It would be really really helpful if the discussion wasn’t so meta. Everyone seems to take for granted that Trump did Something that is really really worrying but no-one says it. What is that something and why does it make you so worried?
encouraging ICE to train its agents to round people up without proper warrants, and with disregard for their fundamental rights. Masked and out-of-uniform law enforcement is an affront to a free society.
attacking foreign countries without consulting congress
threatening Greenland without consulting congress
threatening private companies so they give “golden shares” to the government, or agree to share profits with it
Shutting down the immigration system unilaterally. e.g. adding $100k “fees” for visa classes without congressional direction
Suing newspapers and media outlets for disadvantageous coverage.
The counterargument by Republicans I’ve talked to—and I agree with No77e that this discussion seems to be taking a lot of partisan views as settled priors—is as follows:
Weaponization of the justice system is baked in, at this point, to the point where adhering to due process as defined by the opposition party amounts to pre-committing to always cooperating against an opponent that has spent the past hundred turns defecting.
The murder of Craig Robertson (I’ll use The Guardian as a left-leaning source here; if you want a right-leaning source there are plenty) and the subsequent lack of investigation or consequences made it clear to half of the American population—whether you agree or not—that treating the legal system as if it operates in good faith is for suckers.
Reddit’s apparent glee(see the comments; the subreddit is askconservatives but the post histories of the celebrating individuals indicates that they are not right-leaning) over the killing of Ashley Babbit, an unarmed <protestor or rioter, depending on your party affiliation> and the fact that the killer, Michael Byrd, recieved not only a complete lack of consequences but a series of glowing press interviews, was likewise seen as a point-of-no-return.
Decarlos Brown, who killed Iryna Zarutska, had received enumerable light sentences from judges prior to her murder. There are enumerable similar stories that anyone who regularly talks politics with anyone right-of-center has heard, and, together, they give the impression that the current judiciary is not made up of trustworthy arbiters of justice, but is, depending on how much good faith you assume, either horrifyingly incompetent or actively malicious.
attacking foreign countries without consulting congress
I want to assume good faith here, but everyone I’ve talked to, of every political slant from communist to progressive to libertarian to conservative, in the past twenty years, has treated this as a longstanding precedent.
As a concrete example, the Obama admin jeopardizing worldwide trust in vaccinations and—according to some critics from the right and others from the left—contributing to the Polio eradication campaign’s demise on the verge of the finish line—to eliminate Osama Bin Laden seems more-or-less qualitatively similar in terms of legality to Trump (apparently) collaborating with elements in the Venezuelan government to capture Maduro and replace him with his veep.
threatening Greenland without consulting congress
Again, I want to assume good faith, but politicians offending foreign countries is not, in any sense of the word, an exceptional situation that demands exceptional action. Reagan famously joked that he was about to nuke the USSR, triggering an escalation in the alert state across East Asia.
threatening private companies so they give “golden shares” to the government, or agree to share profits with it
From the Republican perspective, at least, much worse has been done. Prior to 2016, I think that most people in either party would take the sort of messages that Twitter received from government agencies as an indicator of coercive behavior on the part of the FBI that violates the first amendment. At the very least, the simultaneous sea change in speech policies across every large platform circa 2017-2018 was very suspicious, and permanently severed the trust that much of the population had in a free and independent market.
Shutting down the immigration system unilaterally. e.g. adding $100k “fees” for visa classes without congressional direction
Dwight Eisenhower did approximately an order of magnitude more on immigration, so it’s difficult to argue that this is unprecedented. To say the least, a temporary pause on immigration and a fee on the H1B program (which itself only recently doubled in scale, and cannot be said to be a longstanding and inalienable national institution) is not unprecedented in American history.
Moreover, unilateral action on immigration is longstanding in the other direction. In 1994, a single judge unilaterally declared that California had to facilitate public services for illegal immigrants, striking down a 60-40 statewide referendum. Many people place this as the action that turned the state blue, and a supermajority of California voters not only did not vote for it, but actively opposed it.
Finally, the share of the immigrant population in the U.S. has tripled between 1970 and 2020, with the raw number quintupling. Over the same timespan, the number of Americans preferring that immigration be decreased has generally exceeded the number wanting it increased. Unless you take the extreme partisan stance that only restrictions require justification or public consent, I do not think that anyone outside of the leftmost half would look at the recent history of immigration in the U.S. and conclude that the restrictionists are unilaterally acting outside of their mandate.
tl;dr: Half of the American population sees Trump as a moderate, sometimes tepid response to a <government/regime, depending on your political position> that has already ignored precedent and invalidated rule of law so severely that capitulation would amount to the total destruction of their way of life, and possibly worse. They have reasons, outlined above, for believing this.
I expect that this reply will be downvoted, given the tone of existing replies, but I don’t think turning LessWrong into a partisan colony is a good thing. For one, it means that half of America will inherently view everything LW wants as enemy. It also incentivizes a lack of skepticism when a same-party source makes a claim that merits it. Reddit went this route after 2016, and a lot of previously interesting and vibrant communities are now composed almost exclusively of, for lack of a better phrase, political slop. Compare r/videos before and after theban on political content was lifted.
I think the rest of these points are colorable and appreciate you saying them, but
politicians offending foreign countries is not, in any sense of the word, an exceptional situation that demands exceptional action. Reagan famously joked that he was about to nuke the USSR, triggering an escalation in the alert state across East Asia.
Threatening to take territory from an ally by force is far beyond “offending foreign countries”, not precedented to my knowledge, and very bad.
And the Reagan thing was a literal joke made in private. As opposed to Trump actually you know, repeatedly threatening to actually invade Greenland in public.
Your points are mostly fair that this kind of behavior has precedents. But I’m a libertarian so saying the other team is doing the same thing doesn’t convince me much that it’s not bad. From my viewpoint, the current administration has more of a plan of ignoring rules, laws, the constitution, etc. than most previous. Each incident has antecedents, and I can see how people on the red team might think “we’re just doing to them what they’ve been doing to us”, but what I see is a more concerted effort to undermine the rule of law.
The behavior of ICE (masks, lack of visible ID, ignoring warrant requirements, ignoring judicial orders) seems beyond the pale, even if the rules (deportation) they’re enforcing are on the books. The way they use self-declared emergencies are more extreme than previous administrations, but you’re right, “everyone does it”.
Your example about RR joking about nuking Russia seems clearly different than Trump’s repeated threats. An off-the-cuff remark doesn’t carry the same weight as Trump’s persistent prodding on this subject.
I’m not sure whether jawboning done behind the scenes is worse than taking partial control and ownership of private companies in the broad light of day. I’m a libertarian, so both free speech and private property are pretty important values to me. They weren’t proud enough of the Jawboning to do it in public, and I think they backed off when it became public. Continuing to insist that individuals and companies accede to his demands for tribute seems different.
But thanks for giving the other point of view. I can see that others see it differently.
I was responding to the question “What is that something and why does it make you so worried?” I would have been able to give a shorter list for any recent administration.
I am going to be honest, if you asked me pre-Jan 6 “how many people would be shot if they attacked en masse the Capitol with Congress in session” my guess would have been much higher than one. This isn’t a case of protestors just doing their business in a public street and getting into some heated argument with police that degenerates into a fight. It was an attempt to interfere with government, and possibly a direct threat to the life and safety of elected officials. Even if you think it was warranted you would be an idiot to think it would be safe. You don’t storm the Bastille and expect no fire in return. A State’s whole thing is a monopoly on violence, it’s entirely expected that an attempt to violently subvert that State’s own internal mechanisms would be met with violence in return.
There’s a difference between becoming a partisan colony and noticing that democratic institutions are being actively undercut. Becoming clear on this is actually a (fairly easy) test of rationality, which we should pass as a community.* Yes, the world is complicated and there have been some serious defections on both sides. Yes, some of the MAGA complaints are valid. ALSO, Trump is degrading democracy and his administration is very rapidly sliding towards authoritarianism (in their actions, which match years of clear rhetoric). It is possible to separate this from underlying trends toward increasing executive power on the scale of decades and recognize it as the active crisis that it is.
I expect that this reply will be downvoted, given the tone of existing replies, but I don’t think turning LessWrong into a partisan colony is a good thing. For one, it means that half of America will inherently view everything LW wants as enemy. It also incentivizes a lack of skepticism when a same-party source makes a claim that merits it. Reddit went this route after 2016, and a lot of previously interesting and vibrant communities are now composed almost exclusively of, for lack of a better phrase, political slop. Compare r/videos before and after theban on political content was lifted.
I find this equivocation annoying. Is your comment about messaging or truth-seeking?
*Some rationalists may acknowledge that Trump has authoritarian tendencies and approve—though I think his blatant disrespect for the truth contradicts most constructions of rationalist virtue. But we should at least be aware of what is happening.
I expect that this reply will be downvoted, given the tone of existing replies, but I don’t think turning LessWrong into a partisan colony is a good thing.
I hope your faith in LessWrong has been restored somewhat. If replies with well-researched specific examples relevant to the discussion got downvoted, there would be no point reading LW anymore.
(Also like, come on, braverydebates etc. Ah, I see you are kinda new here. The more you disagree on this website, the more karma you get… if you can keep it polite, smart, and supported by evidence, of course.)
For one, it means that half of America will inherently view everything LW wants as enemy.
I think this ship has sailed long ago, given that the website is explicitly and unashamedly atheist.
Politically, however, the typical criticism from outside has always been that we tolerate too many opinions.
(Also like, come on, braverydebates etc. Ah, I see you are kinda new here. The more you disagree on this website, the more karma you get… if you can keep it polite, smart, and supported by evidence, of course.)
I’d describe this “good criticism gets upvoted, good ingroup-rah-rah gets upvoted, bad criticism gets downvoted, bad ingroup-rah-rah often gets weak upvoted.” Which I don’t like but am not sure what to do about it.
Mediocre criticism can get plenty of upvotes as long as it’s a culture fit.
If the author does a good job of pitching it to Less Wrongers, then the critical post can activate readers’ it’s virtuous to be open-minded mindset and turn their critical faculties towards the thing that the post is criticizing and away from the post itself. So instead of evaluating the post according to their ordinary standards of epistemics and quality, they instead try to find anything in it that seems good / insightful / overly neglected / provoking of new useful thoughts / on a promising track.
It’s not perfect, but compared to most of the internet, even most of the smarter parts of the internet, we are trying, and the difference is visible. Sometimes bad things get upvoted, but at least a well-written criticism supported by references gets upvoted, too.
Obviously (given the word “bipartisan” in the title), the goal here is not to defeat Republicans at all costs and start a glorious thousand-years era of wokeness. Which already makes it different from a typical anti-Trump debate. This is not about tribes, it is about destruction of the existing political order by one wannabe dictator, whose actions are atypical even for his own political party.
In this context, naming the bad actions of the other side is good—you won’t get bipartisan support against “bad things that Republicans do”. If this is something that every Republican would say when asked to support the resistance, we better be prepared for that in advance. Admit that in the past mistakes were made by both sides, but now things are getting completely out of control, so we need to agree on some common foundation of how we want thing to function. That includes calling out the previous defections against this common foundation, on both sides.
Thanks for the perspective. I would like to note that pointing out earlier instances of bad behavior is important historical context, but doesn’t make more recent bad behavior any less bad. The USA has some really dark stuff in its past. We should remember and do better.
A couple of other things that stand out to me as particularly egregious:
My understanding is that Trump is far more corrupt than past presidents (including Trump in his first term). An example of this is allowing export controls of Nvidia’s AI chips to China in exchange for gifts from Jensen Huang.
The Trump administration has launched criminal investigations against political opponents at an unprecedented rate, most recently against Jerome Powell yesterday.
And of course, the fake electors plot to steal the 2020 presidential election (not to be confused with January 6th—I think his conduct on January 6th was really bad, but the fake electors plot is a much greater indictment of Trump’s character and much stronger evidence of his authoritarianism).
There was also the video from the homeland security secretary blaming democrats for the government shutdown in blatant violation of the hatch act.
Not the highest impact of his many crimes, but does really drive home how casually Trump is willing to undercut any apolitical technocracy for political ends.
attacking foreign countries without consulting congress
That’s what all US administration did in the last two decades. When the Obama administration started bombing Yemen and Somalia they didn’t consult congress for permission for that.
Since I am not taking on “do something about this” I also wasn’t taking responsibility for writing up a clear writeup of what was done that was bad that I made sure was factually accurate. Given that I’m not taking this on, if you’re not already sold on “Trump is bad”, prolly this post just isn’t for you.
ChrisHibbert’s list is the same rough starting point I would make. I’d add “not super answering to the Supreme Court when it intervenes on them.”
One major category of concern is institutional erosion. Here are a few salient examples:
Mass IG firing(Jan 2025): Fired 17 inspectors general in one night without the legally required 30-day notice. Federal court ruled this “obviously” illegal. Several were investigating Musk’s companies. (IGs are the internal watchdogs that catch waste, fraud, and abuse.)
USAID dismantling: Shut down the agency that administered most U.S. foreign aid, firing 83% of staff. This destroyed implementation capacity built over decades. A Lancet study estimates 14 million excess deaths by 2030 from the cuts.
Schedule F: Reclassifying ~50,000 career civil servants to strip job protections, enabling political firings. This converts expertise-based positions into loyalty-based ones.
Firing independent agency heads: Removed FTC commissioners, NLRB members, MSPB chair. DOJ sent a letter to Congress stating it would no longer defend the constitutionality of for-cause removal protections—explicitly signaling intent to overturn Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 precedent that lets Congress create agencies insulated from presidential control.
Unqualified appointments:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (HHS): Longtime anti-vaccine activist with no public health administration experience. His department’s official MAHA report cited nonexistent studies, then introduced additional errors when revised.
Pete Hegseth (Defense): Fox News weekend host with no Pentagon or senior military experience. Participated in the Signalgate breach, sharing military operation timing on an unsecured group chat that accidentally included a journalist.
Kash Patel (FBI): No law enforcement leadership experience. Authored a book, Government Gangsters, containing a list of government officials he considers enemies of Trump, and has stated publicly he intends to pursue them.
Tulsi Gabbard (DNI): Former congresswoman with no intelligence community experience. Sen. Dick Durbin said she “would not be qualified for an entry-level position” at an intelligence agency.
Betsy DeVos (Education, 2017): Billionaire Republican donor with no education policy experience. First Cabinet nominee in history to require the Vice President to break a tie vote for confirmation.
This is a small sampling; a comprehensive account would be far longer.
A few of these are, if somewhat unprecedented, not really institutional erosion, because they have a legitimate constitutional basis. The executive power is vested in the president and Congress shouldn’t be able to create “independent” executive agencies or prevent him from firing particular staff through legislation. The qualification of appointments is just opinion and not institutional erosion. The IG firing, if actually unprecedented and unreasonably politically motivated, is a better example, as is the unilateral USAID-related impoundment.
A few of these are, if somewhat unprecedented, not really institutional erosion, because they have a legitimate constitutional basis.
These are not mutually exclusive.
The qualification of appointments is just opinion and not institutional erosion.
I disagree. If you appoint a leader of an institution with no experience related to that institution (Rex Tillerson: Secretary of State, Dr. Mehmet Oz: CMS Administrator), or who believes that institution doesn’t exist (Rick Perry: Department of Energy, Mick Mulvaney: CFPB, Betsy DeVos: Department of Education), they are highly likely to erode that institution, whether intentionally or through incompetence.
Not all appointments require extensive experience within that institution, but some positions should have deep domain expertise, unless their purpose is to serve as a wrecking ball appointment.
Ah, maybe you were using a looser definition of “institution.” I think it’s fine for the government to move toward dismantling the Department of Education, for example, because I don’t think of it as a core “institution” in the sense we’re talking about.
Do you think it’s institutional erosion when Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, or if a Democratic president were to abolish ICE in 2029?
I’m unclear what institution is directly implicated in the Afghanistan withdrawal, so I don’t have an opinion on whether it qualifies as erosion or not.
Abolishing ICE would be taking down an institution, I suppose. I take (what I assume is your implicit) point that preserving an institution isn’t per se virtuous. Perhaps ICE is beyond reform and would need to be abolished and replaced instead, and perhaps the same is true of the institutions Trump is attacking?
Right, my point was that I understood “institutional erosion” to mean “damage to norms that are central to our constitutional order.” I didn’t understand it to mean more literally reducing the funding or personnel of any government body. For example, if Congress passed an act tomorrow closing the Smithsonian, I wouldn’t consider that “institutional erosion” in the sense we’re talking about.
Likewise, if an administration legally wound down ICE, the Education Department, or whatever, that isn’t what I mean by “institutional erosion.” If the HHS secretary believes that vaccines cause autism, that’s also not what I mean. People sometimes use the term so loosely that they imply that it’s “institutional erosion” to do things that create tons of outrage from the prestige media, as if a core norm of our constitutional order is not to pass policy that contradicts that class.
I have not looked into these details enough to have an opinion, but, I think a lot of US institutions work via a mix of legal rules and implicit norms, and my sense is Trump was doing a lot of violating the norms that made legal rules workable
No, it’s me expressing disagreement with your reasoning for “A few of these are, if somewhat unprecedented, not really institutional erosion, because they have a legitimate constitutional basis.”
because, a constitutional basis is necessary but not sufficient (because soft cultural norms are also important)
(But, this is an area I have not looked into enough to have a strong belief about the object level claims, just objecting to your reasoning as sufficient to prove the point you wanted to make)
It would be really really helpful if the discussion wasn’t so meta. Everyone seems to take for granted that Trump did Something that is really really worrying but no-one says it. What is that something and why does it make you so worried?
encouraging ICE to train its agents to round people up without proper warrants, and with disregard for their fundamental rights. Masked and out-of-uniform law enforcement is an affront to a free society.
attacking foreign countries without consulting congress
threatening Greenland without consulting congress
threatening private companies so they give “golden shares” to the government, or agree to share profits with it
Shutting down the immigration system unilaterally. e.g. adding $100k “fees” for visa classes without congressional direction
Suing newspapers and media outlets for disadvantageous coverage.
This is just a start.
The counterargument by Republicans I’ve talked to—and I agree with No77e that this discussion seems to be taking a lot of partisan views as settled priors—is as follows:
Weaponization of the justice system is baked in, at this point, to the point where adhering to due process as defined by the opposition party amounts to pre-committing to always cooperating against an opponent that has spent the past hundred turns defecting.
The murder of Craig Robertson (I’ll use The Guardian as a left-leaning source here; if you want a right-leaning source there are plenty) and the subsequent lack of investigation or consequences made it clear to half of the American population—whether you agree or not—that treating the legal system as if it operates in good faith is for suckers.
Reddit’s apparent glee (see the comments; the subreddit is askconservatives but the post histories of the celebrating individuals indicates that they are not right-leaning) over the killing of Ashley Babbit, an unarmed <protestor or rioter, depending on your party affiliation> and the fact that the killer, Michael Byrd, recieved not only a complete lack of consequences but a series of glowing press interviews, was likewise seen as a point-of-no-return.
Decarlos Brown, who killed Iryna Zarutska, had received enumerable light sentences from judges prior to her murder. There are enumerable similar stories that anyone who regularly talks politics with anyone right-of-center has heard, and, together, they give the impression that the current judiciary is not made up of trustworthy arbiters of justice, but is, depending on how much good faith you assume, either horrifyingly incompetent or actively malicious.
attacking foreign countries without consulting congress
I want to assume good faith here, but everyone I’ve talked to, of every political slant from communist to progressive to libertarian to conservative, in the past twenty years, has treated this as a longstanding precedent.
As a concrete example, the Obama admin jeopardizing worldwide trust in vaccinations and—according to some critics from the right and others from the left—contributing to the Polio eradication campaign’s demise on the verge of the finish line—to eliminate Osama Bin Laden seems more-or-less qualitatively similar in terms of legality to Trump (apparently) collaborating with elements in the Venezuelan government to capture Maduro and replace him with his veep.
threatening Greenland without consulting congress
Again, I want to assume good faith, but politicians offending foreign countries is not, in any sense of the word, an exceptional situation that demands exceptional action. Reagan famously joked that he was about to nuke the USSR, triggering an escalation in the alert state across East Asia.
threatening private companies so they give “golden shares” to the government, or agree to share profits with it
From the Republican perspective, at least, much worse has been done. Prior to 2016, I think that most people in either party would take the sort of messages that Twitter received from government agencies as an indicator of coercive behavior on the part of the FBI that violates the first amendment. At the very least, the simultaneous sea change in speech policies across every large platform circa 2017-2018 was very suspicious, and permanently severed the trust that much of the population had in a free and independent market.
Shutting down the immigration system unilaterally. e.g. adding $100k “fees” for visa classes without congressional direction
Dwight Eisenhower did approximately an order of magnitude more on immigration, so it’s difficult to argue that this is unprecedented. To say the least, a temporary pause on immigration and a fee on the H1B program (which itself only recently doubled in scale, and cannot be said to be a longstanding and inalienable national institution) is not unprecedented in American history.
Moreover, unilateral action on immigration is longstanding in the other direction. In 1994, a single judge unilaterally declared that California had to facilitate public services for illegal immigrants, striking down a 60-40 statewide referendum. Many people place this as the action that turned the state blue, and a supermajority of California voters not only did not vote for it, but actively opposed it.
Finally, the share of the immigrant population in the U.S. has tripled between 1970 and 2020, with the raw number quintupling. Over the same timespan, the number of Americans preferring that immigration be decreased has generally exceeded the number wanting it increased. Unless you take the extreme partisan stance that only restrictions require justification or public consent, I do not think that anyone outside of the leftmost half would look at the recent history of immigration in the U.S. and conclude that the restrictionists are unilaterally acting outside of their mandate.
tl;dr: Half of the American population sees Trump as a moderate, sometimes tepid response to a <government/regime, depending on your political position> that has already ignored precedent and invalidated rule of law so severely that capitulation would amount to the total destruction of their way of life, and possibly worse. They have reasons, outlined above, for believing this.
I expect that this reply will be downvoted, given the tone of existing replies, but I don’t think turning LessWrong into a partisan colony is a good thing. For one, it means that half of America will inherently view everything LW wants as enemy. It also incentivizes a lack of skepticism when a same-party source makes a claim that merits it. Reddit went this route after 2016, and a lot of previously interesting and vibrant communities are now composed almost exclusively of, for lack of a better phrase, political slop. Compare r/videos before and after the ban on political content was lifted.
I think the rest of these points are colorable and appreciate you saying them, but
Threatening to take territory from an ally by force is far beyond “offending foreign countries”, not precedented to my knowledge, and very bad.
And the Reagan thing was a literal joke made in private. As opposed to Trump actually you know, repeatedly threatening to actually invade Greenland in public.
Your points are mostly fair that this kind of behavior has precedents. But I’m a libertarian so saying the other team is doing the same thing doesn’t convince me much that it’s not bad. From my viewpoint, the current administration has more of a plan of ignoring rules, laws, the constitution, etc. than most previous. Each incident has antecedents, and I can see how people on the red team might think “we’re just doing to them what they’ve been doing to us”, but what I see is a more concerted effort to undermine the rule of law.
The behavior of ICE (masks, lack of visible ID, ignoring warrant requirements, ignoring judicial orders) seems beyond the pale, even if the rules (deportation) they’re enforcing are on the books. The way they use self-declared emergencies are more extreme than previous administrations, but you’re right, “everyone does it”.
Your example about RR joking about nuking Russia seems clearly different than Trump’s repeated threats. An off-the-cuff remark doesn’t carry the same weight as Trump’s persistent prodding on this subject.
I’m not sure whether jawboning done behind the scenes is worse than taking partial control and ownership of private companies in the broad light of day. I’m a libertarian, so both free speech and private property are pretty important values to me. They weren’t proud enough of the Jawboning to do it in public, and I think they backed off when it became public. Continuing to insist that individuals and companies accede to his demands for tribute seems different.
But thanks for giving the other point of view. I can see that others see it differently.
I was responding to the question “What is that something and why does it make you so worried?” I would have been able to give a shorter list for any recent administration.
I appreciate your attempt to be charitable, but I don’t think the left-wing/liberal concerns with Jan 6 is appropriately summarized as “riot.”
I am going to be honest, if you asked me pre-Jan 6 “how many people would be shot if they attacked en masse the Capitol with Congress in session” my guess would have been much higher than one. This isn’t a case of protestors just doing their business in a public street and getting into some heated argument with police that degenerates into a fight. It was an attempt to interfere with government, and possibly a direct threat to the life and safety of elected officials. Even if you think it was warranted you would be an idiot to think it would be safe. You don’t storm the Bastille and expect no fire in return. A State’s whole thing is a monopoly on violence, it’s entirely expected that an attempt to violently subvert that State’s own internal mechanisms would be met with violence in return.
There’s a difference between becoming a partisan colony and noticing that democratic institutions are being actively undercut. Becoming clear on this is actually a (fairly easy) test of rationality, which we should pass as a community.* Yes, the world is complicated and there have been some serious defections on both sides. Yes, some of the MAGA complaints are valid. ALSO, Trump is degrading democracy and his administration is very rapidly sliding towards authoritarianism (in their actions, which match years of clear rhetoric). It is possible to separate this from underlying trends toward increasing executive power on the scale of decades and recognize it as the active crisis that it is.
I find this equivocation annoying. Is your comment about messaging or truth-seeking?
*Some rationalists may acknowledge that Trump has authoritarian tendencies and approve—though I think his blatant disrespect for the truth contradicts most constructions of rationalist virtue. But we should at least be aware of what is happening.
I hope your faith in LessWrong has been restored somewhat. If replies with well-researched specific examples relevant to the discussion got downvoted, there would be no point reading LW anymore.
(Also like, come on, bravery debates etc. Ah, I see you are kinda new here. The more you disagree on this website, the more karma you get… if you can keep it polite, smart, and supported by evidence, of course.)
I think this ship has sailed long ago, given that the website is explicitly and unashamedly atheist.
Politically, however, the typical criticism from outside has always been that we tolerate too many opinions.
I’d describe this “good criticism gets upvoted, good ingroup-rah-rah gets upvoted, bad criticism gets downvoted, bad ingroup-rah-rah often gets weak upvoted.” Which I don’t like but am not sure what to do about it.
Mediocre criticism can get plenty of upvotes as long as it’s a culture fit.
If the author does a good job of pitching it to Less Wrongers, then the critical post can activate readers’ it’s virtuous to be open-minded mindset and turn their critical faculties towards the thing that the post is criticizing and away from the post itself. So instead of evaluating the post according to their ordinary standards of epistemics and quality, they instead try to find anything in it that seems good / insightful / overly neglected / provoking of new useful thoughts / on a promising track.
It’s not perfect, but compared to most of the internet, even most of the smarter parts of the internet, we are trying, and the difference is visible. Sometimes bad things get upvoted, but at least a well-written criticism supported by references gets upvoted, too.
Obviously (given the word “bipartisan” in the title), the goal here is not to defeat Republicans at all costs and start a glorious thousand-years era of wokeness. Which already makes it different from a typical anti-Trump debate. This is not about tribes, it is about destruction of the existing political order by one wannabe dictator, whose actions are atypical even for his own political party.
In this context, naming the bad actions of the other side is good—you won’t get bipartisan support against “bad things that Republicans do”. If this is something that every Republican would say when asked to support the resistance, we better be prepared for that in advance. Admit that in the past mistakes were made by both sides, but now things are getting completely out of control, so we need to agree on some common foundation of how we want thing to function. That includes calling out the previous defections against this common foundation, on both sides.
Thanks for the perspective. I would like to note that pointing out earlier instances of bad behavior is important historical context, but doesn’t make more recent bad behavior any less bad. The USA has some really dark stuff in its past. We should remember and do better.
A couple of other things that stand out to me as particularly egregious:
My understanding is that Trump is far more corrupt than past presidents (including Trump in his first term). An example of this is allowing export controls of Nvidia’s AI chips to China in exchange for gifts from Jensen Huang.
The Trump administration has launched criminal investigations against political opponents at an unprecedented rate, most recently against Jerome Powell yesterday.
And of course, the fake electors plot to steal the 2020 presidential election (not to be confused with January 6th—I think his conduct on January 6th was really bad, but the fake electors plot is a much greater indictment of Trump’s character and much stronger evidence of his authoritarianism).
There was also the video from the homeland security secretary blaming democrats for the government shutdown in blatant violation of the hatch act.
Not the highest impact of his many crimes, but does really drive home how casually Trump is willing to undercut any apolitical technocracy for political ends.
That’s what all US administration did in the last two decades. When the Obama administration started bombing Yemen and Somalia they didn’t consult congress for permission for that.
What is this referring to? ICE doesn’t need a judicial warrant to arrest someone for a civil immigration violation
Since I am not taking on “do something about this” I also wasn’t taking responsibility for writing up a clear writeup of what was done that was bad that I made sure was factually accurate. Given that I’m not taking this on, if you’re not already sold on “Trump is bad”, prolly this post just isn’t for you.
ChrisHibbert’s list is the same rough starting point I would make. I’d add “not super answering to the Supreme Court when it intervenes on them.”
As a Canadian, threats to annex my country is certainly one.
One major category of concern is institutional erosion. Here are a few salient examples:
Mass IG firing (Jan 2025): Fired 17 inspectors general in one night without the legally required 30-day notice. Federal court ruled this “obviously” illegal. Several were investigating Musk’s companies. (IGs are the internal watchdogs that catch waste, fraud, and abuse.)
USAID dismantling: Shut down the agency that administered most U.S. foreign aid, firing 83% of staff. This destroyed implementation capacity built over decades. A Lancet study estimates 14 million excess deaths by 2030 from the cuts.
Schedule F: Reclassifying ~50,000 career civil servants to strip job protections, enabling political firings. This converts expertise-based positions into loyalty-based ones.
Firing independent agency heads: Removed FTC commissioners, NLRB members, MSPB chair. DOJ sent a letter to Congress stating it would no longer defend the constitutionality of for-cause removal protections—explicitly signaling intent to overturn Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 precedent that lets Congress create agencies insulated from presidential control.
Unqualified appointments:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (HHS): Longtime anti-vaccine activist with no public health administration experience. His department’s official MAHA report cited nonexistent studies, then introduced additional errors when revised.
Pete Hegseth (Defense): Fox News weekend host with no Pentagon or senior military experience. Participated in the Signalgate breach, sharing military operation timing on an unsecured group chat that accidentally included a journalist.
Kash Patel (FBI): No law enforcement leadership experience. Authored a book, Government Gangsters, containing a list of government officials he considers enemies of Trump, and has stated publicly he intends to pursue them.
Tulsi Gabbard (DNI): Former congresswoman with no intelligence community experience. Sen. Dick Durbin said she “would not be qualified for an entry-level position” at an intelligence agency.
Betsy DeVos (Education, 2017): Billionaire Republican donor with no education policy experience. First Cabinet nominee in history to require the Vice President to break a tie vote for confirmation.
This is a small sampling; a comprehensive account would be far longer.
A few of these are, if somewhat unprecedented, not really institutional erosion, because they have a legitimate constitutional basis. The executive power is vested in the president and Congress shouldn’t be able to create “independent” executive agencies or prevent him from firing particular staff through legislation. The qualification of appointments is just opinion and not institutional erosion. The IG firing, if actually unprecedented and unreasonably politically motivated, is a better example, as is the unilateral USAID-related impoundment.
These are not mutually exclusive.
I disagree. If you appoint a leader of an institution with no experience related to that institution (Rex Tillerson: Secretary of State, Dr. Mehmet Oz: CMS Administrator), or who believes that institution doesn’t exist (Rick Perry: Department of Energy, Mick Mulvaney: CFPB, Betsy DeVos: Department of Education), they are highly likely to erode that institution, whether intentionally or through incompetence.
Not all appointments require extensive experience within that institution, but some positions should have deep domain expertise, unless their purpose is to serve as a wrecking ball appointment.
Ah, maybe you were using a looser definition of “institution.” I think it’s fine for the government to move toward dismantling the Department of Education, for example, because I don’t think of it as a core “institution” in the sense we’re talking about.
Do you think it’s institutional erosion when Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, or if a Democratic president were to abolish ICE in 2029?
I’m unclear what institution is directly implicated in the Afghanistan withdrawal, so I don’t have an opinion on whether it qualifies as erosion or not.
Abolishing ICE would be taking down an institution, I suppose. I take (what I assume is your implicit) point that preserving an institution isn’t per se virtuous. Perhaps ICE is beyond reform and would need to be abolished and replaced instead, and perhaps the same is true of the institutions Trump is attacking?
Right, my point was that I understood “institutional erosion” to mean “damage to norms that are central to our constitutional order.” I didn’t understand it to mean more literally reducing the funding or personnel of any government body. For example, if Congress passed an act tomorrow closing the Smithsonian, I wouldn’t consider that “institutional erosion” in the sense we’re talking about.
Likewise, if an administration legally wound down ICE, the Education Department, or whatever, that isn’t what I mean by “institutional erosion.” If the HHS secretary believes that vaccines cause autism, that’s also not what I mean. People sometimes use the term so loosely that they imply that it’s “institutional erosion” to do things that create tons of outrage from the prestige media, as if a core norm of our constitutional order is not to pass policy that contradicts that class.
I have not looked into these details enough to have an opinion, but, I think a lot of US institutions work via a mix of legal rules and implicit norms, and my sense is Trump was doing a lot of violating the norms that made legal rules workable
Is this meant to reply to my other comment? What is this referring to
No, it’s me expressing disagreement with your reasoning for “A few of these are, if somewhat unprecedented, not really institutional erosion, because they have a legitimate constitutional basis.”
because, a constitutional basis is necessary but not sufficient (because soft cultural norms are also important)
(But, this is an area I have not looked into enough to have a strong belief about the object level claims, just objecting to your reasoning as sufficient to prove the point you wanted to make)