the Law, Democrats Cash In As Biglaw Lawyers & Staff Open Their Checkbooks

David Lat, Biglaw Leans Left—And is Moving Further Left, Research Shows: Around 92 percent of the Biglaw campaign contributions analyzed in a new study went to Democrats—a 12-to-1 ratio, up from 6-to-1 four years ago

Washington Post, Nation’s biggest law firms back off from challenging Trump policies

I was a Big Law partner in the 1990s, and I would guess that some 60 percent of contributions at that time went to Republicans and 40 percent to Democrats. How things have changed!

Interestingly, according to the Washington Post, our nation’s largest law firms are most definitely not putting their mouth where their money is.

At least for the most part—with some major exceptions, like the good folks at Jenner & Block, and some others.

Conclusions? Inferences? I Report, You Decide

One important conclusion I draw—and your mileage may differ—is that any “support” from Trump among the elite in our society is pretty damn hollow and brittle. 

When you put enough pressure on something that is hollow and brittle, it tends to break.

All of a sudden. 

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“An Uncontrollable Urge to Defile Himself and His Office. Most National Leaders, After All, do not Willingly Associate Themselves with Diarrhea.”

Michelle Goldberg (N.Y. Times), Trump Posted a Video of Himself Dumping Excrement on Our Cities. It’s a Glimpse of His Deepest Drives.

Ms. Goldberg writes, 

This weekend, I was surprised to learn that Donald Trump seems to see himself in the same way I do: as a would-be monarch spraying the citizenry with excrement.

On Saturday, perhaps stung by the enormous nationwide “No Kings” protests, Trump posted an A.I.-generated video on Truth Social that inadvertently captured his approach to governing. In it the president, wearing a crown, flies a “Top Gun”-style fighter plane labeled “King Trump” above American cities crowded with demonstrators, dumping gargantuan loads of feces on them. Amplifying it on social media, the White House communications director Steven Cheung gleefully wrote that the president was defecating “all over these No Kings losers!”

It is not at this point surprising that Trump holds half the country in contempt, or that he treats urban America as a group of restive colonies to be brutally subdued. This is a man who told the military it should use our cities as “training grounds” for foreign operations, and who has sent both troops and federal agents to terrorize Los Angeles and other cities. The president’s attempts to demote the residents of blue America from citizens to subjects have become so routine they barely make headlines anymore.

What’s curious, then, is not Trump’s eagerness to degrade us, but his uncontrollable urge to defile himself and his office. Most national leaders, after all, do not willingly associate themselves with diarrhea. Scatological attacks are usually the province of outsiders trying to cut the powerful down to size. (French farmers, for example, have vented their fury at ruling authorities by dumping piles of manure in front of government buildings.) Rulers, by contrast, tend to jealously guard their dignity. But not Trump.

A perverse delight in defilement has always coursed through MAGA circles. Describing the profoundly cynical, curdled atmosphere in which 20th-century totalitarian movements took root, Hannah Arendt wrote, “It seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest.” A similar giddy nihilism has long surrounded the president and his devotees, who often treat his unlikely ascension as a world-historical feat of trolling.

There’s a tension, however, when people in power adopt this oppositional stance. On the surface, Trump longs for grandeur. But on some subconscious level he and those around him have a deep instinct for degradation. The administration purports to venerate traditional aesthetics; an August executive order on federal architecture disavowed modernism and called for classical designs that convey “the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of America’s system of self-government.” At the same time, Trump paved over the lawn of the White House Rose Garden to make it look like the patio at Mar-a-Lago. On Monday, The Washington Post reported that his construction crews have begun demolishing the facade of the White House’s East Wing to build a ballroom.

The dominant aesthetic of the administration comes not from antiquity but from A.I. slop, the tackier and more juvenile the better. (Think of the White House’s image of a crying migrant rendered in the style of a Japanese Studio Ghibli animation.) 

Last week, when HuffPost asked the White House who chose Hungary as the site of an upcoming meeting between Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, responded, “Your mom did.” She was obviously trying to insult and delegitimize a representative of the liberal media. But the result was to reveal herself as a gross parody of a professional press secretary. The administration plans to mark America’s 250th anniversary with a UFC cage fight on the White House’s south lawn, an idea that seems ripped from the scabrous 2006 satire “Idiocracy.”

The Trump gang’s compulsion to debase and cheapen almost everything they touch is far more than a matter of style. Perhaps the most puzzling thing about the second Trump administration has been its attacks on pillars of American strength that pose no challenge to its ideology. It was predictable that the White House would gut support for the humanities, but not that it would defund pediatric cancer research. I expected it to try to eliminate the Department of Education, but not to deliberately wreck the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which helps communities in both red and blue states when they’re beset by disasters.

Some of this slashing and burning can be explained by the old-fashioned small-government fanaticism of administration personnel like Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. But it also seems like a function of Trump’s abusive insecurity. Part of him wants to aggrandize the country to reflect his own inflated self-conception. And part of him seems to want to trash it out of rage at the limits of his dominance.

In “The Emergency,” an allegorical novel coming out next month, the writer George Packer captures some of the lust for desecration animating the Trumpist right. The book hinges on a conflict between self-righteous Burghers, who live in cities, and resentful, paranoid rural people known as Yeomen. In a narrative turn that appears, in light of Trump’s video, quite prescient, the Yeomen make plans to bombard the Burghers’ city with fecal cannons. It’s as if Packer managed, for a moment, to tune into the president’s wavelength.

“There was something so audacious about it, so inventive and barbaric, so low,” he writes, adding, “It would break through the final restraint, and there would be no going back.”

Fights over resources and beliefs can be settled. It’s much harder to imagine rapprochement with those who want, above all, to befoul us.