How Calm Becomes a Political Act

 

I’ve written a lot about politics in this space — usually zoomed in close, responding to the outrage du jour rather than stepping back for the big picture. I’ve long argued that political cartoonists have a rare gift for distilling truth into a single, clarifying image, such as this one by Barry Blitt of The New Yorker that captures the feeling of Thanksgiving this year. It’s ironic, then, that the most incisive political analysis I’ve come across recently comes from a former cartoonist turned writer: Tim Kreider’s new Substack essay, Sang Froid: The Case for Keeping One's Cool.

What sets it apart is not simply the macro-argument, what Trumpism is—how we’ve arrived here, and how democracies slide into authoritarianism—but its structure. Kreider frames the entire piece around a real event from his girlfriend’s youth: a terrifying encounter with a man she later in life recognized as the serial killer Israel Keyes. At seventeen, alone on a mountain trail, she survived by doing the counterintuitive thing: she stayed calm, engaged him directly, made eye contact, and refused to accept the victim role he was trying to impose. Her composure didn’t guarantee her safety, but it allowed her to navigate a situation in which panic would likely have been fatal.

 

That story becomes Kreider’s central analogy for our lethal national moment — when the danger is obvious to anyone who isn’t in denial, yet the rituals of normalcy compel us to behave as if things are merely “unprecedented” or “norm-breaking” rather than openly authoritarian.

 

This, I think, is the problem with the newly conciliatory Bill Maher, who now preaches a sort of kumbaya politics that feels more like a policy for “getting along” than one of resistance. For me, January 6 and everything that followed makes that approach unworkable.

Kreider would likely argue that this is also the problem with much of the traditional media: the persistent fantasy that “the system will hold” if only both sides show enough respect and tolerance. Where Kreider and Maher might actually agree is in their fear that the moment we drop the pretense of dialogue altogether, things could tip from a cold civil conflict into a hot one.

 

With that in mind, Kreider urges a different kind of resistance: to continue exhausting every legal and democratic tool available — courts, protests, boycotts, the defense of immigrants, insistence on due process, and protection of fair elections. The goal is not moral purity but tactical advantage: foul the authoritarian machinery from within the confines of legitimacy, buying time until circumstances shift. And when they do, the very Republicans who have bent the knee to Trump may ultimately turn on him the instant he becomes a liability.

 

In the end, what Kreider offers is a reminder that composure is a strategy that neither underestimates the danger nor romanticizes resistance. We only have to keep the machinery of democracy running long enough for the forces opposing it to exhaust themselves or turn on one another. And as his girlfriend’s story makes clear, survival sometimes depends less on bold, dramatic gestures than on the simple refusal to play the role the aggressor has written for you.

 

Full circle now, with Thanksgiving in mind. Fifteen years ago I marked the holiday with a photograph of my younger family and a warning about “increased polarization in this country.” That was during the Tea Party’s rise — a tremor we now recognize as the prelude to all that followed. So I’ll end as I did then, with something simple and still true:

 

To friends and family, near and far, Happy Thanksgiving — my favorite holiday, and a uniquely American one.

The Glide Path of Inequality

 

It was fifteen years ago that I wrote one of my first pieces on economic inequality in this country, and since then that inequality has soared on an exponential basis.

 

It is no longer the millionaire next door; it’s the billionaire—and now, with Elon Musk’s potential pay package, the trillionaire next door. That’s larger than most countries’ gross national product. That earlier piece was about a book I published years ago, Herbert Inhaber’s and Sidney Carroll’s How Rich Is Too Rich, and although its focus was on the inheritance tax (or lack of it), its ingenious first chapter vividly depicts the parabolic rise of wealth in our population in the form of a parade—each marcher’s size proportional to their income. Imagine what that parade would look like today.

 

Back then I pointed to the policies of the Tea Party. How quaint that Party now seems next to the present Republican Party of plutocrats, whose leader even held an extravagant Halloween Great Gatsby celebration at Moolah-Lago—as millions of Americans lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. It’s hard to accept that as “coincidence.” It is abject cruelty. Meanwhile, ICE roams the nation, snatching people of color it thinks may be illegal immigrants—under the guise that all such people are violent criminals, their families be damned. This is heartbreakingly captured by Mike Luckovich in a recent political cartoon in the Atlanta Constitution.

 

This especially hit home last Thursday. I was playing tennis, still recovering from my injury, and as I looked up to serve, I stopped: overhead was a low-flying C-17 Globemaster, a hulking military transport. Were we being invaded? Well, yes—in a sense. The tennis courts happen to sit on that particular plane’s low glide path into Palm Beach International Airport. And since it was Thursday morning, I knew what it meant: another weekend visit by our President, come to play golf and consort with the rich and famous and—with his steady stream of pardons for those who helped make J6 a reality or enriched themselves with crypto duplicity—the infamous as well. That transport carries “the Beast”—his armored car—as well as other security vehicles, devices, and, who knows, his favorite golf clubs.

 

We were once a country of compassion. Our tax laws have always been open to debate, but never before have they been so one-sided—or the government run so shamelessly as a personal plaything. It makes you wonder who will prevail at Sotheby’s impending auction of “America” AKA the Golden Toilet Bowl (Maurizio Cattelan, “America” --ca. 2016) reportedly being sold by billionaire Steve Cohen (also NY Mets owner). Perhaps it will be won by an absentee bid, destined for the Classified Documents bathroom. 

 

 

The Emperor Remodels

 As usual, if you want the truth in one picture, turn to our political cartoonists. I’ve sandwiched this entry between cartoons by John Darkow and Mike Luckovich. Both depict the wanton violation of “The People’s House”—tearing down the East Wing to install a grand faux-gold ballroom to satisfy the faux golden boy president. I hear Nero fiddling away. Everything is now in flaming chaos.

 

One wonders when the people who voted for him will finally feel repulsed and deceived. Perhaps all they care about is his entertainment value. If Trump says his playthings are funded by donors, they take it at face value (ignoring the obvious “pay to play”) and cheer on his AI video showing him dumping excrement on the people they hate. His true followers are his enablers—the politicians, the judges, the cronies—all of whom have an open invitation to “The Rose Garden Club” (yes, that’s really its name), which now looks like the patio of Moolah Lago, complete with the new golden ballroom.

 

When SCOTUS declared him immune to just about anything, we all knew what was coming. His pardon of the J6 “tourists” was merely the tip of the iceberg. The ICE website—now under the direction of supreme sycophant Kristi Noem—is advertising a $50,000 sign-on bonus for uber-masculine men who can now legitimately roam our cities masked, seeking out the so-called "invaders" many of them despise. How many of these new ICE recruits are former J6 participants or Proud Boys?

 

And who is going to stop him? All the so-called “laws” that have reigned for decades are really built on good faith. So what if a court rules that he cannot tear down part of the White House without congressional approval—or that he cannot withhold congressionally authorized funds? There is no “police force” to enforce the courts’ decisions. Any other administration would back down once the court had spoken.

 

With all the ICE provocation taking place in American cities, it may be only a matter of time before the Insurrection Act is invoked. Will the military follow orders if asked to fire on protesters? Meanwhile, back in Washington, the demolition goes on and the plutocrats party.

 

Alacrity of Autocracy

 We are at a symbolic tipping point: Trump firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he believed Friday’s jobs report was manipulated “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” as he wrote on social media.

A classic autocratic (and Pavlovian) response—no evidence, no careful review of the data, just his self-proclaimed genius “gut” instinct.

The report followed closely on the heels of the Federal Reserve’s decision to hold interest rates steady. No doubt Fed Chairman Jerome Powell will be blamed, although he has repeatedly stated that the Fed’s decisions are driven by data. A rate cut is reportedly likely next month -- whether Powell can endure the constant onslaught from Trump and his acolytes until then remains to be seen. (It is evidence of dear leader’s lack of understanding that lowering short term rates – the only rate over which the Fed has direct control – would have little immediate impact on the national debt, which his One Big Beautiful Bill exacerbates.) 

Powell has also been waiting for the chaos surrounding tariffs to settle—if it ever will. These tariffs are designed to feed the narrative that the U.S. has been treated unfairly by its trading partners. Facts don’t matter. Only the story—and Trump’s self-imagined Superman persona rectifying it.

There is no opposition from Congress, and the glacial pace of a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., in deciding the legality of those tariffs—imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—only adds to the chaos. Even if the court ultimately agrees with the lower courts that Trump lacked authority under the IEEPA, the case will likely land before the Supreme Court—already stacked in his favor.

The point of this brief entry is captured in a quote from 1984 by George Orwell:

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.” The Party’s slogan was: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

In summarily firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Party has spoken.  Our Four Freedoms further fade, as captured above by the award-winning editorial cartoonist for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Mike Luckovich  

 

The Beautiful Bill That Isn't

 

Once, it felt like “This land was made for you and me,” as the Woody Guthrie song goes.

Never before have I felt so disenfranchised. America may have always fallen short of being a “perfect union,” but over my lifetime, racial, gender, and economic equality grew, and the “American Dream” became more tangible. That is, until Donald Trump purloined the Republican Party.

Between the Texas flood tragedy and the passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB),” I was hardly in the mood to “celebrate” July 4, as our unalienable rights seem to be dwindling and American institutions are being dismantled, one by one. January 6, 2021 should have put an end to it all, but DJT has proven himself an escape artist extraordinaire, and the beneficiary of extraordinary luck.

I daresay I am not alone in lamenting what we have lost and what we are becoming. As former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers wrote in a recent New York Times Op-Ed, Lawrence Summers: This Law Made Me Ashamed of My Country  Everything that’s wrong seems to coalesce in the OBBB—not only in its substance but in how it will be cynically implemented. The tax “benefits” arrive just in time for the 2026 midterms, while the real pain—cuts to Medicare, food aid, clean energy, student loan programs, affordable housing, and rural hospitals—hits afterward. The political calculation is as cunning as it is cruel.

Until now, I felt our country stood for assimilating generations of immigrants fleeing persecution or simply seeking a better life. (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” as Emma Lazarus’ poem on Lady Liberty’s pedestal proclaims.) Now, empathy has vanished—replaced by false narratives portraying undocumented immigrants as the primary source of crime. While some do commit offenses, studies show they do so at lower rates than native-born citizens. Now, with the OBBB’s massive funds for ICE and deportation centers, MAGA lawmakers gleefully cheered, thinking anyone trying to escape “Alligator Alcatraz” would be torn apart by the Everglades wildlife. Reportedly, when the President toured the facility with Governor DeSantis and ICE Barbi Kristi Noem, he supposedly said, “Biden wanted me in here, that son of a bitch.”

The OBBB reallocates resources, shifting funding from social safety nets and clean energy to tax cuts, immigration enforcement, and national defense. But the math doesn’t add up, and the bill is estimated to add more than $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

Here’s another reason to feel disenfranchised: While the OBBB was being formulated, what is an ordinary citizen to do? I wrote letters to my Senators, Rick Scott and Ashley Moody, as well as to my representative, Brian Mast. I even called. All are MAGA Republicans, but I felt I had to make my arguments against passing the OBBB, particularly focusing on the unsustainability of the deficit. Except for Brian Mast, I received brief formula responses that extolled how hard they were working for Floridians and how much they “appreciated” my views.

Representative Brian Mast did not reply until after the OBBB was signed into law. His was a detailed (but formula) response which is below in a four-part screenshot.

He employed classic Gish Gallop tactics: a flood of loosely connected talking points, misleading statistics, and emotionally appealing claims, all designed to overwhelm rather than address the fiscal irresponsibility and unsustainable deficit implications of the OBBB. I randomly checked one of the many footnotes; it was cherry-picked to substantiate a point he made, but ignored what the same footnote said about the whole, much of it negative. As I lack the time and expertise to read this 1,000-page bill, in full disclosure, I requested the assistance of AI, asking it to turn to public data and nonpartisan fiscal analysis. This is what that query revealed:

Claim: “This bill secures the border, reins in wasteful spending, and reignites economic growth.”
Reality: This is a vague and unsubstantiated assertion. The bill’s core function is massive tax reduction, not meaningful deficit reduction or targeted infrastructure investment.

Claim: “Extends the 2017 tax cuts that unleashed our economy.”
Reality: The 2017 tax cuts provided short-term growth but not enough to offset revenue loss. The national debt increased by over $2 trillion post-enactment, even before COVID.

Claim: “Across every income level, Americans got a break…”
Reality: While marginal tax rates decreased, the effective tax relief was minimal and temporary for most. The wealthy received permanent, far larger benefits.

Claim: “Increases the child tax credit from $2,000 to $2,200.”
Reality: This $200 increase does not compare to the temporary 2021 expansion that lifted millions out of poverty. Many low-income families remain excluded due to refundability limits.

Claim: “Cuts taxes on tips, overtime, and Social Security.”
Reality: These cuts offer modest benefits and are not offset. Cutting Social Security taxes may actually weaken the trust fund’s solvency over time.

Claim: “Fully funds Trump’s border wall… hires more border patrol… empowers Coast Guard.”
Reality: Border wall funding is a separate issue and cannot justify multi-trillion-dollar tax cuts. These provisions serve as emotional appeals, not fiscal justification.

Claim: “Increases Social Security payments by creating a $6,000 tax deduction.”
Reality: This is misleading. It doesn’t increase benefit payments—just allows some recipients to reduce taxable income, with limited real impact.

Claim: “Strengthens Medicaid by eliminating fraud and abuse.”
Reality: Fraud should be addressed, but even perfect fraud elimination does not offset the massive cost of the tax cuts. This is a political talking point, not a fiscal plan.

Claim: “Work requirements apply only to able-bodied adults without dependents.”
Reality: These requirements often create administrative burdens that remove eligible people. The cost savings are limited, and the societal harms can be significant. The bill's changes to work requirements and funding could result in nearly 12 million people losing health coverage.

Claim: “This bill empowers individuals to live the American Dream.”
Reality: The bill’s structure overwhelmingly favors the wealthy and deepens the deficit. Real empowerment comes from opportunity, fairness, and sustainability—not debt-financed tax cuts.
 

Note: This analysis and rebuttal were drafted with the assistance of ChatGPT, a language model developed by Open AI, to help ensure clarity, factual grounding, and accessibility.  The conclusions drawn are my own.    

Looking ahead, I fear the OBBB will cause massive dislocations in our society: deepening inequality, increasing cruelty toward law-abiding, tax-paying migrants, and continuing the decimation of core American institutions—health, education, and justice. Even more concerning, it undermines the very idea of America as a nation others can trust. The long-term economic, political, and social consequences are staggering—and potentially irreversible.