Stupid Coup Month Three: Two Plus Two Is Still Four

Imagine you were on a ship, and reports kept coming to you that the new captain and his crew had done a series of strange things--jettisoned the anchor, blew some holes in the hull, shredded the sails, thrown some of the old crew overboard. But also imagine that the person delivering these reports brought each of them to you as though it was an isolated incident, curious, maybe distressing, but your reporter didn't want to add them all up to tell you that crazy malicious people are trying to sink the ship and everything on it. 

Imagine you were dealing with a person who would report that there was two and there was also this other two but didn't want to add them up to get to four, because getting all the way to four felt like making a statement and they didn't want to make a statement, take a stand, alarm anybody, be accused of making an accusation. Or they couldn't add it up in their own head, because of poor math skills or a hesitation to plunge into big controversial numbers like four. 

That's what it feels like looking at the news failing to say that we are under attack from within and the impact will be to harm a great many of us and maybe collapse the federal government, which has already been greatly weakened and destabilized (and yes, there have been good editorials and podcasts and things, but the overall tone of reports is anti-addition, it's pattern avoidance, it's conclusion-dodging). They did get riled up about the tariff rollercoaster whiplashapalooza, which was threatening to crash the global economy, led to trillions in losses, and pretty much did in the US's last vestiges of being a trustworthy stabilizing nation in the eyes of the global financial world, which is going to come back and bite us in all sorts of ways, from rodent nips to tiger shreds. 

There's also a way of taking the administration known for its lying and unreliability and stupidity at face value, to act as if all these royal proclamations--aka executive orders--are really about what they say they're about, which is a huge disservice to the public and the truth. Every news story should at least find an expert to say something more true than the administration does about its intents, actions, and impacts. And reaching for some theory that there's a logical agenda behind overtly stupid actions--like those tariffs levied according to stupid math and malice and unshakeable mistakes lodged in Trump's fossilized brain--isn't journalism; it's excuse-making. 

On Friday, National Public Radio published a piece about therapists at the Veterans' Administration who are not just fearful they can't protect their patients' privacy anymore because they've been ordered to "return to the office" that many of  them never worked in in the first place. They've also been given a script to read to those patients from shared offices: "While I will do my utmost to maintain your privacy, I cannot guarantee complete confidentiality." The report has the formal qualities of good journalism, but it mentions in passing that the Trump Administration intends to fire more than 80,000 VA employees, and it does not mention the possibility that the VA will simply not function at all with this and other forms of meddling by DOGE and other incompetent and bad-faith Trumpists, and that is the apparent goal. 

It's a report that looks at a small piece of the picture--patient confidentiality--while ignoring the big piece that is the rampage of destruction. Yes, thanks for telling us the plastic thing over there is melting, and that metal thing is very hot, but please say it's because the whole house is on fire. Nothing against NPR, which has been pretty good in this crisis. But the devil is the details without the larger picture. That way lies incoherence, and we desperately need people to understand so they can act. 

You probably know all this which is probably why you--and me, and nearly everyone we know--has an urge to run out screaming in the street. The truth is not just evident, it's screamingly obvious and extremely alarming. They're trying to sink the boat, they're trying to sink the lives of the huge majority of us--anyone who's immigrant, who's reliant on social security, who works for the federal government, who relies on government services to see that the planes we're on don't crash or the food we eat isn't contaminated (fecal matter in butter was a recent story, and you definitely want a sub-department trying to prevent that and they're definitely sabotaging that). 

Everyone knows. But the Democrats in Congress, with notable exceptions, and the mainstream press, with more exceptions, are just plodding through piece by piece of this insanely destructive rampage. Imagine journalism that reported on each piece and move on the chess board separately or treated each soldier in the invading army as an individual maybe doing something mysterious or quirky. That's the maddening disconnnect between our reality and its representation. 

There's a famous part of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in which his protagonist, Winston Smith, is tortured and broken until he agrees that four fingers held up are five, that reality is whatever his torturer from the administration wants him to say and think. There's a real basis for this example--the early Soviet Union was full of five-year plans to industrialize the country, and the government put out posters stating 2 + 2 = 5 as an exhortation to accelerate.  

Orwell wrote about that in his novel: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." It's a really important pair of sentences about totalitarianism worth keeping in mind right now, a "do not obey in advance" for thinking itself. If you rely on your own senses and own judgment and memory, you are an independent thinker, and a threat to the state. Orwell's protagonist contemplates all this and writes in his diary:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. 

That's a really important axiom, but Orwell and his character thought about it mostly in terms of people who were coerced into saying or brainwashed into believing it made five. You'd have to go elsewhere in his writing, to his diatribe about euphemisms and avoidance in "Politics and the English Language," to see him describe people who feel that saying it makes four a bridge too far and prefer to stick with two over here and another two over there, and no risky addition, which would add up to taking a stand. Telling the truth might seem partisan if you're saying your own government is a criminal syndicate, but it's your job to say it. The mainstream media are free to do it, technically. But they hew to the old norms of news in which news is what happened yesterday and tracing the pattern and adding up the pieces is editorializing. Unfreedom can be internalized habits and blind spots, not just external coercion.

I think the astonishing success of Heather Cox Richardson's "Letters from an American" is in part because she does advanced math for us, by which I mean she adds up the numbers, brings context, situates what just happened in the larger context of the parties, the year, the decade, sometimes the deep past, including the history of this country since its founding. People are hungry for context. And we're hungry for truth during this pandemic of lies. This is part of why small media--podcasts, newsletters like Heather's--are thriving and doing a superb job while mainstream media is declining. 

Context is meaning, and often it's truth, and in this crisis it's often the context demonstrating that something is a lie. When you repeat something that's not true you become complicit in the lie. That's what any and every media outlet that amplifies anything Trump says without context is doing, because a high percentage of what he says is not true. A lot of his executive orders are lies in that they claim powers that are not granted to presidents and some of them claim powers granted only to God or if you prefer biology, when it comes to defining gender. Many of them are overreach to seize powers not granted to presidents under the law, and the fact that so much of what the Trump teams are now doing is illegal is also left out of many stories (people go to court to get affirmation that orders are illegal, but treating those actions as legal helps legitimize and empower them). And not nearly enough is being said about the open bribery, graft, and profiteering going on. 

On April 8th Trump issued an executive order titled "Revitalizing America's Beautiful Clean Coal Industry," packing three or four lies into six words. It's affirmative action for coal because coal is somehow tied to masculinity, like red meat, in the minds of the right, and both those things being bad for the climate is not a coincidence, because caring about the earth is coded feminine on the right. Coal will not be revitalized because it's now just the worst way to make electricity; it's hideous in the damage it does to land, to miners, to anyone who happens to be inhaling the heavy metals and other contaminants that spread when you burn the stuff; and it's about as clean as pork chops are kosher.

Solar is cheaper and better in absolutely every way, and the renewables revolution can be delayed and sabotaged, but it's inevitable in the long run. Trump did some of his coal promotion stuff with men who were supposed to be coal miners standing around; some of them were later discovered to be management types in hard-hat drag, and the pretense that this administration cares about coal miners while it's cutting the Center for Disease Control specialists that deal with the hideous diseases miners suffer should not be given the time of day. 

Coal is one of Trump's fixed ideas, like his hatred of wind power (which he's been attacking since his first term) or his longterm obsession about shower pressure that led to a completely ridiculous and utterly petty executive order last week in the midst of the tariff crisis. That he's using the office to carry out an inane hotelier's complaint (while also boasting about his "beautiful hair") is part of the degradation of the office and this nation.

What's also alarmingly hard to find in the news is coverage stating baldly enough that two plus two equals looming catastrophe--what will happen if and when tens of millions of people lose their Social Security coverage or their healthcare via Medicare or Medicaid? What happens when DOGE just erases a huge amount of the data the Federal government has produced and when DOGE, an unaccountable entity run by a maniac has all our private information? What happens to American universities now that they're under attack in myriad ways, and to the research done at those universities? What happens to the world now that the global economic and security order has been destabilized?

What will happen to the American economy now that they're trying to drive out immigrants (who do a lot of the essential work in this country) and making the USA so unpalatable and alarming that they're also wrecking the international tourist industry, which is a huge source of income for a whole lot of places? This economy is propped up by immigrant labor, and further damage to many industries and communities is likely to result from the direct attacks on immigrants and the intended effect of terrorizing most or all of them and everyone who loves an immigrant. But even that immigrants are a net positive for the economy is a truth hard to come by (though this Washington Post story notes it), let alone coverage of what happens to agriculture and other crucial industries if large numbers of essential workers are deported.  

Maybe it's true, as Jamelle Bouie wrote, that Trump's second term is his revenge tour; maybe it's true that a bunch of the Silicon Valley guys onboard want to destroy this nation in pursuit of their grim authoritarian network-state dreams; but it's certainly true that they are wrecking this country, and in so doing are wrecking quite a bit of the world.

Though of course no one should underestimate the stupid. The fact that Trump has persistently failed to grasp what tariffs are and that he gave the financial world whiplash by capriciously imposing and reversing them is at its essence about his profound stupidity. The fact that he doesn't understand trade deficits is another piece of the Big Stupid. The ship is being sunk in part because the captain is an idiot as well as a sociopath. Whether we can wrest control of it from him or build enough lifeboats remains to be seen--or done. But one of my working premises is that  diagnosis is the first step in treatment, and describing the destructiveness and the stupidity and the danger is every journalist's job right now. And shouting that two and two make four.