NYT paywall"New York Times" regular columnist Frank Bruni, castigates Senator Susan Collins and other Republican Senators for their lack of opposition to some of Donald Trump's more controversial Cabinet appointments. The headline on his column reads, "Susan Collins and Her Cowardly Caucus Bow Down to Trump."
"I wonder what, in the end, persuaded Senator Susan Collins that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had the right stuff to be the official steward of Americans’ health."
NYT
"He’s a crank and Collins is a coward. Worse yet, she’s a bellwether. Make that a church bell, the kind that tolls when there’s a death. In this case, it marks the passing of any independence, any dignity, any scruples among Republicans in the Senate, who are letting President Trump have whomever he wants and seem poised to let him do whatever he pleases because it’s the easy path, the one that protects them from his rancor and retribution."
"Collins’s obeisance is especially significant because she was once thought to be a potential holdout against Trump’s most reckless appointments and rapacious behavior, a moderate who would moderate him. I remember conversations just months ago in which political observers speculated that because of her and a handful of other skeptical Senate Republicans, Trump would have to resort to trickery — maybe recess appointments, perhaps the designation of “acting” cabinet members who didn’t need Senate approval — to get any outlandish picks for top jobs across the finish line."
"Oh, they have their talking points. Their rococo rationalizations. They tell the world or themselves that they’re simply respecting the will of voters by giving a duly elected president his preferred team. That they’ll be keeping a close eye on how these unconventional department and agency heads perform. That they’ll speak up and step in if such intervention is required. (Pro tip: Don’t hold your breath.)"
"I think of Collins. She in fact did vote against Hegseth, but that was apparently less a bold stand than a last gasp. She’s no doubt nervous about next year, when she’s up for re-election: mustn’t motivate the MAGA brigade to come after her. But what’s the point of the office if you’ve junked your principles to cling to it? And what’s to become of a Congress — of a country — that watches a disaster unfold and convinces itself that submission is the prudent response?"
David Brooks NYT
"Over the past 20 years or so many of us social observer types have been writing about the horrific chasms separating the educated class (people with college degrees) from the working class (people without)."
Brooks cites sites difference in life expectancy, children born out of wedlock, number of friends and educational achievement of their children as statistics bearing out the differences.
"If America elected a populist as president, you would expect him to devote his administration to addressing these inequities, to boosting the destinies of working-class Americans. But that’s not what President Trump is doing. He seems to have no plans to narrow the education chasms, no plans to narrow the health outcome chasms or the family structure chasms. He has basically no plans to revive the communities that have been decimated by postindustrialization."
"Why is that? The simplest answer is that Trump really seems not to give a crap about the working class. Trump is not a populist. He campaigns as a populist, but once he has power, he is the betrayer of populism."
"In 2018 the organization More in Common released the “Hidden Tribes” survey. It found that two groups were driving American politics, which it called progressive activists and devoted conservatives. These groups are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but they have a lot in common. They are the richest of all the groups in the More in Common typology. They are the whitest of all the groups. They are among the best educated of all the groups. When I wrote a column about the bitter feud between these two elite groups, I headlined it “The Rich White Civil War.” That headline still accurately describes what we’re seeing."
"You might say that progressives have it coming. The moment they began shutting conservative and working-class voices out of their institutions, they were inviting a backlash, and now here it is.
"But here’s the problem: As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in “The Great Gatsby,” rich people are careless. They break things. The members of the Trumpist elite think they’re going after the educated elites at U.S.A.I.D. and the N.I.H., but you know who’s really going to pay the price? It’s the woman in Namibia who is going to die of AIDS because PEPFAR has been eviscerated. It’s the child in Ohio who’s going to die of cancer because medical research was slowed. It’s the future citizens of America whose lives will be worse because their state institutions no longer function. It’s the working-class communities that will continue to languish because Trump ignores their main challenges and focuses instead on culture war distractions.
"Here’s the essence of Trumpism: It’s to be blithely unconcerned that people without a college degree die about eight years sooner or that hundreds of thousands of Africans might now die of AIDS but to go into paroxysms of moral panic because of who competes in a high school girls’ swim meet."
