I Can't Even Be Mad...

Earlier this evening, Donald Trump's Twitter account posted a curious tweet:

May God be with the people of Sutherland Springs, Texas. The FBI and Law Enforcement has arrived.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2017

(In case it goes bye-bye, the Tweet reads: May God be with the people of Sutherland Springs, Texas. The FBI and Law Enforcement has arrived. 11:34 Nov. 14 2017)

The fact that the President's account posted a quasi-shout out to the victims of the Sutherland Springs shooting nine days after the fact is the sort of gaffe that those of us living through the Trump administration have learned to simply shrug off. Yes, of course, the President finally made a tweet nearly two weeks late about a shooting, story checks out. 

WHY  did the President's account suddenly make this seemingly ill-timed post? For those paying attention, Trump has been out of the country for the past twelve days. Owing to the magic of time zones and the international date line, and trans-continental air travel, it is likely President Trump sent this message right at the cusp of his phone losing wi-fi or cellular data service, and the original tweet got bounced back to his phone. When this happens, the Twitter app will store the orphaned tweet and attempt to send it along at the next possible opportunity. With this tweet suddenly popping onto Twitter means is that Donald either just turned on a phone where the tweet was stored, or has gotten into range of wi-fi or cellular data service as of 11:34 PM EDT. 

This is generally not a big deal for those of us who travel with phones. I know I have sat down in my seat on an airplane, written a text, or typed up a Facebook status, and watched it not send for a few moments before I have been forced to turn off my phone for takeoff. The post times out, the plane takes off, my post floats in the aether for a few hours, and when I turn my phone back on, suddenly I am making a comment about flying to MSP FROM MSP. I'm very meta. But, in my case, nobody gives a single damn because I am just a random passenger on a cheap red-eye flight. This is not the case for the President of the United States.

The security implications behind the nature of this tweet -- and the extrapolations people in the know could develop from keeping an eye on the President's twitter feed in the future -- are not insignificant (and not something I will be delving into because I enjoy not being visited by the Secret Service), but this is one of the rare instances where the absurdity of the Trump administration makes even the most innocuous gaffe into a potential headache for the administration and the government at large. Some will surely pounce on this tweet as just yet another sign of The Don's ever growing dementia. Others will downplay the significance of the missive as a technical glitch that anyone's doddering grandfather would fall into (whose parents haven't inadvertently sent a Facebook birthday message to them three months after their actual birthday? Not mine, surely). 

A story like this -- which would make the top two stories on Fox News had Obama done it -- will be a charming anecdote for those of us lucky enough to survive the Trump administration. Remember that time Donald forgot to clear out his drafts folder in the Twitter app? Good times. We will regale our children of this moment as we sit around a campfire eating hobo beans and drawing lots to see who has to go scout into the radiation zone for more beans. But, we can't even be mad about this. It is simply another great moment in Trump's presidency that defies expectations and challenges our assumptions about the people we have put into positions of absolute power over our lives. Just as every rose has it's thorn, every day of the Age of Trump has a gaffe.

Rage And America

A recent Politico expose on the year anniversary of Donald Trump's election presents a stark reminder for those paying attention that the current President of the United States was not elected solely on his merits, but also because America's new number one pastime seems to be using the vote as a way to express communal rage.

It is a nearly worn out trope that the American political process has been warped by a rising tide of rage. Ethnic rage as shown by the slow growth of the white supremacist Alt-Right, economic rage as seen in the voting patterns of those living in Pennsylvania or Michigan -- to make no mention of Occupy Wall Street -- rage over health care, gun control, police corruption, sexual assault, the direction of American politics both in general and specific, immigration, people not saying Merry Christmas, and on and on. I am not turning over new ground in suggesting that the American id has become enthralled in the service of resentment and fury. Americans seem angrier than at any point in living memory and more able and willing to share their collective aggreivement with one another in social settings.

While it is not news to suggest that contemporary America is a rage fueled nation, where personal resentment and anger dominate the landscape. But what is up for debate are the root causes of this period of great strain. While all are generally in agreement that there are many causes of our recent outbursts, but they are divided as to the main force propelling us down this path. Some argue that economic anxiety is the primary driving force behind this roiling fury. Others claim that the root cause is a toxic media environment whose constant diet of otherization has pushed a wedge between citizens. Still others point to a collapse of the social consensus, and the rise of new political norms that are signalling the dawning of a new American political era (or, perhaps harkening back to earlier eras democratic of disagreement.

Owing to the longue duree that historians deal with in their work, I am more inclined to see the recent outbreak of political and social angst as a regression to the mean of American political activity. Thomas Jefferson believed that the American republic was healthiest when the citizenry was occasionally driven to revolutionary fervor. Americans have long disdained migrants coming into their nation as criminals and drug addicts (and have frequently simply shifted their animus towards migrants from one ethnic group to the next as the complexion of American immigration has changed). The American Civil War -- arguably a near-fatal brush with the consequences of political alienation for the American state -- was fought as a result of Southern anger over abolitionist agitation against the institution of slavery and fears that the practice would be abolished by President Lincoln. Americans are not special when one examines the fractious nature of their politics and society for much of its history. The last seventy years of politics dominated by a post-war generation who understood the costs of unchecked anger and their children raised in an era of nearly unparalleled economic growth while simultaneously sheltered and threatened by the blanket of nuclear deterrence can be seen as an anomaly when viewed with an eye towards the scope of American history.

Americans are no more angry than their ancestors, but perhaps they are coming out of a long political coma. Issues that -- even as recently as five or ten years ago -- could be swept under the rug and ignored have come to the forefront of the American consciousness.

The New Grad School Tax

The latest revelation from the latest GOP tax plan is that it would tax tuition waivers for graduate students. For someone who has two post-graduate degrees, and who benefited greatly from tuition waivers covering the cost of my education, I can say that this is a blow to graduate students everywhere. In essence what this change to the tax code means is that the tuition waiver that students receive, will be taxed as income, despite the fact that money never changes hands between the student and the institution. When I had my tuition waived I never even received a statement telling me what I owed (one semester there was a bit of a mistake with the Student Finance Office, and I did get to see what Clark charges for tuition, but more on that later).

In order to give some sense of what this change to the tax code would mean to a graduate student, I am going to give a brief breakdown of what my tax situation looked like while I was a Teaching Assistant and Graduate Student at Clark University (where I earned my Ph.D.). Since at the time I did not have to pay any tuition to Clark University, outside of a $100 'Activities Fee' every year, I left graduate school essentially debt free. This has been a major boon for me in my job search as I have been able to forestall getting a full time position and exist in the part time world of adjuncting, because I do not have loans to pay back. That said, even though I came through debt free, I did not rake in the money while a graduate student, as at most I had about $2,000 in my bank account at the end of the six years of work at Clark.

Compare that modest gain with the following math. For the six years I was at Clark -- and I graduated ahead of schedule in my field -- my tuition was meant to be around $42,000 per year. On top of that, for four of those years, Clark paid me to take on the role of Teaching Assistant in the Department of History for about $10,000/year. So, for four out of the six years, under this tax plan, I would have "earned" $52,000, and for the remaining two my "earnings" would be $42,000. We will be calculating the tax rate based upon the Republican tax plan as it is proposed, and can be found here. Thus, for the years I earned $52,000 as a single filer, I would be taxed at the 25% rate, meaning I would owe: $13,000 before any applicable deductions. For the other two years, where I only "earned" $42,000 my tax liability would be: $5,040. All told, for all six years of my graduate studies I would owe the federal government $62,080. Remember: at the end of grad school, without this sort of onerous burden, I was only able to save about $2,000, under this plan I would owe approximately thirty times that amount.

This sort of tax burden would have undoubtedly have forced me to take on loans, and likely would have made me reconsider going to graduate school, which is likely the point of this tax plan in the first place. Trump's constituents tend not to be those with graduate degrees, and the Republican Party seem entirely fine with the idea of restricting education as much as possible. The problem with this plan is that it is going to further skew the nature of education in America, and will absolutely lead to many young, ambitious, graduate school considering students to travel overseas for their education, where they will not be saddled with the tax burden of high tuition -- as most non-American universities charge a pittance compared to the American educational system. The knock on effect of such a migration of intelligent young people will surely be that it is more difficult for American businesses to attract workers who have moved countries, many of whom will start a life of their own in their newly adopted lands. Because of this, it is possible that the United States will find itself lagging behind in research intensive fields, which could potentially be a major issue for the American military-industrial complex, as well as America's standing in the world as a whole.

This plan is a misguided, and short-sighted attempt at grabbing as many dollars as possible to try and make sure that the budget conforms to the Byrd rule, and another attempt by the GOP to kick the ladder out from under the next generation, as it tries to climb out of the economic rubble that the Baby Boomers have left in their wake.