Tag Archives: Don’t Know/Don’t Care Principle

Trump Presidency — It’s Only Going to Get Worse

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I have been reading four books dealing with authoritarianism, a doctrine the Donald Trump, among others, is trying to use to overturn American democracy. The books are:

Autocracy, Inc by Anne Applebaum, who has a Pulitzer Prize to her credit.

How to stand up to a dictator by Maria Ressa, who has a Nobel Prize.

Fortress America-How we embraced fear and abandoned democracy by Elaine Tyler May.

Strongmen by Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

I have only finished Autocracy, Inc., which is subtitled The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. It describes Donald Trump and those like him around the world with frightful clarity:

Modern autocrats differ in many ways from their twentieth-century predecessors. But the heirs, successors, and imitators of these older leaders and thinkers, however varied their ideologies, do have a common enemy. That enemy is us.

To be more precise, that enemy is the democratic world, “the West,” NATO, the European Union, their own internal democratic opponents, and the liberal ideas that inspire all of them. [Autocracy, Inc. at 10]

This should look familiar. It is Donald Trump’s agenda to the letter. And, to the dismay of many Americans, it is the goal of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an outrage that Trump supports. For its part, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov summarized it this way in 2022:

This is not about Ukraine at all, but the world order …. The current crisis is a fateful, epoch-making moment in modern history. It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like. [Autocracy, Inc. at 14]

Trump, of course, has not intellectual grasp of any principles related to any of this. His understanding of the world centers around his image and his money. They form the basis for his approach to almost everything.

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My original plan had been to accumulate news stories about the horrors of the Trump presidency and lay them out in bullet format, but I simply could not keep up with the daily dose of outrages.

But just when you think you’re done, sometimes something good happens. Meidastouch that publishes extensively on substack.com has more resources than I do and has done the job for me. It has published in two sections thus far, appropriately titled: 500 Worst Things Trump Did in 2025 It is authored by Ron Filipkowski, Editor-in-Chief of MeidasTouch Network:

https://www.meidasplus.com/p/500-worst-things-trump-did-in-2025?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3078900&post_id=182695550&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=34np5m&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

This is a comprehensive list documenting 500 of the worst things Trump and his admin did just this year. The list is in chronological order beginning on January 1, 2025, to the end of the year. This is not merely a list of the things Trump did personally – it is an accounting of the worst things his administration has done this year.

Part Two of the series, covering the worst things Trump’s administration did between late February and early April, may be read here:

https://www.meidasplus.com/p/500-worst-things-trump-did-in-2025-4d7?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3078900&post_id=182764313&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=34np5m&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

His related column, the ‘25 Worst Villains of the Trump Admin’, can be read here: https://www.meidasplus.com/p/25-worst-villains-of-the-trump-admin?r=9qw74

If you want to continue reading Filipkowski’s pieces, and you should, simply go to substack.com and sign up. It’s free, although there are paid subscriptions with benefits available. Parts 3 and 4 of the series have been published.

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It is now 2026. If democracy in America and around the world is going to be saved, this is the year in which it must happen. We can only save ourselves. No one is coming to our rescue. The Republican Party, likely with the concurrence of the Supreme Court, is doing everything it can to rearrange the voting districts to make it impossible for Democrats to regain control of the Congress. This effort must be defeated or we are lost. The last chance to resist is NOW!

The 2020 Election Was Not Stolen

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I continue to see reports of Republicans claiming that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Republican talking heads are being given air time on the networks and, of course, on cable, to continue arguing about this. They are wrong. It’s time to move on.

Republicans claiming the election was stolen due to rampant voter fraud are wrong for multiple reasons.

Belief is a choice. If we are to be rationally and coherently connected to the world, we must have a basis for that choice. There are several options.

One option (Evidence Principle) is: evidence. I believe X because there is sufficient evidence that X is true and insufficient evidence that non-X or anti-X is true, when both X and non/anti-X cannot be true at the same time.

Another option (No Evidence Principle): I go by the “absence of evidence rule” that the “absence of evidence is not evidence of the absence.” Thus, if there is no evidence from which to adopt Belief X, I still may choose to believe X because of the “rule.” Don’t try to tell me X is not true; I believe it because there is no evidence to disprove X. Bear in mind, however, that this option is only rational and coherent if there is no evidence. If there is evidence that X is not true, one cannot use this “absence of evidence” rationale for asserting X is true.

Another option (Don’t Know/Don’t Care Principle): I have no idea whether there is evidence or not regarding the truth of Belief X, but I choose to believe X anyway, because I believe a lot of things for which I have no evidence: (1) there is too much evidence to cope with, (2) evidence exists but we just don’t know what it is yet, (3) I know a lot of other people who believe X and I like them/respect them/want to be seen as one of them, so I really don’t care what is true. I believe what I believe.

What do we know regarding the 2020 election?

    1. After more than 60 legal challenges, the Republicans supporting Trump prevailed in exactly none that would have changed the result of the presidential election – NONE. Trump’s counsel and experts were never able to produce evidence that X was true, where X is the fact that the presidential election was stolen by rampant fraud in the handful of battleground states that decided the election.
    2. Since the legal battles ended and the Electoral College results were certified, the pro-Trump crowd has still not produced evidence of X, that the presidential election was stolen, despite months of opportunities to do so.
    3. During the multitude of legal challenges prior to January 6, the pro-Trump contingent was never able to explain how the presidential election was stolen (X was true) while Republicans continued to have electoral success in other races in the same battleground states (Belief Y, that would be expected to be concurrently true if X were true).

It appears that the Evidence Principle and the No Evidence Principle must be rejected as rational and coherent explanations for the continuing claim that the election was stolen.

We are left with the Don’t Know/Don’t Care Principle that, I suggest, means that there is no rational or coherent basis for the claim that the election is stolen. The apparently widespread belief in the QAnon Conspiracy and some of the other nonsense being spread on cable TV, most notably FoxNews, Newsmax and OAN, including but not limited to shows like Breitbart, are examples of the Don’t Know/Don’t Care Principle in practice – large numbers of Americans choose to belief utter nonsense for which no evidence exists or even could exist.

To be clear, I am open to being shown the error of my thinking on this but, absent such proof, this is where we are.

I am happy to have settled this problem for the nation. The subject should be considered closed. The media can now stop giving air time to the proponents of the Don’t Know/Don’t Care Principle. They have nothing useful to contribute to the national dialogue about how we should govern ourselves and therefore no more valuable air time should we wasted on them.

The End. Roll the credits. Blackout.