To reckon with the mess

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Mar 5th, 2025 | By Ophelia Benson
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

The Trump administration’s elimination of PEPFAR, the American program to combat HIV infection in Africa, symbolizes the path ahead. President George W. Bush created the program because it would do immense good at low cost, and thereby demonstrate to the world the moral basis of American power. His successors continued it, and Congresses of both parties funded it, because they saw that the program advanced both U.S. values and U.S. interests. Trump and Vance don’t want the United States to be that kind of country anymore.

The thing about this demonstrating the moral basis of one’s power is that you can’t do it without actually having the moral basis. The ulterior motive is there, but so is the immense good being done. Immense good is good.

The American people need to reckon with the mess Trump and Vance are making of this country’s once-good name—and the services they are performing for dictators and aggressors. There may not be a deep cause here. Trump likes and admires bad people because he is himself a bad person.

And not just a bad person but a kind of paradigm of a bad person – a bad man, specifically. Bad so thoroughly; bad in so many ways; bad to the total exclusion of any good. There are no stories of Trump doing something benevolent. None. Everything he does is about enriching and empowering and flattering himself; there is nothing left over for people who are not trump.

4 Responses to “To reckon with the mess”

#1
Acolyte of Sagan
March 5, 2025 at 6:58 am

The American people need to reckon with the mess Trump and Vance are making of this country’s once-good name

The problem with this is that a vast number of Trump’s supporters don’t care what the rest of the world thinks of America. For them it’s ‘We’re America, we’re number one, and if you don’t like it you can go to Hell’. They remind me of the supporters of the London football club, Millwall FC, infamous for being the most violent hooligans in the country throughout the darkest days of football hooliganism. To this day their favourite terrace chant is ‘Everybody hates us….and we don’t care’.
#2
Mike B
March 5, 2025 at 8:14 am

I’m still having trouble truly fathoming the shitstorm that is happening right before my own eyes. Some horrors may be too large for pea brains to grasp.
#3
What a Maroon
March 5, 2025 at 8:20 am

PEPFAR was probably the best thing the Bush administration did. Saved countless lives. But of course those are African lives, so they don’t matter, I guess.

Somewhat related, Katherine Stewart on authoritarian rhetoric and the Trump administration. This part I didn’t know:

But the thinker who arguably matters more in understanding the radicalized MAGA intellectual is Carl Schmitt. A conservative Catholic with a sex-addiction problem who managed to get himself excommunicated from the church, Schmitt defined a genuine sovereign as “he who decides on the exception.” Which is a nice way of saying “he who is above the law.” Schmitt also articulated the importance of the “state of emergency” as a means of separating out the genuine sovereign from the effete liberals who would otherwise betray the people and give in to the enemies of the state. He associated these woke wimps with the rationalist German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whom he accuses of trying to base the legitimacy of the state on reason and liberal values.

All this is music to the ears of Claremont intellectuals, who vie with one another in their condemnations of Hegel and the rational “administrative state,” which they associate with the dread evil of wokeism. For example, Charles Kesler, the longtime editor of the Claremont Review, implicitly follows Schmitt when he identifies the administrative state with all that is bad in America.

It is helpful to know that Schmitt was a full-on Nazi. When Hitler declared an emergency and seized control of the government in 1933, Schmitt was exultant. At last, the ghost of Hegel has been killed off, he enthused. He lobbied hard for a position as adviser to the Nazi government, and he did his part to condemn the work of Jewish scholars.
#4
Mostly Cloudy
March 6, 2025 at 6:18 am

Acolyte of Sagan : There was a joke made by a US journalist about the popular but critically-reviled thriller writer Mickey Spillane in the 1950s.

It was “Everybody hates Mickey Spillane…except his millions of readers and his banker!”

Now with Trump, it’s “Everybody hates Donald Trump….except his millions of US voters and his toadies!”