I Wish Trump Supporters Would Just Throw Us The Occasional Bone Over The Next Few Years

(Though maybe we owe them a few bones as well)

A few programming notes:

—I’m mindful of the possibility of getting sucked into a Trump-vortex and am seriously going to try to avoid doing so. While it’s inevitable that I will be writing about him or his administration from time to time, especially in these early days. it will not become a primary focus of this newsletter, except when there are obvious entry points based on my areas of (relative expertise.)

—I’ll be announcing a new, more regular schedule for the newsletter as well as some aesthetic upgrades, possibly as early as next week. These exciting new initiatives should drag Singal-Minded at least most of the way into the early or even early-mid twenty-first century.

—Last fall, Jeff Maurer and I piloted our comedy/politics/whatever live show $oyboyz in Chicago, and we had a blast. In a couple months we’re taking it to New York City (Village Underground, Saturday, March 22, 4:00 p.m.) and Washington, DC (DC Improv, Sunday, March 23, 7:00 p.m.). The more tickets we sell and the sooner we sell them, the better, so please click those links!

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Look, there is an obvious divide between the Americans who voted for Donald Trump and those of us who don’t think he should be anywhere near the levers of power. That is not a divide that can be bridged. Trump and his side won, and now they have a lot of power to do whatever they want.

I think what disturbs me is the level of completely unwavering devotion to him and to everything he does. I’ll give a very specific, current example, but first I just want to note that this was not the treatment Joe Biden and Kamala Harris got from mainstream liberal commentators. Did they have their hardcore, die-hard weirdos? Of course. Every famous politician did. Did a small group of Biden’s inner circle attempt to shield his status from everyone — a truly horrible act that I hope eventually gets the full exposure it deserves? Also yes.

But overall, did liberals — even very online, very partisan ones — worship Biden or Harris, act like they were infallible, or otherwise treat them like cult leaders? Plainly, no. While Biden’s performance in the June debate with Donald Trump made his ouster from the race inevitable, the conversation about whether he should run had fully broken into the mainstream by February of last year, when Ezra Klein argued in the Times that “Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden.” This made a lot of dumb, annoying people mad at Klein, but the point is that there was, from that point on, a real debate. Obviously, though many of us wish the debate had picked up sooner, the debate was real.

As for Harris, yes, there was that dumb honeymoon period with the trend pieces about how she had rizz and something something Zoomer TikTok — I’d chalk that up to a lot of pent-up frustration at the prospect of Biden running again. But it simply wasn’t the case, during the campaign, that liberals refused to criticize Harris when it was warranted. You saw actual discussion and debate among the left about her performance. Again, there was a small group of die-hard, hyperpartisan weirdos for whom she could do no wrong, but that’s standard.

In response to last night’s terrible plane crash near Reagan National Airport, earlier today, as The New York Times reported, Trump held a strange press conference in which he “blamed diversity requirements at the Federal Aviation Administration and his two Democratic predecessors for the midair collision over the Potomac River on Wednesday night, saying that standards for air traffic controllers had been too lax.” Asked how he could possibly know DEI was the case, Trump’s response was that it was “common sense” that this was so. Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, also in attendance, echoed the focus on DEI.

It should go without saying that 1) blaming Barack Obama’s administration for this is beyond laughable given that if Trump had identified problems with Obama’s approach to the FAA, he had four years to take actions to fix them; and 2) at this juncture Trump does not in fact have any idea what caused this accident, because no one does.

Trump is blaming DEI for two reasons: First, because opposition to DEI is one of his main cultural and government-reform causes, largely (I would argue) because no issue has more effectively energized the political right’s intellectual and legal elites. (I’m actually not sure the average Trump voter is that invested in the more in-the-weeds DEI fights, beyond the widely shared American skepticism of race preferences in hiring.)

I’m not entirely unsympathetic to the conservative view here given my work on the lack of evidence surrounding diversity trainings, but I think this has become a witch hunt in some cases, and overall the conversation over DEI is now so sprawling, and in many cases symbolic, that it’s very important to clarify exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about it. There are some conservatives who rightly point out that certain hiring practices appear to be prima facie illegal; others are using the DEI fight to make much more questionable arguments. It’s like any other big, noisy cause.

Second, while Trump didn’t mention this exactly, there was a hiring scandal at the FAA involving DEI, as my former Blocked and Reported producer Jack Despain Zhou —  more widely known by his internet handle Tracing Woodgrains — explains here in a post from almost exactly a year ago:

A scandal at the FAA has been moving on a slow-burn through the courts for a decade, culminating in the class-action lawsuit currently known as Brigida v. Buttigieg, brought by a class who spent years and thousands of dollars in coursework to become air traffic controllers, only to be dismissed by a pass-fail biographical questionnaire with a >90% fail rate, implemented without warning after many of them had already taken, and passed, a skill assessment. The questionnaire awarded points for factors like “lowest grade in high school is science,” something explicitly admitted by the FAA in a motion to deny class certification.

After Trace broke this story, it got some of the national attention it deserved (and we talked about it on a premium episode of the podcast), because it’s in fact really bad!

But again: No one knows why this accident occurred. Not yet at least. And Trump, Vance, and Hegseth are clearly blaming someone on the Black Hawk flight team, within the DC-area air-traffic control network on duty last night, or on the flight crew of the plane that crashed — they are clearly saying that someone was hired who lacked the merit to be hired. If they aren’t saying this, why are they bringing up DEI?