CULTURE

Susan B. Glasser on the Deficit, and Why “We Are the Boiled Frog”

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“Rarely have so many members of Congress voted for a measure they so actively disliked,” Susan B. Glasser noted, in her recent column after the passage of a deficit-exploding Republican bill. Millions of people will lose access to Medicaid—a fact that the President blatantly lies about—and many trillions of dollars will be added to the deficit. Interest payments on the federal debt will skyrocket, and Trump is so desperate for lower interest rates that he seems poised to fire his own chair of the Federal Reserve and install a compliant partisan to head the heretofore independent central bank. “Anybody panicking about that in Washington?” David Remnick asks Glasser. “I think we are the boiled frog,” she replies. “We are almost panic-immune at this point, in the same way that Donald Trump has, I think, inoculated much of America against facts in our political debate. Even inside of Washington, there’s so many individual crises at one time—it’s very, very hard in Trump 2.0 to focus on any one of them.”

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