The “strange new respect” for Marjorie Taylor Greene

Plus Bidenflation, private equity, and the shoddy world-building of Harry Potter

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene presides over a House Oversight Subcommittee hearing on U.S. foreign aid. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker)

This is the week that we started to see some real signs of Trump as a lame duck, whether that’s Congress bucking him on the Epstein files or something more subtle like the Senate Armed Services Committee delaying votes on obscure-but-important Pentagon nominees.

And yet, I don’t think we should let those glimmers of normalcy distract from the reality that we are still experiencing an extreme outlier presidency in terms of personalistic rule.

Trump is flying around the world with Jensen Huang making arrangements about chip exports with no objective standard or real process. The Pentagon says it’s risky to sell F-35s to Saudi Arabia because they may become a vector for exfiltrating American military secrets to China, but Trump decided he doesn’t care about that. In all this stuff he is freely blending domestic political considerations, his ego-driven quest for a Nobel Prize, and the high levels of corruption within himself, his family, and his entire inner circle. These are kind of below-the-radar issues that don’t matter very much to most voters, but that’s precisely what’s fallen apart: the basic functioning of professional, orderly, law-bound government. It’s all very bad, and it also raises the question of whether there is any way Trump can manage an open succession process.

There’s some not-so-cheery thoughts for your Friday morning.

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Saira: What’s your opinion of the FIRE and early retirement movement?

I’m a bad person to ask because while I would obviously change my habits if I were a billionaire, I would also obviously keep posting political takes, whether or not I needed the money. In fact, we see every day that billionaires love to post their political takes as a hobby so I feel very lucky to have this job.

For those who don’t know, this is “financial independence, retire early.” (I am a fan of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, but that’s a different FIRE). It is basically the idea that by working hard and having an unusually high savings rate, you’ll be able to retire early and enjoy more leisure and consumption in the long run than the typical American. I find a lot of the specifics touted in the FIRE community to be extreme and kind of misguided, but in a broad sense I think that most Americans (especially when on the younger side) do over-consume and under-save without adequate concern for the long-term, so I’m hesitant to be too FIRE-critical. More people should learn more about compound interest and the upside to deferred gratification.

loubyornotlouby: what’s the deal with Far Left Intellectuals and cultural figures suddenly infatuation with Alt Right figures like MTG, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens? Do we really need “MTG has some good ideas?” Discourse? All of these folks have been known quantities (bullshitters, liars, etc) for a while now, so why suddenly would Far Left folks feel compelled to “engage” with them in anything but a disapproving fashion as if their position taking is anything close to sincere? Is the horseshoe closing in on a circle?

I find the discourse around Marjorie Taylor Greene in particular to be pretty troubling. If you roll back in time several years, it was pretty common to hear pro-Palestinian advocates calling out Jewish institutions and elements of the press for largely giving her a pass on antisemitic statements because she was kosher on Israel, while critics of the U.S.-Israel relationship were held up to a microscope.