As arts funding boosts many local schools, PVUSD faces questions over spending and transparency
Three years after California voters approved Proposition 28, many Santa Cruz County school districts say the arts funding has expanded programs and opportunities for students — but teachers in Pajaro Valley Unified are raising questions about how millions of dollars have been spent and why the district has lacked transparency.
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Expanding the Frontiers of Mediocrity
Sunny is Coming Home
Free Will Astrology
Keeping yesterday's computers ticking takes more than nostalgia
How Elon Musk Is Re-Engineering the World
Elon Musk is an avatar of digital capitalism: He both embodies and defines it. In “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed,” co-author Quinn Slobodian examines how Musk’s actions have altered American capitalism by changing its relationship with the federal government while ushering in a new, technologically driven political economy that’s upending our lives.
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On this week’s More To The Story, Slobodian talks with host Al Letson about how the world’s richest person exploits government investment to his own financial benefit and the many ways this intersects with his views on race and technology. It’s nothing less than a futuristic vision of a frightening new world order.
“What is the social contract of Muskism?” Slobodian asks. “You will be locked into a kind of cult of Elon and so ideologically bolted onto him that you’d never question his decisions.”
Slobodian also touches on the ways Musk fused himself to the American economy—and our imagination—and how growing up in South Africa shaped Musk’s white supremacist worldview.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
Is Trump the GOAT of Presidential Corruption?
President Donald Trump is an unimpressive person. He possessed no real intellect even before his cognitive faculties began to decline. His real-estate business career was mediocre at best, having inherited most of it from his father before going bankrupt multiple times. He lacks any real sense of ethics or integrity and often appears incapable of moral reasoning.
As an electoral candidate, Trump’s only real skill was disposing of ossified, entitled competitors: the Clintons, the Bushes, the unremarkable and uninspiring band of GOP primary challengers, and so on. Trump won in 2016 thanks to a fluke in the Electoral College and the luck of having an opponent falsely tarred by the FBI director on the eve of the election. He won in 2024 amid public backlash to inflation that he helped cause and after President Joe Biden stepped aside mid-campaign after the incumbent turned in a disastrous debate performance.
Having attained the White House twice through sheer luck, he has largely squandered the legacy of past generations. Trump’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic led to his defeat in 2020. He lacks the focus or interest to build sustainable policy achievements beyond harming his perceived foes. He lacks the basic capacity to transmute a GOP majority in Congress into permanent legislative accomplishments. Among our nation’s presidents, he will surely rank as the worst.
The only thing truly impressive about Donald Trump is his skill at corruption. This is not, strictly speaking, a good thing to be good at. Yet one cannot help but be awed at the talent that he possesses for abusing power and enriching himself. The last ten years have seen more innovations in corruption by Trump than the 240 years of American history that preceded them.
Take, for example, his latest scheme to enrich himself and others at the expense of everyone else. Trump owns a social-media company named TruthSocial on which he writes his infamous stream-of-consciousness posts. (He previously posted them on Twitter before its then-owners banned him for trying to overthrow the 2020 election in 2021.) These posts can provide an unusual level of insight into Trump’s thinking, and interpreting them has been a recurring feature of his political career.
Last week, TruthSocial announced an extraordinary new “product”: Truth API, a version of his social-media feed that gives subscribers “a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths.” (“Truths” are the hyper-Orwellian name that TruthSocial gives to posts.) In practical terms, it would allow Wall Street firms and other financial institutions access to Trump’s market-moving posts a handful of seconds before they reach the general public.
Why would anyone bother to pay for a few seconds’ advantage to read a Trump post? Because TMTG, the company that operates TruthSocial, can make money off of it. Imagine, for instance, that Trump announces higher or lower tariffs against U.S. trading partners, a new bombing campaign against Iran, or his decision to support or oppose a publicly-traded American company. A few seconds of lead time could allow firms with complex trading algorithms to cash in on market movements by Trump’s posts—all by handing him a small monthly slice of the profits.
Insider trading is not an unintended byproduct; it is the point. “Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” Kevin McGurn, the interim chief executive officer of TruthSocial owner TMTG, reportedly said in a press release. “Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths while advancing our strategy to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream.”
This is a longwinded way of saying that the president is cashing in on his own public comments. According to some reports, subscribers would be charged $100,000 per month for early access to the president’s posts. Trump personally holds a 41 percent ownership stake in TMTG himself, making him a direct financial beneficiary of his own actions as president. The scheme is functionally no different than if he asked for giant burlap sacks of cash from Wall Street executives in exchange for reading his executive orders the day before they are issued.
Trump has largely given up on anything resembling policymaking or governance during his second term. His legislative agenda is practically nonexistent, save for a constitutionally dubious bill to reshape American elections that is dead on arrival in the Senate. He has outsourced his foreign policy, which largely consists of being humiliated by the Iranian government over closures of the Strait of Hormuz, to Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Stephen Miller, Trump’s domestic policy guru, is largely running the mass-deportation portfolio without real supervision.
That gives Trump plenty of free time to devote himself to his two great loves. When it comes to remaking Washington, D.C., in his own image, Trump has had a mixed record of success. The Kennedy Center no longer bears his name thanks to a court ruling, while the ruins of the East Wing are slowly being built over into a gaudy ballroom. The administration also plans on erecting a giant marble arch to honor Trump himself outside Arlington National Cemetery; the next Democratic president will likely demolish it as soon as they can.
When it comes to corrupt self-enrichment, however, there are no obstacles or guard rails. He has stuffed the Justice Department with his former (and, in a way, current) personal lawyers to end its post-Watergate tradition of independence. The Supreme Court ruled two years ago that Trump enjoys “absolute immunity” for any crimes committed in connection with his “core constitutional powers.” This anti-consitutitional decision amounted to a blank check to collect bribes, kickbacks, and other forms of graft.
To that end, Trump has taken millions from various donors in exchange for pardoning a wide range of white-collar criminals. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that the rumored going price for clemency is at least $1 million. In one instance, Trump pardoned a Democratic member of Congress whose family had petitioned him for help and then lashed out at him on social media for not switching parties, implicitly suggesting a quid pro quo of sorts. (Texas Representative Henry Cuellar, the lawmaker in question, has denied any wrongdoing over his original bribery charges or the pardon he obtained from Trump.)
This is fairly unimaginative by Trumpian standards, of course. A more characteristic scheme is assigning a personal aide—Meredith O’Rourke, a fundraiser whom he reportedly calls his “princess of darkness”—to collect tens of billions of dollars in contributions from major corporations to various pet projects. The Journal reported last month that O’Rourke has taken to referring to Trump as “the boss” and telling the companies, many of whom have regulatory concerns in Washington, that “the boss wants this money.” Those companies have in turn donated hefty sums for the new White House ballroom, Trump’s planned presidential library, and more.
Then there is Trump’s tax immunity deal with the Justice Department. Earlier this year, Trump’s personal lawyers struck a bargain to create an “anti-weaponization fund” to compensate alleged victims of “lawfare” by the Biden administration. In real-world terms, it was a slush fund to reward his loyalists who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and faced criminal charges for it. (Trump pardoned all of them on his first week in office last year.) Trump himself also purported to obtain retroactive immunity for any tax-related crimes he or his family had committed before this year, under the guise of pushing back against the “weaponization” of his tax returns.
One of Trumpism’s basic dogmas is that Trump can commit no crimes and it is a crime to investigate him for them. Translating that dogma into legal language proved to be harder than expected. Rare bipartisan pushback from Capitol Hill led Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to seemingly back down from the fund itself, but not from the purported immunity agreement. Trump insisted that Blanche be confirmed as attorney general nonetheless, and Republican senators appear ready to fold on the matter as well. Corruption, like any disease, is spread by close contact.
It is impossible for an honest person to not be repulsed by Trump’s grotesque adventures in self-enrichment, to his near-total sense of amorality and lack of any belief in honest government. At the same time, there is something remarkable about the depths and lengths to which Trump will go to stuff a few more dollar bills in his shirt. It is like watching Barry Bonds hit home runs in the early 2000s—yes, obviously, it is all corrupt and tainted, but isn’t it incredible to see the outer bounds of the human experience? Isn’t it stunning to see what the most corrupt person in America can do when placed in the most powerful job in the nation?
That said, it’s worth noting that Trump’s genius for depravity still can’t hold a candle to the true GOAT of American political corruption. Richard Nixon and his cronies were breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters and kidnapping the attorney general’s wife in an era where Congress was powerful, most government officials saw themselves as public servants, and the Supreme Court regularly upheld our constitutional order. Imagine what a man of Nixon’s genuine brilliance could have accomplished if he played under today’s rules. It would be like watching Wilt Chamberlain score 100 points every night, but for bribery.
The Case for Sticking With French Theory
“I fucking love Foucault. I fuck with Foucault hard,” enthused Supriya Ganesh, star of The Pitt, in a recent interview with New York magazine. Ganesh, who uses she/they pronouns, never felt comfortable with rigid gender and sexuality labels, and Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume I showed her how these categories have in fact varied across cultures and through history: “I think this idea of defining sexuality is very new—or at least that’s the argument he’s making … it really illuminated a lot of that for me.”
Ganesh was unwittingly providing fresh evidence for the central argument of The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory, which proposes that a small group of dead twentieth-century intellectuals are “crucial for understanding the world we inhabit today.” Written by Emily Eakin, a senior editor at The New York Times Book Review, The Frenchmen focuses on eight French or French-speaking theorists (Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, and Paul de Man) who, she argues, “permanently alter[ed] how we think not only about bedrock philosophical ideas but about the role of language in shaping those beliefs and everything else.”
Eakin’s Frenchmen are an eclectic group, differing in interests, politics, and methods. Two were practicing psychoanalysts. Most were academics, working in fields including philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, history, and comparative literature. They wrote on topics as varied as schizophrenia, prison architecture, photography, Edgar Allan Poe, and (in Barthes’s case) their mom. What unites them, according to Eakin, is their emphasis on systems, as opposed to individuals, and their attention to the complex and contradictory ways that language operates. Instead of taking for granted (as the existentialists did) that people are autonomous free agents defined by their choices, they wrote about the ways people and texts are created and constrained by powerful yet unstable structures of knowledge and language—an idea that resonates in our era of inescapable algorithms and artificial intelligence. (“Chatbots frighten us,” Eakin writes, “to the degree that they make literal theory’s suggestion that thought does not require a human thinker.”)
“Deconstruction,” an analytical method developed by Derrida, came to define French theory and is at the heart of Eakin’s book. She defines it as “a style of reading” that “took apart” a text and left it in pieces, showing how it was undone by its own internal contradictions. A common deconstructive move is to show how the binary terms that a text’s argument depends on—for example, speech versus writing—are not actually opposed after all. In classic Derridean fashion, Eakin structures her book around an oft-repeated binary between “theory” and “real life” that she sees as ripe for deconstructing, contrasting the Frenchmen’s “stringent antihumanism” with their all-too-human lives; academic theory with real-world historical developments; and her own personal tendency toward hyperintellectualism with her desire for real-world experience.
For the young Eakin and her cohort, theory was more than a field of study—it was a radically innovative mode of thought enveloped in mystique and glamour, whose leading lights were treated like international celebrities and conducted themselves accordingly. At the same time, Eakin’s immersion in theory seemed to cut her off from everything else, including herself. This binary approach to intellectual history and memoir is elegant and symmetrical. But it also sometimes feels forced—like a straw man conjured up only to be toppled. Is it really necessary to think about a “life in theory” as an opposition on the verge of collapse? If theory is truly as illuminating as Eakin argues, there ought to be a less reductive, less formulaic way to bring it to life.
French theory found its way to the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s, at a tumultuous time for American higher education. Baby boomers had arrived in college en masse, and campuses were roiled by protests against war, racism, and sexism—an environment conducive to new approaches to knowledge. Though French theorists were often trained in philosophy, in the United States their ideas found a welcoming home in literature departments, which were due for a shake-up. Cold War–era lit departments had often cultivated a soft nationalism, in which texts were valued for their democratic, humanistic, or Western ideals. The popular “New Criticism” approach to reading presumed that literary texts were unified and self-contained works of art, transcending their historical or political context. Literary education was often an exercise in appreciation and canon-consolidation: Students took classes on Major English Poets or The Great American Novel to learn how to properly revere literature as “major” or “great.”
Theory brought a welcome blast of iconoclastic energy to the reading process. No text was immune to structural analysis or deconstruction, no matter how supposedly great it was. No text was untainted by history and politics. At a time of increasing skepticism and cynicism, theory was appropriately disillusioned and disillusioning. And French theory’s roots in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics brought a new sense of rigor to the study of literature and culture just as the prestige of social sciences was soaring.
Eakin highlights concepts from French theory that seem prescient, even prophetic, in 2026, such as Foucault’s critique of “the panopticon,” an eighteenth-century prison design in which incarcerated people are constantly visible from a central watchtower and thus learn to proactively police themselves—a supposedly enlightened form of social control that creates a more coercive, internalized kind of domination. Today, as employers monitor our keystrokes to ensure peak productivity, and Palantir, Amazon, and ICE team up to track immigrants across databases, the panopticon is a strong contender for the defining metaphor for our age, reminding us of the sinister side of inescapable surveillance.
Eakin also persuasively suggests (following media scholar David Gunkel) that Barthes anticipates problems posed by AI-generated writing in his essay “The Death of the Author,” which argues that a text’s meaning resides in its readers’ interpretations, rather than in its author’s life or intentions. Barthes was frustrated with the limitations of traditional modes of reading that relied on parsing what the author meant; these approaches are obviously irrelevant to writing generated by machines, and given the infinite influences that shape any piece of writing and the variety of ways it can be interpreted, perhaps all texts—not just auto-generated ones—are best understood as a collective cultural creation, rather than as the sole intellectual property of one singular mind. And like Supriya Ganesh, Eakin celebrates French theory for laying the groundwork for contemporary attempts to rethink gender and sexuality beyond the binary.
At times, however, Eakin overstates her case. She sees French theory as a nearly universal cause or explanation for modern phenomena, from the multiplicity of fashion subcultures to the recognition of neurodivergence in schools. She views the Trump administration’s erasure of words like “equality” and “climate crisis” from government publications and websites as an instance of a “dawning awareness of language’s determinative unstable force” in the wake of theory—but it’s unclear why theory gives us more insight into this kind of state censorship than Orwell’s 1984. She sums up theory’s intellectual legacy as a set of core commandments: “Be skeptical. Be alert. Pay very close attention. Beware political claims posing as timeless truths.” While it’s difficult to argue with these admonitions, they are hardly unique to theory.
Even when she’s focusing on academia, Eakin tends to give the Frenchmen too much credit. She writes that French theory exposed “omissions regarding gender, race, or class,” without giving enough consideration to the homegrown student protest movements that led to the founding of African American and ethnic studies programs and established race and gender as worthy objects of study. She uses the terms “theory” and “French theory” almost interchangeably, largely ignoring the vast world and influence of theory beyond France, including the Frankfurt School, the Birmingham School, the Combahee River Collective, and postcolonial theory. And her “Frenchmen” framing gives the erroneous impression that French theory was essentially an all-male endeavor. Aside from a brief parenthetical stating that her eight men were “arguably among the most influential in the United States and certainly the ones who figured most prominently in my education,” Eakin doesn’t explain why she decided to exclude theorists like Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva from her main lineup.
Though French theory wasn’t the whole story of American intellectual life in the late twentieth century, it was a significant one, and it managed to maintain its influence and mystique for decades, appealing to fresh generations of scholars. As a Harvard undergrad in the late 1980s, Eakin was fascinated by how some students used theory as a secret language (“It was their common currency, their secret code, their drug”). She speaks of herself as coming “under the Frenchmen’s spell,” and is explicit about theory’s erotic allure: “Theory was cool. Theory was French. Theory was also, strange though it might sound, sexy.” Her tone vacillates between light mockery of her youthful passion and a rapturous re-creation of it. Though Eakin is alive to the absurdities of her adolescent obsessions, she also evokes the magic of the past. The first pages of The Frenchmen make theory-infused lit students seem as irresistibly glamorous as classics majors in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.
During the fierce culture wars of the Reagan era and beyond, theory offered a sophisticated alternative to the stodgy traditionalism championed by bestselling academics Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind (1987), and Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon (1994). The Blooms (no relation) ironically helped to make theory a household word by blaming it in part for impending cultural collapse. By the 1980s and 1990s, theory had made the leap from academia to pop culture, and the term “academostar” was coined to describe its high-profile practitioners. Time magazine covered Foucault fandom with the headline “MICHEL FOUCAULT HAS A GROWING CULT.” Derrida even reached Hollywood: In 1997, Woody Allen made a movie called Deconstructing Harry.
Eakin captures the air of celebrity that hung around these figures, and the accompanying heightened sense of drama. In her telling, the Frenchmen are like a Real Housewives cast, hobnobbing with one another at parties, pursuing chaotic sex lives, and imbuing their sometimes arcane disagreements with a distinct sense of drama. “Two had children with women who were not their wives. A third was a bigamist,” she writes. “One was obsessed with knots. One swindled his friends and was sentenced to prison. One dabbled in S/M.… One killed himself by jumping out a window. One murdered his wife.” At various points, I found myself caught up in the intrigue, excitedly texting obscure tidbits to old grad school friends: “Did you know Paul de Man was Henry Kissinger’s French tutor?!” “Did you know that Avital Ronell had an affair with Derrida’s teenage son?!” “Did you know that during the Occupation Lacan was sleeping with a pregnant woman in the German sector and a pregnant woman in the French sector and he’d shuttle between them?!”
Lacan was my favorite character—seemingly a scammer for the ages. Among other things, he invented bite-size, under-10-minute therapy sessions, claiming these mini-sessions prompted psychological insights that longer sessions did not. Mini-sessions also conveniently meant he could see dozens of patients a day, and as a result he earned about a million dollars a year from his practice alone. But he was an amateur compared to Paul de Man, whom Eakin calls “a George Santos avant la lettre” and whom a colleague described as prone to “lying, evasion, fantasy, greed, possibly even theft.” This list doesn’t even include the most sordid parts of his past, which include the fact that, as a young man in Belgium, he wrote for a Nazi newspaper.
The scandalous news of de Man’s Nazi ties broke in 1987, after his death, and it was arguably the beginning of the end of the heyday of French theory. Critics seized on it as proof that deconstruction and moral relativism went hand in hand. It posed a question also raised by Eakin’s biographical approach to the Frenchmen: What is the relationship between a person’s life and their ideas? Though Eakin occasionally draws connections between the Frenchmen’s biographies and their thinking—speculating about how Barthes’s ill health or Derrida’s outsider status as an Algerian Jew affected their writing—most of the biographical material she shares is disconnected from the intellectual story she’s telling. It is life not as a key to theory, but life for its own sake.
I entered graduate school not long after Eakin left, and I witnessed the starstruck aura she describes, but I personally experienced French theory as more of an academic obligation than an erotic object. I went to hear Derrida speak when he came to campus because not going was unthinkable. I read various volumes of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality in more classes than I can count. And I attended the first day of an oversubscribed, standing-room-only seminar taught by one of Derrida’s former students. Avid grad students were sitting on the floor and lining the walls, hoping to be chosen to return the next week. I decided to switch to a less fashionable class where I knew I’d have a seat at the table.
I dutifully studied the theory that saturated my syllabi and found it more or less instructive. My grad school notes are full of panopticons, interpellation, deconstruction, and jouissance. I genuinely appreciated that the Frenchmen’s compulsive wordplay gave me a license to make terrible puns in the titles of my seminar papers. (Apologies to my past professors!) But the very things that charmed Eakin about French theory—that it was esoteric, exclusive, elite—were off-putting to me. When I ran across a disparaging reference to “mean, Derrida-quoting grad students” in Molly Crabapple’s latest book, I nodded in recognition.
The theory heads in my grad program struck me as obnoxious and condescending—and not in a sexy way. There was the very rich student who was rumored to organize his closet alphabetically by designer, and who liked to tell classmates that the “D&G” logo on his Dolce & Gabbana tank top stood for Deleuze and Guattari. He once publicly mocked me for participating in a protest against an anti-gay marriage organization because gay marriage was not heteronormative and should be banned! Then there was my glum, Eeyore-like classmate who complained about everything, including the injustice of having to read literature (as opposed to just theory) for his general exams. This was baffling to me: Why get a Ph.D. in English if all you wanted to read was philosophy?
Toward the end of the book, Eakin cites a conversation along similar lines as the catalyst for her decision to drop out of grad school and break up with the Frenchmen. When she asks a student in her program what field of literature she studies, the student laughs and replies, “I don’t read books. I just do theory.” If theory was a drug, this moment was Eakin’s bottoming out. She writes:
I felt something like panic wash through me.… Surely, theory needed an object, a relationship with something else—another text. It didn’t exist in a vacuum. I went home deeply agitated.… Theory had become a dangerous substance to me, too abstract, too all-consuming, too removed from everyday life—too removed from lived experience.
That summer, I went to work at The New Yorker as a fact-checker.
For Eakin, theory was too rarefied and out of touch. A job in legacy literary journalism was by comparison a bracing reality check.
Several decades later, The Frenchmen is Eakin’s attempt to bridge the gap between life and theory: to merge the theory head she once was with the journalist she now is. But despite her big, impassioned claims for theory’s explanatory power, Eakin the narrator seems oddly removed from the ideas she describes. She self-deprecatingly describes herself as a theory “survivor,” and sometimes seems to align herself with a skeptical reader who finds theory burdensome or abstruse.
If Eakin’s personal relationship to theory often feels apologetic or ambivalent, Jordan Alexander Stein’s Avidly Reads Theory makes a less detached, more wholehearted case for a “life in theory.” Like Eakin, Stein fell in love with theory in college, and like Eakin, he cops to some youthfully cringe excesses. (I don’t know which was more painful to read about: Eakin finding herself “so wracked by sobs I could hardly talk” after receiving critical comments on a Lacan-inspired paper she wrote her junior year, and noting in her diary that her adviser obliged her “with a fifty-minute phone call at 11 p.m.” to talk about it (!), or Stein spending literally years revising his seminar paper on Kant: “Kant threatened to be my Waterloo.”)
But Stein never has to disavow or detox from his love of theory, in part because for him and his friends, theory is always obviously connected to their real, embodied world. (Or should I say it was “always already” connected?) Eakin informs us that during her time as a student—despite the anti-apartheid encampment in Harvard Yard—“politics seemed to have gone dormant, its focus elsewhere.” Theory offered Eakin and her friends a kind of countercultural feeling in the absence of political commitments or action. For Stein, on the other hand, “theory” meant not just “the Frenchmen” but the much more diverse and capacious universe of postcolonial, feminist, and queer theory, and it translated directly into political speech, protest, and anger: “An education in feminist theory … gave us a means to refine our own senses of the ideas and politics we cared about.… [W]e contemplated it with raised fists and even more raised voices. We yelled. We fought. We seethed.” Instead of a youthful phase to leave behind, theory for Stein was a practical preparation for real life.
This promise of an everyday, real-world existence made possible and purposeful by anti-authoritarian ideas is arguably theory’s most important legacy for our time. Though it’s mostly absent from The Frenchmen, lately I’ve been catching glimpses of it elsewhere, from Stein’s account of his feminist awakening; to Joseph Osmundson’s new memoir, Spawning Season, and its searching reimagination of parenthood via queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz; to Supriya Ganesh’s Foucault-inspired celebration of her transformed sense of self. Unpretentious and urgent, testimonials like theirs show how still-radical cultural theory can continue to combat all the oppressive old orthodoxies about gender, sexuality, and power that keep endlessly reemerging in our daily lives like Whack-a-Mole, refusing to disappear or die.
How Cornyn and Tillis Got Played by Trump
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s inexplicable advancement of Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general—who is now, according to Politico’s Chris Marquette, only one vote shy of Senate confirmation—has me thinking about the anchoring effect, a topic explored by the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in their 1974 paper, “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” The piece is a foundational work in the field of behavioral economics; it led to Kahneman winning the Nobel prize for economics in 2002 (even though Kahneman wasn’t an economist).
“Heuristics” in this context means “mental shortcuts,” and Tversky and Kahneman spent their careers demonstrating that these tend to follow seriously bad logic. They were especially fond of showing how bad heuristics can be when it comes to math. If you haven’t read Michael Lewis’s delightful joint biography of Tversky and Kahneman and their ideas, The Undoing Project, published in 2016, I recommend it highly. Kahneman also popularized his research with Tversky in his 2011 best-seller, Thinking Fast and Slow.
“In many situations,” Tversky and Kahneman wrote in their 1974 paper, “people make estimates by starting from an initial value that is adjusted to yield the final answer.” That’s anchoring. These initial estimates, Tversky and Kahneman, are pretty arbitrary and extremely susceptible to suggestion. In one experiment, they spun a wheel of fortune and then asked participants whether the percentage of United Nations delegations that represented African countries was higher or lower than that anchor number. They then invited participants to guess what the real number was. When the anchor number was higher, the guesses were higher, and when the anchor number was lower, the guesses were lower, even though the anchor numbers were arrived at through transparently arbitrary means and had zero bearing on the real answer (which, incidentally, is 28 percent).
Christopher Voss, a negotiation expert and author of 2016’s Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, writes of extreme anchoring, citing Tversky and Kahneman and taking it one step further. If you’re negotiating over something and you let the other guy bid—that is, you let him anchor—then “you’ve got to be careful”:
If the other guy’s a pro, a shark, he’s going to go for an extreme anchor to bend your reality. Then, when they come back with a merely absurd offer it will seem reasonable, just like an expensive $400 iPhone seems reasonable after they mark it down from a crazy $600.
Voss, who used to do hostage negotiation for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, advises strongly against extreme anchoring because “your reputation precedes you” and if you get a reputation for making preposterous demands nobody will want to deal with you. What goes around comes around. Point taken.
On the other hand, you might end up in the Oval Office.
President Donald Trump is a dedicated practitioner of extreme anchoring, having learned it (according to Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark’s excellent new biography, American Scoundrel) from the reptilian McCarthyite and mob lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn’s terrible reputation preceded him, which led, among other things, to multiple indictments (though no convictions). Cohn learned early on that people weren’t going to like him and he made his peace with that. Trump’s terrible reputation precedes him, too, and it’s cost him over the years in certain business sectors like banking. Even Trump’s fellow Republicans don’t like him much. You’d think that would be a liability in elective politics, but in Trump’s case it hasn’t been.
Trump has made extreme anchoring work for himself on a scale Cohn could only fantasize about. His $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, filed while he was president, and concerning events that occurred during his first presidential term, is perhaps the most extreme anchor in the history of negotiating. And the likely Senate confirmation of Todd Blanche shows that it kind of worked.
I won’t rehash Step One, which is the lawsuit itself, because I’ve written about that already. I also won’t dwell on Step Two, which is the settlement Blanche approved (part one, part two) as deputy attorney general—a $1.8 billion slush fund plus indemnification from IRS investigations—because I’ve written about that, too. Instead, let’s look at Step Three, which is the negotiation over supporting Blanche’s nomination in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The holdouts were Republican Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Both are lame ducks who have in their latter days in office offered some token resistance to the president. Their defiance probably isn’t based entirely on principle because they’ve both gotten screwed by Trump. Cornyn lost a primary earlier this year after Trump endorsed his opponent. Tillis decided to retire after Trump threatened to support a primary challenge against him. The salient point is that neither has any obvious reason to appease Trump.
The two senators both opposed Blanche’s nomination in committee and said they wouldn’t back down unless it could be demonstrated that a.) Trump’s slush fund, which Blanche said previously was cancelled, really was cancelled, and b.) Trump’s IRS immunity, in Cornyn’s words, “does not extend to people beyond the parties to the lawsuit.” Trump and Blanche met these two conditions, or purported to, and so Cornyn and Tillis changed their votes to aye. Blanche put in writing that “there is no fund” and he posted his Senate testimony stating that the IRS indemnity applies only to the Trump family plaintiffs (Donald, Eric, and Don, Jr.) and to the Trump Organization.
There are persuasive reasons to doubt whether Cornyn’s and Tillis’s conditions truly have been met. These are described here, for instance, and here. But don’t let’s lose sight of the lameness of Cornyn’s and Tillis’s conditions even if they are legitimately met. The outrageousness of Trump’s lawsuit should have yielded no concessions at all from the Justice Department (and the courts may yet throw them out). Why didn’t Cornyn and Tillis get that? Why didn’t they condition a nay vote for Blanche on demonstrated proof that both the slush fund and the IRS immunity deal were kaput? (I set aside here the many other arguments to oppose Blanche to keep the focus on Trump’s extreme anchoring.)
Trump filed a kleptocratic lawsuit against the federal government that itself could be grounds for impeachment. Any settlement in such circumstances is intolerable because Trump’s legal claim possessed no merit and the mechanism for settling it possessed no legitimacy. Cornyn and Tillis surely understand this. They owe Trump nothing. They are 74 and 65, respectively, so any future opportunities in Republican politics would seem, even in this gerontocratic moment, quite limited. Yet they accepted the warped reality Trump created that he ought to get something out of his $10 billion lawsuit. Why did they do that?
Maybe they just didn’t read their Voss. In Never Split the Difference Voss writes that “no deal is better than a bad deal. If you feel you can’t say ‘no’ then you’ve taken yourself hostage…. Never be needy for a deal.” Cornyn and Tillis’s willingness from the start to allow Trump some of his IRS indemnity showed they were, for no apparent reason, needy for a deal. Maybe it’s a Senate thing. It is, after all, a place that prides itself on being the world’s greatest deliberative body. Deliberation isn’t always such a great idea.
Trump was not needy for a deal. At one point he threatened to withdraw Blanche’s nomination over this dispute temporarily until January, when Cornyn and Tillis would have left. Cornyn and Tillis should have replied: “Be our guest.” Instead, they “worked collaboratively” with Blanche, according to “a source familiar with the meeting.” Why weren’t they working uncooperatively? Trump was.
This was a make-believe conflict from the beginning. Cornyn and Tillis had some power to deny Blanche Senate confirmation, but they had no power to keep Blanche from remaining as attorney general in an acting capacity. Blanche was likely going to be attorney general either way, just as President Joe Biden’s nominee for Labor secretary, Julie Su, remained acting Labor secretary after the Senate wouldn’t confirm her. In both instances, their previous Senate confirmations as deputies allowed them to be acting secretaries indefinitely. For this reason, I was surprised Cornyn and Tillis picked a fight over Blanche in the first place.
But if they were going to have this fight, they should have really had it. When a person makes an outrageous demand, the appropriate response isn’t “Let’s negotiate.” The appropriate response is “Hell no.” There’s no honor in compromising under such circumstances. The United States Senate is the last place to understand that.
This Is the Real Story of Trump’s Presidency—If Democrats Will Tell It
On Saturday morning, Donald Trump posted more than 40 times on his own social media platform, Truth Social, which is his primary megaphone. Nearly all of these posts could charitably be described as AI slop, and none of them is worth dwelling on at any length. OK, fine: In one image, he wore a garish, bedazzled white jumpsuit reminiscent of Vegas-era Elvis; in another, he was depicted as a screaming George Washington, leading soldiers in the Revolutionary War. He posted a doctored photo of Bruce Springsteen looking haggard, and bragged about his own physique at 80, claiming he was “aging in reverse.”
How much would you pay to access such posts slightly faster than nearly every other human? Truth Social reportedly is charging as much as $100,000 per month to high-frequency trading firms to gain access to the website’s API, allowing traders to see these stupid posts a few milliseconds before everyone else. The service was announced a few weeks ago, resulting in accusations of self-dealing and a Democratic bill (that will go nowhere) to ban selling speedy access to the president’s posts. Meanwhile, thanks to congressional Republicans, Trump has held onto his immunity from IRS audits, his (probably spyware-filled) plane from Qatar, and the billions of dollars he’s already raked in by selling the presidency.
This is the story of so much of Trump’s presidency: an unending series of scandals that amount to the biggest act of public corruption in American history. The scandals just keep coming, and yet, aside from complaints from the usual corners—the minority party, The New Republic, etc.—they’re largely greeted by a collective shrug. Of course Trump is corrupt. Of course he’s profiting from the presidency. What will it take to snap Americans out of this complacency?
The Truth Social API scheme is debased, even by Trump’s standards. As with many of his scams, it comes with a fig leaf: Truth Social is not just selling access to Trump’s posts, but to those of the top-performing accounts on the platform, which likely include those belonging to other administration officials like JD Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Kash Patel, as well as the official White House account. But there is only one account that matters on Truth Social—and it certainly matters a lot, especially to high-frequency traders. Trump’s posts have gotten dumber and more deranged, but they still have the power to move markets. You’re at least as likely to hear updates about the Iran war or tariffs there as you would from “official” White House sources.
More importantly, Trump’s updates are more chaotic and unpredictable than others, making them all the more appealing to traders. Selling access to them is a flagrant and naked act of corruption, allowing the most vampiric buyers and sellers on Wall Street an edge to make vast amounts of money that will never “trickle down” to ordinary Americans. Most of the time, these traders will get AI-generated images of Trump’s various obsessions, like his planned “triumphal” arch or his belief that he’s up there with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, or “ReTruths” of Fox News and Breitbart stories. But sometimes they will get real news that they can act on, to the tune of millions or more.
They may also get news that has been ginned up especially for them. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this scheme is the fact that it incentivizes Trump to use his Truth Social feed to make news that moves markets—and therefore increases demand for these $100,000 subscriptions. Given the volatile war in Iran, this could quite literally be a matter of life and death: The bigger the news Trump creates, the more subscribers he will likely rake in. And that money ends up in his pockets.
At the same time, Trump has used one flagrantly offensive and unconstitutional move—a propose $1.8 billion slush fund that would go to people who claimed they were victims of malicious prosecution by the Department of Justice (like January 6 rioters)—as cover for another: permanent immunity for himself, a long-suspected tax cheater, from IRS investigations. Senate Republicans successfully held up Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general until he provided (nonbinding) guarantees that the slush fund would not move forward; the IRS immunity deal is very much still in place, and has, predictably, received much less coverage than the comparably more odious slush fund.
Some of the apathy surrounding these stories stems from the fact that the president has long benefited from the common belief that American politicians are corrupt, which has ironically helped cloak Trump as he swiftly became the most corrupt politician in American history. As with much of his political persona, there is the sense that he is doing things openly that other politicians do secretly—even when that’s not really true, as in the case of his literal selling of the presidency. Similarly, because the Democrats are out of power and the GOP is completely under Trump’s control, there’s nothing that really can be done officially—at least not yet. This, too, has oddly helped Trump because it has provided the perception of invulnerability. Because Trump is getting away with it, which he is, it must be OK. And for those who don’t think it’s OK, the assumption is that Democrats aren’t stopping him because they’re feckless, when in fact it’s because voters denied them a scintilla of power under Trump’s second term.
This has also led to a prevailing narrative that Trump is a teflon politician, someone uncommonly immune to scandal. It is certainly true that no president has ever faced so many serious scandals and nonetheless survived. Still, I’m not sure this narrative is quite right. Though Trump is still president, he has clearly been damaged by his laundry list of misdeeds. He is historically unpopular, with an approval rating hovering in the low 30s. He has held onto power in large part because he has held onto a sizable support among Republicans, allowing him to wield unprecedented influence over his party, and because he is the most shameless figure in American political history. By never apologizing or admitting wrong, he can always fight on—even if each fight diminishes him.
Still, these two stories from the past week—Trump selling access to his social media posts, and Republicans preserving his IRS immunity—tell us something important about his presidency. These scandals have largely been treated separately by opposing politicians and the media, which is understandable: They are separate stories. But they are also part of a larger story—perhaps the largest story—of Trump’s presidency, which is his brazen and ever-expanding corruption. He is lazy and stupid, but he has been very dogged in using his perch as the country’s leader to pilfer taxpayers and enrich himself and his billionaire cronies.
Trump hops from scandal to scandal because each one is treated as a separate. By the time public interest focuses on one scandal, another has emerged. It is exhausting, but—from Trump’s perspective—effective. He takes damage but always lives to see another day (and make another dollar). That’s made possible in part by his destruction of presidential norms and ethics, but also by the fact that his party controls the House and Senate. The Republicans will run cover for him as long as he remains popular with the base, which, I suspect, he always will be.
But the Democrats will almost certainly retake one, if not both, chambers of Congress in the fall. When they do, their biggest task will be to restrain this administration—and a huge part of that will involve investigating this corruption. But to do that effectively, they must weave these scandals into a larger narrative, not just pick one or two that seem particularly odious or emblematic. This should be easy. The Democrats will spend the fall campaigning primarily on what has been the biggest issue of the post-pandemic era: the affordability crisis. Prices are rising, real wages are going down, and Americans are anxious and pissed off. While many voters are struggling to get by, one man is doing better than ever. He made more than $2 billion last year alone. And he did it by selling the highest, most sacred office in the land.
This week in Santa Cruz County business: Volunteer Center names new director as longtime exec retires; new life ahead for Casalegno’s market
Shawn Peterson takes over for Karen Delaney at a powerhouse local nonprofit, a revival for a Soquel institution and names, numbers and dates to know – Jessica M. Pasko runs it all down in her weekly survey of Santa Cruz County business.
Things to do in Santa Cruz
The Days Between
Secret Identities
Peak Dumplings
The Editor’s Desk
Letters
Double trouble for Microsoft as pre-owned software licenses claims converge
Trump’s Fury at Reflecting Pool Mess Darkens as Damning New Leaks Hit
Donald Trump has been raging at Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for Washington, DC, because she dropped those high-profile prosecutions for alleged vandalism of his Reflecting Pool renovation. That pressure is corrupt on its own. But new leaks are making it look even worse. CBS News reports that Pirro actually carried a box of evidence to the White House showing that the facts simply didn’t support those prosecutions. The meeting got “heated,” per CBS, seemingly meaning Trump wanted prosecutions in spite of what the facts and the law dictated. Meanwhile, we just learned this fiasco triggered private “tirades” from Trump, further underscoring his quest for lawless prosecutions. We talked to former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade, author of The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government. She walks us through just how deeply irregular this presidential conduct truly is, discusses what has been lost at DOJ, and reflects on how a Democratic House and/or Senate can rein in all this madness next year. Listen to this episode here.