Belated Memorial Day

Philipse Manor War Memorial, Yonkers, New York, via.

David Brooks writes about the thing that made him angriest last week, something he says William F. Buckley, Jr. advised him to do when he first entered into punditry, but doesn't often get the chance, because it's so rare that anything makes him angry at all, but apparently he did this time ("The Trump World Idea That's Pushed Me Over the Edge"):

Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.”

This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy. He’s a central figure in the national conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Trump acolytes cut their teeth.

I think we can assume "communing with my phone" means "googling desperately, having forgotten for the past three days that Memorial Day existed, for something I could hang a belated Memorial Day column on". I'm not sure what "the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism" is (postliberalism with accordions and a bubble machine metonymically representing Champagne?), but "postliberalism" is Brooks's current term for the bothsides thing that gets him sort of quietly irritated just now, not angry of course, the thing that JD Vance and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez do where they object to "neoliberalism", which seems in his view to be when they are pushing "populism", which seems to me (a non-bothsiderist) to refer to two quite different responses to income and wealth inequality, depending on whether you have ideas for doing something about that (as Ocasio-Cortez does) or not (like Vance) and thus different sides, but maybe that's just me.

Birthright Citizenship Redux

Wong Kim Ark, from a 1904 US immigration document, via Wikimedia Commons. 

Revised and expanded from the post of January 26, with what I think is a somewhat new argument up in front, inspired immediately by an irritating Bluesky post. 

Maybe the birthright citizenship order will ultimately be held unconstitutional, but I find it highly embarrassing for a judge to say something so unequivocally at a preliminary stage without the slightest acknowledgement that there is an entire literature that disagrees. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/2R4OE9lT8a

— Ilan Wurman (@ilan_wurman) January 23, 2025

The "entire literature" (which seems to consist of a single book by Peter Shuck and Rogers Smith, Citizenship without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity, Yale University Press, 1985, and its brief recap in the American Enterprise Institute's magazine National Affairs, summer 2018, presumably published in the hope of attracting attention from President Trump and his factotum Stephen Miller), is fatally flawed by its failure to recognize the significance of an obvious fact: there were no "illegal aliens" in the United States at the time the 14th Amendment passed Congress in 1866 and was ratified two years later, only millions of immigrants who might or might not choose to be naturalized (white immigrants, that is, under the terms of the Naturalization Acts of 1798 and 1802).

And when those immigrants had children, as they often did, no reason to question their citizenship or "naturalize" them; as affirmed in an 1844 New York state case, Lynch v. Clarke, in which a state judge held that a woman born in New York City, of alien parents temporarily sojourning there, was a U.S. citizen. They were "natural" already; for the children of immigrants, birthright citizenship was the universal norm (local governments could order the deportation of obnoxious individual immigrants, but there wasn't a national policy). Miller's scenario is completely irrelevant to the realities of the time when the 14th Amendment was written.

The hard cases before 1866-68 were not immigrants, but people whose parents were born within the borders of the US: citizens of the Indigenous nations, and the freed descendants of enslaved Africans.

To the President's Health

At Top Cottage, Hyde Park in 1941, with Fala and Ruthie Bie, granddaughter of one of the gardeners. Via.

In March 1944, not long after his 62nd birthday, President Franklin Roosevelt, who was taking too long to recover from a bout of flu the previous December, went to Bethesda Hospital for a battery of tests meant to find out why, and diagnosed with a pile of serious heart problems: hypertension, atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease, and congestive heart failure. The doctors' recommendations focused on rest—no business guests at lunch, and two hours' rest after lunch—not easy, as he was pretty busy prosecuting World War II and running for his fourth presidential term. They also prescribed some drugs, and thought he should cut down smoking, and try to lose some weight, which last turned out awkward: Roosevelt was anxious to hide his health problems from the public, as he always had been, going back to the paralysis he'd been concealing since contracting polio at Campobello in 1921, and the successful dieting ironically left him looking sick to the public, not his robust, jaunty, grinning self but gaunt and haggard, sparking exactly the rumors he was most anxious to avoid. 

That was a kind of bad thing, as everybody understands nowadays, in the wake of Eisenhower's heart attacks, Kennedy's Addison's disease, Nixon's stress-related alcoholism, Reagan's incipient Alzheimer's, Trump's obesity, severe personality disorder, and possible psychoactive drug use (sniff, sniff!), and whatever was going on with President Joe Biden during the presidential campaign last year on June 27, during the presidential debate with Trump, when he spoke in an almost inaudibly hoarse whisper, and altogether lost the thread of what he was saying at at least one point early in the show. Just an hour or two later he seemed fine, as loud and as on message as ever, but the damage (thanks in part to a long campaign on the part of The New York Times and other organs, not to claim that Biden was suffering age-related infirmities but that the public thought he might be, based not on observation of the president but on a bunch of rather pushy Times-Siena public opinion polls) was done.

Adventures in the Trump Brain

Over at Techdirt, the genial Mike Masnick has come up with a brilliant explanation of what is happening when Trump does an interview like the one with Time a couple of weeks ago; it's something remarkably similar to the way a chatbot, especially the less successful-looking early models like ChatGPT itself,  handles a conversational series of prompts, with its "response generator":

1. A journalist asks a specific question about policy or events
2. Trump, clearly unfamiliar with the actual details, activates his response generator
3. Out comes a stream of confident-sounding words that maintain just enough semantic connection to the question to seem like an answer
4. The response optimizes for what Trump thinks his audience wants to hear, rather than for accuracy or truth....

Brilliant, if maybe not exactly right. Consider Masnick's first example:

You were harshly critical of what you called the weaponization of the Justice System under Biden. You recently signed memos—

Well, sure, but you wouldn’t be—if this were Biden, well, first of all, he wouldn’t do an interview because he was grossly incompetent.

We spoke to him last year, Mr. President.

Huh?

We spoke to him a year ago.

How did he do?

You can read the interview yourself.

Not too good. I did read the interview. He didn’t do well. He didn’t do well at all. He didn’t do well at anything. And he cut that interview off to being a matter of minutes, and you weren’t asking him questions like you’re asking me.

(In case you’re wondering, you can see the Biden interview here and he did not cut if off after a matter of minutes).

Because he's not doing what the automaton does, saying "what he thinks his audience wants to hear" (or, more accurately, trying to assemble the string that represents the most probable response to the prompt). Unlike the automaton, he is thinking, but in this passage from late in the interview what he's thinking about is how not to respond to the prompt, an uncomfortable series of questions on the abuse of foreign students' free speech rights over the Gaza issue, which he's not enjoying and doesn't know anything about (other than the less than accurate report that there was "tremendous antisemitism at every one of those rallies"), and he leaps at the mention of Biden's name as an opportunity to change the subject to something more comfortable, the subject of how superior he is to Biden, who would never have had the courage to submit to an interview with Time, except of course it immediately turns out he did.

So he instantly switches to pretending not only that he already knew that, though he obviously didn't, but even more ridiculously that he'd actually read the transcript, bringing in the words from the prompt.

That's the part that really looks like AI, where he lies, or hallucinates, "I did read the interview", though he's just told us he's hearing about the interview for the first time. AI is unable to maintain discourse coherence over a certain distance, as in this beautiful example I saw yesterday:

I asked Google how much $1M in gold would weigh. Simple math problem. It gave the wrong answer, then the correct answer, then wrong answer again. Somehow they have broken the math ability of a mathematical machine. It’s impressive, actually.

[image or embed]

— Ross in Detroit (@rossindetroit.bsky.social) May 5, 2025 at 7:23 PM

Gemini's conversational rules for answering a prompt like that are evidently to state the conclusion, then show its work, then repeat the conclusion: but it doesn't "know" the conclusion before it's done the rather complicated work required for this question, and "hallucinates" an answer instead. Then, after doing the work, it doesn't "know" that it has contradicted the prefabricated conclusion. 

In a similar way, Trump has a set of prefabricated conclusions about Biden that he has been deploying for well over a year, that he's afraid of interviews and that everything he does is a failure, and when the prompts force him to switch them up, he simply does so, without showing any awareness that he's contradicting himself, and adding a kind of "hallucination" for verisimilitude, in the bit about the interview having been cut short (possibly inspired by an incident of September 2023, when a very jet-lagged Biden was giving a speech in Hanoi and his staff pulled him offstage before he was finished).

That's exactly how he maintains that tariffs will both protect the return of manufacturing industries to the US (because people will buy American dolls and pencils rather than pay the tax) and simultaneously raise hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue (because people will gladly pay the tax). The two concepts aren't connected for him, so they never collide, unless some mean interviewer forces the issue, like Time here telling him that the magazine did interview Biden, or Terry Moran on Kilmar Ábrego García:

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Don't do that -- M-S-1-3 -- It says M-S-one-three.

TERRY MORAN: I -- that was Photoshop. So let me just--

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: That was Photoshop? Terry, you can't do that -- he had --

-- he-- hey, they're givin' you the big break of a lifetime. You know, you're doin' the interview. I picked you because -- frankly I never heard of you, but that's okay --

TERRY MORAN: This -- I knew this would come --

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But I picked you -- Terry -- but you're not being very nice. He had MS-13 tattooed --

TERRY MORAN: Alright. Alright. We'll agree to disagree. I want to move on --

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry.

Where Trump responds to being contradicted like a Mafia don.

And you don't necessarily need the AI concept to understand it. There's a lovely formulation by David Roth at Defector:

It is one of the defining Trump things that any belief that makes it into his mind will bump around in there forever; his understanding of the world is the sum of those things, thousands of permanent and perpetual irritants cut free from any context or facticity, smashing into each other and echoing forever inside of his luxuriously appointed skull. They drop bowling balls on the cars; there is no such thing as gold paint; they looked at his hand and the proof was right there. None of this, of course, is new. None of the beliefs are new, really, and nothing that Trump will do between this moment and his last one on earth will be new, or surprising in the least. It's just a matter of which echoes are ringing most loudly at that moment.

Just floating around his brain, from the bowling balls (probably not originating in a bizarre misinterpretation of the Nissan ad at top—the most thorough investigation I've seen is by Philip Bump, from 2018) to Kilmar Ábrego's knuckle tattoos, and all the rest.

 

What Were You Expecting?

 

Image by Nicholas Konrad for The New Yorker, from David Rohde's coverage of the Mar-a-Lago documents case, August 2022.

The defense secretary makes more use of that inadequately secured communications platform than he originally said, like to keep his missus and his brother apprised of his military activities, thus endangering national security even more than when he did this with members of the Principals Committee, plus the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic (who wasn't supposed to be there but seems to be the only person involved who had a clue on how to behave in a situation where sensitive information is being discussed). Hegseth seems extremely reliant on the missus and the brother, dragging the one of them to meetings for which she hasn't got an appropriate, or indeed any, security clearance, and appointing the other to a Pentagon sinecure, and I can't help thinking their job is to carry the hip flasks, but who knows. 

The punditry explodes with excitement: surely the president will have to fire him now, but that's not what happens when the president is informed:

Mr. Hegseth called the president around 8 p.m., said the person, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private conversation. The president told Mr. Hegseth that disgruntled “leakers” were to blame for the report and made clear that he had Mr. Hegseth’s back. The president also said he had plenty of experience dealing with leakers.

As far as Trump is concerned, the problem isn't that Hegseth is a threat to national security, it's that disgruntled leakers let everybody know about it. That's what those leakers do, probably because of whatever it was that disgruntled them. Once disgruntled, twice shy.

Indeed it might be the still gruntled ones who are the greater problem, like the White House anonymi who persuaded NPR to report that Trump was actively seeking a new defense secretary. At least the disgruntled ones are likely to be telling us the truth—that more or less everything is out of control.

Keeping Criminals Out

That line of Trump's, when I heard it on the radio—"Isn't it wonderful that we're keeping criminals out of our country?"—struck me as begging a couple of important and opposed questions: asking us to assume, on the one hand, that what he's been doing can be described that way, and on the other that it's an unambiguously good idea.

I've given a lot more attention to the first, especially starting in the 2024 campaign, because the shamelessness of the lying, on the part of Trump and Bannon and Stephen Miller, got me so mad, and the respectable people were hardly discussing it: that when the Trumpies screamed about the millions of criminal aliens they were planning to deport, the murderers and rapists and human traffickers and opiate dealers, the escapees from prisons and "lunatic asylums" Trump had created out of his own linguistic confusion, they weren't talking about anything real.

Waiting For Octopus City

 

Octopus City, rendering of a plan by Peter Thiel's Seasteading Institute, via Wired, May 2015, when the techie billionaires were giving up on their idea. Then Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy.

Found myself unexpectedly attracted by a conspiracy theory around the tariff mishegas, from a Substacker, Daniel Pinchbeck, with an excitingly transgressive headline: Paul Krugman is wrong.

Not that I was planning to go that far myself! I think Krugman's judgment of the White House at the moment is fundamentally right: