Commentator
May God Help Us All
Dear Friends,
There are two purposes to these Commentator posts. One is to analyze news/politics. The other is to showcase well-reported political pieces from around the web. I’ve settled on trying to do these Commentator posts once a month since they are time-consuming to do and take away from other projects. If some of you switch to paid subscriptions 😊 I can do them more often.
Best,
Sam
THE DAY THAT WE ALL HOPED WOULD NEVER COME
So, here we are.
I didn’t have it in me to watch the inaugural address, but I read the transcript and actually laughed out loud at different points — what Trump wants to do is so exactly the same agenda that my kid brother would have, back when he was six or seven. There are cars and trucks — “you’ll be able to buy the car of your choice”! — there’s going to Mars, and then there’s his very brief glance at the map and the thought of all the things he wants to do there, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, conquering Greenland (as any self-respecting 8-year-old Risk player knows, Greenland is only a step away from taking Iceland and then seizing Europe and getting all five of its armies), conquering Panama, and then re-renaming Mt Denali as Mt McKinley (what is it with Trump and William McKinley? — although I guess it’s nice that he’s not just roughhousing with his friends but also paying a bit of attention to his studies). If that agenda struck even Trump as a tad childish, he managed to throw in that he would end chronic disease.
More consequentially, though, the agenda is to undo everything his annoying older sister does to curry favor with the parents. So that means no Green New Deal, no DEI, no amnesty for illegal immigrants, and no trans rights — the entire progressive agenda, everything that the left has felt good about for a decade, is scrapped. The declaration that “as of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female” really is a big deal and draws a profound cultural line in the sand — I can only assume that, on the cultural front, we will spend the next four years fighting furiously, even more than we have been, about gender fluidity and gender binaries.
It’s of course unfortunate that the left has committed so many own goals on so many of these issues — pursuing illiberal means in the service of the right-thinking agenda — and now the chickens have come home to roost. The social issues gave Trump a stalking horse to drive through the entirety of the MAGA program.
What the red meat of that program is still remains a little hard to decipher. I think there was a certain all-around relief that Trump didn’t use his inaugural address to share his hit list. The feeling has been that at some point the clown mask will come off and there will be Mussolini, or worse, beneath it, but as further layers are peeled, it’s still essentially clown. Some aspects of the program — the ‘External Revenue Service,’ since, get it?, the Internal Revenue Service is unpopular — seem to just be made up on the fly. But the gist of it feels basically similar to the first term. As many controls as possible are taken off the economy. Everybody gets to stop worrying about the environment and global warming while Trump is in office — and drilling whenever, wherever, is encouraged. Regulations are gone and the private sector unleashed. Of course, it’s not so easy to square that with tariffs, and it’s anybody’s guess how Trump will manage that and how serious he really is about tariffs if they clash with business interests. As usual,
has the salient analysis for the moment. If, in 2016, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Brexit — this return to the soil movement — seemed like the critical analogy for understanding Trump, now it’s Javier Milei and small-government to the point of libertarianism as the guiding political. “Milei has sharply devalued the currency, killed most subsidies, laid off 50,000 public employees, privatized or eliminated entire ministries—and these activities were conducted in a spirit of magnificent showmanship,” Gurri writes. “Milei remains a popular figure, and he has persuaded the public that the chainsaw strategy — cutting government — is preferable to raising taxes.”That may well change — Trump isn’t very ideological — but my expectation is that we can expect a replay of the first term, with Trump maybe a bit savvier as a tactician. For the first couple of years, there will be the daily outrages, and very bitter culture wars, but, meanwhile, Wall Street and the corporations will like what he’s doing, the economy will be in good shape, he’ll be popular enough no matter what liberals think of him. And then there will be the moment when the rubber meets the road — when there’s some crisis, whether it’s a pandemic-type situation or a financial crash along the lines of 2008 — and everyone will look to a functioning state to take control and the question will be how gutted the state is by that time.
THE GREAT VIBES SHIFT
As much as it pains me to say this, Ezra Klein has proved to be an incisive and thoughtful commentator, and his article on the ‘vibes shift’ does capture a great deal of what’s going on. “Silicon Valley and crypto culture’s embrace of Trump has changed his cultural meaning more than Democrats have recognized,” Klein writes. “In 2016, Trump felt like an emissary of the past; in 2025, he’s being greeted as a harbinger of the future.”
What seems to have happened, in the world of vibes, is that gangster beat out polish, rap beat out jazz, sharp elbows beat out smooth tongues; and, in the related world of what we’re really arguing about, an idea of evolutionary biology, especially as it’s passed around in Silicon Valley and accompanied by reheated classicism, has beaten out corporatized feminism. Klein contrasts the right’s let-it-all-hang-out use of social media as opposed to the Dems’ cautious, curated approach; and he is right to note the “gaudily masculine” feel of the present moment, the presence of Hulk Hogan and Dana White, as well as Rogan, the way that all of Trump’s Silicon Valley acolytes seem suddenly to be testosteroning-up. Writing for Persuasion,
digs up a photo of Covid-era leaders mugging by a mountainside in 2022 and writes that it feels like “a peek into into an era that already feels long past, even before it’s quite over.” Trudeau’s quiet departure in Canada seems to complete the picture. That was the era of thin men working the room. This is the era of broad-shouldered men bloviating.
The most obvious weathervane for the vibes shift is Mark Zuckerberg — his new muscles somehow looking even more fake than his gold chain, none of it quite undoing the effect of the curls. I haven’t heard him speak in a while, and it really is striking how he just hasn’t grown up at all. But his guilelessness — his usual babe in the woods routine — speaks eloquently to the larger tonal shift of the era. The story that he tells to Rogan is familiar by now, but it’s interesting to hear it from him. He really entered into the era of content moderation with good intentions, he claims. “We just faced this massive, massive institutional pressure to basically start censoring content on ideological grounds,” Zuckerberg said of the period after Trump’s first election and chided himself for “assuming that everyone was acting in good faith.” It just got out of control from there, with the fact-check industry honing in ever more on political content, with the moderation guidelines reaching a level of detail that was wholly arbitrary and capricious, and with the Biden administration piling on restrictions in the Covid-era well beyond even what Meta was willing to enforce. “They pushed us super-hard to take down things that were true,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s tough to be at the other end of that.”
I don’t think Zuckerberg will ever set any world records for moral fibre, but, listening to him, it is possible to be sympathetic to his predicament. He bowed to external pressure during the first Trump administration and set up a vast moderation apparatus that turned out to be unsustainable. That apparatus opened the door for government to tighten the screws — which it duly did (“it was like something out of 1984,” Zuckerberg claimed) — and which eventually caused liberals to lose control over social media altogether, with Musk buying Twitter and with Zuckerberg essentially defecting to MAGA. In all of this one shouldn’t underestimate just how not bright Biden is, and the heavy-handed pressure on Meta — “these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse,” Zuckerberg recounted — seems like a direct extension of Biden’s way of doing things, being always sure that he’s right, pushing and pushing until he gets the narrow thing that he wants, and not really thinking through the larger ramifications. In this case, the larger ramification is that the Democratic establishment all but invalidated itself — it went deep into illiberalism and, as excruciating as the next four years are certain to be, it’s hard not to breathe a sigh of relief as we see the Biden people go.
A Wall Street Journal exposé on the Biden administration makes it clear that it was even worse than we thought — an administration that was both rudderless and authoritarian, like something out of The Last Emperor, with Biden holding only highly-scripted meetings with cabinet secretaries, and with an inner circle issuing directives as if ‘in the name of’ Biden without any kind of collaborative process. It was an immense charade, and apparently conducted almost all the way through the Biden presidency. These kinds of things have real consequences — it wasn’t just the loss at the polls, it was the complete hollowing-out of the Democratic brand.
THE OFFICE-WARMING GAZA CEASEFIRE
It really does pay to be an asshole and Trump comes into office with a Gaza ceasefire gift-wrapped for him. The Israelis seem to have been good enough to the outgoing administration to have the ceasefire take effect on Biden’s watch, but the narrative being put out to the press is that it was all Trump.
The Times of Israel quoted “two Arab officials familiar with the negotiations” as saying that Trump’s top aide “did more to sway Netanyahu in a single sit-down than outgoing President Joe Biden did all year.”
Let’s take this with the appropriate grains of salt. Trump’s policy for the Israel-Palestine conflict has been less than clear. He has managed to say to the Israelis both “This has to end, we want it to end” and “Keep doing what you have to do.” Netanyahu just knows that now is a good time for a reset with the US and for Trump to think that he has leverage over Israel — before Israel finds ways of slipping the leash again. The whole thing is best thought of a rousing game of red light / green light. ‘Green light’ means the period when the US is in a lame-duck administration and when its allies can do whatever they want — which, in this case, means to invade Russia and invade Lebanon. ‘Red light’ just means a pause in the action where allies make nice with the new powers-that-be.
The overall sense is that Israel is happy with the new regime, even if the change won’t concretely affect policy all that much. It’s more just trading the mean nanny Jake Sullivan, who insists on having you eat your greens and open humanitarian corridors to Gaza, for dad’s fun friends who let you eat pizza and stay up late and may give you a lecture at one point or another about how real men respect human rights before flipping back to late-night television.
In any case, the ceasefire seems not to be worth treating all that seriously. Hamas is obviously completely undisturbed in its political control of Gaza. And Hamas took the news of the ceasefire as an opportunity to declare victory over Israel. “The Palestinians who took to the streets in Gaza after the announcement of the ceasefire agreement celebrated their survival as a people and as human beings against Israeli aggression,” Middle East Eye wrote. “These scenes indicate that as far as Israel is concerned, it failed.” That, of course, gives the Israeli right all the ammunition it needs to demand the continuing prosecution of the war. “Hamas actually emerged unscathed from this conflict,” The Jerusalem Post wrote. From the US, Commentary chimed in that “there is no such thing as a permanent ceasefire so long as Hamas is in power.” And Netanyahu will, I’m sure, look for the first excuse — and the right dynamic in relations with the Trump administration — to ramp up the conflict again.
Meanwhile, The New York Times has an interesting tell-all piece on the intelligence work that went into Israel’s Lebanon offensive. The takeaway is that Hezbollah, at least in this incarnation, really was a paper tiger and that Israel had all-but-full intelligence penetration of the organization between human intelligence, signals intelligence, and the pager ploy. In retrospect, it makes more sense that — despite the screams of the Israeli right — the Netanyahu administration waited so long before launching its offensive against Hezbollah. Israel had the capacity to dismantle the organization very efficiently, and Netanyahu seems to have attacked with reluctance, only once it became clear that the booby-trapped pagers were about to be exposed. The most suggestive line in The Times piece is the following: “Specifically, the Mossad recruited people in Lebanon to help Hezbollah build secret facilities after the [2006] war.” In the way of these articles, it’s hard to know if that means that Mossad had just paid off contractors who helped to build facilities or if that means that Israel had, essentially, deliberately fostered Hezbollah’s post-war growth knowing that they could take down Hezbollah any time they wanted. In any case, one can’t help but assume that Israel has shot its bolt, that any New York Times-reading Hezbollah operative will know not to make the same mistakes again and that we’re onto a new merry-go-round of intelligence and counter-intelligence with Hezbollah trying to build itself back up all over again.
EL MUNDO DE HANNAH BEECH
The New York Times has had a series of great, long-form pieces recently, from all over the world, and I’d been very impressed by their reporting, until I realized that almost all of them were by a single reporter, Hannah Beech, who’s based in Thailand but ranges across Southeast Asia. I’m not exactly sure that there’s a takeaway from Beech’s reporting except that, if you’re recruited for a scammer concentration camp on the Myanmar/Thai border you probably shouldn’t take the job, no matter how good the benefits initially seem, and if you find yourself a hit man working for Rodrigo Duterte you may be surprised at how the remorse catches up to you no matter how many bodies you coolly chop up and deposit in the jungle. Myanmar is of course one of the leading underreported conflicts in the world, and Beech’s reporting helps to showcase what a basketcase the country has really turned into, with the opium trade rampant and both sides of the civil war using its profits to fund themselves.
Another excellent Times piece — this one not by Hannah Beech — sheds some extra light on what went wrong in Afghanistan and makes lamentable reading.
It wasn’t just that the Afghan army was corrupt and inefficient. It was that the US, particularly in the north, actively worked with militias that were so horrific as to drive the countryside into the arms of the Taliban. “For years, the Americans helped recruit, train and pay for lawless bands of militias that pillaged homes and laid waste to entire communities,” writes Azem Ahmed. “In the end, the militias were the undoing of the government,” one of his sources tells him.
All of this poses the question of what in the world we thought we were doing in Afghanistan. The two people I know who know Afghanistan best — both war correspondents — advanced the following theories. One is that a lot of people look at a map and see that if they can manage to control Afghanistan then they have control over a great deal of Eurasia (all seven of Asia’s armies!). And the other is that it was a very successful operation for marching a great deal of money off Capitol Hill and down K Street. In neither theory did catching Osama bin Laden nor building up civil society in Afghanistan have all that much to do with it — and reporting like Ahmed’s showcases just how quixotic the whole endeavor really was. The US was never really going to be able to directly control Afghanistan. To a greater extent than I realized, the occupation was carried out by proxies — and the proxies made the Taliban look good by comparison.
Interesting your take on Afghanistan is exactly the same as many others on Central and South America for the last sixty years. I would agree with both but with the proviso - Afghanistan was a Pentagon grift that, had it worked, they would have been paid twice. Once for the twenty plus year grift of invasion and control and then again with the opium trade in their full control (if the country succumbed) to fund more and more black ops in other countries. Looking at the Pentagon as having any other agenda than this is just like Trump. An eight year old kid. Dual use baby! US’hey where’s mine - is the grift that keeps on griving.
"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." Politics, by nature, seduces people who love power, limelight, celebrity, and control. Leadership, like everything in US lately, becomes self-interest and image, so there is no true leadership. In walks a "savior"; out walks a multimillion dollar book deal, a country still crying in hope for a messiah, and the press creating our history.