A New Congress Begins, Trump The Unstable, On Tariffs, GLP-1s and Disinhibition

Let's Keep Fighting Trump's Unacceptable And Dangerous 4

Good morning all. This week we’ve been talking about the importance of “winning” to Trump and why we must take and celebrate our wins when they come. Here’s one of his posts this morning. It’s all about “winning" -

What is going to happen today in the House? Will Johnson make it, and when? No one knows. Talks are ongoing. As of posting this morning Johnson doesn’t have the votes. And yes, our next President seems very, very worried about taking another very high profile loss (or stumble) in what has been a remarkably bad start to Trump 2.0. For losing is a strongman’s kryptonite.

Thanks to all of you who have self-reported making calls to your House and Senate offices insisting that they fight the Unacceptable And Dangerous 4 - Gabbard, Hegseth, Kennedy and Patel. Today would be a good day for everyone in this community to call their Senators and House Members, offer them good luck in this new Congress, and insist they do everything they can to block these 4 outrageous nominees. Gaetz went down. They need to follow.

Here’s Senator Ed Markey in a recent appearance on Lawrence O’Donnell showing us how it should be done. May other Senators and House members follow his lead in the days ahead.

Paul Krugman On Trump’s Ridiculous Tariffs - In a new Substack post this morning, Paul Krugman, now a full time Substacker and no longer with the NYT, does a terrific takedown of Trump’s crazypants embrace of tariffs:

I don’t know about you, but I’m still extremely unsure what the incoming president will actually do about trade. The Smoot-Hawley level tariffs he promised during the campaign would be disastrous, but sometimes I think he may have at least a vague sense of the damage those tariffs would do, so what he’s really aiming for is an extortion scheme — one in which most companies would secure exemptions via political contributions and/or de facto bribes (e.g. buying Trump crypto.)

But then he’ll come out with something like the Truth Social post above, and I’ll be reminded that wealthy and powerful people like Trump or Andreesen or, of course, Elon Musk are often far more ignorant than policy wonks can easily imagine……

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But when Trump or Andreesen ask why we can’t go back to the McKinley era, when the government subsisted on tariffs and didn’t need an income tax, their problem isn’t failure to understand the revenue function; it’s failure to appreciate the simple fact that in the 1890s America barely had a government by modern standards….

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Sure, tariffs could pay for a government without Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, at a time when even the military was tiny. But the constituency for returning to that kind of small government consists, as far as I can tell, of a couple of dozen libertarians in bow ties. And the kind of government we have now needs a lot more than tariffs to pay its way.

Which brings me back to what is likely to happen on tariffs. You might think that it’s obvious that Trump’s announced plans, or concepts of plans, are unworkable. But it’s probably not obvious to Trump — and who’s going to tell him?

Catherine Rampell, “Ozempic economics: How GLP-1s will disrupt the economy in 2025” - Found this new column from the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell fascinating (gift link if you want to read the whole thing):

A new technology is disrupting the economy. Even experts don’t entirely understand how it works, its full range of uses and what its unintended consequences could be.

No, it’s not artificial intelligence; I’m talking about weight-loss drugs. With adult obesity rates falling last year for the first time in more than a decade, drugs such as Ozempic and Zepbound are already reshaping Americans’ waistlines. Now, they’re poised to reshape the entire economy, too.

As of May, roughly 1 in 8 American adults had tried GLP-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1s for short). This percentage has almost certainly grown since then, as telehealth companies, “medi-spas” and compounding pharmacies have aggressively marketed GLP-1 prescriptions.

We’re only just beginning to learn the full universe of effects for this class of drugs. Originally developed to treat Type 2 diabetes, GLP-1s were soon discovered to be effective in treating obesity and managing weight loss. Now there’s an ever-growing list of other potential uses (on- and off-label), including for treating heart disease, sleep apnea, Alzheimer’s, substance abuse and maybe even gambling addiction.

“I’m on Wegovy for the rest of my life, but I can show you an entire medicine cabinet full of medications that I no longer have to take,” said Taryn Mitchell, 53, a GLP-1 patient in Greensboro, North Carolina…..

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Besides robbing many Americans of their energy, health and self-esteem, obesity has also robbed the U.S. economy of some of its most precious assets: workers.

Obesity-related disabilities, absenteeism, “presenteeism” (that is, showing up but not performing your best), and premature death all have enormous social and economic costs. Which means that making Americans healthier can make the labor market healthier, too, especially if interventions occur while patients are young and have many working years left. Mitchell, for instance, said she picked up a second job this summer, something she would not have had the energy to do before her recent 85-pound weight loss.

These drugs don’t yet “pay for themselves,” but if the list price gets cut in half, they would probably start to — at least, if you add up all the workforce benefits, quality of life improvements and reduced spending on other care.

Innovation, competition and expanded production capacity are already stoking a price war among drugmakers. And Medicare officials are expected to start negotiating the prices of these drugs, potentially reducing the blow to federal budgets and helping private insurers’ bargaining positions as well.

That kind of payoff is a longer-term goal, not one we’d likely see in 2025. But it’s a reason to celebrate as we ring in the new year nonetheless.

In related news, this morning the Surgeon General Of The United States has called for putting cancer warning labels on alcohol like we do cigarettes:

And note my call here in February for Democrats to make improving public health and attacking the roots causes of declining life expectancy a major priority in the 2024 campaign:

The president faces a similar opportunity to address an unacceptable decline in American life expectancy in recent years. Life expectancy continues to decline, and we’ve fallen behind peer nations. We should use this as a sign that a new emphasis on the health and well-being of Americans is needed, and the president should commit to reversing this decline in his second term. All ideas need to be on the table—better mental health and addiction recovery programs, more aggressive steps to stop the flow of foreign drugs into the country, better gun laws, the restoration of women’s reproductive freedom and addressing unacceptable levels of maternal mortality, fighting to restore trust in vaccines and the broader concept of public health.

We should not be ceding this ground to RFK and Trump.

Josh Marshall On Political Violence And The Great Disinhibition - Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted a terrific column yesterday that talked about the rash of political violence we’ve seen of late and how it reminds him of what happened in post-Civil War 19th America. His concept of “disinhibition” may become an important prism to understanding Trump 2.0:

Aside from a conceivable connection between the New Orleans and Las Vegas cases yesterday, these different incidents not only don’t seem connected in the sense of some joint conspiracy. They also run the gamut ideologically — more or less recognizable cases of lone wolf Islamist terrorism in New Orleans and a right-wing dude building an arsenal in Virginia. With Mangione, a highly privileged kid goes off the rails and commits what used to be known as “propaganda of the deed” targeting the U.S. health care system. At this point, it’s a true Rorschach trying to make sense of just what the plan or point may have been with the Cybertruck explosion. And then there were the two assassination attempts on Donald Trump. The first seemed to follow the general trajectory of a school shooting or mass shooting until veering off into targeting Trump; the second had a culprit with a scattering of political enthusiasms but who generally seemed to be aligned as hostile to Trumpism. And we shouldn’t ignore the example right in front of our faces, a generation of young, angry men and boys who shoot up their schools before often taking their own lives. Sometimes these guys leave a trail of semi-articulate indicators of political motivation — they hate women or Blacks or Jews. Usually the “cause” is the violence itself.

But perhaps that very cacophony is the story: a lot of angry people, angry at different things, but all simultaneously resorting to or planning violence of one kind or another…..

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Quite simply, the late 19th century was a particularly violent period in American history, and particularly violent both within and adjacent to the political process. It wasn’t like the 1960s or the 1990s or the teens of this century when there was politically inflected violence that was overwhelmingly on the left or the right. It was more like everyone was more violent at once — a general disinhibition affecting all “sides,” with incidents feeding on each other. It doesn’t take too great an imagination to see the U.S. today moving in a similar direction. I’m not placing any great weight on the events of the last four or five weeks to make this argument. But I think this may be the best framework to understand them.

More From Hopium for your weekend reading, listening and viewing pleasure:

• The Trump Wrecking Ball Is Already Here (video and post)

• For Dems It’s A Time For Re-invention, Re-imagination and Innovation (video and post, has my current 6 things we need to do now)

• In A Time Of Turmoil And Transformation There Is Opportunity

• 9 Interviews In Our “What Happened, What Comes Next” Series - including Ruben Gallego, Abigail Spanberger, Ben Wikler, Ken Martin and more

• Weigh in on Hopium’s future in this forum for paid subscribers (I will be reviewing the comments again this weekend)

• Follow me on Bluesky

Opening day of the 119th Congress inspiration from Thomas Jefferson

Keep working hard all. Proud to be in this fight with all of you - Simon