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Jeff Maurer opines: I Don't Think Trump Will Be Stopped By Repeating "Trump Bad" Over and Over.
In my twice-weekly sweep of BlueSky — which I do to check in on the diet of the brain worm that’s devouring the American left — a narrative for this week emerged: The President is completely off the rails, and Democrats need to devote every fiber of their being to sounding the alarm.
I completely agree with the first part of that story. I don’t know what to write about Trump anymore — how many different ways can I say “This is a dumb and bad man doing dumb and bad things”? Did you see Trump’s message to the Norwegian Prime Minister, which history might ultimately call The Butthurt Dispatch? In a functioning democracy, something that unhinged would cause the president to be removed; in a banana republic, Trump’s generals would be drawing straws to see who gets to throw him out of the helicopter. This is a slow-motion disaster, and bad things are already happening, starting with the fact that we all have to admit that the world’s most annoying Resistance Libs were basically right.
Republicans live in fear that Democrats might actually take Jeff's advice.
But (thank goodness) Trump seems to have backed off his most dangerous positions, thanks to (I guess) Tuesday's stock market freak-out. That seems to have been a wakeup call.
But let me call on Daniel Hannan one more time for his grenade of truth: Greenland as a stress test for MAGA loyalty. Daniel's a Brit, an architect of Brexit, so attention must be paid:
There is no point in sugarcoating this. The chief executive is unfit for office. His erratic behavior, his inability to distinguish between his public role and his private interests, his determination to subordinate U.S. foreign policy to his personal wants: These things should bar him.
Congress could put a stop to all this nonsense tomorrow. It could reassert its prerogatives over trade policy and cancel the tariffs. It could begin impeachment proceedings on the grounds that the president is no longer compos mentis. But, filled with cowards and flatterers, it hangs back. And so the checks and balances that the founders put in precisely to contain two-bit Caesarists fail for lack of will.
"A republic—if you can keep it." Can you, cousins?
Well, we'll see. I'm also indebted to Daniel for giving a name to a phenomenon I've always been curious about:
Will anything turn MAGA against him? I wondered whether, by threatening to annex Greenland, he had found the one issue where his base would not follow him. He was elected as the candidate who would put an end to foreign adventurism, and voters opposed taking Greenland by 71 percent to 4 percent—4 percent being, coincidentally, the "lizardman's constant," the estimated proportion of people in any poll who will give insincere or demented replies. Perhaps that is why, as I write, he seems to be backing down from the demand.
I think "Lizardman's Constant" can be actually higher than 4%, depending on how utterly annoying the poll, or pollsters, are. For example, UNH's Carsey Institute might plausibly have been very annoying in compiling their 2022 study Conspiracy vs. Science: A Survey of U.S. Public Beliefs. That study got 10% of respondents to agree with the assertion that "The Earth is flat, not round" and 9% saying "Unsure". NASA faked the moon landings? 12% agree, 17% unsure.
They didn't ask about the lizard men.
Also of note:
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Figuring out new ways to lose my vote. Since the local Libertarians have decided to go Full Asshole, I'm a pretty reliable GOP voter nowadays. (But not Trump.) Veronique de Rugy has some bad news for that strategy: 'RINOs,' Meet the 'Depublicans'
For some years now, conservatives who believe in free markets and limited government have been labeled RINOs — "Republicans in name only" — as GOP liberals or moderates have historically been known. The MAGA movement flings this term as an insult and a signal that respecting the realities of supply and demand instead of endorsing price controls is a character flaw.
But after watching the last few weeks unfold, it's hard not to ask this: If believing in markets makes you a RINO, what exactly do we call Republicans who now openly embrace ideas lifted from the playbooks of Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)?
How about "Depublicans"?
Not very catchy, but accurate. Vero rattles off the too-numerous warning signs: "They have adopted many of their counterparts' instincts, rhetoric and policy tools, including industrial policy, trade protectionism, corporate scapegoating, price controls, ownership restrictions and discretionary federal intervention."
And not only that, but…
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Were you one of the suckers who sacrificed to pay off your student debt? The WSJ editorialists note a move that might have been lost in all the Greenland/Venezuela/ICE kerfuffle: Trump Reverses Himself on Student Debt. (WSJ gifted link)
Elizabeth Warren must be laughing as President Trump embraces so many of her policies, one after another. In recent weeks he has pushed for a cap on credit card interest rates and a ban on institutional investors buying homes, among other big government proposals. The latest move, announced last Friday, is a pause on the collection of defaulted student debt, Joe Biden-style.
The Administration last spring made a point of declaring that there would be consequences for not repaying student debt. “American taxpayers will no longer be forced to serve as collateral for irresponsible student loan policies,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said. So much for that. The Trump team is now giving borrowers another reprieve.
So now it appears that American taxpayers will be forced to serve as collateral for irresponsible student loan policies. Cute wrestling move there, Linda.
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I find it hard to believe, but… Jim Geraghty noticed that Democrats finally abandon Bill Clinton. (archive.today link)
The House Oversight Committee voted Wednesday to hold former president Bill Clinton in contempt of Congress. That’s not surprising, but what is surprising is that nine Democrats sided with the Republicans. Another two profiles in Democratic courage, Reps. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona and Dave Min of California, voted “present” — maybe it was just their way of saying it depends on what your definition of contempt is.
Like Jim, I'm old enough to remember when Democrats circled the wagons around Bill for merely "lying … about sex". Completely understandable, and (not coincidentally) excusable. I guess that attitude has expired.
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And finally, some good news. At the Free Press, Faye Flam says Relax, Microplastics Aren’t Killing You.
Plastic is everywhere. We all know that. And we’ve all heard about the danger that plastic can pose to our health when specks of it from, say, soda bottles or take-out food containers wind up ingested.
For instance, there was a highly publicized study of cadaver brains in February 2025, using a new technique for finding plastic particles in the body, that concluded that in the most extreme cases, plastic shards made up 0.48 percent of the brain—enough to make a plastic spoon. Other studies, using the same technique, came to the same conclusion, leading to lots of shocking headlines and scary quotes from scientists. Matthew Campen, co-author of the plastic spoon study, even implied that plastic lodged in the brain might cause dementia.
Fast-forward to November, when another group of researchers published commentary in the journal Nature showing that the technique used to find all this plastic couldn’t distinguish the stuff from ordinary fat molecules. The Guardian, which had run some of the most alarmist headlines (“Microscopic Plastics Could Raise Risk of Stroke and Heart Attack, Study Says”), suddenly reversed course. Last week, it published a lengthy article slamming the research, with critics calling the original 2025 brain study a “joke.”
For me, it's one of those "at my age" things: Specifically, at my age, there are so many things that threaten to kill me, it's pretty unlikely that any one of them will be the root cause. So, plastic away!
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