The Boys [Media Notes 187]

David Colman, The Emmy Awards Are Afraid of This Vulgar, Gory, Brilliant Show, NYTimes, July 19, 2026.

Last week, a raft of intelligent, watchable, enjoyable shows were nominated for the Emmy Award for outstanding drama series, the TV version of the best picture Oscar. Each of these prestige TV shows made tart references to our current moment. “The Pitt” dealt with ICE in the E.R. “Slow Horses” and “The Diplomat” dramatized the dangers of cynical political expedience. “The Gilded Age” and “Paradise” produced two very different takes on oligarch-itecture. “Your Friends & Neighbors” wallowed in larcenous suburban finance dads in midlife crisis, while “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” jousted with how to transcend one’s “low birth.” The only show to truly depart from dramatic realism was “Pluribus,” a sci-fi show about a space virus that made virtually all humans highly agreeable zombies, making you wonder if this is what life will be like living in a world ruled by A.I. agents.

But in the end, none of them actually tried to capture the grand farce of a moment we’re in. They didn’t even come close. Each of them is too polite, too nuanced, too, in the end, moderate — centrist, even.

And then there’s The Boys, which captured our current moment, where it’s “as if we’re living in a burn-it-all-down age of greed, mayhem and corruption.”

There was one show, however, that hit this head-on — and it’s not “Industry,” HBO’s finance-and-cocaine drama that was also snubbed by the Emmys this year. It’s Amazon Prime’s “The Boys.” The superhero spoof, which ended its five-season run this May, received not a single Emmy nomination in a major award category. Despite the fact that it dared to land savage, serious and entertaining punches about everything warped in American culture — corporate greed, celebrity worship, moral hypocrisy and how they all fit together. [...]

For those unfamiliar, “The Boys” is set in an alt-present-day United States, where superheroes (“supes”) are real and abundant. But instead of renegades valiantly saving the world from doomsday plots, they’re more like substance-abusing superinfluencers: entitled, narcissistic pursuers of fame whose high-profile “saves” are frequently stage-managed photo ops. They often offhandedly end up killing bystanders. The supes — especially the elite supe group known as “The Seven,” a parody of DC’s Justice League — are controlled, weaponized and monetized by the company that came up with the chemical to create them: Vought International, a corporate octopus whose business interests range from Disney-style entertainment to pharmaceuticals to military contracts.

The gullible public laps up all the supe mythology — especially that of Homelander, the all-American, charismatic leader of the Seven whose authoritarian megalomania drives him to take over the Oval Office, having naysayers locked up in detention camps (or just laser-visioning them in half) along the way.

For what it’s worth, I was hooked from the first season in 2019, while the Trumposaurus was finishing off his first term.

This vulgar world of corporate-branded superheroes isn’t just an ironic conceit; it’s a brilliant, subversive lampooning of our politically divided, social-media-addicted, celebrity-hypnotized society — and, in the words of the “Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke, of the “powerful and selfish people using social media to intentionally tear people apart for their own selfish interests.”

It may not be subtle. But neither is the era we live in. The Shakespearean scramble of “House of Cards” or “Succession” (both repeat Emmy winners for outstanding drama series) seems quaint by comparison with what we get on newsfeeds every day. [...]

You might wonder why a show that focuses on the superheroes isn’t called “The Supes,” but that’s really the point here. The characters putting the plot into action aren’t the supes, but “the boys,” the four men, and eventually two women, who commit themselves to destroying the company and the supes who are making their world a living hell. Even if some have superpowers, they don’t know what they’re doing. They take insane chances. They fail over and over and keep getting outsmarted by Vought — until they don’t. The show’s real heroes, working outside the official system, pursue their impossible task no matter how the deck is stacked against them. And that is how they win.

There’s more at the link.

Trump is hell-bent on nuking America back to the Stone Age

OK, OK, I get it. That statement is exaggerated and misleading. The Stone Age is too far back, 1960 will do. He’s not using nukes, he’s using oil and coal. And he’s doing considerable damage in the process.

Thomas Edsall has a long article on the subject – all his articles are long – in today’s New York Times, “Trump Is Fighting the World’s Stupidest Culture War,” May 12, 2026. His opening salvo: “On the day our oil-stained president returned to the White House, he began an all-out assault on clean energy. Today, 16 months later, he and his party are paying a significant political price while American consumers are stuck with the bill.”

Edsall goes on:

That bill, according to one scholarly estimate, totals $1,508 per household since President Trump took office for the second time (in after-tax dollars). And as the president does not need reminding, that’s with the congressional elections six months away and the cost of living the voters’ top concern.

As if that were not enough, these same voters, when they fill up their cars, are confronting the costs of Trump’s choice to go to war with Iran, at a national average of $4.52 a gallon — that’s $90.40 for a 20-gallon tank.

Trump has severely, but not fatally, wounded the American renewable energy industry, which is falling further behind China. At the same time, he is doling out tax dollars by the millions to keep dilapidated coal-fired power plants open.

That’s Edsall’s introduction. The rest of his article adds detail upon disgusting detail.

What’s it all about? According to one expert, Leah Stokes, a professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara, it’s all about the Benjamins:

The big story here is corruption. Trump is doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry and enriching his friends because they got him elected.

I cannot fathom why else he’s keeping open these old, dirty, expensive coal plants that were otherwise slated to close in places like Michigan. Someone is getting very rich off these decisions, and everyday Americans are paying the price.

That’s how it is with Agent 47, who has inverted John F. Kennedy’s exhortation from his inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Agent 47’s revision: “Ask not what you can do for your country – grasp greedily for all your country provide for you.”

Well into the article, Edsall reports:

...not only is the United States falling way behind China on energy, but that the United States is becoming increasingly dependent on China. As a result, Atlas continued:

The strength of Chinese manufacturing and innovation in many parts of the clean energy supply chain, including battery components and solar components, means countries are increasingly reliant on China.

Policies that discourage clean energy manufacturing and deployment in the United States risk weakening the country’s position in the global clean energy supply chain, creating space for China to consolidate its market leadership.

As the old saying goes, with friends like this, who needs enemies. To quote that great philosopher, Pogo the Possum, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Edsall’s list of depredations and stupidities goes on and on. Here’s another:

A key element of Trump’s reward to oil companies for their contribution to his and other Republican campaigns has been his effort to cripple the electric vehicle industry.

In doing so, Trump is trashing free-market principles treasured by traditional conservative Republicans. He has adopted a MAGA industrial policy that goes beyond government propping up one group of special interests to include a deliberate effort to snuff out competing industries.

Julie McNamara, federal energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote by email that Trump, simply on the basis of personal grievances and political ideology, “is ceding opportunity after opportunity for the U.S. to be a leader in the global clean energy transition, and all the benefits such leadership can afford.”

Edsall’s conclusion:

Where does all this leave the country?

Stuck with a president committed to policies that amount to national self-sabotage, a man driven by personal grievance and reckless promises to campaign contributors, devoid of any real concern for America’s long-term energy needs.

The power of the Presidency has allowed Trump to become a prisoner of his appetites and grievances.

Why Trump's corruption is the single most disturbing thing about his presidency [+ Yazoo!]

A friend recently asked me for critiques of Trump’s performance. The first thing that came to mind was his corruption and, though I went on to say some other things, I kept thinking, “corruption, corruption, corruption.” Why? Can’t we just set the corruption aside as an unfortunate personal attribute and focus on the results of his policies? I thought about it and decided that, “no, we can’t.” Why? Because his corruption undermines the basis of modern institutional structures. It undermines democracy itself. 

The following conversation with Claude 5.4 explains. Also, there’s a bonus at the end, The Yazoo Land Fraud. It’s a whopper.

* * * * *

First, I want you to review the paper, The Evolution of Cognition, in the project area. Now, here’s a passage from a book [David] Hays wrote about the evolution of technology:

Let me begin, this time, closest to home, with New York. The most basic principle of organization here and now is that an officer of government must separate the rights and obligations of his office from those of his or her person. If the officer is given a budget of $10,000,000, the person must not take $1 of that--as numerous officers have learned only by going to prison. Giving special help to friends and relations is also forbidden. Nor may the officer look to daddy's college roommate, who now occupies a much higher office, for special help in solving a hard problem. This principle belongs to rank 3; violation is now said to be corrupt, but in rank 2 "corruption" is the way of life.

Now, that sense of corruption is consonant with the one you’ve been advancing in this conversation. But now it’s been placed in the larger context of the ranks account of cultural evolution. The separation of one’s own interests from the duties and obligations of one’s organizational role is central to modern society. Without it, it seems to me, modern society would be very difficult, but perhaps not impossible.

But it does seem to me that such separation is central to democracy. Without that separation, those at the top of the social order will feel and be free to maintain their position of advantage and those at the bottom would have no access to advancement.

Having now reviewed the paper, I can see how neatly the Hays passage places our entire conversation within the ranks framework — and it sharpens everything considerably. The key move Hays makes is identifying the separation of role from person as specifically a Rank 3 achievement. It's not just a moral or political norm — it's a cognitive-organizational one. Rank 3 is the rank of algorithms, of systematic procedure, of the impersonal rule applied consistently regardless of who is asking. The very idea that an officer's budget is not the officer's money requires a level of abstraction — the office as a distinct entity from the person occupying it — that Rank 2 organization simply doesn't sustain. In Rank 2, the person is the role, which is why what we call corruption was then simply the normal logic of how things worked. Daddy's college roommate in the higher office is not a bug in Rank 2, it's the system.

Your point about democracy is the crucial extension though, and I think it goes even deeper than access to advancement, important as that is. Democracy requires that losing be tolerable — that the party that loses an election accepts the result and peacefully transfers power. That is only possible if the institutional role of "president" or "minister" is clearly separable from the person occupying it. If power is personal rather than institutional, losing it is existential, not merely political. You can't peacefully hand over something that is felt to be constitutive of your identity and social existence. Which is why the collapse back into Rank 2 personal-relationship logic is so specifically lethal to democratic governance — it makes the normal mechanics of democracy feel like annihilation to those who lose.

And of course the peaceful transfer of power is a central problem of political organization. It was central to Shakespeare’s history plays, and is one reason for adopting a democratic form of government.

Yes, and it's one of those cases where the historical and the literary illuminate each other directly. Shakespeare's history plays are obsessed with exactly this problem — how does power move from one holder to the next without destroying the social order in the process? And the answer that medieval and early modern England kept reaching for was dynastic legitimacy: the king's body natural dies but the king's body politic — the office, the crown — persists and passes by hereditary right. Ernst Kantorowicz's great book The King's Two Bodies traces exactly this legal-theological construction, and it's directly relevant to Richard II and the Henriad.

But the dynastic solution is enormously fragile, as Shakespeare shows again and again. It depends on there being an unambiguous legitimate heir, on that heir being competent, on powerful barons accepting the arrangement, on the Church's sanction — any one of these can fail and the whole mechanism breaks down into civil war. The Wars of the Roses, which shadow the entire sequence of history plays, are essentially what happens when dynastic legitimacy becomes contested. And contested legitimacy means that power can only be settled by force, which is catastrophically expensive in lives and social order.

Democracy solves this — at its best — by separating the question of who holds power from the question of legitimate succession entirely. The procedure is the legitimacy. You don't need the right bloodline or divine sanction; you need a credible count of votes and an institutional framework that everyone accepts as binding. The office passes not through the body of the king but through the mechanism of the election.

Which is why attacks on the integrity of elections are so specifically dangerous — they don't just dispute a particular outcome, they corrode the procedural legitimacy that makes peaceful transfer possible at all. You're pulling out the load-bearing member, to return to your earlier metaphor.

And this connects back to the ranks framework in an interesting way. The democratic solution is a Rank 3 achievement — it requires the abstraction of legitimate procedure from personal authority. But it's perpetually vulnerable to Rank 2 pressures — the loyalty to persons over institutions, the feeling that my man losing means I have lost something existential. The democratic form sits on top of a substrate of human social psychology that was shaped long before Rank 3 cognition existed, and that substrate never goes away. 

* * * * *

The Yazoo Land Fraud

My friend Michael Liss told me about what may be the singled biggest act of corruption in America's political history. It's from the old days, The Yazoo Land Fraud. Here's what Claude had to say about it:

The Yazoo Land Fraud is a fascinating and somewhat underappreciated episode in early American history, touching on corruption, populist backlash, constitutional law, and the politics of the new republic all at once.

Cybertrucks for the State Department? Hell no! Can you say "corruption"? Heck yeah!

I remember when I first saw pictures of Musk's cybertruck: Yuck!! That is one ug ug ug ugly piece of pseudo-futuristic machinery. But who knows? Maybe it's also good. But then I saw these YouTube videos complaining about poor fit and construction. We've got significant safety concerns and by the end of 2024 this super-truck of the future had been recalled seven times.

What's a savvy businessman to do when faced with a rolling dumpster fire like this? That's right, sell them to the government. And Elon Musk was in a position to do just that as he'd donated $250 million to Trump's campaign. So arrangements were made to sell them to the State Department.

Fortunately, someone blew the whistle on that one and the order's been put on hold, at least for now. Jack Ewing reports in The New York Times, State Dept. Suspends Plan to Buy Armored Teslas:

The State Department said Thursday that it had put plans to buy armored electric vehicles on hold after reports that the $400 million order would go to Tesla, whose chief executive, Elon Musk, is one of President Trump’s most important advisers and supporters.

The agency pushed back against suggestions that the purchase was designed to benefit Mr. Musk, saying in a statement that the plans stemmed from a request by the Biden administration “to explore interest from private companies to produce armored electric vehicles.”

“The solicitation is on hold, and there are no current plans to issue it,” the State Department said.

The planned purchase was listed in the department’s procurement forecast for 2025, which is intended to give businesses a chance to compete for projects. The document was published in December, after Mr. Trump won the election but before he took office.

Tesla’s name was removed from the document after the existence of the list was reported late Wednesday. Plans to order Tesla vehicles had provoked controversy because of Mr. Musk’s close association with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Musk spent more than $250 million to help elect Mr. Trump, who then appointed him as the leader of a cost-cutting initiative that has been called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Is DOGE just a dodge for Musk to line his own pockets at taxpayer expense? Enquiring minds want to know.

There's more at the link.

75% Americans are afraid of government corruption

In The Smithsonian:

For the third year in a row, corruption of government officials has topped the list—only this year it jumped 13 percentage points, from 60.6 percent of Americans identifying themselves as afraid of government corruption in 2016, to a whopping 74.5 percent being afraid of the same in 2017.

“Our previous lists had more to do with disasters and crime, and that naturally lent itself to the type of messaging [about crime] we’re doing,” Bader says. “The list this year is fundamentally different in the sense that it’s showing a great fear of some of the things happening in this presidency.”

Fear of North Korea using weapons came in at number nine on the list, with 44.9 percent marking themselves as being afraid. The survey has been asking about nuclear attacks since it first started; this is the first year North Korea was listed specifically. “It’s very difficult to curb people’s fears about North Korea when frankly, North Korea and how it’s being addressed is very scary,” says Bader.

Another first this year was environmental concerns appearing in the top ten list of fears, of which there were four: pollution of oceans rivers and lakes; pollution of drinking water; global warming/climate change; and air pollution. And the survey was conducted before Hurricanes Harvey and Maria and the ongoing California wildfire crisis, with questions sent out from June 28 to July 7. The researchers ascribe the increased environmental fears to media coverage of President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement and cut funding to the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as coverage of the lead in the tap water in Flint, Michigan.

H/t 3QD.

Trump, the person (DJT) versus the role (POTUS)

Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic has a new post up, A New Jurisprudence for an Oathless Presidency, in which she considers, as she has in earlier posts, the judicial fate of Trump’s travel ban. Her discussion turns “on whether the judiciary can permissibly consider off-the-cuff statements made by Trump and his associates as evidence of religious animus in the drafting of the executive orders,” a matter which may soon end up before the Supreme Court. The issue is the intent of the order and what constitutes legitimate evidence of that intend.

Heretofore the practice has been to ignore such “off-the-cuff statements” (including Presidential tweets) because, in effect, they are merely personal statements and cannot be taken to reflect the intention of actions taken in the name of the Presidency. For reasons Jurecic has stated before and reiterates here, the courts are now allowing such statements to be taken into evidence. There is the opinion that Trump himself does not make a firm distinction between his personal interests and opinions and the Presidency and therefore the courts cannot treat his actions in the ordinary way.

And so Jurecic ends up here:

And examining Trump’s campaign-trail and presidential statements on the travel ban—an examination the majority considers permissible under McCreary—the court finds the national security rationale behind the travel ban to have been proffered in bad faith. (In her concurrence, Judge Stephanie Thacker reaches the same conclusion only on the basis of post-inauguration statements by Trump, having reasoned that candidate Trump’s comments are not appropriately considered.)

There are certainly disagreements to be had with this analysis. (Judge Niemeyer, for example, argues that it substantially misapplies both Mandel and Din. On Lawfare, Peter Margulies and Josh Blackman have made similar points.) But if the courts are going to write a new jurisprudence for an oathless presidency into the law, Mandel and Din actually make for a very natural place to start. Both literally concern the question of “bad faith,” the same question raised by whether the courts can trust Trump’s fidelity to his oath. To put it another way, the cases are an expression of the “presumption of regularity,” the idea that we can usually trust public officials to do their duty. And as the Trump administration is discovering, that presumption of regularity is only a presumption, which courts can waive in extraordinary circumstances.

If the majority—along with the number of other courts that have ruled against both the original and the revised travel ban—is crafting a new body of law for a new kind of presidency outside the presumption of regularity, why not say so explicitly? I suspect that many onlookers sympathetic to the plaintiffs but concerned by the charge into uncharted legal territory might be comforted by a direct acknowledgement of the dynamics at work here, but the rhetorical signposts of blindness and sight may be as close as the courts can comfortably get. It may be a question of wanting to step lightly or to avoid further accusations of making up law from whole cloth. Or perhaps some of the judges ruling against the ban are seeing through a glass darkly, and may not themselves be entirely aware of the implications.

That’s what’s interesting, that the judges may be “crafting a new body of law for a new kind of presidency” and this is being done is full view of the public. At the center of this action we have the distinction between a person, in this case Donald J. Trump, and the status that person occupies, the presidency of the United States.

That distinction, of course, is quite general and applies to all manner of organizational life, both public and private, and not just to the presidency. The idea of a meritocracy, for example, depends on the distinction. One succeeds in an organization based on one’s competence and accomplishments, not on one’s attachments to kith and kin. Is the Trump presidency going to unfold as a morality play about that distinction?

Jurecic concludes:

Courts regularly rely on legal fictions and simplifications, which are what make it possible to map the reasoned structure of law onto a chaotic and unreasonable world. There is nothing wrong or unusual about this. The difference here is that the bizarre facts of the travel ban cases and the bad faith at the core of Trump’s presidency have exacerbated—to the point of absurdity—the gap between the abstract legal questions at play under existing doctrine and the facts at the ground. The situation recalls Thomas Kuhn’s description of scientific crisis, in which an existing paradigm of thought begins to lose its ability to explain and predict the shape of things. We may be at that point now—where the paradigm of deference to the executive in national security without reference to the integrity of the president’s oath is clearly faltering but the jurisprudence of an oathless presidency has yet to fully emerge.

* * * * *

You might want to look at an earlier article by Jurecic, Body Double: What Medieval Executive Theory Tells Us About Trump’s Twitter Accounts, where she says:

The astute reader will instinctively see what I’m driving at here: President Trump’s two Twitter accounts. Indeed, I want to propose here almost entirely with a straight face that the relationship between the @POTUS and @realDonaldTrump accounts is the new manifestation of a very old dynamic. That is, the distinction between @POTUS and @realDonaldTrump is the distinction between the office and the person who fills it, what we might call the President’s “Twitter politic” and his “Twitter natural.”

You might also want to review a post I made shortly after the election, The Crown and the Presidency, 2016, in which I discuss the Netflix series, The Crown, and point out that one of the central themes of that series, at least in its first season, is the distinction between the person, Elizabeth, and the status she came to occupy, Queen of England.

A Fourth Constitutional Crisis?

Over at Down with Tyranny Gaius Publius argues that we're having a fourth constitutional crisis. He sets things up by arguing that Trump will not be impeached:

I'll lay decent odds the administration will appoint no special prosecutor, and if they do, no independent special prosecutor. It would take a revolt from congressional Republicans to prove me wrong. That could happen, but odds that it will? Less than 50-50 as I see it now.

Which means the country stays in its current state, ruled by a man and a party actively perverting the Constitution to enable obvious corruption and — finally, what the Democrats alleged all along on no evidence — apparent collusion by that man with a foreign power to gain domestic power. Whether that collusion was decisive or not in his victory, matters not at all. [...]

All of which means that if Trump's Russia doings aren't formally investigated, either by a special investigator or by Congress, elites who want him gone will have to force him out by extra-constitutional means.

Extra-constitutional means?

• Relentless, damaging leaks and innuendo from all quarters aimed at turning public opinion against him.

• Privately issued threats and rewards — sticks and carrots — to induce him to step down. Remember, intelligence agencies of various stripes likely have almost all the goods on almost all officials who matter to them. Imagine what's hoarded in NSA databases, or what FBI background checks reveal. Imagine what secrets angry CIA field agents might dig up. [...]

• Threats amounting to blackmail and, if not physical violence, violence to his wealth, business interests, and "brand." ("We will destroy your brand forever, you will never do business again, if you don't get out. Here's how we'll do it. First...")

And that leads us to the fourth Constitutional crisis:

• 1789, the Revolutionary War and transition from colony to slave-holding republic.

• 1865, the Civil War and transition from divided slave-holding nation with two competing economies to united freed-slave state. This change took down the Southern agricultural aristocracy (by depriving it of the nearly free labor it depended on); made the Northern industrial economy nationally ascendant; and put us firmly on the path to first-world industrial powerhouse.

• 1933, the Great Depression and transition from a light-handed pro-business government to a heavy-handed regulatory state.

• And now, this.

What will the next American Constitution look like? Turkey's and Hungary's, with their dictators and single-party governments wrapped in the old constitutional forms? A naked kleptocracy, where constitutional forms are simply ignored, like those in many third-world countries? A state in which forms are observed but the hand with real power belongs mainly to the "security" apparatus? In many countries, coups by segments of the elite, blatant or covert, are welcomed as correctives and tacitly approved (another way constitutions are revised without being rewritten).

If Trump is not successfully impeached, and it looks for now like he won't be, our government as practiced will once more dramatically change, as it did when Bush's crimes were not addressed, and Obama's after him (never forget that targeted assassination is an innovation Obama made lawful).

But whatever happens next, whether Trump is impeached or not, I think we've already been changed as a nation forever by what's already led to this moment. After all, in 2016 the nation wanted someone like Sanders to be president, wanted an agent of change, and look what it got. This is in fact our second failed attempt this century at change that makes our lives better.

I don't think that point's been lost on anyone. We're in transition no matter what happens to Trump. Transition to what, we'll have to find out later.

And something else to consider. The last three times the government fundamentally changed, we got lucky. We found leaders — Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt — up to the task, in chaotic and troubling times, of steering an altered ship to calmer water and a safer port.

For Trump's supporters, corruption is part of the deal

Matthew Yglesias in Vox:

But Jan-Werner Müller, a Princeton political scientist who recently published an excellent little book about authoritarian populist movements, finds that Trump supporters’ indifference to Trump’s corrupt leanings is actually rather typical. Even when clear evidence of corruption emerges once an authoritarian populist regime is in place, the regime’s key supporters are generally unimpressed.

“The perception among supporters of populists is that corruption and cronyism are not genuine problems as long as they look like measures pursued for the sake of a moral, hardworking ‘us’ and not for the immoral or even foreign ‘them,’” he writes, “hence it is a pious hope for liberals to think that all they have to do is expose corruption to discredit populists.”

George Mason University’s Justin Gest is the author of a recent study of white working-class politics in the United States and United Kingdom, and one of his major themes is that there is a pervasive cynicism about politics and government among the people he interviews.

“Today’s working class, Rust Belt voters are disenchanted by what they perceive to be a political and economic culture of exploitative greed and gridlock,” he writes, “and are waiting for someone to adopt their cause.”

Per Müller, their enthusiasm for Trump doesn’t necessarily reflect a misperception that he is honest or that he will eschew greed and corruption. Rather, their view is that he is on their side and that the protestations of his opponents merely reflect the self-interested defensiveness of the establishment. Highlighting themes of racial and ethnic conflict as central to American politics further feeds this dynamic. Trump may be a sonofabitch, the thinking goes, but at least he’s our sonofabitch.

Ignore the clown, focus on policy:

A November 22 Quinnipiac poll revealed both the risks and the opportunities currently facing Democrats. It showed that attacks on Trump’s character have set in, and most people agree that Trump is not honest and not levelheaded. But it also showed that a majority believe he will create jobs, that he cares about average Americans, and that he will bring change in the right direction. Yet at the same time, Quinnipiac also finds that most voters favor legal abortion, oppose tax cuts for the wealthy, oppose deregulation of business, and oppose weakening gun control regulation.

Which is to say that the most normal, blandly partisan parts of Trump’s agenda are also among the least popular. And yet Trump’s support for them is what immunizes him from Republican criticism and oversight over the abnormal stuff. Defending the basic norms of American constitutional government is important, but doing it as a partisan agenda won’t work — it turns off Trump’s core supporters and signals to wavering ones that his opponents are focused on abstractions rather than daily life. As long as Trump is enjoying the lockstep support of congressional Republicans, his opponents need to find ways to turn attention away from the Trump Show and focus it on his basic policy agenda and the ways in which it touches millions of people.

Will Trump transform the nature of corruption in America and amplify its influence?

Dem leaders are thinking of Trump's lack of principles as an opportunity but it's a threat https://t.co/bgm3XmZr9F pic.twitter.com/wYnI0Bq2Az

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 17, 2016

Matthew Yglesias in Vox:

We are used to corruption in which the rich buy political favor. What we need to learn to fear is corruption in which political favor becomes the primary driver of economic success.

Many American administrations have featured acts of venal corruption, and Trump’s will likely feature more than most. The larger risk, however, is that Trump’s lack of grounding in ideological principles or party networks will create a systemically corrupt government. Such governments, Wallis writes, “are rent creating, not rent seeking, governments” that operate by “limiting access to markets and resources in order to create rents that bind the interests of the ruling coalition together.”

This is how Vladimir Putin governs Russia, and how the Mubarak/Sisi regime rules Egypt. To be a successful businessman in a systemically corrupt regime and to be a close supporter of the regime are one and the same thing.

Those who support the regime will receive favorable treatment from regulators, and those who oppose it will not. Because businesses do business with each other, the network becomes self-reinforcing. Regime-friendly banks receive a light regulatory touch while their rivals are crushed. In exchange, they offer friendly lending terms to regime-friendly businesses while choking capital to rivals. Such a system, once in place, is extremely difficult to dislodge precisely because, unlike a fascist or communist regime, it is glued together by no ideology beyond basic human greed, insecurity, and love of family.

The death of civil society:

The risk is not that Trump becomes a dictator, but that civil society simply withers and dies. We all like to think we would stand up and do the right thing under difficult circumstances. But to be honest with ourselves, we are all susceptible to the push and pull of fear and greed — especially those of us with spouses and families to think of. A suborned regulatory state could easily quiet mass media criticism, defund opposition activity, and enrich politically friendly actors.

The Crown and the Presidency, 2016

I’ve been watching The Crown on Netflix. It’s about the accession of Elizabeth II to the British crown. It started streaming quite recently, perhaps no earlier than the beginning of November, and I began watching it a couple days before the election. It struck me that this timing was likely no coincidence, a TV show about a woman becoming the British monarch even as a woman was about to become President of the United States. But, Hilary lost.

And that leaves me free to point out another coincidence, a matter of thematic counterpoint. One of the major themes of The Crown, perhaps THE major theme, though I’m only five episodes in (out of 10 so far, it’s slated to run for 60), is the conflict between personal life and public duty. By contrast, the Presidential election seems to have been dominated by confusion between private life and public life.

Let’s start with The Crown. Elizabeth’s father, King George VI, became king when his brother, Edward VIII, was forced to abdicate. Why? Because he decided to marry Wallis Simpson, an twice-divorced American socialite and, of course, a commoner. That is, it is because he uncle chose to put his private happiness above his public duty, that Elizabeth was in a position to become monarch. This much of the story is told in flashback, but Edward, now merely the Duke of Windsor, figures prominently in these early episodes.

In the second episode we see two examples. Elizabeth’s husband, Philip, has two demands: 1) the family keep his name, Mountbatten, and 2) that they remain in Clarence House, one of the royal residences, which they’ve just renovated, rather than moving to Buckingham Palace, which is not particularly homey. Elizabeth is fine with this but the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, is against, as is her uncle Edward (the one who abdicated). Duty wins out in both cases. In the fifth episode Elizabeth gets crowned. Philip requests that he not have to kneel before the new sovereign during the ceremony. Elizabeth refuses.

And so on. There are other incidents throughout the five episodes and each is surrounded by conversation.

In the current presidential election the most obvious collision between public and private is, of course, the tape where Trump brags about his sexual harassment, which was just the last in a number accusations. There is nothing new in the wayward sexual behavior of powerful men, but the press didn’t report it, not for Roosevelt, or Eisenhower, nor John Kennedy. That changed with Bill Clinton and the Lewinsky scandal in his second term. Just why the change, I don’t really know. But it’s happened. And Trump used the Bill Clinton story to defend himself against the his own sexual accusers.

Other issues were about public-private confusion as well. Continuing with Trump, there’s his apparent tax avoidance, which may well have been legal, but was presented as a failure of civic duty, his use of his foundation, and other issues. On the Clinton side, there’s the use of a private email server for conducting public business and there’s the Clinton Foundation: did they trade political favors for donations to the foundation?

What, if anything, do I make of this? I don’t quite know. What I’m wondering, of course, is whether or not this series at this time is somehow a response to or in conversation with the kinds of dynamics which ended up driving the 2016 Presidential Election. Of course the lead-time involved in producing a TV series like this is measured in years. I’d think the scripts were written and production started before Trump and Clinton became the nominees. On the other hand, while the Obama administration has been scandal-free (as far as I can recall), blurred lines between public-and-private is a standard issue in politics.

So, it’s possible there is some kind of ‘resonance’ between the appearance of The Crown at this time and the current atmosphere surrounding presidential politics in the United States.

* * * * *

And then there’s Shakespeare’s treatment of this theme, public and private. Prince Hal pals around with Falstaff and then, when he ascends to the throne, what does he do? He rejects Falstaff. Why? What was appropriate for him as a private individual is not appropriate for him as monarch.

Well, Falstaff just got elected President of the United States.

* * * * *

From the NYTimes, about potential conflict between Trump's business assets and his role as President:

The layers of potential conflicts he faces are in many ways as complex as his far-flung business empire, adding a heightened degree of difficulty for Mr. Trump — one of the wealthiest men to ever occupy the White House — in separating his official duties from his private business affairs.

Further complicating matters are Mr. Trump’s decision to name his children to his transition team, and what is likely to be their informal advisory role in his administration. His daughter Ivanka Trump joined an official transition meeting on Thursday, the day before Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey was removed from his post leading the effort.

Mr. Trump has said he will eliminate ethical concerns by turning the management of his company over to his children, an arrangement he has referred to as a blind trust.

But ethics lawyers — both Republicans and Democrats — say it is far from blind because he would have knowledge of the assets in the trust and be in contact with the people running it, making it unlike a conventional blind trust controlled entirely by an independent party.

* * * * *

From a recent op-ed by Paul Krugman (25 Nov. 2016):

Remember, over the course of the 2016 campaign, the three network news shows devoted a total of 35 minutes combined to policy issues — all policy issues. Meanwhile, they devoted 125 minutes to Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

What is it that makes those emails so salient? Could it be that they blur the line between public and private? She used a private email server to handle public business.