Michael Lewis has in 219 pages outlined what is wrong with Trumpism.
And what is Trumpism? At it's essence is the conviction we do not need government except for two things: Military might and defending our borders.
What Lewis shows, by telling stories of various admirable people who chose to work in the federal government, is how important the daily workings of the federal government really are: The Department of Commerce, which is really the department of Data, which collects weather data and transforms it into weather predictions. The Department of Agriculture, which is really the Department of Rural Development and the Department of Science and Technology.
Part of the problem is the names of the various Departments are misleading. We know what Defense and State do, even though those, too are misnomers: These are really the Department of War and the Department of Foreign Affairs. But most of us do not know or understand what Commerce or Agriculture do.
Growing up in the Washington suburbs, I went to school with the kids of Congressmen--this was back when Congressmen, especially Senators, moved their families to Washington and lived there--but most of the parent of kids I went to high school with worked for agencies like Standards and Measurement or NOAA or the National Institutes of Health, or NASA.
They did things like figuring out how much stuff had to be in building materials so skyscrapers wouldn't collapse, or figuring out how to predict tornadoes in time to warn people to take cover. They were involved in collecting huge troves of data which allowed airplanes to fly, buildings and bridges to remain functional. They did all the work which was too expensive or unprofitable for private enterprise to be interested in doing but which made private enterprise profitable--like developing something called "the world wide web" and the internet.
These are the people of what Trump's friends at Fox News call "the deep state." These are the men and women vilified by Steve Bannon: All those nefarious civil servants who Trump wants to root out.
People like the folks at the Department of Agriculture who, with astonishing speed, developed a lab test for bird flu so only a few million chickens had to be culled rather than hundreds of millions, and who protect us from Mad Cow Disease getting into McDonald's burgers across the land, or Toni Fauci, who heads the institute at the NIH which oversaw the identification and treatment of HIV/AIDS.
But as Lewis demonstrates, the men President Trump has appointed to run these departments have either been actively hostile to the idea of what they might be doing-- without actually knowing--like Rick Perry who thought the Department of Energy was all about funding solar energy, killing "clean coal" and proving climate change was man made, and was clueless about it's more important mission, which is to track loose nukes (stolen nuclear war heads) to insure our own nuclear arsenal is maintained safely and to clean up vast areas contaminated by previous nuclear bomb building factories which currently are moving in subterranean drift toward the Columbia River.
Wilbur Ross, who heads Commerce, thought the business of Commerce was business and tariffs and had no idea it is actually the main data collection center of the federal government, which does the census, tracks water temperatures, weather patterns and most of the data on the planet's natural phenomenon which control fisheries, airplane and ship travel, and when he was told about these other, more important functions said he was not interested in any of that.
And there is Barry Myers, who founded a commercial weather prediction company which predicted a tornado would hit a town in Oklahoma but informed only his subscribers so the rest of the population of that town was struck without warning, whose company, Accu Weather, functions completely dependent on weather data collected by the federal government's National Weather Service (part of NOAA) but who considers the government a competitor and sought to become Secretary of Commerce so he could strip the Weather Service of its capacity to offer its services to any company but his own.
All of this is the devil in the details.
We think we know the venality and avarice and sheer depravity of Trump and those who sail with him from the Trump tweets and from CNN, but the details of these banal creeps who have swarmed in to eat out our government from the inside is only apparent when you dig into it with someone like Lewis.
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| Michael Lewis |
And what is Trumpism? At it's essence is the conviction we do not need government except for two things: Military might and defending our borders.
What Lewis shows, by telling stories of various admirable people who chose to work in the federal government, is how important the daily workings of the federal government really are: The Department of Commerce, which is really the department of Data, which collects weather data and transforms it into weather predictions. The Department of Agriculture, which is really the Department of Rural Development and the Department of Science and Technology.
Part of the problem is the names of the various Departments are misleading. We know what Defense and State do, even though those, too are misnomers: These are really the Department of War and the Department of Foreign Affairs. But most of us do not know or understand what Commerce or Agriculture do.
Growing up in the Washington suburbs, I went to school with the kids of Congressmen--this was back when Congressmen, especially Senators, moved their families to Washington and lived there--but most of the parent of kids I went to high school with worked for agencies like Standards and Measurement or NOAA or the National Institutes of Health, or NASA.
They did things like figuring out how much stuff had to be in building materials so skyscrapers wouldn't collapse, or figuring out how to predict tornadoes in time to warn people to take cover. They were involved in collecting huge troves of data which allowed airplanes to fly, buildings and bridges to remain functional. They did all the work which was too expensive or unprofitable for private enterprise to be interested in doing but which made private enterprise profitable--like developing something called "the world wide web" and the internet.
These are the people of what Trump's friends at Fox News call "the deep state." These are the men and women vilified by Steve Bannon: All those nefarious civil servants who Trump wants to root out.
People like the folks at the Department of Agriculture who, with astonishing speed, developed a lab test for bird flu so only a few million chickens had to be culled rather than hundreds of millions, and who protect us from Mad Cow Disease getting into McDonald's burgers across the land, or Toni Fauci, who heads the institute at the NIH which oversaw the identification and treatment of HIV/AIDS.
 |
| Toni Fauci |
But as Lewis demonstrates, the men President Trump has appointed to run these departments have either been actively hostile to the idea of what they might be doing-- without actually knowing--like Rick Perry who thought the Department of Energy was all about funding solar energy, killing "clean coal" and proving climate change was man made, and was clueless about it's more important mission, which is to track loose nukes (stolen nuclear war heads) to insure our own nuclear arsenal is maintained safely and to clean up vast areas contaminated by previous nuclear bomb building factories which currently are moving in subterranean drift toward the Columbia River.
 |
| Rick Perry |
Wilbur Ross, who heads Commerce, thought the business of Commerce was business and tariffs and had no idea it is actually the main data collection center of the federal government, which does the census, tracks water temperatures, weather patterns and most of the data on the planet's natural phenomenon which control fisheries, airplane and ship travel, and when he was told about these other, more important functions said he was not interested in any of that.
 |
| Wilbur Ross |
And there is Barry Myers, who founded a commercial weather prediction company which predicted a tornado would hit a town in Oklahoma but informed only his subscribers so the rest of the population of that town was struck without warning, whose company, Accu Weather, functions completely dependent on weather data collected by the federal government's National Weather Service (part of NOAA) but who considers the government a competitor and sought to become Secretary of Commerce so he could strip the Weather Service of its capacity to offer its services to any company but his own.
 |
| Barry Meyers |
All of this is the devil in the details.
We think we know the venality and avarice and sheer depravity of Trump and those who sail with him from the Trump tweets and from CNN, but the details of these banal creeps who have swarmed in to eat out our government from the inside is only apparent when you dig into it with someone like Lewis.
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