Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.
Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, went to the White House on Wednesday hoping to have a constructive policy discussion with Donald Trump about, among other things, his escalating tariff war. Beforehand, she made public remarks:
I understand the motivation behind the tariffs, and I can tell you here’s where President Trump and I do agree: We do need to make more stuff in America, more cars and ships, more steel and ships. We do need fair trade.
She ended up—unwittingly, according to her communications office—being sent into a press event in the Oval Office, where she was praised by Trump as she stood up against the wall looking bleak and dissociated, one more trophy to go with the gilded knickknacks. It was one of the president's executive order signing sessions, in which, among other things, he meted out punishment to the former cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs, for the infraction of having opposed Trump's effort to steal the 2020 election. And there she was, making Trump's vengeance look like the sort of ordinary presidential business that an opposition-party official might drop in to watch.
What did Whitmer gain by agreeing that Trump was trying to do the right thing with tariffs? Before she even said the words, what he'd actually accomplished with his tariffs—his noble motivation "to make more stuff in America"—was to get 900 auto-parts workers laid off in Michigan and Indiana.
Every day, or multiple times a day, it's the same story. Political leaders, pundits, lawyers, college administrators—everyone keeps repeating the lines, even as the lines get more and more hollow. Sure, what Trump is doing may be excessive, abusive, and illegal. But you do have to grant that he has a point. Don't you?
Why? In a talk at Hamilton College last week, Barack Obama made headlines for encouraging university leaders under attack from the Trump administration to fight back. But before he delivered the pep talk, he made it conditional: "If you are a university, you may have to figure out, are we in fact doing things right? Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion?"
None of those questions was the least bit relevant to the universities' situation. If a university has violated the law, there are longstanding processes and limits governing how it may lose some federal funds as punishment. The Trump administration has ignored those rules and just declared it will be confiscating whole swaths of the university budgets.
Columbia, under right-wing criticism for supposedly harboring antisemitism, made a big show of doing the kind of self-criticism Obama was urging universities to do—right up to the grotesque concession of putting its Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies into academic receivership, as the White House had ordered it to do in a list of demands. And the university's latest reward for its willingness to engage with Trump's complaints is that the Justice Department is seeking to put the entire institution under federal control, through a proposed consent decree.
Yet even with the unfolding example of Columbia to refer to, when the Trump administration announced it was looking at withholding $9 billion from Harvard, Harvard's president, Alan Garber, tried to mollify the White House by putting out a public letter saying that the government had informed Harvard it was "concerned that the University has not fulfilled its obligations to curb and combat antisemitic harassment," and declaring that Harvard embraced "the important goal of combatting antisemitism, one of the most insidious forms of bigotry."
In all, Garber's letter contained the words "antisemitism" or "antisemitic" 10 times. "Academic freedom" appeared only once. The Trump administration responded by hitting Harvard with a letter of demands like the one it had given Columbia.
Donald Trump isn't interested in defeating antisemitism; the Great Replacement Theory is part of the basic operating ideology of his administration, and plenty of the staffers are straightforward Nazis. What Trump is out to defeat are the universities themselves.
Yet Trump's targets insist on trying to bargain—rhetorically and substantively—with someone who doesn't want anything they have to offer except their humiliation and submission. Top law firms are lining up to volunteer their pro bono services to an administration that suspends its own lawyers if they decline to press lies and bogus arguments to a judge. The bidding started at $40 million per firm in March and as of today is up to $150 million.
The moral and ethical arguments against cooperating with Trump were always obvious, but by now the practical case is just as clear. Trump is entirely treacherous and dishonest. Bad faith is the only faith he knows. There is nothing anyone can give him that will make him stop, and the more he gets, the further he's prepared to go. You can't ride the avalanche halfway down the mountain and then hop off at the charming little inn you spotted on your way up.
None of this keeps people from trying to imagine some other Donald Trump who might work constructively with them toward a shared goal. "The president has made great, great progress on border crossings," Virginia Sen. Mark Warner said before Trump's address to Congress last month, explaining why he was choosing to attend. "That's something we ought to celebrate."
Warner's performance of willingness to try to connect on border issues meant he was sitting in the chamber while Trump denounced, on national television, "the open border policy of these people, the Democrats, the Biden administration—the open border, insane policies that you've allowed to destroy our country." Warner apologized afterward for the misjudgment, but he had simply been showing off a fixed habit of mind: Before that, in February, he responded to Elon Musk's demand for a five-point weekly email self-evaluations across the federal workforce by posting:
Listen—it’s not nuts to ask federal employees to report what they’re working on. My staff has to do weekly reports too.
But the WAY Musk is doing this? What’s he gonna do, read 2 million emails? This is just not serious stuff.
But there was no difference between Musk's methods and his goals. His DOGE initiative exists to harass, humiliate, and break up the entire civil service. It was, in fact, nuts for Elon Musk and his corps of fellow ignoramuses to be hassling government workers about justifying their employment. It was even more nuts to try to imagine a sane and useful version of the process.
Again and again, people strain to demonstrate their willingness to overlap with the administration on something or other. "I think it would be a mistake for Democrats to deny the validity of the right’s complaints about DEI. in all cases," Eric Levitz wrote for Vox, as Trump's appointees were firing Black people and women and purging the government of anything even vaguely resembling an integration initiative.
"If anything, as I’ve written, I’d like to see Musk take on even more controversial fights, such as modernizing the entitlement programs that are the drivers of unsustainable debt or overhauling the corrupt and outdated system by which the Pentagon gets its weapons," Matt Bai wrote in the Washington Post—in a piece that laid bare the recklessness and sadism of DOGE's destruction of USAID.
"Don’t necessarily hate the idea if it’s done intelligently—do you?" New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote in a roundtable discussion of Trump's early actions, when the topic of tearing apart the operations of the Department of Defense came up.
If I were one of these Democratic officials or liberal or centrist public figures, I would preface any criticism of them by saying that open-mindedness and cross-party outreach are exactly what Donald Trump has driven out of our political system, and that it's natural to want to model the kind of behavior that might pull our riven country back together. But I'm not and I don't care about their good intentions. The people who keep gesturing at agreement with Trump are weaklings and pernicious fools, and their addiction to being seen as high-minded is helping to destroy what's left of our republic.
There is no "Yes, but—" in Donald Trump's vocabulary. There is only "Yes, sir, you're absolutely right" and "No," and anyone who says "No" is there to be crushed.
You don't have to agree with any of this. The Trump administration is not going to address your personal concerns about how institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives may help avoid reckoning with the true structural problems of workplace power and access. The Trump administration is handling its version of the DEI problem by firing anyone who doesn't look like the kind of white man Donald Trump believes should be in charge.
If someone is trying to tell you that Trump has a point about how mass migration really does put a strain on social services, they are telling you that they support masked goons snatching people off the street and sending them to concentration camps. The camps are open and taking prisoners, and ignoring legal orders meant to bring them under control.
No one who matters is interested in hearing your bids in the marketplace of ideas. They're busy doing real harm to real people. Rhetoric about policy goals is nothing more than the rug the boots march in on.
