More of the Hodgepodge of Mundane Crazy and Aberrant Crazy, esp. Birthright Citizenship Crazy
As the number of shockingly awful actions by Donald Trump and his shameless henchmen grows by the hour, there will be a temptation to focus only on the most extreme and unprecedented among the outrageous arguments and policies that they unleash. That would be a mistake, because a lot of what they will do is no less crazy simply for being oldies but baddies.
It is not merely that we should avoid normalizing the abnormal but that Republicans long before Trump were already constructing and living in their own evidence- and logic-free universe. Because I am an economist and tax policy scholar, I have unfortunately had a close-up view of a lot of the craziest and least defensible claims coming from Republicans about taxes for decades. I thus ended my column earlier this week by discussing the mundane craziness of "trickle-down economics," only one version of which is the claim that "tax cuts pay for themselves." Republicans generally claim to believe the latter (crazier) argument, but even those who are not quite that crazy happily embrace and repeat the former.
To be clear, I am using the word "crazy" here to mean that a sentient, passably intelligent, reasonably informed person could not possibly make such an argument with a straight face. That does not mean, however, that the argument could not possibly be true in a different universe with a different set of facts. As I have said many times before, for example, I would be perfectly willing to support tax cuts for the rich if such cuts truly did result in benefits trickling down to the rest of us. But they don't. There are in fact internally consistent cases for both of the regressive tax proposals, but the evidence simply does not back up either case, despite decades of motivated investigations by right-wing economists and policy types.
Such crazy claims are not only found in the tax area, of course. For example, Republicans have spent decades attacking Democrats for "Borking" judicial candidates and then used those lies to justify Republican blockades on Democratic nominees. The problem is that even Robert Bork was never Borked. He received a full hearing and was denied a Supreme Court seat when an actual vote was taken, where multiple Republican senators were so appalled by the content of his judicial philosophy that they joined Democrats in voting no.
But it is not that it is impossible for a party's Senate caucus to do what Republicans accuse Democrats of having done. How do we know? Because Republicans have done it! The problem is that Democrats never did it, so "turnabout is fair play" is a crazy thing to say when there is nothing to justify any retaliation.
Similarly, and getting back to taxes for a moment, it is possible for the IRS to abuse its power to punish a president's partisan enemies, as the Nixon presidency proved -- and Trump will surely soon prove again. But even after Republicans launched five separate investigations (or was it six?) trying to prove that the Obama White House had directed the IRS to "target" conservative groups, the investigators continually failed to prove the case. Even so, it is canon among Republicans that Obama did something that he never did. That is mundane, but it is still reality-free craziness.
The less said about "the 2020 election was stolen" the better, but it is especially insane that believing in that lie is a job requirement for Republicans at this point.
"Crazy" can also mean believing something that is in fact impossible. That is, there are some things that are not backed up by even a semi-plausible story of cause and effect. Trump's innovation, if one wants to call it that, is to be willing to engage in magical thinking that does not even pretend to have a basis in reality. "I'll reduce grocery prices while the economy booms" is only one of the more laughable of such boasts.
What are some other crazy claims that are relatively mundane at this point? Every time Republicans want to block any federal spending bill, they cherrypick items from it that they think will sound outrageous to the public. This was, to be sure, never exclusively a Republican move. I have written several times (most recently here, in 2022) about former US Senator William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin who served from 1957 through 1989. Proxmire was infamous for his "Golden Fleece Awards," in which he highlighted what he presented as absolutely-no-question-about-it WASTE by the federal government. The problem is that he would pick up on some small thing that he did not understand (probably by choice), such as the time he criticized a tiny grant to study why prisoners try to break out of jail. "Cuz they want out! Duh," is not an answer, given that we would in fact want to know why prisoners make the risk-reward calculation to do something very dangerous; and knowing why they take the mortal risk would help to guide policy.
Republicans over the years, however, have developed their own cottage industry of highlighting things that they think are stupid, such as a big battle in the 1990's over a minuscule grant for cities to run "midnight basketball" programs, which had been proposed to give urban youth something to do after dark other than hang out and possibly commit crimes. In the 2010's, there was an outcry over maintenance costs for the National Mall, specifically an absolutely standard effort to repair the grass on that nationally important patriotic tourist attraction.
So we have gone from "That's an important thing, but we already know why prisoners want to escape" (even though we do not know), to "I don't want to pay a pittance for an anti-crime initiative, because ... um ... basketball and 'urban,'" to "No money for something that we have always done and that everyone who visits the nation's capital would notice if it's not done."
That is plenty bad. Can Republicans make it even worse? Hold their beer.
In the completely unnecessary near-shutdown last month (instigated by budgetary simpleton Elon Musk), the fever swamps spat out what Republicans viewed as a damning list labeled "What Congress Snuck Into Its Pork-Packed Christmas Spending Spree" -- where "Congress" here includes the Republican-run House. What was on the list? It was puzzling.
On a part of the list that Fox News hyped, we saw this: "Members of Congress would be allowed their first pay raise since 2009." That seems less like a spending spree than an overdue inflation adjustment (and in any event, it would not have come close to making up 15 years of price increases). They also complained about a "feral swine eradication program," a complaint that one assumes was not motivated by a commitment to animal rights, where the money was almost surely designated to minimize economic damage from feral animal populations. Are Republicans now anti-farmer and anti-private property?
It becomes even stranger, however, when we get to "accountability for recycling and composting fraud" and "no longer calling homeless adults and children 'homeless.'" These are part of the "Pork-Packed Christmas Spending Spree"? Maybe -- maybe -- the accountability thing requires some kind of absolutely minimal enforcement budget, but the complaint about vocabulary is beyond nonsense.
Again, this starts with the old and very familiar kind of craziness and is thus fundamentally mundane, but it does show signs of aberration due to evidence- and logic-free metastatic craziness. Still, nothing can beat the biggest aberration of all. Trump not only says things based on nothing at all while refusing even to try to justify his claims. He also has absolutely no idea how to understand the few facts that he comes across.
Enter his war on birthright citizenship. In an excellent "Legal Eagle" video on this topic earlier this week, the editors included a clip from Trump's December 2024 interview with NBC's Kristen Welker and another clip from a Trump speech that was available on his social media feed.
Here is Trump in the first clip (starting at the 0:45 mark): "If somebody sets just a foot -- one foot, you don't need two -- on our land, 'Congratulations, you are now a citizen of the United States of America!' Yes, we're gonna end that because it's ridiculous." As the narrator/lawyer of the video immediately points out, the best guess is that Trump was referring to the so-called "wet-foot-dry-foot policy" that was part of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966. But that, of course, has nothing to do with birthright citizenship. It was simply a rule that determined which refugees were to be sent back to Cuba (those without a "dry foot") and those that could stay. Notably, a person who stayed was not "now a citizen of the United States of America."
Trump in the second clip is even weirder (19:52 mark): "The United States ... says that, even if neither parent is a citizen nor even lawfully in the country, their future children are automatic citizens the moment their parents trespass onto our soil." Huh? Children born in the United States are citizens when they are born here, not because their parents were in the country at some point. To hear Trump tell it -- and based on his odd, sing-songy delivery, he seems to be reading from a teleprompter, so this is not off-the-cuff guesswork on his part (not that that would excuse the mistake) -- once anyone "trespasses," the die is cast. They can go anywhere and give birth to as many US citizens as they want. Among other things, that would mean that even if Trump succeeds in deporting millions of people, their having been in the country even for a nanosecond gives all of their future children citizenship. Are all of the deportees' foreign-born children from the last few decades missing out on the privileges and immunities of US citizenship?
Years ago, someone I knew claimed to have heard about women in the midst of labor running onto the grounds of US embassies abroad to "give birth on American soil." The idea, I suppose, was that a woman would hide nearby until she was literally crowning and then throw herself over the embassy gate or sneak past the guards. Even if that story were not apocryphal, the most that would happen (under the most extreme set of circumstances) would be that that specific baby would be a US citizen. No siblings would be. The father would not be. It is all insane.
Yet that is where we are. Trump seems actually to think that all a person has to do is wash up on shore, set one foot on dry land while finishing giving birth, and the "invasion" has begun. He complains that the media will make him look bad if he deports the parents of birthright citizens, which he says gives him "no choice" but to deport the entire family. Ignorance, meet stupidity. Stupidity, meet malevolence.
Trump and his people have decided (see the pardons of the January 6 insurrectionists) that they simply do not have to answer questions or followups, and when they do, they believe that they can get away with saying any crazy thing. All of that craziness will, as I noted above, be a mixture of the mundane and the for-now aberrant. At some point, however, the aberrant will become familiar, and they will start all over again.