by liberal japonicus
This is the second post from this podcast by Hasan Minaj, with the transcript for the podcast linked here. Jacob Soboroff’s second book is Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster and he recounts a very strange anecdote that has been knocking around in my head.
Minaj pulls out these details from the book, and this story is that Soboroff is originally from the Palisades, which was ground zero for the LA wildfires. He and his family had moved away, but when the fires started, he immediately went there to report and this LATimes article talks about it.
He has a lot of interesting anecdotes and points, but the one that I can’t shake is this. The Palisades is next to Santa Monica, which is Stephen Miller’s hometown and while he is reporting on the fires, he gets contacted by Katie Miller, Stephen Miller’s wife, asking him to check on the house of her in-laws, Stephen Miller’s parents, which is in the Palisades. Soboroff and Katie Miller were not in any way friends and in fact, Katie Miller was a flak for Homeland Security and after Soboroff’s reporting on family separation, they were on the outs. So Soboroff was pretty surprised that Katie Miller reached out to him.
He goes to the parent’s home and it has been destroyed and he let her know that. I’ll let Soboroff take it from here.
And like many friends of mine, she asked, can I go check on their house to see that I was the only person that she knew that was there? And she asked me to go look. And I did. And their house burned down and I let her know. And frankly, I felt awful for them and devastated and sad. And I thought, in a way, maybe this is going to be that olive branch that allows us to see these types of disasters and have a shared sense of humanity and to feel like we were in this together. But she had just been appointed to work for Elon Musk at Doge. And within, I think hours, both Donald Trump and Elon Musk were tweeting misinformation and disinformation about the fires. And it did the opposite of have a thawing effect with Katie. And in fact, in the long run, when it was an arsonist that was announced to have started the fire that became the Palisades fire, you know, she’s tweeting cheekily about, oh, I thought it was climate change. It didn’t do anything for all of us to see things in a common way.
They go on to talk about it more, but to me, this sounds like textbook sociopathy. The Manual of Mental Disorders lists it as Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), which is a “pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others” and this sounds exactly right, except for the fact that the anti- in antisocial has a hard time when you have whatever percentage you have who are willing to cheer Orange Douche on. Both Adorno and Bauman talked about the notion of negative ethics, where good and bad were swapped. When I read the anecdote of Katie Miller and it just seemed to be of a piece.
Seamus Healey wrote The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes and the end has often been quoted, but this story reminds me of the beginning:
Heroes. Victims. Gods and human beings.
All throwing shapes, every one of them
Convinced he’s in the right, all of them glad
To repeat themselves and their every last mistake,
No matter what.
People so deep into
Their own self-pity, self-pity buoys them up.
People so staunch and true, they’re fixated,
Shining with self-regard like polished stones.
And their whole life spent admiring themselves
For their own long-suffering.
Licking their wounds
And flashing them around like decorations.
When in high school, Miller ran for some class office – student council president or similar. His platform was that he would “say the things nobody else would say”. The example he offered was that he sick and tired of being told to pick up his own trash, because they paid janitors to do that kind of thing.
What a funny guy! Such a comedian.
He was a malicious, shit-stirring, smart-assed little punk. It’s not unusual, but most folks grow out of it. He has embraced it as his personal brand.
I’m not a mind-reader or a psychologist, so I can’t really speak to whether he is clinincally sociopathic. That said, his public statements and actions are those of a sociopath.
If he’s not one, he certainly does a great imitation.
I once had a long-ish conversation with a friend about whether everyone has some redeeming aspect – some spark of decency, no matter how deeply hidden, which could perhaps be brought to light.
No, my friend said. Some people are just bad people.
I think Miller is one of those people. I think he enjoys it.
the whole admin is just aspiring grifters in the service of narcissistic sociopaths.
thanks, Republicans.
Oh, I think there are also narcissistic sociopaths in service of aspiring grifters. It is, unfortunately, quite synergistic.
The next few lines too, which I love for how they render the mess of us.
…
I hate it, I always hated it, and I am
A part of it myself.
And a part of you,
For my part is the chorus, and the chorus
Is more or less a borderline between
The you and the me and the it of it.
lj: I had never read the whole of The Cure of Troy, only the end. The beginning which you quote is absolutely wonderful. I’ve just ordered the book – thank you for bringing this to ObWi.
this is just insane.
https://www.eschatonblog.com/2026/01/the-best-guy-in-trump-adminsitration.html
Well, this administration had already gotten our (pretty nearly all ex- by this point) allies to stops sharing some info. Just because they can’t be trusted. If Patel publishes this, expect them all to just walk away. US satellite intel will take time to replace, so they may keep up with restrictions on which of their people can talk to us. But even that will be just a limited, temporary expedient.
After all, it’s about intelligence. And for this administration, intelligence seems to be generally anathema.
So, just like how all the “sources” in Russia went dark right after Trump first took office, and met privately in the Oval Office with the Russian Ambassador?
The GOP has elected TWICE a guy who is objectively a traitor to the US. And they’re proud of it.
Meanwhile, talking of Moral Insanity, this is an extract from The Critic. I don’t agree with the entirety of the piece (fairly reflexively anti-Europe), but you can’t disagree with this:
Trump’s latest insult was to sneer that non-American troops who served in Afghanistan “stayed a little back”. This ignobly underplays the sacrifices of thousands of coalition troops — including those of 457 Britons who died — and is being received with outrage online. Actually, I am not sure I have ever seen such bipartisan condemnation.
Something else that Trump said seemed almost worse, though. “We’ve never needed them,” he said, dismissively, of his NATO allies. Now, I actually agree that the US didn’t “need” NATO support in 2001. It didn’t need to embark on a foolish and destructive war in Afghanistan, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people before the Taliban simply took control again. But it certainly claimed to need a “worldwide coalition”. So, if anything, Trump should be apologetic rather than dismissive. He is sneering at people for not sacrificing enough for the sake of American hubris.
Given that, for example, coalition casualties in Afghanistan in response to 9/11 included:
USA 7.96 deaths per million of population
Denmark 7.82 deaths per million of population
UK 7.25 deaths per million of population
I’m sure you can imagine, even if you haven’t seen them, the responses ricocheting around the world from former servicemen to Trump’s and Hegseth’s comments. One I’ve just seen from someone called Andrew Fox, alongside a picture of a chestful of medals, says
I always thought it was super nice of the Americans to give me that badge for “staying a little off” from the front lines.
It’s nice to be appreciated!
American friends, especially my former brothers in arms – I’m sorry your President shames you daily. You deserve better.
That poem is exactly right. In terms of civic involvement, sociopathy is the norm with R base voters, combined with self-aggrandizement and self-pity. I wonder if there has always been a percentage of the population that is like this or is or were they created by Faux and the rest of the hate propaganda network? Or always there, but more apparent now, give the decades Republicans have spent encouraging this mindset?
All the worse given tRump’s phantom bone spurs. The f**king gall…
Yup. Four educational deferments, and eventually one bone spur exemption. But it’s OK, we do know that his own personal Vietnam was risking STIs, and that was the “front line” he bravely risked…
OK, on lj’s formulation that this thread is about American reaction (as opposed to foreign reaction) to Trump, this is David Brooks in today’s NYT. I know he is not any kind of favourite on ObWi, but since it is decades since I read Tacitus I was very struck by this:
Tacitus was especially good at describing the effect the tyrant has on the people around him. When the tyrant first takes power, there is a “rush into servitude” as great swarms of sycophants suck up to the great man. The flattery must forever escalate and grow more fawning, until every follower’s dignity is shorn away. Then comes what you might call the disappearance of the good, as morally healthy people lie low in order to survive. Meanwhile, the whole society tends to be anesthetized. The relentless flow of appalling events eventually overloads the nervous system; the rising tide of brutality, which once seemed shocking, comes to seem unremarkable.
As the disease of tyranny progresses, citizens may eventually lose the habits of democracy — the art of persuasion and compromise, interpersonal trust, an intolerance for corruption, the spirit of freedom, the ethic of moderation. “It is easier to crush men’s spirits and their enthusiasm than to revive them,” Tacitus wrote.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/23/opinion/trump-authoritarian-power.html?unlocked_article_code=1.G1A.6RhQ.aLVPTM4t9pmB&smid=url-share
Sir Rod Stewart released a video statement about Trump’s diss of UK soldiers.
That Tacticus quote is right on the money-which is why the actions in Portland and Minneapolis are so important and inspiring. There’s no giving in to cynicism there and a strong assertion of the moral values the dictator is trying to destroy.
Thanks for the David Brooks link, though let me rag on it a bit. I wish he had spent a little less time the previous 2 years claiming that everyone who was pointing out the direction this clown car was rolling had their hair on fire and a little more time putting up some resistance, even if only by observing it in a column or at a speaking event. I remember him saying that Trump was ‘the most consequential president in our lifetime’, which sounds a lot like the sentence in the reference letter “When you come to know him as we know him, you will appreciate him as we appreciate him.”
The column has Brooks going back to Tacitus, but it would have been nice if he invoked Tacitus to discuss some other points of the MAGA movement, perhaps noting after one of those circle jerk cabinet meetings that ‘Flatterers are the worst kind of enemies’ or, in considering the whole cult of MAGA “In their ignorance they called it culture, when it was part of their enslavement.”
Brooks has spent a lot of time claiming that the judiciary would ultimately function to stop Trump and that what people should do is stay at their desks. He’s still playing the same games when he says
And no, I don’t think America is headed toward anything like a Rome-style collapse. Our institutions are too strong, and our people, deep down, still have the same democratic values.
I think in response to the line about how everyone needed to stay at their desks, Jamelle Bouie said that this is really hard when the desk is being sold for parts. (I hope you can post Bouie’s reply to Brooks, he’s weighed in a few times in response, I think, and I’m sure that it will be worth reading)
Battle hardened vets on the blog can also note that Tacitus was the nom de blog of one Josh Trevino (the tilde over the n came later), who got into some problems with editorials on Malaysian politics, but, like a bad penny, pops up again and again. I understand that one can’t blame the original Tacitus for the sins of the nouveau Tacman, but I have to wonder about the connection in Brooks’ mind. The Tacitus quote “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws” embodies one notion that has gotten us into this mess, so a little reflection might be in order from Brooks, though that is not his strong suit.
Again, apologies for ragging on the article, but as you note, Brooks is certainly not a favorite of mine.
I understand that one can’t blame the original Tacitus for the sins of the nouveau Tacman, but I have to wonder about the connection in Brooks’ mind.
LOL, classic!
As requested, I went looking for Jamelle Bouie’s response, but it’s not out yet, obvs.
as you note, Brooks is certainly not a favorite of mine.
Nor of russell’s, and probably various others here. It’s interesting, but I realise I don’t really have favourites. I read the arguments of the various commentators, and sometimes I think they’re worthwhile, and sometimes not. Quite frequently, people with whom I’ve deeply disagreed on other subjects say things I think are worth considering, or a hopeful sign from commentators who might influence a constituency with whom I very much disagree (like David Frum), and I take some comfort in that.
I guess, quite properly, everybody’s mileage varies….
>I remember him saying that Trump was ‘the most consequential president in our lifetime’
i’ve been thinking the same thing.
if you disregard the direction of the things he’s done and only focus on their magnitude, it’s hard to say he hasn’t changed far more than anyone since FDR. the problem is that all he’s done is negative.
also, re Tacitus the blogger – he’s a reason a few of us are here. back in the mists, his blog was a place where people could try to seriously discuss things (the Iraq invasion being the primary thing). and a lot of the early ObWi crowd were also Tacitus regulars. there was even interlinking. some of us followed those regulars from Tacitus to ObWi. for a while, Travino seemed like one of the sane Republicans. he grew out of it.
i’ve been thinking the same thing.
if you disregard the direction of the things he’s done and only focus on their magnitude, it’s hard to say he hasn’t changed far more than anyone since FDR. the problem is that all he’s done is negative.
I agree.
Regarding his consequentialism in domestic policy, everybody here is without doubt a better judge of it than I.
But in foreign policy terms alone, he has single-handedly destroyed your allies’ trust in the (within reason) goodwill of America, and therefore of a roughly stable world order. Nobody sane ever expected the US to act against its own interests, but it was taken for granted that your interests would not be seen purely in terms of short-term financial gain and might making right tout court.
The open contempt for your European and other allies by Trump and J D Vance, enthusiastically approved and magnified by their appalling henchpeople, has been an extraordinary wake up call. Everyone knows that every nation contains these kinds of amoral, ignorant bigots, but nobody really expected that the greatest power in the world, and one of the originators of the post-war settlement, would produce politicians who allowed one its two main political parties to become their creature.
What GftNC said.
And no, I don’t think America is headed toward anything like a Rome-style collapse. Our institutions are too strong, and our people, deep down, still have the same democratic values.
It seems clear that he has missed a couple of relevant details:
1) several decades of diligent work by the Federalist Society have produced a court system, now including the Supreme Court, which is no longer a reliable strong defender of those democratic values. With a bit of venue shopping, it’s often possible to get a judge who is an ideologue rather than a jurist. When that’s not possible, the majority on the Supreme Court is — the main check there being that they can only hear a limited number of cases, so some precedents guarding democracy remain. For now.
2) turns out the Congress depended on tradition and good faith on the part of its members in order to function reliably. Gingrich started chipping away at that, and McConnell raised bad faith to a high art. At this point, one has to search really hard to find a Republican Congressman who shows signs of having ever heard of good faith. Or has something resembling a backbone; at least until their reelection is seriously threatened.
3) a lot of the institutions in the Executive Branch were staffed by people who are actually experts in their field. The Civil Service Act protected them from politics, so they could do their jobs. But thru a variety of ploys, the Civil Service Act has been neutered for those who will not knuckle under to the ideologues placed at the top.
In short, on the national level, those institutions are far less robust than we thought they were. The state and local levels are still solid, at least in the places most of us live. But their ablility to resist Federal overreach is limited, especially when it entails use of the court system.
As for our people, we always knew we had those among us who disliked democracy — at least when the results were not perfectly aligned with their views of the moment. But there are rather more than we thought. Worse, there are way too many who simply can’t (or at least couldn’t) believe anyone would be elected and then trash the system. They are learning (“Hey, I didn’t mean you coud do that here!”), but whether it will be soon enough remains to be seen.
We may yet avoid a Rome-style collapse.** But it will be a near run thing.
** Domestically. In international relations that ship has sailed. And won’t return, at the earliest, until everyone in the world currently past their teens has not just passed from the scene but died.
wj’s response to Brooks’s ritual performance of balance calls to mind one of the books I read early in my Ph.D. studies when I was building my Media Studies chops: Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, by Alexander Galloway. The central idea there being that what makes the modern networked world continue to function is not deregulation, nor is it centralization – it’s the informal and changeable rules that negotiate the conflicts between those two poles, which Galloway identifies as protocol.
In the US, that protocol was largely a function of what we call The Deep State. Congress makes laws. Private citizens make products. The Market exists as a fluctuating hologram of the shifting dynamics between those two. The Deep State oversees the negotiations between those two in order to steer the overall system and keep it functioning within acceptable parameters for both sides. (His digital analogy for this is the system of protocols that allowed TCP/IP to work with the DNS system to facilitate information exchange.
Galloway was, like most of the Media Studies people writing in the moment between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, a bit of a utopian technolibertarian. He did point out that the authoritarian nature of DNS
allows whole realms of the Web to be blacked out with the flip of a switch, but the belief was that those things would self-correct as protocol adjusted to keep the system moving.
We are living in the moment when protocol has been destroyed in order to prevent the system from moving to preserve the privilege of the powerful. Without the federal bureaucracy, and with the legislative branch neutered, we have only the executive and the judicial, operating top-down with no negotiation.
Anyway, thought I’d mention the book in case any of the (more) tech savvy (than me) here wanted to find it and take a look.
Don’t recall who originally wrote it, but “Bobo” Brooks has an MO:
Yak about some social ‘problem’.
Zoom out to 40,000 feet to ‘analyze’ it.
Zoom in to land on the GOP position.
Cash check from NYT.
It’s interesting, but I realise I don’t really have favourites. I read the arguments of the various commentators, and sometimes I think they’re worthwhile, and sometimes not. Quite frequently, people with whom I’ve deeply disagreed on other subjects say things I think are worth considering, or a hopeful sign from commentators who might influence a constituency with whom I very much disagree (like David Frum), and I take some comfort in that.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit. Definitely one of those chacun son gout sort of thing, but Snarki’s observation twigged why I don’t like Bobo, which is that everything seems to be in service of defending a GOP position and every observation seems to be linked to that.
It reminds me of the banning of Tacitus/Trevino from here. IIRC, he accused _Edward of promoting Islam when he quoted a Saudi cleric on some point. But (again iirc), the final step was when he came in under a different name to participate and try and put the same point across. As cleek mentioned, back in the day, he was part of the thrust and parry of the site, but there are (or at least were) norms and pretending to be someone else was a step too far. I feel like the site was proven right when he found a job that had him playing up the sodomy charges against Anwar Ibrahim because the government wanted him out of the picture. (and in a bizarre turn, Anwar Abrahim ended up forming a coalition with the guy who tried to throw him in prison and is now the current PM)
Now, Brooks hasn’t pretended to be someone else, but that unerring ability to land on a GOP friendly position suggests that what he says is driven by considerations outside of what I would think are important.
lj, I went back and read that Brooks piece more carefully. I must say, when he writes:
And no, I don’t think America is headed toward anything like a Rome-style collapse. Our institutions are too strong, and our people, deep down, still have the same democratic values.And no, I don’t think America is headed toward anything like a Rome-style collapse. Our institutions are too strong, and our people, deep down, still have the same democratic values.
I think he is deluded, although I hope not. But it seems crazily optimistic in a way that even wj isn’t these days.
However, on the subject that you and Snarki raise of his having an “unerring ability to land on a GOP friendly position”, it seems to me that
the whole piece is a really scathing denunciation of Trump’s character, conduct, motivations etc etc. And given, as we all see, that the GOP as a whole has cravenly and pathetically bent the knee to him, enabled him, acceded to his power grab from Congress and been totally mealy-mouthed about his attacks on the constitution, I think it’s odd to say that he is supporting the GOP.
I have no desire or need to defend David Brooks, but also no desire or need to automatically or instinctively condemn him. This may be because I have not been reading him all my life, and have not formed a fixed idea of him from which I find it difficult to depart. But we are in a time of flux – I’m happy to retain the ability to be open to the ways in which people’s views or prejudices might change, and to the ways in which they may be able to change the attitudes of people with whom I am in general disagreement.
GftNC – However, on the subject that you and Snarki raise of his having an “unerring ability to land on a GOP friendly position”, it seems to me that the whole piece is a really scathing denunciation of Trump’s character, conduct, motivations etc etc. And given, as we all see, that the GOP as a whole has cravenly and pathetically bent the knee to him, enabled him, acceded to his power grab from Congress and been totally mealy-mouthed about his attacks on the constitution, I think it’s odd to say that he is supporting the GOP.
I’d say that he’s lending cover to the GOP as a whole when he writes:
When you look at the things currently being done in the US, the majority of them are in line with what the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation have been working to get done for a lot longer than Trump has been on the scene. This administration is not acting on the whims of a mad king, they are taking advantage of the noise and foment that Clementine Caligula provokes to advance their own agenda. Brooks’ heaping of all this on He Who Slumbers head is some fine scapegoating. At the end of the day it allows him to put all the sins of the GOP on one man’s head and usher him into the desert, sins forgiven after having momentarily succumbed to a fever.
But really, the institutions are okay, and the people still believe in democracy in their hearts.
See? No one else in frame. No lackeys. No institutional agendas. No long assault on the judiciary to facilitate this takeover. No discussions of illiberal democracy and wishing for a Red Caesar. It’s all one madman dragging everyone else with him.
…so I guess this adds a second formula to the one that Snarki outlines. Sometimes it is the “zoom out until the particulars blur” tactic. This time it’s the “tight focus to leave others off camera” tactic.
Either way, it saves face for the people who continue to facilitate this push to authoritarian illiberalism.
Hey nous, I sent you an email a couple of days ago … if you didn’t get it, will you email me so I can try to reply to a correct address? It’s just a quick question….
Well, you certainly get no argument from me on the role played by the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society or the SCOTUS. And the roots of this have certainly been long in the growing, long before any dream of a Trump presidency. It just seems impossible to me to contemplate the particularly poisonous confluence of current circumstances without the craven behaviour of the GOP.
yikes, the Brooks debate again!
FWIW and for the record, my issue with Brooks is probably much simpler than y’alls.
He seems to live in, and speak from, a pretty privileged place. Which is all well and good, I live in and speak from a pretty privileged place.
But a lot of his writing seems to be along the lines of “If everyone would just calm down and stop being so extreme they would see that everything is kind of OK”.
Which is not really true for all the folks who don’t live in or speak from a pretty privileged place.
I think the Trump years have kind of freaked him out and made him understand that we all don’t live in the kind of well-groomed world that he does.
But I generally agree that if he thinks it’s all down to Trump, he is mistaken and is still wearing his blinders.
And that’s everything I have to say about Brooks.
On another topic, I encourage everyone reading this who lives in the US to get on the horn to your Senators and let them know you want them to NOT PASS funding for the DHS.
I think the (R)’s in the Senate are currently trying to figure out how to separate that stuff from the overall budget so that turning off the tap to DHS doesn’t shut the whole government down (again). Which tells me that they are finally beginning to understand that the current ICE/CBP thing is fucking toxic and might well lose them a (R) majority in the Senate.
But one way or another, it’s time to shut these fuckers down.
I try not to use bad language but the times are what they are.
Even if the DHS budget gets slashed, what would stop His Orangeness to just transfer funds from elsewhere*? Iirc he already does so in other places** and SCOTUS has essentially said that nothing can be done about it.
* “Defense” will get its usual boost, so it’s not as if there is no money available.
** and refuses to spend funds Congress has specified for use.