Brendan Nyhan

Congress can pass a new VRA...tomorrow.

It can abolish IEEPA/Section 232 & end Trump's tariff power...tomorrow.

It can eliminate SCOTUS clerk funding, add seats, make justices ride the circuit, & end the shadow docket...tomorrow.

It can end DOGE & restore all the jobs/funding...tomorrow.

Etc.

Excellent piece, including this quote from the head of Greece's statistical agency about why fights over data are also fights about whether a country can see itself clearly:

If there ever was a “major question” requiring more specific delegation … and yet …

Tragedy of the text commons

The contradiction matters: Immigration advocates say the pressure to meet daily targets has led the administration to flagrantly violate due process and cut corners. Judges keep citing it as they strike down Trump’s most aggressive deportation measures. www.politico.com/news/2025/08...

At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery | Quanta Magazine After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving a 40-year-old conjecture.

Why would mathematics of all fields reject a prodigy applying to admission to grad school? Kudos to Johns Hopkins and U Maryland for being flexible. www.quantamagazine.org/at-17-hannah...

Imagine a group of 5-year-olds playing a board game. The rules are clear, the goal is fair, and one child edges ahead — until, suddenly, another child starts losing. That’s when the trouble begins. “He cheated!” the losing child yells. “I’m the winner anyway!” he declares. And then, like clockwork, he flips the board. In the world of kindergarten conflict resolution, we expect this kind of behavior. We chalk it up to development. We teach better sportsmanship. What do we do when the president of the United States behaves this way? On Friday, President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the nation’s workaday scorekeeper of employment, wages and productivity. Why? Because the data didn’t make Mr. Trump look good. The statistics were inconvenient. So the president didn’t just challenge the findings; he fired the statistician. That’s not governing. That’s board flipping.

Janet Yellen's husband & Econ Nobel Laureate George Akerlof:

"...when presidents flip the board, it’s not just a game that ends. It’s the pieces of democracy that get scattered to the floor."
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/o...

In some ways, the drug prices thing is the platonic ideal of Trump assertions:

An incredibly wrong statement that isn’t sensible much less possible, a media that won’t push back, and an American discourse that will adopt it uncritically, making culture just a hair worse. Great work, all around.

One way of looking at this is that it is a story of a government losing its ability to rely on merit and rationality, surrendering instead to cult-like loyalty and conspiracy theories.

Harvard “is seriously considering resolving its dispute with the White House through the courts rather than a negotiated settlement.”

The university president said “the suggestion that Harvard was open to paying $500 million is ‘false’”

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

This story of blatant pay-for-access corruption is excellent reporting, but the Times hides it behind a very bland headline and lead art that does nothing for the story.

Here is a GIFT LINK for the article, because everyone should read it:
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/02/u...

Who could have predicted???

Trump And Miller Compel Colleges Not To Enroll International Students Trump officials are using rules, policies and agreements to compel and discourage U.S. universities from enrolling international students.

Wow. Had not realized that Columbia’s settlement with Trump admin included a commitment to decrease international student enrollment. In what way does this help “combat antisemitism,” which is supposedly the administration’s objective?
www.forbes.com/sites/stuart...

Trump’s Efforts to Control Information Echo an Authoritarian Playbook

And don't miss this related piece from @peterbakernyt.bsky.social about the authoritarian echoes of what he calls Trump's "war on facts":
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/u...

Trump Fired America’s Economic Data Collector. History Shows the Perils.

President Trump didn't like the jobs numbers, so he fired the person responsible for producing them.
It's a move that has been tried before, by leaders of countries from Argentina to Greece to the Soviet Union. It rarely ends well.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/b... #EconSky

The counts below size up the one-year effect of “150,000 fewer students [arriving] this fall.” Now consider the cumulative damage after two subsequent years of suppressed enrollment, as older cohorts graduate with no newcomers replacing them.

The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns.

The annoying spam texts destroying the Democratic brand:

$678M raised through those spam tactics

$282M to one consulting firm: Mothership Strategies.

$11M to actual campaigns (1.6%)

The party isn’t just treating donors like marks—it’s being fleeced itself yet continues to back Mothership.

ADL web gone

Shortly after Trump’s election in November, the Internet Archive registered major changes to ADL’s website. Sections devoted to voting rights, racial justice, and other civil-rights issues were all gone. (3/x)

I agree that Axios et al often miss the forest for the clicks, but here they use language of "purging dissenters, rewriting history, criminalizing opposition" and say Trump "threatened to eviscerate the integrity of US govt data."

That is the kind of descriptive language we need more of from media

Cool new study: "staffers account for 40% of the differences in the number of bills written between high-performing and low-performing offices" in Congress and "moderate extreme offices within a party"
andrew-kao.github.io/files/Staffe...

Chilling: "speaks to the intent to use the military within the United States at a level not seen since Japanese internment" newrepublic.com/article/1987...

"But apply any of these five storylines from the past week to a foreign leader — or even a past U.S. president — and it reads like an authoritarian playbook." www.axios.com/2025/08/02/t...

an alarming report even by the alarming standards of these alarming times — 🧵

Pete Hegseth's younger brother is laying out a strategy to use the military for domestic law enforcement. Perfectly authoritarian brand of nepotism and democratic backsliding.

Donald Trump is posting threats about the most powerful weapons on Earth to salve his ego and improve his political fortunes, Tom Nichols argues. https://theatln.tc/kOJ3wFCz

<all together now>

Really glad that our most prominent public intellectuals are still doing the "It's not fascism unless it comes from the Champagne region of 🇫🇷" thing, while Trump is setting up concentration camps, extorting universities, & doing this textbook dictator stuff 🤷‍♂️

adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-...

Bending the knee one after the next

How quickly we normalize corruption

The autocrat's playbook