Lost in "Trump Country"

Stranger in a Strange Land

May 3, 2025

“You know Hannity on TV, right?” the bartender asked, as he handed my wife and I menus and asked what we wanted to drink. He then proceeded to tell us the story of the restaurant’s famous patron and neighbor down the beach. We found ourselves in this unlikely setting, listening to an even more improbable tale from our bartender, Woody, on the occasion of a friend’s wedding last weekend in Glen Cove on Long Island. While spending the weekend in Glen Cove, on the day before the ceremony we had ventured out in search of a place to have lunch. Given the gorgeous spring weather and the proximity to the Long Island Sound, we decided to look for a waterfront place to eat. We found a lovely restaurant, right on the beach in nearby Bayville, looking out over Oyster Bay. We were the first to arrive, and we settled in at the bar overlooking the water. A lone sailboat tacked west across the water along the Connecticut shore across the Sound. A TV tuned to Fox News hovered over the back bar. As we opened our menus, I think my wife and I were both struck by a startling, simultaneous realization—Hannity, as in Sean Hannity? Fox News on the TV? —in a place much to upscale to have a TV? Had we unknowingly wandered into Long Island’s north shore Trump Country?

After a brief diversion during which Woody name-dropped the restaurant’s other famous “bayman” neighbor, Billy Joel, we returned to the story of Sean Hannity, who apparently prefers the bar stool that was immediately to my right. “Because you can’t see the water from that seat” Woody explained, which didn’t really strike me as a reasonable explanation for liking the seat, but I let it stand without asking for clarification. He’s the nicest guy you have ever met, Woody assured us. The likelihood of my wife and I ever meeting Sean Hannity was most definitely limited to Sean showing up at that exact moment for lunch, which we prayed was not about to happen. Our host continued. Hannity was in here one time having dinner, Woody went on, and one of the busboys was having trouble with a tray full of dishes. Sean picked up the tray and brought it all the way back to the kitchen. Hannity later bought the young man a car and put him through college, Woody added. I wanted to ask Woody if, per chance, the young busboy in the story was also Hannity’s son, or did Hannity occasionally appear in the dining room, Oprah style—“You get a car, and you get a car!”—but just as I was about to pose the question, two parties who were obviously regulars entered the lounge, bantering with the staff, and sat on either side of us at the bar.

As Woody went about making their drinks, one of the newcomers, prompted by a story on the Fox News screen above the back bar, asked the assemblage in the bar if they had heard that “Trump had arrested a judge!” This comment was met approvingly with roars of laughter from the other patrons, who obviously were familiar with the FBI’s recent arrest of Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan for allegedly interfering in an ICE operation in her courthouse. They apparently all thought this was hysterical. A staffer behind the bar restocking the cooler chimed in with a “fu%#ing liberals”, which left my wife and I wondering if we had somehow wandered behind enemy lines and that we really needed to find our way back to the front. But we had just gotten our appetizer of clams on the half shell.

It is in situations like this when I ask myself if our body politic has degenerated into two separate and irreversibly opposed constituencies, three if you count unaffiliated independents, and that any change in political outcomes will be decided on the margins, which for the most part now means independent voters. I suspect that my thoughts about tariffs or trade policy or NATO are not all that different from the “finance guy” that sat down at the bar and joked about Trump locking up judges. What is different is that these new MAGA Republicans are willing to take the word of, and trust the judgement of, someone whose judgement and fidelity and values are abhorrent to anyone who cares enough to examine them. I used to think of myself as a moderate middle of the road “New England” Republican, but that description and that person no longer exists in the MAGA Republican universe. Many voters fitting that description now count themselves as Democrats, perhaps reluctant Democrats. From a policy perspective, they are certainly closer to Lisa Murkowski or Joe Manchin than AOC or Bernie Sanders. We were not drawn to the policies or politics of the Democratic party, we were driven away by the total absence of values and lack of credibility in the new Republican party’s (read, Trump’s) policies on pretty much everything: the environment and climate science, energy, immigration, trade, tax policy, budget deficits, LGBTQ rights, foreign aid, health care, international alliances, voting rights, and so many more.

Trump was handed an economy which, by all accounts, was humming along— “all he had to do was go play golf”, a friend in finance said to me yesterday, and everything would have been fine. Yes, inflation was ¾ point higher than Fed targets, but it was coming down, and more importantly, nothing that Trump has done will improve the inflation rate, and his new tariffs will substantially worsen it. The chaos caused by his off-again on-again imposition of tariffs has everyone frozen in place, unwilling to commit to spending of any kind, building the new plant, or expanding the factory, or just buying that new car. Consumer confidence is cratering. Not to belabor this statistic, but if consumers are less confident, they spend less, and—unlike China— consumer spending is fully two thirds of our economy. Dramatic drops in consumer confidence typically presages dramatic drops in consumer spending which brings about the R-word. The result of that hesitancy started to evidence itself in Wednesday’s first quarter GDP number, the first quarterly decline since the pandemic. I believe that Q2 will show an acceleration of that downtrend, thanks to Trump’s continued insistence that these new tariffs are a good idea. As bad as the Q1 number was, it was buffered by the surge in pre-tariff spending as consumers sought to beat the impending price increases. Q2 will not have the benefit of that front loaded spending.

Last week Trump actually opined that income from these proposed tariffs could lead to the elimination of federal income tax, a suggestion not supported by any economist not on the White House’s payroll, or by anyone who can add. There could not possibly be enough revenue from tariffs to offset the lost income from tax revenue, and he refuses to acknowledge that these tariffs are not paid by the exporting country, they are paid by the individual or business importing the items. Not surprisingly, the White House had a melt down on Wednesday when Amazon announced that they were going to start posting the price impact from tariffs on items offered for sale on their website. Trump actually called Jeff Bezos to inform him of his displeasure as the White House labeled the planned policy a “hostile political act”—and Amazon folded.

Not surprisingly, all of this chaos is starting to show in the polling, where Trump’s net favorability percentages have collapsed to the worst showing for any president’s first 100 days since polling began during the Eisenhower administration. Trump, of course, will view all of these polls as “fake news” and my new friends in Bayville will hear nothing about it on Fox News, which will be covering some trans athlete in Kansas who is supposedly destroying NCAA women’s sports. Fox News actually ran an opinion column this week on their digital platform telling viewers to ignore the “biased polls” addressing Trump’s favorability collapse at 100 days – one of which was theirs! Such kidders, these guys.

How does this story end? Allowing government to function in its current state of chaos for another election cycle seems downright frightening. Expecting the House or Senate to suddenly come to their senses and act as a check on the Executive Branch seems unlikely unless something more frightening than a primary challenge appears on the scene. One pollster suggested that the current net favorability ratings for a general Republican / Democratic ballot (would you prefer to see a Republican or Democrat represent you right now?) would result in a 40 person swing to Democrats, giving them control of the House. Unfortunately, the midterms are twenty months away. A bill to rescind Trump’s authority to impose tariffs at will deadlocked 49-49 in the Senate but with Republican support, but was destined to go nowhere in the House or to survive a veto by Trump if it did. A Democratic led House would undoubtedly have drawn up articles of impeachment by now, given the illegal and unconstitutional initiatives of this President, starting with arresting people off the street and deporting them to South American gulags without counsel or the due process guaranteed in the 5^th amendment to the Constitution, or starting your own family owned crypto currency while simultaneously closing the federal government’s office of crypto currency oversight. (If and when there is an impeachment, I predict that this will be article #1.)

We can thank John Roberts for orchestrating the Supreme Court’s novel interpretation of the Constitution’s Immunities Clause, protecting a president from prosecution for acts “presumptively” performed in his capacity as president, i.e.: some people are indeed above the law. We must rely on the legal community to challenge illegal White House initiatives in the courts, even when their own firms are being challenged with threats from this White House. This week a District Court Judge ordered the White House to restore $12 million in funding for Radio Free Europe that had been appropriated by Congress and illegally clawed back by the White House. Trump continued the assault on Public Broadcasting by sending termination letters to three directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting even though CPB is not a federal agency, and the President has no right to fire anyone there—not that legality has ever influenced any of Trump’s tactics. Trump escalated the attack on public media on Friday when the White House announced the termination of federal taxpayer funding for NPR and PBS. The move is expected to have the greatest impact on smaller rural stations like North Country Public Radio (NCPR), which have been bracing for the announcement. Like many of Trump’s “Executive Orders”, the defunding of NPR and PBS will immediately be challenged in court. Big, bold Sharpie letters notwithstanding, the President has no legal authority to override funding from a Congressional appropriation. Nor does a president have the authority to revoke Harvard’s—or anyone else’s—tax exempt status. Sometimes I wonder which side will run out of lawyers first. (Full disclosure: I serve on the Executive Council of North Country Public Radio)

We somehow have to keep the train on the tracks until the midterms, at which time we can only hope that the current polling reflects that people really are finally paying attention and now realize that we have elected a charlatan with no values, no shame, no sense of honor, and importantly— absolutely no clue about managing the world’s largest economy.

There are, or there should be, only three criteria for supporting someone for elected office:

· Are they qualified?

· Do they share your values?

· Are they an honorable person?

Two out of three is not enough, and our current president has shown us that having none is catastrophic. John Adams opined that the third, honor, is the most important, and at this time in our nation’s history, I wholeheartedly agree. I suppose that when you spend your days discussing current affairs with James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, your value system develops differently than someone who spends their days listening to Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Elon Musk.

The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our people in a greater measure than they have it now, they may change their rulers and the forms of government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty. They will only exchange tyrants and tyrannies.

~ John Adams

Comments and suggestions are always welcome, as are Shares. If you like what you have read and you would like to receive a Saturday morning email with the current week’s Adirondack Diary update, please consider subscribing. All posts are public and available for free.

Join me on BlueSky @northcountryjoe.bsky.social