The Casual Blog

Tag: Stephen Miller

January 14, 2026

Falklands nourishment, and disrespecting Trump

Black-browed albatross

In my recent trip to the Falkland Islands, I took around 50 thousand pictures of the animals that live there.  Reviewing them was a lot of work, but also enriching. I’ve been struck again and again at how amazing nature is.  

Somehow all these wonderful creatures evolved and became perfectly adapted to thrive in their harsh environment.  I particularly enjoyed seeing young animals courting and playfully rough housing, and the miracle of new life in the dense, noisy rookeries.  

Although the weather was rough at times, spending time with these animals inspired a sense of wonder and inner peace, and I hope these pictures communicate that.  In these dark times, we need to take peace and spiritual nourishment where we can find it.  

Magellanic penguins

In the past weeks, we’ve seen a dramatic escalation in the signature violence of the Trump administration.  Several US cities seem to be coming under quasi-military occupation, including  Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans, Minneapolis, and Portland. Protestors and bystanders are being attacked with chemical weapons, beatings, and bullets.  

Imperial cormorant rookery

A massive US military force has anchored in the Caribbean and invaded Venezuela, while we’re bombing various countries in Africa and the Middle East.  Now Trump is threatening to invade several more countries.  European nations are making contingency plans to defend Greenland from the US, while our friendly northern neighbor, Canada, is considering steps to defend itself.  

There’s a common thread between the violent attacks by Trump’s goons in our cities and the violence against other countries.  Trump rejects the values and aspirations that we’ve taken for granted as essential for both civil society and international relations.  Values like freedom, democracy, rule of law, and mutual respect are under siege.  In their place, Trump is attempting to substitute greed and lawless violence.  

Southern elephant seals

Trump contends he isn’t bound by US or international law.  Stephen Miller may have articulated the MAGA world view best when he declared this week that the real world is governed by force and power.  

The Miller “realist” view has a grain of truth, of course:  governments have and exercise power.  But the Miller view is myopic and distorted.  Throughout history, governments that are essentially despotic tyrannies have failed, because the governed resent and reject them.  More successful governments incorporate non-despotic elements, including fair legal systems, representation through free elections, and checks on executive power, as well as systems for promoting citizens’ health, education, and welfare. 

In the realm of international affairs, the notion that states prosper through pure brute force has been tested through two world wars and numerous other conflicts, and it hasn’t worked.  Instead, the most prosperous period in human history has occurred since WWII, under a widely adopted  voluntary framework of international law.  Despite imperfections, this framework, which generally prohibits invading other countries and stealing their resources, has helped to minimize warfare and promoted more peace.  

Sea lions

Trump’s recent move to steal the oil of Venezuela is brazenly criminal, and also idiotic.  The demand for the sludgy oil is low, the practical barriers to development are high, and renewable substitutes for fossil fuel are getting ever cheaper.  Plainly, the best thing for planet Earth is to leave that oil in the ground and move as quickly as possible away from fossil fuels.  

So why is Trump spending hundreds of millions of our tax dollars on a smash and grab operation for that sludgy oil?  For that matter, why threaten to seize the territory of friendly long time allies like Denmark or Canada?  Or attempt to take control of American cities with armed masked thugs?  

Long-tailed meadowlark

It’s obvious that Trump isn’t too smart, but dumbness alone isn’t an adequate explanation for his escalating wide-ranging threats and violence.  There’s a persuasive explanation in Thomas Edsall’s latest NY Times column. It seems that Trump has become addicted to power.  

Edsall quotes Professor Manfred Kets de Vries as follows: 

It is possible to become addicted to power — particularly for certain character structures. Individuals with pronounced narcissistic, paranoid or psychopathic tendencies are especially vulnerable. For them, power does not merely enable action; it regulates inner states that would otherwise feel unmanageable.

Donald Trump is an extreme illustration of this dynamic. From a psychoanalytic perspective, his narcissism is malignant in the sense that it is organized around a profound inner emptiness.

Malignant narcissism is a combination of narcissism and psychopathology. Because there is little internal capacity for self-soothing or self-valuation, he requires continuous external affirmation to feel real and intact. Power supplies that affirmation. Visibility, dominance and constant stimulation temporarily fill the void.

Crested caracara

As Edsall explains, psychologists say that power stimulates the brain much like an addictive drug.  The sensation can be intoxicating, but as with other addictions, the power addict develops tolerance, a need for ever increasing doses.  It leads to poor decision making, as delusions of omnipotence  are thwarted by reality.  This causes feelings of frustration and rage, and impulsive and foolish behavior.  

Gentoo penguins

Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia, also explains some of Trump’s behavior as an attempt to address his insecurity and feelings of being disrespected.  It’s telling that Trump attempted to justify the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis by saying she was “very, very disrespectful to law enforcement.”  That is, he has proposed that police shootings can be justified by the victim’s disrespect.  This is not the law in America.  It’s lawless tyranny.

Is disrespect a central driver of the MAGA movement?   David Frum, in the Atlantic Daily, writes  “MAGA is many things, but above all it’s a movement about redistributing respect away from those who command too much (overeducated coastal elites) to those who don’t have enough (white Americans without advanced degrees who feel left behind).” 

Frum says, “ICE is violence-prone in part because the agency has lowered its training standards and ditched much of its background vetting to meet the president’s grandiose deportation targets. But more fundamentally, ICE is violence-prone because its main purpose has become theatrical. Under present leadership, ICE is less a law-enforcement agency than it is a content creator.”

Southern rockhopper penguins

This content, Frum suggests, is about demonstrating that disrespect will not be tolerated.  In the MAGA framework, foreigners, racial minorities, religious minorities, LGBTQ+ folks, women, and anyone else suspected of disrespect for white Christian males must either demonstrate subservience or face violent consequences.  

So here we are:  our leader is a rapidly deteriorating guy of barely average intelligence and way below average morality trying to compensate for his inner emptiness and unhappiness with more and more dramatic gestures of violence and domination.  And his ardent followers share some of his worst traits and continue to support him.

King penguins

Fortunately, the worm may be starting to turn.   In the last few days, a few Republicans in Congress are starting to break ranks and speak out against the lawlessness.  Public support for ICE and for Trump continues to drop.  Thousands of Americans are daring to take to the streets in opposition to ICE violence.  

Also, Trump, who hardly ever makes a truthful statement, said one reality based and encouraging thing this past week:  that if the Democrats win the mid-terms, he’s going to face impeachment.  Inshallah!

September 19, 2020

Sleeping trouble, adieu to RBG, and picking the lesser of evils in Trumpworld

 

Canada geese at Shelley Lake

I heard on the news last week that a lot of people are having trouble sleeping these days, and thought, me too!  My insomnia seems to be getting worse, though it’s nothing new, and over the years I’ve learned to make the best of it.  Lately when I wake up at 2:00 a.m., I’ve been watching YouTube videos of gifted pianists playing Chopin and Liszt, which are stimulating, but in a soothing way.  

There are so many things to feel anxious about that just listing them makes me anxious, so I won’t.  I can scratch from the list the worry that Justice Ginsburg might not survive until 2021, since yesterday she died.  I met her when I clerked at the D.C. Circuit, where she was then an appeals court judge, and found her pleasant, though quiet and in no way charismatic.  Only more recently, from the documentary RBG, did I realize that in her quiet way, she was an extraordinary person, who devoted her life to justice and did a lot of good for our country.  

Great egret at Shelley Lake

What will the Republicans do now?  The thought of a Justice Bill Barr, Justice Stephen Miller, or Justice Roger Stone is more horrifying than another Justice Federalist Society Ideologue, but they’re all horrifying.  Is there some chance that a few Republican senators will feel enough civic responsibility and/or shame to put off confirmation until after the election?   We can only hope.

Even if we didn’t face the strong possibility of an even more politicized, reactionary Supreme Court, we’d still have big problems.  We’re at a crossroads of American history, and I’m seriously worried that democracy as we know it is at risk.

Although I have nothing good to say about Donald Trump, I’m not profoundly worried about him in particular.  In the last two centuries, we’ve had leaders almost as corrupt and unqualified as Trump, and survived.  My sense of dread is more about the new way of engaging with politics that he reflects and inspires.

This came into focus for me last week with an odd op ed in the Washington Post arguing that although Trump had a lot of negatives, he was still the lesser of evils.  The criticisms of Biden were vague, but after a couple of re-readings, I think I got the gist:  Biden’s policies would destroy the republic, because they were liberal ones supported by Democrats.

This was difficult for me to process, because I’ve always thought that liberalism was not a monolith, but rather just one collection of views among many on the American political landscape.  In the 20th century, there were all kinds of political positions in America, from far left to far right, and it seemed normal for people to have different ideas on what were the best policy solutions.  To resolve our political differences, we had institutions, like legislatures, where we tried to persuade others and find compromises.  We agreed to have regular fair elections, where we could get rid of bad players, and the winners could carry on with the democratic experiment.

For me, there was never a time when the Democratic Party seemed particularly wise or enlightened.  Indeed, for more than half a century I’ve watched Democrats participate in a long series of what I thought were terrible choices on business regulation, criminal justice, healthcare, social services, foreign policy, and other areas.  In all of those, it arrived at compromises with Republicans.  Neither party had a monopoly on bad ideas, or good ones.  

I thought there was general agreement on this:  that political parties could fumble and sometimes fail, but politics would continue, with the possibility that future compromises would be better.  It never occurred to me to view American politics as a winner-take-all game, in which political opponents were viewed as by definition illegitimate.  

So it took me a while to grasp that Trumpism involved a different kind of thinking, with little in common with traditional Republicanism other than the name. But I think I’ve finally got it:  Trumpism at its core is defined not by any policy objective, but by fear and dread of enemies.  And in the political arena, the primary enemy, as they conceive it, is all those to the left of far right — that is, Democrats, and people like me. 

Of course, not everyone who supports Trump thinks the same way, and there are surely some who will vote for Trump without intending the destruction of all Democrats.  Still, the thing that drives the Trump movement is not a set of policies or even a value system.  Rather, it’s a strong conviction that Democrats aren’t just ordinary people who happen to have different ideas as to policies.  They are evil.  And very frightening.  

Once I understood this, some things I’d thought were plain lunacy started to make a kind of sense.  It seems crazy to deny the reality and effectiveness of science — unless science is consistently supporting Dark Forces that want Us to change Our Way of Life.  Increasingly popular nutty conspiracy theories like QAnon have at their base a belief that politics is not just politics, but a battle between good and evil.  And as everyone knows, there can be no compromise with evil — that is, according to this way of thinking, with Democrats.

If you’re persuaded that Democrats are not just a political party, but rather agents of Satan, it probably seems reasonable to buy more guns and ammunition to defend yourself against them.  It also would seem right and proper to use force against them when they assemble to protest something.  

On the other hand, under the Democrats-are-evil assumption, it makes no sense to have free and fair elections.  If you did that, there’s a possibility Democrats might win.  And then we’d be in big trouble!  No, in this new, Trumpist view, to save our democracy and our traditional way of life, we need to have a different kind of election, in which those who disagree with us cannot win.  If they insist on winning, a reasonable response is violence.    

For a full on Trumpist, encountering opposition to Trumpism is different from an ordinary political disagreement.  It is treason, or worse than treason — blasphemy!   In this strange worldview, those who attempt to argue that Trump has minor or major shortcomings like, say, lack of intelligence or lack of character, simply prove that they themselves lack intelligence or character.  Those who oppose Trump (that is, Democrats and others),show, by their opposition, that they are wrong and evil.

This is not to say all Trumpists like everything about Trump.  Some do, but some have various criticisms of his manners or certain policies.  But Trumpists believe he is the lesser of evils, because his opponents are really and truly evil.    

Obviously I’m putting things a bit strongly, and not trying to address every individual variation.  Again, I don’t think every Trump supporter is this extreme.  I realize that there are a minority of them who are willing to have a sincere, good faith political discussion, and who are willing to allow that political opposition can be legitimate.  I’m always on the lookout for those, and happy to have more discussions with them.  

But there’s really no point in attempting to have a discussion with an extreme Trumpist.  They are not willing to listen to anti-Trumpist ideas, and may react violently.  If they’re carrying weapons, I advise keeping at a safe distance.  If we’re going to continue the American political experiment, we’ll need to get back to basics.  First of all, Democrats and others who still believe American democracy is worth preserving need to vote.