Trump’s Economy in Crisis

Posted on March 29, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 29, 2025

If we look at the facts and avoid partisan spin, it’s clear that the Biden administration did the heavy lifting required to restore our economy to its pre-COVID vigor. The runaway inflation that began in late 2021 was forecast quite accurately during the COVID lockdown. Farmers talked about having to destroy crops and herds of cattle and hogs, which would have to be rebuilt. The incredibly low food prices during 2020 resulted from agricultural products being dumped on the market.

Manufacturers warned of severe supply chain disruptions which would adversely affect production and raise prices, and because so many businesses failed during the lockdown, unemployment began to spike. The University of Michigan’s Consumer Confidence Index (CCI) had reached 96 in 2019, but COVID caused it to drop to 81.6 in 2020, 77.6 in 2021, and 59.0 in 2022. All this is well-documented.

With Republicans determined to prevent him from accomplishing anything, Biden and the Congress had to enact partisan legislation. The inflation rate was reduced to pre-COVID levels, and unemployment dropped to the lowest value since Ronald Reagan was president. By Election Day, 2024, financial markets were at all-time highs, and the CCI was in the 70s. But Trump and the MAGA spin machine kept sayng our economy was failing and countless bad actors on the internet, including Russian and Chinese bots, reinforced that message. Millions of voters believed the lies and elected Trump, who promised to “fix” the economy and make life better for his supporters.

During his first term, Trump touted booming financial markets as a sign that his economic policies were working. In doing so, he showed a basic lack of understanding of the economy. When he took office amid a raging bull market with the best CCI since COVID, he claimed the robust economy he’d said was failing was due to his efforts. To some extent, he was correct, but the reason says more about his ignorance than anything he accomplished.

Neither the CCI nor the financial indexes measure the strength of the economy. They both reflect what people hope the future will look like. CCI surveys ask consumers how they feel about the future based on their personal circumstances. Financial markets reflect how large corporations, wealthy investors, and conservative managers of retirement funds see the future. In December, with voters having spoken and no one attacking the Capitol, investors projected what a future in which Trump kept his promises and understood what drives our economy might look like. Both the CCI and the markets spiked upward.

But Trump’s Cabinet nominations made it clear that his administration would be a road test of Project 2025, which advocated a “hard restart” of our government. As one pundit pointed out, that’s a sci-fi reference to rebooting a starship’s engine, knowing everything might simply blow up, and it’s a perfect analogy for what the MAGA people are doing. Voters began realizing Trump’s claims that he had nothing to do with Project 2025 were lies, and he intended to do everything he said he would during the campaign: make a show of rounding up and deporting undocumented immigrants, re-start a trade war with punishing tariffs, destroy the Deep State, by which he meant the structure of the federal government, and take down everyone who had ever opposed him.

Then Elon Musk started using his chainsaw to eviscerate the government with no logic or plan, and hundreds of thousands of government employees, nearly half of whom were veterans, were targeted without cause. Trump disregarded the checks and balances in our Constitution and ignored Congress. He threatened judges who ruled against his illegal actions, and tried to control what universities teach. Overall, he demonstrated that his primary goal in reducing the size of government was killing agencies he hated: those that protect consumers and the environment, FEMA, and Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, which take money from billionaires and give it to freeloaders.

Most economists warned Trump’s policies would lead to more inflation and higher interest rates, and likely cause a recession. When that started getting through to voters, especially Trump voters, his approval rating began plummeting, and the CCI and financial indexes crashed. Trump’s Executive Orders were being reversed or delayed by the courts, and he was verbally assaulting federal judges and threatening to have them impeached (which he does not have the power to do.) The unsecured group war chat over our attack on Yemen enraged active duty troops, especially fighter pilots who felt exposed and compromised, and in nine weeks, Trump is already in crisis with his base.

Trump may have misunderstood how the economy works in 2016, but he understands that yesterday’s market crash and the announcement that the CCI dropped to 57 spell jeopardy for his plans to become a dictator. He pulled the nomination of Elise Stefanik as UN Ambassador, because he desperately needs her vote in Congress, and if the special election to replace her were won by a Democrat, his effectiveness would be ended.

Politicians who fail to heed Jim Carville’s warnings usually wish they had.

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Take a Step Back and Enjoy the View

Posted on March 28, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 28, 2025

Whenever the Weather Channel covers a massive hurricane, I’m fascinated by the different ways they present It. Their bread and butter is sending people in waterproof bodysuits out into the storm. Viewers love chaotic scenes of meteorologists with microphones being blown around by 100 mph-plus wind gusts and ducking flying debris. Viewers also love high-tech color-coded maps accompanied by phrases like “bomb cyclones,” “occluded fronts,” and “temperature inversions.” For me, however, the most impressive shots are satellite photos that show a mass of roiling energy that resembles a giant behemoth in a horror film encompassing half of North America.

It’s all about perspective. We can get lost in the fog of war, drown in never-ending analyses and predictions, or we can be awestruck by the massive power of nature. All three aspects are valuable, but we often let ourselves be overwhelmed by details or hang on the words of experts eager to explain what’s happening instead of taking a step back and looking at the whole picture for ourselves.

The storm I’m thinking about today is the torrent of Executive Orders and DOGE-inspired mayhem of chopping up government agencies – before anyone shouts “exaggeration,” remember that their self-selected symbol is a chain saw. We see the chaos and confusion that are the intended results of the Trump administration’s strategy every day, although more and more people seem to be tuning out. This weekend, millions of us are directing our attention to March Madness or the opening of the baseball season to preserve the illusion that life goes on as usual. Imagine the damage Trump and Elon Musk may have done by Monday while none of us was looking.

My favorite historian, Heather Cox Richardson, whose career focused on the Republican Party and its founding principles, took that step back for us today. Richardson understands that focusing only on specifics like the horrific security breach around our attack on Yemen or the dismantling of the Department of Education is like watching a battle scene in a war movie. Lots of noise, destruction, and personal tragedy but no context. She also understands that the fabric that holds all this madness together is Project 2025, whose principal author, Russell Vought, is now Donald Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought’s position arguably makes him the most powerful person in government, because it controls how funding authorized by Congress is disseminated or held hostage.

It’s obvious that Project 2025 is Trump’s blueprint for the future of America, although he repeatedly lied about having no knowledge of it. He still doesn’t acknowledge it, despite the fact that almost every action he has taken in the nine weeks he’s been president comes directly from that thousand-page manifesto, and much of his support team were involved in writing it. Richardson makes that clear in simple terms, just as the satellite view of a massive storm gives us a better understanding of its power and extent, but her words took on greater significance when I read Hilary Clinton’s Op-Ed in today’s New York Times.

Clinton, appropriately, focused not only on the cynical nature of the Trump administration’s actions, but how stupid they are in terms of the objectives Trump campaigned on. Clinton pointed out what many others have: that Trump’s actions in cutting government services are hurting his voting base more than the rest of us; that his trade war is likely to seriously damage our economy; and that firing talented generals and ignoring security rules greatly weaken our military. Clinton concluded that those actions are dumb. Richardson had a different view.

She pointed out that if, in fact, Trump’s intention is to cut waste from government, strengthen our military, and improve the lives of his devoted base, most of the things he’s done, including the majority of his Executive Actions, make no sense. But what if his real intention is to destroy the power of the federal government because in his delusional universe, it’s controlled by the mythical Deep State?

She makes a strong case for this, and it’s an easy one to make. The perspective her satellite view shows us is that the apparatus of our government is not being improved or made more efficient – it’s being dismantled with no plan for which governmental services will continue or how the ones that don’t will be replaced. Or, more importantly, how the millions of people (non of whom are Trump’s billionaire donors) who are seriously hurt because of Trump’s actions will survive.

Her most convincing argument centers around Curtiss Yarvin, a reactionary intellectual who was heavily involved in Project 2025. She quotes extensively from Yarvin’s speeches and writings from 2021, which lay out how to replace a democratic government with an autocracy. In the context of today, Yarvin’s words read like a crystal ball predicting Trump’s agenda. I urge everyone to read Richadson’s Letters From an American newsletter on Substack to see for yourself. It’s free, no account necessary.

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Conflicted Loyalties

Posted on March 27, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 27, 2025

Suppose one of our vital allies – maybe the UK, Germany, Australia, Mexico or Canada – suddenly went rogue. After decades of cooperation and a shared sense of purpose, they suddenly switched gears and began flirting with our enemies. Their leaders began referring to us in insulting, derogatory rants, making it sound as if nearly a century of common purpose was really just transactional, a Ponzi scheme to rip them off, until someone else offered them a better deal.

To make matters worse, our hypothetical ally adopted economic theories that have been shown to be unworkable, either for their own population or the stability of international trade and its consequent effects on inflation and complex supply chains. In addition, their new populist leaders were pushing their country toward oligarchic, religion-based Fascism that was tearing our once valuable ally into warring factions that threatened their viability as a dependable nation, especially if they possessed nuclear weapons. Unlikely as that seems, bad economic policies and internal chaos caused the Soviet Union to implode in 1991, reminding us that large, powerful countries remain so only until they’re not anymore.

In recent years, we’ve seen similar trends in NATO allies Hungary and Turkey. That was disturbing, but while both nations were of strategic importance in defending NATO countries against Russian aggression and radical Islamic terrorism, they were neither major trading partners nor large stakeholders in our domestic economy, so most Americans didn’t feel particularly affected or threatened by what they did.

But suppose they did. Suppose our rogue ally was heavily invested in American assets, and was a country we depended on for scarce resources or military support. If we saw our own economy or general well-being threatened, what would we do? Our government would attempt to use all its diplomatic assets to resolve growing conflicts and avert future ones. But what if there was no one listening at the other end of the phone? What if, despite warnings and hand-wringing, as when the UK decided to break from the European Union, our entreaties fell on deaf ears?

It’s not clear how we would react. The only thing that’s certain is that months or years of chaos would ensue which would threaten the security of individual nations as well as increasing the prospect of major military conflicts. Regardless of what our government did, we’d have our own personal reactions. Remember after nine-eleven when Americans directed their anger at every Muslim country and wound up supporting a twenty-year war with the wrong enemies? As individuals, we’d all be rooting for a revolution like the recent overthrow of Assad’s government in Syria, and our intelligence services would likely be working covertly to support that end.

Those are the thoughts that trouble me when I imagine what our former allies think about Project 2025, which is blindly driving the Trump administration in an uncertain, dangerous game of chicken with the entire world that looks very much like the tantrum of an angry child with a loaded gun. It’s also clear, from Donald Trump’s history and the fact that he filled his cabinet with unqualified  amateurs who have no respect for diplomatic norms and procedures, that they are being herded along a path most of them, includig Trump, do not understand. It’s the natural evolution of a nation that allowed political rhetoric and an unregulated, hack-vulnerable internet to destroy the meaning of truth and facts.

Unlike the hypothetical scenario I presented, our closest allies are looking at the possible dissolution of a coalition they’ve depended on and rebuilt their post-WW2 economies around. They don’t see the possible loss of a valuable ally; they see the toughest kid on the block who used to be their friend suddenly turn hostile. As a patriotic American, this appalls and terrifies me. I find myself wishing for what the rest of Europe and North America are wishing for, not a coup or revolution, but responsible opposition that can stop Project 2025 in its tracks.

Unfortunately, the opposition to Trump’s policies has no leadership, and I find myself greatly conflicted. In truth, I’m hoping for the Trump administration to fail miserably and quickly before it can inflict further irreversible damage. That I feel that way shocks me, but when I see reckless, irresponsible, dangerous behavior on the part of leaders who are drowning in waters they’ve never swum in before, I find the interests of Americans far more aligned with those of our horrified allies than the Trump administration’s.

I expect that more than half of America is experiencing a similar conflict. When the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate cannot agree on whether to pass a budget resolution, when we have to choose between shutting down our government and giving Trump a blank check to destroy whatever personally offends him, our country is in serious trouble. No wonder I feel conflicted.

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O Canada

Posted on March 18, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 18, 2025

To Americans like me who have always loved Canada and considered our Canadian neighbors our best friends in the world, the actions of the second Trump administration are especially damning. Imagine that one day you found out your best friend since childhood was publicly bad-mouthing you, calling you a leech and a parasite who steals from you. Imagine they’ve been making up outrageous lies about you like knowingly allowing Fentanyl to be smuggled into your neighborhood, and they even questioned your right to exist as an independent entity.

I admit I’m biased. I have twenty-two aunts and uncles, and from the time I was a young child, my favorite uncle, who was always nice to me even when I was a pain in everyone’s rear end, was from Alberta. In 1965, he bought one of the first Ford Mustangs, and of all things, he gave it to me for a month and let me drive it from New York to Ithaca and keep it at Cornell while I finished my Masters Degree – who does things like that? He didn’t have to, but when my father and millions of other American men were drafted to fight in World War 2, my uncle enlisted in the U. S. Army and fought alongside Americans. (I learned, many years later, that he was actually born in Brooklyn and moved to Canada as a toddler, but he was still my Canadian uncle.)

He was only one man, but I’ve known many Canadians, and they’ve always lived up to their reputation of being “just like us only nicer.” It infuriates me that Trump is treating Canada the way he is. He even threatened to destroy their automobile industry after decades in which Canada and Mexico have partnered with American car companies to create efficient, affordable vehicles, we couldn’t have made alone. Our interests don’t always align perfectly – sometimes we’re competitors. Have you ever known a family in which siblings never bicker or disagree?

According to Trump’s (and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s) policies, Canadians are no different from our thieving allies in Europe. When we forget who our real friends are we diminish them and ourselves.

Canadians own roughly 500,000 homes in Florida. They pay several billion dollars in real estate taxes and patronize stores, restaurants, and amusements. For years they have been a consistent source of demand in the real estate market, helping Floridians maintain the value of their homes. They make up a significant portion of the snowbirds who spend every winter in Florida, fitting seamlessly into our population.

In the last few years, however, severe hurricanes and high inflation have greatly increased the cost of having a second home in Florida. Insurance rates have skyrocketed, and Homeowners Association fees and special assessments resulting from Florida’s new structural integrity laws are doing the same. This hits all of us, but it hits Canadians harder. The average household income in the northeast and middle Atlantic regions of the United States, where most American snowbirds live, is about $86,000 US dollars. For Ontario and Quebec, where most Canadian snowbirds live, the comparable numbers in US dollars are $68,700 and $52,440. In addition, the exchange rate between American and Canadian dollars is US$0.69 = CA$1.00. As a result, many Canadians have been finding it too expensive to own and maintain properties in Florida. The news media are full of comments by Florida realtors who see an accelerating trend of Canadians selling out.

This began well before Trump took office, but the White House’s policies toward Canada seem to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. The administration has proposed new rules and restrictions on Canadians crossing the border, particularly for those who plan to stay more than thirty days. Moreover, Trump’s on again/off again trade policies make the future extremely uncertain for Canadians. The result is that more and more of our northern neighbors are divesting their Florida properties.

You don’t have to be an economist to see that dumping thousands of properties into an already tight real estate market could have a devastating effect on home prices all over Florida. It’s another clear example of what happens when zealots take a chain saw to our economy. I wonder how Governor Ron DeSantis feels about what Trump is doing to property values in his state.

I see Canadian friends who have wintered in Florida, propping up its economy for decades, finally deciding that Canada’s relationship with the United States is too uncertain to risk their investments. I’ve approached a number of them to participate in a Focus Group with me. I intend to interview them regularly and listen to their views on Trump and United States policy toward Canada, and I will publish everything they tell me in future articles.

Stay tuned. It should be very interesting.

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Gangsters, Dictators, and Presidents.

Posted on March 16, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 16, 2025

When Jimmy Carter was president, things didn’t go very well. The cost of Vietnam and the sharp increase in energy prices left over from the Arab Oil Embargo had led to record high inflation and interest rates, and when our puppet dictator, the Shah of Iran was overthrown by the Ayatollahs, our embassy in Tehran was ransacked and taken hostage. Our government was in terrible disarray. America’s love affair with the Godfather movies had people suggesting that we ought to let the Mafia run the government.

It was an interesting hypothesis. According to a recent research study published in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, gangsters, specifically Mafia bosses, consistently display the same sets of traits: “self-centeredness, [a] sense of grandiosity, incapability of feeling remorse, empathy or compassion towards others as well as emotional coldness and parasitic behavior. These traits result in their violating the law and social norms and undermining society structures.” Is that who we want governing us?

The American Psychiatry Association defines the traits associated with people who suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a serious mental illness, as:

  • A grandiose sense of self-importance.
  • Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
  • Belief that they are “special” and can only be understood by other special or high-status people.
  • Need for excessive admiration.
  • A sense of entitlement (i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment).
  • Taking advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.
  • Lack empathy, unwillingness to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.
  • Envy of others or belief that others are envious of them.
  • Arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

When I noticed that the personality traits of Mafia bosses are nearly identical to those of extreme narcissists, I thought it was interesting if not terribly surprising. When I looked further, into the characteristics of autocratic leaders, a light of epiphany went on. Many scholarly sources discuss such traits. One describes them as:

  • Making decisions without input from others
  • Not listening to different points of view
  • Not being open to change
  • Being inflexible
  • Having a “my way or the highway” approach
  • Expecting others to follow without question
  • Having a very rigid, structured approach

The same source acknowledges that some situations, like wars, economic depressions, and natural disasters can benefit from autocratic leadership. An autocrat with good intentions can produce rapid results and operate efficiently. But autocratic leadership also contains the seeds of its own destruction. A leader whose values and ideals are inconsistent with democracy or concern for the common good will produce catastrophic outcomes like abuse of power, poor decision-making, and suppression of dissent. Autocratic leadership  also causes subordinates and group members to feel unmotivated and uninvolved due to nepotism, favoritism, intimidation, and iron-fisted control.

Do you see what I saw? I’ve listed the traits typically associated with Mafia bosses, people who suffer from extreme narcissism, and dictators like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. When I look at them in combination, I see a frightening portrait of Donald Trump.

If you voted for him thinking he was going to reduce your taxes, reverse inflation, and make it easier to raise your family, think again. He only cares about any of those things when he’s trying to buy your vote with false promises. If you’ve been ripped by Elon Musk’s chainsaw, you already know this. If you’re a veteran who is underserved or unemployed because of this president’s callous disregard, you understand what more than half the country knew all along.

Trump only cares about the nation’s economy because if it crashes, so do his wealth and power. He claims to care about the Ukrainian and Russian soldiers who are dying every day, but he doesn’t recognize that killing USAID is resulting in the deaths of countless innocent children in third world countries. He claims to care about antisemitism, but he’s really only interested in the money Jewish billionaires contribute to him. He has no ethics, no moral center, no sympathy or empathy for anyone but himself. Many of his supporters say that’s all right because they love his policies, but except for tax cuts, xenophobia, and arbitrarily slashing agencies he disapproves of, no one has articulated what those policies are.

People who voted for him are realizing they’ve been scammed. Farmers, factory workers, government employees, and all the people likely to lose their jobs when Trump’s tariffs force American companies to reduce their costs will soon see how little he cares about them.

Our president is an insensitive narcissist with the mentality of a gangster. Rationalizing his hateful, vengeful behavior and disregard for anyone who doesn’t help enrich him can only make things worse. That’s why Republicans in the House of Representatives have been told by Leader Mike Johnson to stop holding Town Halls. Communicating with constituents can’t be much fun for House members once voters figure out that they’re complicit with the madman in charge.

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Columbia University, Antisemitism, and Free Speech

Posted on March 15, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 15, 2025

I began my undergraduate career at Columbia University as a naïve, seventeen-year-old Jewish kid from Brooklyn. In 1960, Columbia was an elite university, an Ivy League school ranked with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and the University of Chicago. Being in New York, it was always a mecca for protests and demonstrations. Fifteen years after the end of World War 2, the Cold War was already underway, and the Soviet Union had forged ahead of the United States in the space race. With misplaced fears that whoever controlled near-Earth space would have a huge military advantage, young people were mostly concerned with avoiding a nuclear war.

Columbia believed in free expression; years before Civil Rights became law, the university supported diversity and enlightened free speech. It was my first exposure to a world in which I felt free to speak out against things I disagreed with. It was mind-expanding and freeing in a way I’d never known before. In the early sixties, our campus protests focused on the ROTC program, which in retrospect seems kind of silly, but that isn’t the point. The three thousand young men who attended Columbia College were learning in real time what it meant to grow up in America.  

We were also learning about finding a balance between freedom of expression and personal responsibility. It was okay to be angry and express our anger in speeches and marches. It was not okay to destroy public property or injure people. It was also not okay to march and protest but not listen to what the other side had to say. To be honest, it was also fun, until October 16, 1962, when our play-acting at solving real world issues ran into the Cuban missile crisis. The campus where we had marched and given voice to whatever we disagreed with was suddenly a scene of more than a thousand terrified young people listening to our transistor radios to find out if we were about to be nuked.

The obvious incompetence and lack of transparency with which the Kennedy administration handled that crisis changed everything, and our attention switched to our growing involvement in the mess the French left us in Vietnam. Fears of a guerilla war in Asia began to dominate campus protests, and in the years after I left Columbia, a protest movement instigated by the radical Weather Underground and Students for a Democratic Society, led by Mark Rudd, took shape.

In 1968, students occupied campus buildings and completely disrupted the business of the university. They were angered by the school’s military research which they believed was supporting the growing war in Vietnam and by alleged instances of racial segregation. The university showed great restraint, at first, but eventually had to ask the NYPD to clear the campus. The university adhered to its support of free speech, taking action only after the demonstrations prevented it from functioning.

After students attempting to defend the university blockaded the protestors, police used tear gas to break up the demonstrations, resulting in 150 injuries, including twelve police officers. Compare that to the current protests by Palestinian activists angry over the war in Gaza. They were loud and intense, resulting in many Jewish students and faculty feeling unsafe on campus. It was an ugly, regrettable scene that re-opened religious and ethnic wounds that go back two thousand years. Antisemitism is not new. Neither is the plight of Palestinians who have fallen prey to Islamic terrorist groups.

Columbia became the focus of protests at universities all over the country, but it’s essential to remember that compared to 1968, what happened at Columbia in 2025 was relatively benign. The larger problem is a President who is mad with power, who believes he has the right to tell schools and universities what they are allowed to teach, who is using the unfortunate situation around Palestinian grievances to further his autocratic agenda. As awful as the events of 1968 were, no one in Lyndon Johnson’s White House attempted to abridge the principle of free speech on which our society is based.

That is precisely the issue here. Antisemitism, while awful, has little or nothing to do with Trump’s attempt remake American values, and American Jews would be foolish to believe Trump’s actions are about protecting them. Trump only believes in free speech if the speaker agrees with him. Restricting free speech is the surest way to destroy America.

Let’s ask America’s first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis, what he thinks. Brandeis wrote that only a dire emergency justified restricting free speech. He believed that until such time as there is an overt threat of violence, “the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence…[and] we have nothing to fear from the demoralizing reasonings of some, if others are left to demonstrate their errors and especially when the law stands ready to punish…criminal act[s].”  “[F]reedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are…indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.”

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How to Survive 2025

Posted on March 13, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 13, 2025

Most Americans are so distressed over Donald Trump’s actions, they won’t watch newscasts, and they shun political discussions. But turning into ostriches won’t save our nation from slipping into fascism and autocracy. We need to remain informed, whether we’re directly engaged or not, and remaining informed includes distinguishing truth from fiction, lies, and fantasies.

It’s also important to not exaggerate problems or succumb to thinking they’re insurmountable. They’re not. That’s an illusion Trump’s strategists choreographed by flooding the ether with so much chaff, no one can tell what’s a real threat and what is just a distraction. We must learn to tell the difference. Trump’s game has always been to create sufficient confusion and chaos that his victims and adversaries don’t know what to defend or when to fight back.

Don’t fall into that trap. Pick your battles and try to ignore everything else. We can’t defend against every potential threat – that’s what Trump wants us to do. The painful truth is that solving crisis situations must start with triage. Doctors and first responders do it every day. Trump is going to do a lot of damage and hurt a lot of people. He is going to create terrible turmoil as he tries to dismantle the protections average Americans depend on from their government. That’s unavoidable.

Trump tells the media we have to absorb some pain. He admitted that bringing the price of eggs down was a lie to buy votes – I paid $8.99 for a dozen Sauder’s eggs, yesterday – and he told Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business he’s okay with his policies resulting in a recession, but it will all be worth it in the end. To beat him, we’ll use his own argument against him.

Corporate CEOs and economists keep telling us Trump’s insistence that he’s making America richer is utter nonsense, though saying richer instead of stronger or better reveals his real intentions. The more likely end result is that he’ll permanently damage both our economy and our country. But his argument makes perfect sense for the rest of us. We will undoubtedly suffer pain in 2025, but that pain is a necessary price to pay if we’re ever to rid ourselves of the dangerous, fascist, isolationist populism Trump preaches.

If you want your mental health to survive this year, you need only discipline your thinking. Don’t let fear and anxiety drive you. If you feel like you’re drowning in the confusion Trump creates, do what you would do if you woke up from a nightmare feeling that way. Remind yourself that it’s just a dream – you’re not really drowning, and most of what you hear and read is just propaganda designed to make you feel that way. Neither are you helpless against MAGA craziness; they want you to think you’re weak and defenseless.

Most important, remember that Trump has no regard for laws, regulations, morality, common decency, or the Constitution. He considers all those things annoying hindrances to his personal agenda, and that will be his undoing in the end. As Jim Carville said last week, I believe Trump has about eight months to try to remake our government in his autocratic, greed-based image. His approval rate is slipping, down from 52% when he was inaugurated to 43% seven weeks later. When his trade war re-ignites inflation, puts farmers out of business, closes factories, and creates impossible supply chain delays, that number is certain to drop into the thirties.

We may not care about Trump’s approval rating, but a few dozen people who are critical to the success of the Project 2025 script do. Every House Republican in a swing district is already dreading the midterms. As voter anger mounts, especially as Trump’s trade war impacts his base far more than the rest of us, those Representatives will do what they always do: act entirely in their own self-interest, and their first priority is being re-elected in 2026. They will have to choose between loyalty to Trump, a man who routinely stabs anyone he considers insufficiently loyal in the back, and responding to voters ready to reject MAGA. What do you think they’ll choose? And if, as Carville suggests, Virginia voters, who include 150,000 angry government employees and thousands of underserved veterans, elect a Democratic Governor in November, it will be game over for Trump’s agenda.

As I was writing this, federal “Judge William J. Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California…ordered six federal agencies to rehire thousands of workers with probationary status who had been fired as part of President Trump’s government-gutting initiative.” That’s just the latest of a rapidly growing number of court decisions that are telling Trump he won’t get away with tearing up our Constitution.

Hang in there. The game has just begun.

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Does the Fate of the World Hang on a Grudge?

Posted on February 28, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 28, 2025

Just when we thought it couldn’t get worse, the arrogant, insulting behavior of President Trump and Vice President Vance in their White House ambush of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky illustrated how quickly hope can turn to terrified despair. That’s surely what 40 million Ukrainians must be feeling, not to mention the leaders of our former allies in western Europe. You can watch and listen to it here.

The appalling dressing down of the president of a sovereign nation that has been brutally attacked for three years by Russia, captured live before the entire world is unprecedented. The clowns our country elected to govern us last November have no class and even less sense of history. Can you imagine Franklin Roosevelt or Charles deGaulle addressing the president of Poland, Ignacy Mościcki that way as Hitler’s military was bombing his country? To most of Europe, Vladimir Putin’s determination to recreate the Soviet Union looks very much like a replay of the lead-up to World War II.

Zelensky tried to make that point today, on camera, as French President Emanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer did earlier this week in separate meetings with Trump. What an embarrassing, frightening spectacle. The leaders of two nuclear powers whose soldiers have shed blood alongside our own in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and who stood with us in complete solidarity after 9-11, had to bow their heads and bend their knees to a narcissistic wannabe emperor. It’s what might happen if a spiteful child somehow got control of our ICBM launch codes, and the rest of the world had to tiptoe on eggshells to pacify him.

Much of the MAGA crowd will cheer their heroes for today’s performance. The remaining real Republicans in Congress, and all the rest of us, however, will look on in horror. Our mentally ill president is simply acting out a personal grudge against Zelensky.  It was Zelensky who refused to let Trump blackmail him into framing Hunter Biden, and whose resistance baited Trump into attempting a public shakedown of the Ukrainian president, which resulted in Trump’s first impeachment. Trump’s fury and embarrassment over his own illegal action is what caused the resentment he showed today, because Trump cannot ever be seen to be wrong or weak.

I wonder if Trump ever read Gulliver’s Travels in school. If he did, the message didn’t sink in. Remember the story of Gulliver and the Lilliputians? Of the many moral lessons offered by Jonathan Swift, the one that made the most impression on me was that even if you’re a giant in a land of tiny people, if they unite against you, your size advantage won’t help you. Trump imagines himself a giant among world leaders. He thinks he can dictate not only to Americans but to the rest of the world. We knew his ego had no bounds, but even I never imagined a scene like the one in the video link.

Zelensky and the leaders of almost every NATO country view the war in Ukraine as an existential threat to the whole world. When they compare it to Hitler’s attempt to take over Europe, and the war that cost 40 million lives, their message is clear. Giving in to Putin and rewarding his aggression is the surest way to wind up fighting another major war in Europe. We’ve been taught all our lives to never give in to terrorists and bullies, because that simply tells them we’re afraid to defend ourselves.

Vice President Vance has never been a supporter of defending Ukraine against Russia. He wasn’t always a blind isolationist, but his conversion from a never-Trumper to an acolyte was on display before the world today. Did Trump and Vance orchestrate today’s spectacle, with Trump sitting back and pretending to hear Zelensky while Vance waited for the right moment to attack him verbally on camera? If that’s not what happened, Vance went rogue, and Trump couldn’t resist humiliating his guest..

The thought of Trump and Vance egging each other on, stroking each other’s need to be relevant is horrifying. Is the fate of the world in the hands of two people drunk on power, neither of whom has a realistic sense of history or our future? The only reason our allies put up with it is that we control most of the West’s nuclear arsenal.

Perhaps today was just a performance to humiliate Zelensky before the world, and once Trump’s ego is satisfied and Zelensky resigns, he’ll make a sensible deal with whomever succeeds him. But this clown show is no way to conduct diplomacy, and it puts us all at risk. Trump had the audacity to assert that in defending his country against Russia, Zelensky is leading us into World War III.

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James Carville on Responding to Trump

Posted on February 27, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 27, 2025

As long ago as the Reagan administrations, Republicans have argued that tax cuts and deregulation of the private sector would ultimately bring prosperity for all Americans. The last forty-five years, however, have shown that the trickle-down theory of economics never came close to delivering on that promise, and the primary beneficiaries of that theory were billionaires who became far wealthier than they were before, while the income gap between them and other Americans grew massively. Most of that wealth growth came at the expense of the other American taxpayers, who could ill afford it.

James Carville, the most astute political commentator Democrats have, understands that. He noted in a February 25th New York Times Op-Ed, that the things Trump’s first administration will be remembered for are massive tax cuts that added $2 trillion to our national debt, over 80% of which benefitted the wealthiest Americans; 500 miles of border wall; and a wrong-headed approach to COVID that sacrificed over a half-million American lives to fight against the lockdown that broke the back of the pandemic. That sacrifice was a vain attempt to protect corporate profits.

Carville noted that Trump is great at making promises to the disaffected, who then go out and vote for him. But when it comes to governing, in Carville’s words, Republicans suck. He said George H. W. Bush was so out of touch with how most Americans saw the economy, it cost him re-election. His son, George W. Bush, reacted to nine-eleven by getting us involved in a nearly twenty-year-long war in Iraq and Afghanistan, while sucking up to the Saudi regime that produced the nine-eleven terrorists. And Trump left our economy in a shambles that resulted in the awful inflation inherited by the Biden administration.

Carville also notes that as the second Trump administration attempts to blitz the opposition into submission and re-write our Constitution, Democrats have no clear leader and no legitimate way to slow down the Trump juggernaut. His advice is to not even try. He thinks Democrats should “play dead.” Try to fight back and you’ll look disorganized and inept. Trump holds all the political leverage right now.

There’s a chance the courts will stop Trump from committing some of the worst mayhem he’s attempting. Lower courts have slowed or stopped the implementation of the most obviously illegal and unconstitutional of Trump’s Executive Orders, but appellate courts may take a more conservative stance. Mitch McConnell finally realizes his legacy requires him to speak out against Trump’s policies, though he spent the last decade enabling all this, stacking those courts with right-wing judges. Too little too late? McConnell’s past actions could be what enables Trump to destroy our federal government.

Some look to the Supreme Court and its six to three conservative majority which includes the three justices Trump appointed to reverse Roe v. Wade. They place their faith in Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts to keep the court on a relatively nonpartisan path, but his action yesterday, allowing the decimation of USAID to continue, makes that look unlikely. Having eliminated every other way to combat Trump’s power grab, Carville looks to the voters to solve this mess.

The process of voter disaffection is already underway. Trump began this term with an approval rating of more than 50% for the first time in his political career, but in five weeks, his approval rating is back where it used to hover, around 43%. The drop seems based on fears that his promises on inflation were lies and that his Cabinet picks seem based on pledged loyalty to the president with little regard to qualifications or past accomplishments, and especially the illegal role given to Elon Musk.

Carville sees the alienation of Trump voters growing quickly and crashing his approval rating back into the thirties, where it sat for the last year of Trump’s first term. He suggested that could happen by the end of March, but almost surely by the end of April, citing massive federal job cuts and reductions in federal spending that must result in large private sector job losses. Voters will soon feel the inflationary impact of Trump’s tariffs, which will hurt red states, where the bulk of Trump’s support lives, most.

A few months of this, and Trump’s plummeting approval ratings will cost him his majorities in Congress, as the midterm elections loom. The cowards in Congress who show no inclination to stand up for their oaths still want to be re-elected in 2026. They’ll stab Trump in the back as readily as he turns on them when it suits him.

There’s a governor’s race in November in Virginia. Glenn Youngkind, who was elected in 2021 on an aggressive MAGA platform, cannot run for re-election in 2025 because Virginia’s constitution prohibits anyone from serving two consecutive terms. But Virginia is home to almost 150,000 federal workers who all feel the threat Trump poses. Carville suggests that if the Democrats win in Virginia in November, that will spell the end of Trump’s ability to move his agenda forward.

The good news is that Carville is right a lot more often than he’s wrong.

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Robot Umpires

Posted on February 24, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell. February 24, 2025

We all need a break from worrying about whether Donald Trump can upend our Constitution and become a virtual king. Since many Americans are in mourning and withdrawn since the Super Bowl, I’m focusing on baseball today. Specifically, on the arrival of robot umpires during Spring major league games.

Baseball needs this. Not as badly as football, but neither the NCAA nor the NFL seems inclined to make such a change. Ironically, it would be easy to fix the absolute worst thing about football: spotting the ball accurately at the end of a play. How many times have you seen a game turn on a “4th and inches” call? Referees can’t even place a football down within a couples of inches of where it should be after an incomplete pass or penalty.

At the end of a play that resembles a rugby scrum, like the fashionable Tush Push perfected by the Philadelphia Eagles, television cameras and observers in the coaches’ booths have no idea where the ball ended up, surely not within a critical couple of inches. How do we fix that? Place micro-transmitters in the ends of every football, and set up receiving antennas along both sidelines. Football is a high-profit business, so cost isn’t an issue. It’s not hard to find a transmitting frequency that’s not affected by a two-ton pile of humans.

Back to baseball. I was an umpire when my kids were growing up. I even taught umpire school, and I’d begin the course by asking: “Who can tell me what a strike is?” After a dozen or so wrong answers, I’d say: “A strike is anything the umpire says is a strike.” That sounds pretty arbitrary, because it is.

Anyone who watches baseball knows a good umpire is right more than 90% of the time, but if 250 pitches are thrown in a game, up to twenty are likely to be miscalled. Anyone who’s been an umpire knows it’s physically impossible to call every pitch accurately, especially pitches that touch one of the corners of that rectangle you see in every baseball telecast. It happens so often, baseball had to outlaw arguing over ball and strike calls. Anyone who challenges a pitch call is likely to be thrown out of the game.

Baseball players accept that umpires have their own strike zones. We frequently hear commentators say things like: “This guy has a high strike zone,” or “He’s a hitter’s umpire,” meaning his strike zone is smaller than usual, making it more difficult for the pitcher. On average, a human umpire’s strike zone averages, top to bottom, from 55.6% to 24.2% of a player’s height. The robotic Automated Ball-Strike System (ABS) always uses exactly the same strike zone, based on the precise height of the batter. The strike zone is always between 53.5% and 27.0% of the batter’s measured height. MLB provided the following chart to illustrate this:

Note that the average human-called strike zone tends to miss the four corners of the rectangle that defines the robot strike zone. That means batters will see more strikes called at the corners but fewer at the high and low extremes when robots are in full use. And scrappy players who bat from an exaggerated crouch may have to rethink that – ABS always assumes the batter is standing tall.

In 2006, I published a novel, The Portal, in which my main character was, among other things, a baseball star a hundred years in the future. I described a robot umpire in that book as “an inset metal box with identical dimensions [to home plate] that [lay] beneath it. The umpire worked by scanning a batter to create a three-dimensional strike zone as a hologram shimmering in the air. Microchips embedded in the artificial rawhide that covered the baseballs emitted cold sparks whenever they intersected the strike zone. No one argued with electronic umpires…”

I thought that was a pretty cool approach, but ABS uses a series of radars to accomplish the same thing. It’s been used in the minor leagues for a couple of years, but in 2025, robot umpires are being debuted in Spring major league games. Human umpires will call balls and strikes, but this Spring, each team gets to challenge two pitches in each game. If the ABS sides with the challenger, the team is awarded another potential challenge. Only batters, catchers, and pitchers may challenge an umpire’s call.

Robot umpires will change the game considerably. For example, human umpires vary their strike zones depending on the batter’s count and the game situation. Historical data show that on average a human umpire’s strike zone, (the rounded red shape in the figure,) ranges from 412 square inches to 550 square inches. Strike zones get smaller when a batter’s count has more strikes, larger, when it has more balls. ABS’ strike zone is always 443 square inches, much smaller than the average human strike zone, which should favor hitters.

If you’re a baseball fan, this will be a welcome added dimension to the game. But even if you’re not, isn’t this more fun than watching Donald Trump create mayhem?

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