Letters from an American - January 29, 2025

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

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January 29th, 2025. In a conversation with Greg Sargent of The New Republic published today, writer Amanda Marcotte called out an important moment in White House press secretary Caroline Levitt's first press conference yesterday. When a reporter noted that egg prices have skyrocketed since President Trump took office and asked, what specifically is he doing to lower those costs for Americans? Levitt answered, really glad you brought this up because there's a lot of reporting out there

that is putting the onus on this White House for the increased cost of eggs. I would like to point out to each and every one of you that in 2024, when Joe Biden was in the Oval Office or upstairs in the residence sleeping, I'm not so sure, egg prices increased 65 percent in this country. We also have seen the cost of everything, not just eggs, bacon, groceries, gasoline have increased because of the inflationary policies of the last administration. During his campaign for the presidency, Trump repeatedly attacked Biden for the post-pandemic

inflation that afflicted the country, and promised to bring down the price of everything. Even before he took office, Trump had begun to walk back his promise, and JD Vance has also suggested price relief would take a little bit of time. Now, coffee and egg prices are at an all-time high, and the administration's solution is to attack Biden. No matter the incompetencies of the Trump presidency, Marcotte notes, it appears the answer will be, you might not like what we're doing, but don't you hate Democrats more?

President Richard Nixon's team pioneered this strategy before the 1970 midterm elections to rally wavering Republicans around the president's party. Nixon had won election with a promise that he would end the war in Vietnam honorably, but had, in fact, increased the U.S. presence there. By the end of 1969, with opposition mounting, he insisted that a silent majority

agreed with his Vietnam policies. Then, at the end of April 1970, he told the American people that he had sent ground troops into Vietnam's neighbor, Cambodia. Protests led to the killing of four college students at Ohio's Kent State University. Members of Nixon's key demographic, middle-class white Americans, threatened to abandon him. Nixon's advisors urged, middle-class white Americans, threatened to abandon him. Nixon's advisors urged him to win his voters back by attacking their opponents as lazy, dangerous, and un-American. They called their strategy positive

polarization because it stoked the anger they needed voters to feel in order to show up to vote, a development they saw as positive. Patrick Buchanan wrote a memo to Nixon urging him to take much stronger control over the nation, to manipulate the media, and to go to war with his opponents, whom he considered illegitimate, warning, we are in a contest over the soul of the country

now, and the decision will not be some middle compromise, it will be their kind of society or ours. Nixon so internalized this advice that by 1972 he was willing to sabotage his democratic opponents campaign in order to win, convinced that a democratic victory would destroy America. He ended up having to resign when his participation in covering up the bugging of the Democratic National Convention's headquarters at the Watergate Hotel surfaced. But in his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan picked up the rhetorical technique of dividing the country in two. In part, that depended on

constructing a false world, claiming, when challenged on his stories of government mismanagement, that a liberal media was determined to undermine him. When voters elected him, Reagan began the dismantling of the post-World War II government that protected equality before the law, equal access to resources, and the right to have a say in government. Whenever it seemed that voters were turning against the Republicans' policies, which moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90%

to the top 1% between 1981 and 2021, Republicans doubled down on the idea that popular government programs were socialist or Marxist, designed to redistribute wealth from hard-working Americans to undeserving liberals. By 2020, accompanying that rhetoric with voter suppression and a flood of money into Republican election war chests had made many Republican voters loyal to the party above the country.

So convinced were they that the government was corrupt and that they were fighting a war for America, that they were willing to die of COVID in order to own the libs. And in 2021, they tried to overturn democracy in order to keep their leader in power. Now, in 2025, the impulse simply to hurt Democrats, no matter how badly such actions would hurt the country, showed in a social media post today by Senator Tommy Tuberville, a Republican of Alabama, that the Senate should confirm Trump's

deeply problematic nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., because, no cabinet nominee could damage the political future of Democrats more than RFK. Kennedy is before the Senate Finance Committee today in confirmation hearings to head the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Food and Drug Administration, among other agencies. Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist who opposes the vaccines that have slashed deadly illnesses

in the U.S. and has attacked the institutions he would oversee. More than 18,000 physicians have signed a letter opposing his confirmation. Yesterday, Kennedy's cousin, Caroline Kennedy, broke her silence about him to write an open letter to senators. She warned that he lacks any relevant government, financial, management, or medical experience, and, calling him a predator, warned that he has gone on to misrepresent, lie and cheat his way through life. Forcing the Republican agenda by continuing to portray Forcing the Republican agenda by continuing to portray political opponents as dangerous to America because of wasteful spending and misguided priorities has reached cartoonish extremes. Trump has nonsensically claimed that, thanks to him, the U.S. military has turned on the water in California, apparently misunderstanding that the Army Corps of Engineers had conducted maintenance

on federal water pumps for three days and turned them back on when the maintenance was complete. Yesterday, Leavitt claimed that the Trump administration tried to stop all foreign aid because Biden supposedly sent $50 million of condoms to Gaza, and that the administration was just focusing on being good stewards of tax dollars. The story is simply false. The US Agency for International Development spent about $7 million on condoms in 2023, the vast majority of which

went to Africa through anti-AIDS programs. Trump's first administration made similar investments. At the same time they are portraying Democrats as wasteful and misguided, Trump and MAGA Republicans are claiming Democratic accomplishments for themselves. Last night, Trump claimed he had just asked Elon Musk and SpaceX to go get the two brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden administration.

And Musk chipped in that it was terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long. In fact, as fact checkers quickly noted, NASA says the astronauts whose damaged spaceship has returned to Earth are not stuck in space but are staffing the space station and that a SpaceX capsule has been docked at the station since September in an arrangement made by the Biden administration to bring them back to Earth as soon as a new crew arrives. True Maga is buying the lies the administration is selling. Fox News Channel pundit Jesse Waters suggested Gazans were using condoms as balloons to float explosives into Israel. But it is possible Nixon's system of polarization is reaching the end of its rope. Key to Trump's 2024 win was his insistence that violent crime was skyrocketing in the

U.S. In fact, it was plummeting, and he vowed to deport criminal migrants. Since he took office, a number of made-for-television sweeps have tried to demonstrate that he is making America safer. But his commutations and pardons of all the January 6 rioters convicted of crimes has made that a hard sell, especially as one is now wanted for soliciting sex with a minor and another has been killed by Indiana police for resisting arrest. In addition, Erin Reichlin Melnick of the American Immigrant Council notes that Trump officials ordered prosecutors to divert resources away from truly dangerous drug traffickers to go after undocumented immigrants. Those who believed Trump would not come for anyone but criminals are learning otherwise. NBC News reported on Monday that nearly

half the migrants arrested in a Chicago sweep on Sunday either had nonviolent offenses or had committed no offense. While the Trump administration defends its sweeps by saying it considers anyone who has broken immigration law to be a criminal, being undocumented is in fact a civil offense, not a crime, and many of Trump supporters did not think he would make such general sweeps. But the biggest wake-up call for those embracing the longtime language of polarization is that when Trump on Tuesday shut down all federal funding and grants to stop what he called the Marxist

diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives of the government. He was attacking virtually all Americans. The administration's pause of all federal funding and grants until it could make sure DEI had been purged out of them, cut everything from meals on wheels, a food delivery program for shut-ins, to education, local law enforcement, and the Medicaid on which programs for the elderly depend. The outcry was so strong that today the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo to rescind its previous memo freezing all federal programs. But Levin immediately contradicted the apparent content of the new memo saying the cuts were still in effect. Judd Legum of Popular Information noted that the plans seemed to be to create as much chaos as possible. That chaos keeps attention on the administration and it also appears

to be a way for the White House to upend lawsuits against the freeze. So far that has not worked. U.S. District Judge John McConnell said he was inclined to grant a restraining order noting that the administration is acting with a distinction without a difference. The Trump administration's cutting of the federal funding on which Americans depend, in the name of opposition to Marxism and DEI, contrasts spectacularly with its embrace of the world's richest man, Elon Musk,

the billionaires in Trump's cabinet, and the billionaires who have poured money into the Trump administration. CNN's Chris Isidore notes that government subsidies built Musk's fortune and that he continues to receive government contracts worth billions of dollars. In addition to government contracts, Trump's tax policy favors the very rich. On Monday, January 27th, the Senate confirmed Trump's nominee, billionaire Scott Besant, for Treasury Secretary. In his confirmation hearings, Besant told the Senate that he believes

extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts is the single most important economic issue of the day. If we do not fix these tax cuts, if we do not renew and extend, then we will be facing an economic calamity. Republicans identify the rapidly growing federal deficit as a crisis for which Democrats are to blame. But in fact, President Bill Clinton, with an assist from Republican President George H.W. Bush, eliminated the federal deficit in the 1990s. What threw the deficit into the red was the tax cuts and unfunded wars under George W. Bush, along with Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or TCJA, that disproportionately benefited the very wealthy and corporations.

The U.S. Treasury estimates that extending the TCJA as is, Trump has mused on deeper cuts, would cost $4.2 trillion over the next 10 years. Slashing the federal funding that supports ordinary Americans will make it easier to fund federal contracts and further tax cuts for the wealthy. With that trade off so visible in 2025, will owning the libs still be worth it? Trump seems to be worried that it might not be. This afternoon, he threw red meat directly at the MAGA base, with an announcement that he would be signing an executive order to open a 30,000-person capacity migrant detention center at Guantanamo Bay to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.

Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss. boss.