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Item one: The real student debt culprits? Those tax-slashing governors

So Joe Biden’s cancellation of debt is generating some complicated reactions. The left is generally applauding while quickly noting that it considers this only a down payment. The center, including most Democrats in tough races in purple and red states, is denouncing it as too focused on one segment of the population. And the right, of course, is up in arms, throwing around the usual charge of elitism and trying to make it appear as if Democrats are only interested in helping out snooty Ivy League kids who came from rich families, went to Harvard, and dropped out because they partied too much (it’s so easy to draw that caricature!).

I’ll come back to that, but I want to start by connecting some dots here that, from my reading, not enough people are connecting. Why is there a student loan crisis in the first place? Because the cost of tuition has increased dramatically over the last 30 years. From 1990 to 2018, in-state tuition at public universities—and I’d rather talk about public universities than the Ivies, the typical focus of media attention, because a lot more people go to public universities—increased by 104 percent. That’s more than the general rate of inflation for the period, which was around 90 percent. Out-of-state tuition increases were generally a bit higher.

Why these increases? As with anything, there are several reasons, which include the fact that during this time, more young people enrolled in college, so competition increased, and when competition increases, the price-setter can increase prices. There’s also the well-known amenities arms race on campuses: Students now expect high-end fitness centers and state-of-the-art dorm facilities and such.

But the biggest driver is clearly that state governments are spending less on public higher education than they were in 1990. According to this website, in 1990, state funding averaged about 140 percent higher per student at public universities than federal funding. By 2015, that figure was slashed to 12 percent. This happened because of the tax-cut mania that consumed so many red- and purple-state governors of the period, notably Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker. The latter, back when he was eyeing a presidential run, cut the University of Wisconsin’s funding by $250 million. (Later, his White House dreams dashed, he actually restored some, which only goes to show that when they aren’t pandering to Grover Norquist and the cheap seats, and after years of intense criticism over cuts that have real impact, even right-wing mediocrities can get it right.)

I totally support Biden’s proposal. At the same time, I understand why someone like Tim Ryan is distancing himself from it. He’s running for Senate in Ohio, where the percentage of people with college degrees is about four points below the national average. Of course, there are a lot of people who have debt and don’t have degrees, and the White House needs to try to find a way to highlight that population. It’s a lot of people, and they’re arguably the ones helped most by this proposal as they have the debt and don’t even have the diploma to show for it that would qualify them for higher incomes.

So the politics are complicated, but let’s not forget the roots of the tuition crisis in the first place. And there’s not a lot a president can do to change that. That would require, well, an overhaul of our nation’s economic priorities such that there’s a consensus once again around the idea that state-level investment in higher education is a value that benefits us all (and by the way—all that tax-cutting didn’t even spur job growth in those states). But with the GOP having built its identity around hatred of elitists—which now apparently includes kids who dropped out of, say, Mississippi State University after two years and can’t pay back their loans—that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.

Item two: As usual, Trump was describing himself

Chris Hayes aired a terrific montage on All In Thursday night of Donald Trump’s various statements during 2016 hammering Hillary Clinton—falsely, unsurprisingly—about her allegedly egregious mishandling of classified information. I tried to write them down, but the only one I got in full was this: “We cannot have someone in the Oval Office who does not understand the meaning of the word ‘confidential’ and ‘classified.’” In another sound bite, Trump called such behavior “disqualifying.”

First of all, about Clinton: In 2019, the State Department—that would be President Trump’s State Department, specifically the Bureau of Diplomatic Security—found that she did not knowingly or flagrantly compromise national security at all: “There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information,” the report concluded.

Sociopaths like Trump often project their own crimes onto their opponents. We see this constantly. If Sociopath A is under suspicion for stealing money or lying about his actions on some matter, he will turn around and accuse his opponents of stealing money or lying about their actions on some matter. It’s how their brains work. The part of the brain that helps people tell right from wrong is dysfunctional or cross-wired or something, so they just lie without compunction, because they see on evidence of experience that flipping the charges against them on their opponents works with a media that is committed to telling both sides, even if one side is complete bullshit. It’s what tells us what the sociopaths are up to: If they accuse their opponents of X, it almost certainly means they are doing X themselves.

But here we have something new in the annals of sociopathy—the sociopath preemptively telling on himself! It’s as if, in 2016, Trump knew that he was going to flagrantly violate the Presidential Records Act if and when he became president. Which, in the darker corners of his mind, he probably did know because he has gone through his entire life attempting to prove to himself and the world that he is above the law and that no law can corner him. And then he signed that law in 2018 strengthening the penalties for doing what he appears to have done. For a normal human being with a normal brain, it would be logical to think, “But surely someone who personally stiffened the law against the mishandling of classified info would be the last person to break that law.” For Trump, the opposite is the case.

It all worked as long as he was lying about his taxes and swindling people in real estate deals. But top-secret documents whose contents potentially contain information like the identity of human intelligence sources around the world are another matter. The odds that he may go find himself a nice dacha in Crimea just got a little higher this week.

Item three: Know your Trumpies: John Solomon

John Solomon is the “journalist” whom Trump appointed as one of his two liaisons to the National Archives. He’s long had a reputation as a water carrier for various right-wing and Trumpy agendas, reliably defending Rudy Giuliani or magically finding some new “document” that “proves” that the entire mainstream press has everything exactly backward. 

Solomon really outdid himself in that regard this week, by posting to his website a letter from acting National Archivist Debra Wall to Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran that Solomon asserted proved that Biden himself ordered the DOJ and FBI to comb through the documents that team Trump had returned in January. In the right-wing mediasphere, this soon enough became proof that Biden ordered the raid.

He did no such thing, and the letter proved no such thing. Media Matters does a thorough debunking here, and it’s worth a read because it’s a very closely reasoned dissection of how they take a phrase, a sentence, what have you, and turn a document into its opposite. What Wall’s letter actually shows is that Biden deferred all such decisions to Wall and that the DOJ and FBI showed unusual restraint before finally seeking approval for the search warrant. 

In any case, it’s interesting to me that Solomon accepted Trump’s designation as a representative of his to the archives because up to that point, he could plausibly say—whatever one thinks of his journalism—that he’s just a chronicler of events. Now he’s a player in them. That’s a different kettle of rotting fish.

This week’s quiz: The King’s English: the history of the English language. I learned a lot of neat stuff researching this one, and you can too by watching a few 10-or-so-minute videos on YouTube.

Jolly good? Answers next week. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com.

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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