The president put a 90-day pause on some tariffs in response to the dangerous instability that came out of the bond markets. Other tariffs are still in play, especially the ridiculous 104 percent tax on goods from China and the across-the-board 10 percent tax on all other imports.

The reaction on the left went something like this: Ha ha, that clown doesn’t understand anything! He thought he could just barge in here and do whatever he wants. Well, reality sure put him in his place!

This belief seemed validated by people like Paul Krugman. The famed economist watched closely as markets reacted to the tariffs. Earlier this week, he said a “nightmare scenario” was taking shape in which “falling asset prices cause a scramble for cash, which leads to fire sales that drive prices even lower, and the whole system implodes.”

The implosion of the financial system would have made for very bad headlines, so that’s probably the reason for Trump’s decision. Liberals cheered: He lies with every breath but he can’t change reality!

But there’s a problem. I think liberals confuse learning and understanding with politics. I think lots of liberals are satisfied with knowing better than the dopes who are in charge. Knowing better feels like being better, and being better is the same thing as winning. 

This is complicated by the fact that learning and understanding do make you a winner. The way I see it, you are a better person if you educate yourself, develop a craft, amass expertise or just understand how things work. You have internalized the republican virtues of merit, determination and individual responsibility. You have made manifest the democratic spirit of citizenship. You are what America needs. 

And it’s because you are what America needs that the Trump regime is going to war with what made you a better person. It is starving out of the government virtually everything to do with acquired knowledge and skill: in policy, science, medicine, arts and culture, really anything. And it is applying ruinous tariffs to immiserate anyone who has benefited from those things, which is to say, the entire middle class.

If the Trump regime can enfeeble or annihilate (liberal) Americans who have chosen to empower themselves individually through learning and understanding – which is to say, people who have amassed enough know-how to be resistant to propaganda and lies – there would be little standing in the way of the regime’s efforts to redefine reality. 

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In the wake of the stunning news that Trump is planning to take over Columbia University, I hope you’ll watch this speech I gave yesterday.

It details Trump’s plan to destroy democracy’s organs of accountability and dissent: the press, universities and lawyers.

1/ Intro pic.twitter.com/4ntbYsDePw

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) April 11, 2025

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There’s another problem. The regime has been moving fast to “destroy democracy’s organs of accountability,” according to Chris Murphy, my senator. Those organs are the press, universities and law firms. “You don’t need a battle royal between the president and the Supreme Court for democracy to die,” he said during a floor speech Thursday. 

“If journalists are constantly looking over their shoulders and unable to report on the truth; if protest is suppressed, even moderately, at universities; if lawyers start providing cover, instead of uncovering corruption and illegality in the regime; if companies start being mouthpieces for the regime as a price of doing business – if all that happens, we are not a real democracy. We are a fake democracy.”

Some liberals assume such evil is self-evident. They believe that the regime cannot expect to spit in our faces, then demand gratitude in response. They predict that Trump is going to be shocked to learn that people really hate that. Sadism and cruelty may be the things that maga dreams are made of, they say, but that’s not how the real world works. 

But that is how the real world works.

The president isn’t the only one who’s destroying those organs of accountability. They are destroying themselves. This is especially true of the press corps. Trump can intimate reporters, censor them, call them the enemy of the people. No matter how bad things get, they come back for more humiliation, indeed, are grateful for the honor. 

This matters, because the things reporters do end up becoming the norm for the rest of us. If a press corps habitually refuses to defend itself against a regime that hopes for its annihilation, as this one does, that becomes so normal as to be uncontroversial. Under those conditions, evil is never self-evident. It becomes an argument, and anyone making that argument risks becoming the enemy of the state.

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Liberals tend to believe two things about evil. Either it’s not really evil – it’s ignorance, superstition or some other human failing – or if it is evil, it needs no explanation. Anyone can see it with their own two eyes. Pointing it out might actually be insulting to people’s intelligence.

This attitude arose from the mid-20th century. Segregation was thrown away (the de jure kind, that is). Civil rights and the blessings of plural democracy had a consensus. Wherever they stood on issues over the proceeding years, liberals could presume a shared understanding that the Nazis were bad. Klansmen were bad. No one had to point it out.

It was just reality.

But reality is not fixed. It can bend and sway, as anything can bend and sway when subjected to democracy’s power to turn virtue to vice and vice to virtue with enough ruthlessness and cunning (money, violence and lies). It can make good things unpopular, bad things popular. 

And here we are. Fascism is fashionable again.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer talked today about the message being sent by Republicans, who can’t defend their abject obedience to Trump. That’s going to hurt them, he said. How? Not because of anything the Democrats said. “Public opinion is everything,” Schumer said. “The public is turning against what Trump is doing.”

But the 20th century is gone. Liberals can’t indulge the idea that there are inherent limits to how far he can go, as if there were an invisible force that exists outside of politics that will intervene on democracy’s behalf – whether that force is God or public opinion or “how the real world works.” Liberals are not going to get what they want by leveraging reality. Trump has changed reality and will continue to.

Liberals will get what they want when they do what the liberals of old did: propagandize the hell out of the populace and harangue citizens into doing the right thing for its own sake without any fear. I mean, if you need polls to tell what evil is, what kind of liberal are you?

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