"With Amy Wax: For and against TDS"
Full vid at ncofnas dot com pic.twitter.com/Z7rF8xx2kK
— Nathan Cofnas (@nathancofnas) April 17, 2025
I support Trump overall (I think his 2020 election denial was a horrible thing that incentivized the January 6 riot and that killed all of my enthusiasm for Trump until his indictments in 2023 when Trump regained my enthusiasm) but I recognize there are many valid criticisms of what he says, what he does, and how he says and does things.
My biggest concern about Trump II was lack of competence.
April 14, 2025, Michelle Goldberg writes for The New York Times:
[S]everal people who once appeared to find transgressive right-wing ideas scintillating are having second thoughts as they watch Donald Trump’s administration put those ideas into practice. The writer Richard Hanania once said that he hated bespoke pronouns “more than genocide,” and his 2023 book, “The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics,” provided a blueprint for the White House’s war on D.E.I. But less than three months into Trump’s new term, he regrets his vote, telling me, “The resistance libs were mostly right about him.”
Nathan Cofnas, a right-wing philosophy professor and self-described “race realist” fixated on group differences in I.Q., wrote on X, “All over the world, almost everyone with more than half a brain is looking at the disaster of Trump (along with Putin, Yoon Suk Yeol, et al.) and drawing the very reasonable conclusion that right-wing, anti-woke parties are incapable of effective governance.” (Yoon Suk Yeol is South Korea’s recently impeached president.)
Scott Siskind, who blogs under the pseudonym Scott Alexander, has been an influential figure in Silicon Valley’s revolt against social justice ideology, though he’s never been a Trump supporter. Last week, he asked whether “edgy heterodox centrists” like himself paved the way for Trump by opening the door to once-verboten arguments. In an imaginary Socratic dialogue, he wrote, “We wanted a swift, lean government that stopped strangling innovation and infrastructure. Instead we got chain-saw-style firings, total devastation of state capacity in exactly the way most likely to strangle innovation more than ever, and the worst and dumbest people in the world gloating about how they solved the ‘grift’ of sending lifesaving medications to dying babies.”
My friend Nathan Cofnas (Substack) had such an impressive track record of careful scholarship, but with regard to Trump over the past month, he’s gotten sloppy in his social media posts. He writes April 11: “Many people (including me) had high hopes about Trump, and it’s tough to face the fact that, after 10 years, the dream is over.”
This might be my biggest difference with Nathan over Trump: I never had a dream about Trump. I expected him to do some of the things that he talked about (such as restricting immigration, changing trade policies to benefit American workers, and to push back against the left’s excesses such as DEI). I judged him against the alternatives. He was less effective than I expected in his first term, and more effective in his second term. The only major American politician I’d rather have as president than Trump is JD Vance. Because the world is complicated, Trump or anyone else I favor may be a disaster.
