Dealt Out

I read "President Donald J. Trump's Plan to End the Gaza Conflict," which was appended to the NPR story on its announcement. It left me with a question... Who makes sure that the Palestinians get what they're promised? None of the 20 points mentions any sort of agreement that's binding on all parties.

I'm not sure that any rational person would expect the government of Israel to adhere to the spirit of any agreement, even if they were to live up to the letter of one, unless some sort of formal sanctions for noncompliance are involved. There's simply too much bad blood there. And of course President Trump thinks that he's an absolutely trustworthy partner, but given they United States' more or less reflexive support of Israel, I can't see why the Palestinians would take him at face value, either. There's no accountability for either the United States or Israel to ensure a good outcome fore the people of Gaza. And Prime Minister Netanyahu has shown a willingness to openly cross President Trump, and his predecessors, when it's suited his purposes to do so, mainly because strong Evangelical support for Israel is a check on imposing consequences.

Perhaps it's a testament to a person's ability to convince themselves that everyone else's opinion of them is in line with their own self-image. President Trump appears to think that this is such a good deal for the remaining members of Hamas that they'll simply give up the fight, but if that were the case, they'd already be suing for peace. And if the Palestinians were ready, willing and able to aggressively police one another for the sake of Israel, things wouldn't be in the state that they are right now.

A good deal comes across as a win for everyone involved, and it's hard to see how this particular plan gets to that point, given that it's basically a call for an unconditional surrender on the part of Hamas, and sets up Gaza to be controlled by someone who doesn't really appear to have the interests of its residents at heart. It could be that the President understands that, but the threat to allow Israel to "finish the job" of destroying Hamas relies on people thinking that the only reason why that hasn't happened already is the United States forcing moderation on the Netanyahu Administration. I'm not convinced that there's widespread belief in that position.

But there's also a strange paradox built into this plan. Both the United States and Israel claim that Hamas is not a legitimate government in Gaza. But Hamas agreeing to the plan would be a green light for President Trump to effectively take over the government of Gaza with this "Board of Peace." But if Hamas doesn't speak for the people of Gaza, it also can't agree to hand over governance to an international body on their behalf. And it's pretty much a given that as soon as another armed insurgency of some sort starts shooting people, or blowing things up, because they feel that they're getting a raw deal out of all of this, all bets will be off. And they likely will come to see this as a bad deal, because it's highly unlikely that Israel would allow a truly sovereign, reasonable self-sufficient Palestinian territory on it's border. Because a Palestine that could defend itself from Israeli incursion could attempt to launch incursions into Israel. And a strong police force that had the support of the people of Gaza can't also be one that's seen to be a tool of the Israeli security apparatus.

Of course, I'm not a Middle-East researcher, or an expert in crafting international agreements. So things could work out swimmingly. But even given the current situation in Gaza, I can't imagine the groundswell of support needed for this plan to succeed actually materializing. Mainly because this deal isn't being made with, or for, the people who are going to have to pay for it.

Not As I Do

Looking back on today's post now that I've written it, I think that this could have simply said "Partisanship encourages the tendency to deny that the failures of one's preferred party are, in fact, the party's own," and been another entry in The Short Form. I may have gone off on a rant, instead. But, what's done is done, so...

The Week's most recent Saturday Wrap kicks off with its "Controversy of the week; Trump: Demanding the prosecution of his political foes," which offers a quick summation of what various news outlets are saying about it. One of the sites it draws from this week is the conservative National Review.

Trump’s demands of Bondi are an “outrage,” said National Review in an editorial. But “Democrats paved the way here.”

The Week tends to paraphrase things in its wrap-ups, sometimes in ways that obscure the broader meaning, so I went to the National Review's editorial to read it for myself.

President Trump’s weekend social media post pressuring Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute his political enemies is an outrage against the Constitution’s guarantees of due process and equal protection under the law.

Sadly, it is also more of the same. Democrats paved the way here with the lawfare abuses on which Trump is doubling down.

One can make the case that American politics only dislikes Whataboutism until it's a useful tool to be deployed against one's rivals and has little risk of being clearly inaccurate, but there's another tendency from American politics on display here: Claiming that "they started it."

Personally, I'm not convinced of the truth of that claim; accusations of lawfare against Donald Trump necessarily come with the presumption that there is no legitimate reason to think that any of the cases against the Mr. Trump had any genuine legal merit. And the National Review's cheerleading is on weak ground here. The only legal case they actually seem to take aim at is New York v. Trump*, which it describes as "an abusive prosecution with no fraud victims in which the absurdly astronomical damage award was recently voided by an appellate court."

Fraud and theft, however, are not the same thing. The National Review is attempting to make the case that lying about one's assets to receive favorable treatment from a lender, or simply to receive a loan in the first place, doesn't count as fraud, so long as the loan is repaid. But that's not how the law works. Sam Bankman Fried is not in prison because he stole money from people... but because he made them take risks that they were not aware of. Now that his investments are being unwound, the investors (or, more accurately, the current holders of those claims... many people, incorrectly convinced their money was simply gone, sold their claims for less than face value) are looking at anywhere from 20%-40% over and above their original deposits. Why should the Trump Organization get off any easier than a fraudster who actually made money for the victims of the fraud? And besides, in the very ruling that vacates the disgorgement portion of the penalty as excessive, the Court notes:

As to the Attorney General’s motion for summary judgment on the first cause of action, Supreme Court found that Executive Law § 63(12) required that the Attorney General prove only that the [statements of financial condition] were false and misleading, and found that defendants repeatedly or persistently used the SFCs to transact business. Supreme Court found that “the documents here clearly contain fraudulent valuations that defendants used in business, satisfying the Attorney General’s burden.”

And this sort of cherry-picking, siting rulings only to the degree that they are favorable to one's case, is common in American politics. Granted, in this case, the lack agreement between the court's five justices lends itself to such selective interpretations.

While it's true that the appelate court voided the high judgement against the Trump Organization, again, in the ruling it says: "Because none of the three decisions garners a majority, Justices Higgitt and Rosado join the decretal of this decision for the sole purpose of ensuring finality, thereby affording the parties a path for appeal to the Court of Appeals."

So while it seems that the court did find the disgorgement order excessive, it was struck down, rather than being sent back to be recalculated, so that the appeals process could move forward. This has been cast as a victory for the President, but it seems more of an administrative matter to me.

The problem with claims of "lawfare" is that the underlying allegation, that court cases are being brought for political reasons, doesn't have a formal process to find fact. When the National Review's editorial notes...

The tension has been resolved over time by the norm that, while presidents guide the DOJ’s enforcement priorities as to subject matter (e.g., more emphasis on border enforcement, even if that means less on, say, public corruption), the administration of justice in individual cases proceeds without political interference — conducted by theoretically nonpartisan prosecutors, applying the law as written and checked by the independent judiciary.

Trump is grossly disregarding this practice.

...They then proceed to insinuate that Democrats had done the same. Whether my own basic research into things refutes that insinuation is left to the reader, but more to the point, if President Trump is "grossly disregarding" the precedent of "the administration of justice in individual cases proceeds without political interference," why does it matter if someone else didn't?

Here I would note that the National Review avoids claiming that either the Biden Administration or the Governor of New York actively sought to push unwarranted prosecutions of Donald Trump. "Former FBI director James Comey" and "New York State Attorney General Letitia James" are not the chief elected executive officers of any federal or state jurisdiction. They did not pressure anyone to bring cases against Mr. Trump. And even if one believes that they were incorrect in their assessments of Mr. Trump, nothing has come forward to say that they were acting in bad faith.

And this (finally) gets me to my biggest gripe with the National Review's take on things. By claiming that "Democrats paved the way here" the National Review absolves President Trump for what is a clear escalation. "The Democrats" did not do what President Trump is doing. President Biden did not publicly lean on Merrick Garland to bring United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, Waltine Nauta, and Carlos De Oliveira. Likewise, New York v. Trump was not the result of a pressure campaign by Governor Hochul. This is not a case of partisan business as usual. The President is demanding the targeting of people he feels have wronged him out of personal pique, and a sense that since they are bad people (as is everyone who opposes him) they must be guilty of some culpable illegality.

Claiming "they started it" because people like President Biden and Governor Hochul didn't step in to forcibly quash the proceedings is, in effect, to justify the President's open interference in the workings of the Department of Justice on the grounds that Democratic politicians didn't previously openly interfere in the workings of the Federal and New York Departments of Justice.

While it's commendable that the National Review is willing to risk the ire of Republican members of Congress and President Trump's voter base to come out at say that the President's open political interference in the workings of justice is bad, their inability to seek placing ultimate blame elsewhere demonstrates one of the biggest problems with partisanship; the inability to admit that parties, including the parties one supports, have interests, rather than principles. The National Review's conclusion references "the public’s disdain for lawfare." If such a disdain existed, we wouldn't be seeing this. Republicans not liking it when they believe that Democrats have behaved badly, and Democrats not liking it when they believe that Republicans have behaved badly, does not add up to a broader public disdain for bad behavior. Especially when each group of partisans believes its members can do no wrong. It's simply partisanship. Genuine disdain does not engage in "they started it," or "whataboutism." It simply condemns. And as long as the public of the United States is divided against itself, no such simple condemnation will be forthcoming. And it's disingenuous to pretend that it will. 

* More specifically: People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Allen Weisselberg, Jeffrey McConney, The Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, The Trump Organization, Inc., Trump Organization LLC, DJT Holdings LLC, DJT Holdings Managing Member, Trump Endeavor 12 LLC, 401 North Wabash Venture LLC, Trump Old Post Office LLC, 40 Wall Street LLC, Seven Springs LLC 

Fair or Foul

Who will be moderating TikTok now under these new owners? Who, from this board of Trump allies, will be setting the policies? We can expect a significant portion of TikTok’s users will be unconvinced by Trump’s assertion that “everyone’s going to be treated fairly” on the platform.
The TikTok Signing Was Good Theater But Only the First Act

I don't think that the "significant portion of TikTok’s users" are necessarily wrong in their skepticism of President Trump, mainly because I note that the President said "fairly," and not "equally." President Trump comes across as one of those people for whom "fair" means something along the lines of "in accordance with what they deserve," and it's pretty clear that, as a committed egoist and partisan, that what people deserve is judged in accordance with how he feels they treat him and Trumpism.

In this sense, the President isn't being dishonest. Disingenuous, perhaps, but not dishonest. Because I don't think that I'm the only person who understands what President Trump thinks of as "fair." Even if the President isn't being clear about it in the moment.

Given the way that the President has acted up to this point in his second term, one would be foolish to think that all political perspectives are going to given equal time on a TikTok run by people who support the President or want his support in turn. Because the President, and his supporters, have very clear ideas of which political outlooks are legitimate, and which are not. And so those TikTokkers who are left of center, let alone openly Socialist or Communist, are going to find that a Trumpist-run TikTok actively works against them. And to the President's mind, that will be fair, because they're bad people, and bad people don't deserve a platform for their ideas. And with Trump allies controlling the moderation of TikTok, the political Left in the United States will have less of one.

In this sense, it's worth taking the President at his word, if for no other reason than to understand how he sees the world and the role of social media platforms in it. The problem with TikTok has stopped being that ByteDance is beholden to the government of China, and thus cannot be trusted to push back against requests for data about American citizens that China may want to exert leverage against, and has morphed into TikTok having the potential to be a way for the President to broadcast his message to people who have no real interest in signing up for Truth Social and/or have fled X. And while TikTok, under the control of allies of the President, is less likely to make an effective intelligence platform for the Chinese Communist Party, it's more or less guaranteed to be to pressed into service as a bullhorn for the Republican Party. And I suspect that there's an impression that TikTok's audience is more captive than X's, and therefore more likely to stay awhile, and listen to the President's messaging. Whether or not the bet that there won't be an exodus pays off remains to be seen, but I think that a lot of people regard it as fairly safe.

David Frum once noted the following about the workings of justice in China in The Atlantic: “What’s really going on here is something once explained to me (in a different context) by a China-watcher: ‘They say that an official who has done wrong will lose power. But what really happens is that an official who loses power will be accused of doing wrong’.” And this encapsulates the President's idea of "fairness." Now that the Left is out of power in Washington D.C., it is accused of doing wrong. And the Trump allies who are poised to purchase the American branch of TikTok (if it ever happens) understand this. And as long as Donald Trump is allowed to position himself as the final arbiter of fairness in American society, any media outlet he comes to control will reflect that.

1B or not 1B

The numbers tell the story: Indians still account for 70% of H-1B recipients, but only three of the top 10 H-1B employers had ties to India in 2023, down from six in 2016, according to Pew Research.
Trump's $100,000 H-1B visa shock: Why US may lose more than India

This somewhat undersells things. This story, from Al Jazeera, makes the change plainer (it shows head to head numbers from 2014 and 2024). But the BBC does nod to it: "Indian outsourcing giants such as TCS and Infosys have long prepared for this by building local workforces and shifting delivery offshore." And raises a question. If TCS and Infosys have been scaling back their use of H-1B visas to bring workers into the United States, and we're not hearing about their businesses suffering, what was up with all of those workers they were importing? If Tata Consulting and Infosys could start hiring domestic labor once they saw the writing on the wall, what was stopping them previously?

There's an unspoken assumption in the H-1B visa debate, when it comes to supporters of the program, that the skills that the United States was importing simply weren't otherwise available. But what is India providing graduates that the United States is not? Not much other than a willingness to work for lower wages, as far as many Americans are concerned. As far back as 2013, Rutgers University put out a paper questioning the persistent complaints from business leaders about a talent shortage.

According to [the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology's] analysis of the engineering workforce, the nation is currently graduating about 25,000 more engineers every year than find work in that field.

They also noted that in 2011, when Steve Jobs told President Obama that the primary obstacle to employing 700,000 Americans in manufacturing was an inability to find workers, at going labor rates, that many domestic hires would have zeroed out pretty much all of Apple's net profit for the year. And this is what leads to the widespread skepticism about the H-1B visa program (and outsourcing, for that matter) among Americans of many political persuasions... the suspicion that it's just a way to lower labor costs at their direct expense. And so more and more American workers feel that their incomes are being sacrificed in the name of corporate profits, and that credulous politicians (like President Obama) were buying into cynical corporate misinformation. And while some Americans are cheap enough to look the other way when people a few towns over are rendered unemployed, there's a certain self-importance that tends to to awaken when unemployment comes for them, personally.

The idea that the main reason that Indian companies like Cognizant, Tata Consulting Services, Infosys and Wipro led the list of H-1B visa utilization in 2014 (and three of those companies are still in the top ten) is that they were Indian companies, preferring to hire Indian nationals (rather than Americans) to work in the United States, became pretty well entrenched. And the boosters of the guest worker program tend to avoid addressing that, instead turning to the tried-and-mostly-sucessful playbook of claiming that labor is the one commodity that somehow avoids having its price drop with greater availability.

There are, of course, all sorts of predictions that the United States labor market will fall apart without the approximately 100,000 annual entrants that the various H-1B programs allow. But if, as the Rutgers paper suggests, part of the reason that Americans were avoiding STEM fields was that the degrees were expensive and competition from guest workers made the return on that investment uncertain, in a handful of years, the shortfall would be made up.

The problem with the Trumpist way of doing things, though, is that it's not likely to stick. Students who suspect that the next President won't continue the policy are likely to go into other fields, not wanting to face a sudden influx of guest workers showing up just in time for them to graduate. The President's open nativism doesn't help, either, as it taints the entire exercise with a whiff of racism that people who would otherwise support the change want no part of.

Shareholder primacy and profiteering, abetted by a political class who feel they need piles of money to get their messages to a passive public, are starting to drive more and more conflict between the business class, who are seen as the haves, and general public, who view themselves as the have-nots. The ghost of President Reagan's trickle-down theories of economics still haunts Washington D.C. (not to mention many state capitals), and politicians seem to constantly buy into empty promises that corporate welfare will turn into corporate largess for the population at large.

President Trump understands this, and is tapping into it. It's remarkable that he's managed to play a fairly strong hand so poorly.

Last Act

I was coming home from having spent the evening with some friends when I passed this small rally? memorial? for Charlie Kirk. This was out on the edge of the greater Seattle metro area, the "drive until you qualify" zone that high housing costs closer in tend to push people to. As a result, it's something of a convergence zone between the deeply-Blue Seattle area and the fairly Red rural parts of the state.

Most of my social circle, and pretty much all of the people within it that I actually see on a regular (even if infrequent) basis are left-of-center, even the ones who live out in the boonies, and passing this prompted me to wonder how much it matters whether political segregation in the United States is physical or not. I doubt the men in this photograph have been talking with their more Liberal neighbors, given that none of the Liberal people I know in the area have been reporting such conversations.

This is not to say that no such conversations are happening. I still talk, sometimes, with the more Conservative members of my circles. But these are people that I've known, sometimes for a very long time. They aren't the result of outreach "across the aisle," as it were.

The idea that Charlie Kirk was in the business of dialog and debate has become something of a given for many people, in the days after his death. But one of his best-known tactics, that of making assertions about some topic (or some people) and then inviting people to "prove him wrong" wasn't a style of debating; it was simply showmanship. No random person on the street (especially not a random college student) was going to have the very specific information needed to force a concession from Mr. Kirk or his audience that, say, Justices Kagan, Sotomayor or Jackson never benefited from any formal or informal "affirmative action" initiatives; if for no other reason than such programs aren't about individuals. The "Little Rock Nine," and other situations where schools were forced to make room for specific, named individuals, and it was clear that they wouldn't have been admitted otherwise, is not the norm.

There's nothing wrong with showmanship and advocacy, or even blending the two. A lot of people who have driven significant social change in the United States have had some level of a showman's instincts. After all, there are a fair number of preachers on the list, and the line between a good preacher and a good showman has always been thin.

But putting on a good show is not the same as really communicating with other people in a way that advances the two-way movement of ideas an understanding.