As a general rule, at least some policies are going to have a neutral impact if only because they are ineffective, not everything is going to be illegal or unconstitutional, and the worst possible political and other outcome isn’t going to happen in every situation.
While it’s traditional for the opposition party to oppose, I don’t think anyone would disagree that there’s something fundamentally different about the Trump Era. Disagreement is not simply disagreement expressed as a preference for something different, an alternative plan or idea to address the root cause of a problem. Rarely, if ever, does a Democrat object to a policy on actual policy grounds, claiming that there’s a better way to accomplish the goal or even that the proposed policy will have an adverse effect. Instead, every disagreement is part of an existential struggle between good and evil, where the Democrats and their progressive allies are the self-appointed hero in the story, variously struggling against some of the darkest forces imaginable. This struggle is generally expressed in three parts. First, there are the hyperbolic claims, either that the policy in question will kill people, literally, and-or that it’s tantamount to some other historical atrocity, either a generalized authoritarianism or a specific Nazism. Hence, the cuts to the USAID program early in President Trump’s second term were said to potentially kill millions (Bill Gates) and as of May 2025, were claimed to be responsible for 300,000 deaths and as of early last month 600,000 deaths around the world (The New Yorker). Likewise, other cuts to government staffing and funding were killing dozens as of March (The American Prospect) with more on the way as a result of our inability to prepare for storms, a lack of expertise in various health departments, or as Politico put it at the time, “The Trump administration carried out more mass firings across the Health and Human Services Department this weekend, continuing a chaotic purge of the federal workforce that career officials and lawmakers warned would hurt key programs and impair efforts to track threats to public health.” Similarly, the Big Beautiful Bill was going to cause people to “literally die” (House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries), some 51,000 Americans per year (Senate Democrats) or as Senator Bernie Sanders put it, “Let’s be clear. The Republican reconciliation bill which makes massive cuts to Medicaid in order to pay for huge tax breaks for billionaires is not just bad public policy. It is not just immoral. It is a death sentence for struggling Americans. If this bill becomes law, more than 51,000 Americans will die unnecessarily each and every year.” Even policies that have been implemented to save lives such as using the National Guard to reduce crime in DC and have already been shown to radically reduce the murder rate (down 40% year over year), will ultimately lead to more deaths. According to Senator Elissa Slotkin, for example, Americans might not be in danger of getting killed by a citizen any longer, but they now risk the military opening fire on them at any moment, “Yeah. So, for me, my primary concern is the use of U.S. military on American shores, on our city — in our cities and in our streets. We’ve seen now the courts overturn the deployment of U.S. military into our streets, including here in Washington, D.C. When you look at these videos coming out of places like Chicago, it makes me incredibly nervous that we’re about to see people in law enforcement, people in uniformed military get nervous, get stressed, shoot at American civilians. It is very — a very, very stressful situation for these law enforcement and for the communities on the ground.”
Either on a stand alone basis or in conjunction with the claim people are certain to die, there will almost undoubtedly be subsequent claims that the policy is a threat to democracy, likely taken from some authoritarian or white supremacist playbook. In August, CNN covered President Trump’s “most authoritarian moves so far,” beginning by noting, “The story of President Donald Trump’s first seven months back in office is the consolidation of power. He has bulldozed the obstacles that often stood in his way in his first term and constantly tested boundaries, in an almost single-minded pursuit of more authority. Whether you think that’s a good thing (because that’s what the country needs) or a bad thing, that’s objectively the state of affairs. Trump has for years made no secret of his disregard for the limits of his power, and he’s governing accordingly.” According to CNN, these authoritarian moves included “his federalization of the DC Metropolitan Police Department and his deployment of the National Guard to the nation’s capital to deal with what he says is out-of-control crime,” his “politicization of government data,” and “ the snowballing number of investigations of Trump’s political opponents” plus tariffs, “MAGA-fying the government’s independent functions,” “coercion of the media, universities and law firms,” “ignoring Congress,” and “due process and the rule of law on deportations.” In September, the liberal Center for American Progress took this view worldwide, claiming that President Trump is fueling “global autocracy” by giving a “greenlight for authoritarianism.” As they saw it, “The Trump administration’s actions in its first eight months follow the authoritarian playbook: dismissal of career civil servants; the persecution of political opponents; as well as attacks on the free press, universities, and civil society organizations. In its efforts to remake U.S. foreign policy, the Trump administration has gutted several agencies and programs that help protect and promote democracy, defend civil society, and gird the rule of law globally.” On a more granular level, one could fill several volumes with references to the gestapo, brownshirts, and other fascist apparatus. Among Democrat politicians this includes Governor Tim Walz, Representative Jon Larson, Representative Stephen Lynch, Representative Robin Kelly, Representative Dan Goldman, Representative Seth Moulton, and others who have referenced a “secret police,” “thugs,” “kidnappers,” or a “terror force.”
From there, the second part will almost undoubtedly commence, wherein the policy is declared illegal, unconstitutional, or unauthorized. In yesterday’s post, I noted that even the latest Artificial Intelligence cannot keep track of how many times this claim has been made. When asked, Google’s Gemini responded “It is impossible to provide an exact count of how many times Democrats have claimed Donald Trump did something illegal since January 2025, as such statements occur frequently in political discourse and media coverage” these “claims manifest as numerous individual statements, official lawsuits filed by the Democratic National Committee or individual members, and ongoing congressional oversight actions.” Over the weekend, we witnessed a real-time case study of this effect in action, when CNN, The Intercept, and The Washington Post reported that the military fired more than once on a cartel drugboat on September 2 and a new term was introduced into the public discourse “hors de combat,” which though few had ever heard it before, everyone was suddenly an expert. While the story was based on leaked anonymous sources, no one really knows the facts, and of course there are other possible explanations as to why we might have fired twice, CNN immediately jumped to the conclusion that the strike was undoubtedly illegal, claiming “People briefed on the ‘double-tap’ strike said they were concerned that it could violate the law of armed conflict, which prohibits the execution of an enemy combatant who is ‘hors de combat,’ or taken out of the fight due to injury or surrender.” “They’re breaking the law either way,” explained Sarah Harrison, a former associate general counsel at the Pentagon who currently serves as a senior analyst at the Crisis Group think tank. “They’re killing civilians in the first place, and then if you assume they’re combatants, it’s also unlawful — under the law of armed conflict, if somebody is ‘hors de combat’ and no longer able to fight, then they have to be treated humanely.” Former military officials immediately concurred in an incident eerily reminiscent of the 51 intelligence experts who claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation during the 2020 election. Though the self-described “Former JAGs Working Group” admitted they had no idea if the story was true in all or even most of its details, they continued to assert that it might “constitute war crimes, murder, or both,” and they did so even while simply glossing over any and all flaws in the chain of reasoning. In order to conclude that everyone involved is guilty, they have to assume that claims Secretary of War Pete Hegseth issued a formal order to “kill everybody” was binding on the entire military and superseded other governing laws, further assume that the order could “reasonably be regarded as an order to give ‘no quarter,’” and finally to assume that the purpose of the “double-tap” was to intentionally “kill survivors.” If any of those assumptions doesn’t hold, the entire edifice collapses, but don’t tell them that. They proceeded to claim that the individuals involved could conceivably be prosecuted for outright murder in the United States, “If the U.S. military operation is not an armed conflict of any kind, these orders to kill helpless civilians clinging to the wreckage of a vessel our military destroyed would subject everyone from SECDEF down to the individual who pulled the trigger to prosecution under U.S. law for murder.”
This brings us to the third part of the reaction: The assumed outcome is always the worst conceivable one for President Trump and his team in addition to those presumably killed or harmed. In the case of the cartel strikes, not only was a war crime and a murder committed, but everyone involved will be prosecuted for it. Some have gone so far as to suggest this will occur even should President Trump issue pardons because he has no jurisdiction over the International Criminal Court at the Hague (of which the US isn’t even a member) and-or some future Democrat President will lead the prosecutions, or something. At times, this tendency can be more than a little absurd, such as when the President had a light schedule over Labor Day Weekend and some progressives claimed he had to have died, it was just being kept secret, or that planes will fall out of the sky in foreign countries, which led me to mock this as The Butterfly Effect Theory of Government Workers. At others, they are deadly serious. The tariffs, for example, were certain to collapse the stock market, bring on a recession, and produce shortages of common goods. On April 25, CNN, for example, asked readers, “Not feeling the trade war pain yet? Get ready. By now, anyone with even half an eye on the news has seen headlines about how the economy is suddenly in trouble because of President Donald Trump’s tariffs: Markets are swinging wildly, investors are panic-buying gold, bond yields are surging, and the dollar is falling. It’s not great. But as you glance up from your phone and look around, maybe nothing feels all that different? You may still have a job. There’s still plenty of produce at the grocery store. Your morning coffee and bagel cost the same as they did a month ago. Maybe the media are blowing everything out of proportion?” Of course, that couldn’t possibly be it. Instead, “When you think of the trade war, think of a summer storm rolling in. There’s a flash of lightning. One. Two. Three. Four. Then a crash of thunder. Right now, most consumers are in that quiet pause in the middle. The crash is coming.”
In a similar yet different vein, President Trump’s decision to strike Iranian nuclear facilities in June prompted many to insist that we were on the verge of World War III. As ABC News reported on June 22, “concerns have been raised both for Americans in the region and at home. A principal area of worry is cyberattacks by Iranian state actors, including targeting the banking system or energy grid…On top of that was the fear of attacks by foreign nationals or American citizens inspired to strike the U.S.” The Center for American Progress claimed, “the full consequences of Trump’s decision to enter the conflict—whether the impact of the strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, Iran’s response to the attack, or the continuation of conflict by any party—remain unknown. Policymakers and legislators should consider a series of questions around the scope and trajectory of the conflict, some of which are listed below. Chiefly among these should be: What did President Trump gain by military action that could not have been gained through diplomacy, and at what cost?” Though a cease fire was already reached at the time of publication, they insisted “a resumption of hostilities could be prompted by potential Iranian strikes—whether direct or through proxies—on U.S. personnel or assets in the region…There also remains potential for Iran to target energy infrastructure in the Gulf, or for Israel to strike Iran’s export facilities should fighting resume, precipitating Iranian retaliation against infrastructure in Arab countries. Similarly, other strikes that significantly disrupt global economic activity, including energy or maritime commerce, risk raising the stakes of the conflict and drawing the United States further into the fray. Iran, for instance, could seek to block the Strait of Hormuz—a major transportation chokepoint between Iran and the Gulf Arab countries of Oman and the United Arab Emirates, through which one quarter of global oil shipments move.” Whether Iran was capable of such a thing, either attacking us in earnest after being completely unable to defend themselves against Israel for twelve days or blocking a 21 mile wide stretch of water against the will of the entire world, was irrelevant. The absolute worst was almost certain to happen – of course, until it didn’t.
Name a topic, almost any topic including whether Trump will be impeached and removed from office, even his poll numbers, and the conclusion that only the worst possible scenario is the most likely scenario will almost undoubtedly be reached. Given the number of times President Trump has defied these predictions this year alone, much less across his relatively short political career, it’s hard to argue that this three step process is a rational one. As a general rule of statistics, at least some policies are going to have a neutral impact if only because they are ineffective, not everything is going to be illegal or unconstitutional, and the worst possible political and other outcome isn’t going to happen in every situation. By chance alone, some things will simply work out better than expected, even if you strenuously disagree, and yet President Trump’s detractors seem pathologically incapable of understanding that to be the obvious case. Instead, they have embraced one overarching Theory of Everything that is only three simple words: Orange Man Bad. For every input regarding the President, there is only one possible output, the worst one imaginable in all possible universes up to and including Trump dropping dead without anyone except them noticing.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 