Donald Trump – CGW's Blog

Statistics aren’t reversible

You might have seen Robert F. Kennedy Jr. make a statistics mistake today.

Rather than clown on it, I wanted to explain the simple and interesting concept behind the gaff.

RFK: “And I said, well, if the drug was $100 and it raised the price to $600, that would be a 600% rise. If it drops from 600 to 100, that’s a 600% savings.”

I’m not one to judge because I’ve made lots of numeracy mistakes in my day, including in my journalism. And statistics actually are complicated, but they’re
cool. So, it’s worth looking at what’s happening here.

No, Elon Musk isn’t attempting a coup. He just really thinks he’s that much smarter than everyone else.

A former journalist-coworker of mine emailed me a couple weeks back: Is Musk attempting a coup?

An op-editor at a metro newspaper, she was referring to the bombastic and destructive collusion of the world’s richest man Elon Musk into the Donald Trump-led shock to the federal bureaucracy under the guise of the irreverently named DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency — a boyish reference to a memecoin.

I suppose it’s possible, I wrote her. Instead, what I see in Elon Musk is a kind of arrogance I’ve found in other entrepreneurs. Brilliant in one domain and successful in others, I’ve seen plenty of them storm into some situation truly and genuinely oblivious to how over their head they really are.

Ron Desantis: Courage to be Free

What can a campaign book say that a candidate can’t on a campaign trail?

I read them when I want to hear from a serious candidate with whom I am not especially aligned. Daily campaign reporting follows minor crisis. I like to understand how these candidates want to be packaged.

That’s why I read Florida governor Ron Desantis’s new book Courage to be Free. It isn’t especially well-written (no ghost writer?), and there’s plenty of trite talking points (lots of Fauci bashing). But there are a few worthwhile criticisms.

Below I share my notes for future reference (and plenty of questions he leaves unaswered).

I believe Donald Trump should be impeached

One of the reasons I’ve maintained this blog for more than 10 years is as an effort to hold myself accountable. I want to make sure I know in the future where I stood on something.

I am the publisher of a news organization and still operate as a community journalist. I do maintain the dated and increasingly unpopular opinion that journalists do have a responsibility for prioritizing policy, over politics. That is, though I don’t believe in an “objectivity ideal” and despite the anti-media climate we are in, I still prize journalists fighting for results and data and something resembling a shared truth. This is unpopular work, but I think it’s important.

This, then is not a partisan cry. I believe Donald Trump should be impeached.