Benji
@johnbenjamin.bsky.social
Writer on business, econ, Israel-Palestine.
Work in Time, The New Republic, Barron’s, Fortune, Boston Globe, The Hill, etc.
Also has a day job.
jbenjamin.co
Work in Time, The New Republic, Barron’s, Fortune, Boston Globe, The Hill, etc.
Also has a day job.
jbenjamin.co
Reposted by Benji
Once in a century political opportunity here, if only there were a party to claim it
"According to the…annual Harris Poll, for the 1st time, a majority of Americans believe billionaires are a threat to democracy. A remarkable 71% believe there should be a wealth tax. A majority believe there should be a cap on how much wealth a person can accumulate." www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/o...
Opinion | The Billionaires Have Gone Full Louis XV
www.nytimes.com
December 15, 2025 at 6:31 PM
Once in a century political opportunity here, if only there were a party to claim it
I thought it was a reasonable and good piece, apart from this HOWLER of a sentence. "entered into in" is just brutal on the reader. And those commas!
December 15, 2025 at 7:56 PM
I thought it was a reasonable and good piece, apart from this HOWLER of a sentence. "entered into in" is just brutal on the reader. And those commas!
Never relinquish your sense of unshakeable moral superiority for never liking or voting for this obvious loser.
December 15, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Never relinquish your sense of unshakeable moral superiority for never liking or voting for this obvious loser.
And we did not save any money doing this. DOGE is already and likely will continue to be a cost driver — in lost expertise, firing/re-hiring, and long-tail challenges we won’t be able to tackle.
The human cost of Trump's gutting of USAID: By the time Tor Top’s mother was sick with cholera, the nearby clinic had been shuttered for weeks. He bundled her into a canoe & paddled toward the nearest hospital, 8 hours away. Less than halfway into the journey, his mother died.
New, @propublica.org
New, @propublica.org
Trump Officials Celebrated With Cake After Slashing Aid. Then People Died of Cholera.
Behind closed doors in Washington, top advisers made a series of decisions that had devastating repercussions for the poorest country on earth. We went to South Sudan and found people who died as a re...
www.propublica.org
December 15, 2025 at 3:09 PM
And we did not save any money doing this. DOGE is already and likely will continue to be a cost driver — in lost expertise, firing/re-hiring, and long-tail challenges we won’t be able to tackle.
Reposted by Benji
i sometimes have a little sympathy for the median voter, because when you lay out the arc of donald trump’s life, with all of his malice and incompetence and cruelty and stupidity, it’s basically impossible to imagine how he could become president, your brain just starts throwing errors
i think all the time about how trump is one of the most singular, atypical people in america, whose entire life experience, going back at least him as a teenager, is so profoundly different from and unrelatable to almost anyone, including his own social class peers
something you have to understand about Trump & his weird comments about the economy is that the dude hasn't paid for anything like a normal person in decades - never pumps gas, never buys groceries - so he's completely & utterly out of touch with what life is like for most of us
December 10, 2025 at 12:48 AM
i sometimes have a little sympathy for the median voter, because when you lay out the arc of donald trump’s life, with all of his malice and incompetence and cruelty and stupidity, it’s basically impossible to imagine how he could become president, your brain just starts throwing errors
Reposted by Benji
there is no available evidence that donald trump understands what a tariff is, what a trade deficit is, and what the national debt is.
The way Trump talks about the problems he caused by unilaterally imposing tariffs is fairly insane, even by his standards.
www.politico.com/news/2025/12...
www.politico.com/news/2025/12...
December 9, 2025 at 6:09 PM
there is no available evidence that donald trump understands what a tariff is, what a trade deficit is, and what the national debt is.
Reposted by Benji
It really is the purest encapsulation of this movement in terms of both its leaders and adherents: an old angry guy who can’t do pull ups making everyone watch him try to do pull ups
December 9, 2025 at 2:46 PM
It really is the purest encapsulation of this movement in terms of both its leaders and adherents: an old angry guy who can’t do pull ups making everyone watch him try to do pull ups
Another week living in North Korea.
December 6, 2025 at 5:21 PM
Another week living in North Korea.
Reposted by Benji
this manages to legitimately be way worse than all the leaks that were being fed to the papers last night
December 5, 2025 at 1:05 AM
this manages to legitimately be way worse than all the leaks that were being fed to the papers last night
Reposted by Benji
“This guy is the hardest worker in the world when he’s playing golf” is exactly the level of patronizing lie that we all deserve for being at this point in history
Sen. Roger Marshall on Trump's health: "I'll work 110 hours a week. He outworks me. He's the first person I've ever known that works harder than I do. He runs around that golf course. He's in incredible shape right now. And you talk about sharp! He's playing 4 dimensional chess"
December 3, 2025 at 1:59 PM
“This guy is the hardest worker in the world when he’s playing golf” is exactly the level of patronizing lie that we all deserve for being at this point in history
I love the multiple invocations of Monica Lewinsky — as if there’s an equivalence between a twenty-something intern being seduced by a charismatic president, and Nuzzi, a journalist who slept with this leathery old circus peanut while in a long-term relationship.
A piece Olivia Nuzzi published yesterday (as part of a Substack Q+A) called "Signs Your Book Rollout Has Gone Awry":
December 3, 2025 at 2:48 AM
I love the multiple invocations of Monica Lewinsky — as if there’s an equivalence between a twenty-something intern being seduced by a charismatic president, and Nuzzi, a journalist who slept with this leathery old circus peanut while in a long-term relationship.
Reposted by Benji
Noticeable, is it not, that every member of this admin starts and ends at the surface.
Hegseth’s fixation here. Duffy on dressing nice while flying.
The reflex to rename stuff — from ‘Gulf of America’ to DC’s nfl stadium.
We can’t think beyond surface bc we can’t fix anything beyond there either.
Hegseth’s fixation here. Duffy on dressing nice while flying.
The reflex to rename stuff — from ‘Gulf of America’ to DC’s nfl stadium.
We can’t think beyond surface bc we can’t fix anything beyond there either.
November 25, 2025 at 2:31 PM
Noticeable, is it not, that every member of this admin starts and ends at the surface.
Hegseth’s fixation here. Duffy on dressing nice while flying.
The reflex to rename stuff — from ‘Gulf of America’ to DC’s nfl stadium.
We can’t think beyond surface bc we can’t fix anything beyond there either.
Hegseth’s fixation here. Duffy on dressing nice while flying.
The reflex to rename stuff — from ‘Gulf of America’ to DC’s nfl stadium.
We can’t think beyond surface bc we can’t fix anything beyond there either.
Reposted by Benji
Some estimates say 30–50% of GDP growth this year is just AI spend. Strip out AI and data centers and business investment is flat, commercial construction is shrinking, and the only real bright spot is the AI boom which, so far, seems great for GDP and bad for workers.
How the U.S. Economy Became Hooked on AI Spending
Growth has been bolstered by data-center investment and stock-market wealth. A reversal could raise the risk of recession.
www.wsj.com
November 25, 2025 at 2:18 AM
Some estimates say 30–50% of GDP growth this year is just AI spend. Strip out AI and data centers and business investment is flat, commercial construction is shrinking, and the only real bright spot is the AI boom which, so far, seems great for GDP and bad for workers.
Ah yes, regime change, that thing that famously stabilizes cross-border migration
Cracks me up how you could just replace Venezuela and Venezuelans with Iraq and Iraqis and it’d be indistinguishable from something written in 2002
November 25, 2025 at 2:59 AM
Ah yes, regime change, that thing that famously stabilizes cross-border migration
Reposted by Benji
answer is great but also it's telling that the guy who's been saying this since day 1 has to answer about whether he's an antisemite for 5 min every interview while the same people grin vacantly at the jewish space lasers lady and call her a brave warrior
WELKER: What is your message to Jewish New Yorkers who feel you won't be tough enough in your response to antisemitism?
MAMDANI: That I am looking forward to being the next mayor and fulfilling the commitment I've made to Jewish New Yorkers to not only protect them but to celebrate and cherish them
MAMDANI: That I am looking forward to being the next mayor and fulfilling the commitment I've made to Jewish New Yorkers to not only protect them but to celebrate and cherish them
November 23, 2025 at 4:26 PM
answer is great but also it's telling that the guy who's been saying this since day 1 has to answer about whether he's an antisemite for 5 min every interview while the same people grin vacantly at the jewish space lasers lady and call her a brave warrior
Reposted by Benji
"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
-FDR, 1937
-FDR, 1937
November 22, 2025 at 6:31 PM
"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
-FDR, 1937
-FDR, 1937
It’s not the main point, but what’s with this administration’s insane animus toward Canada?
You hear a lot less from them about Mexico — a country with a leftist Jewish socialist woman in charge.
Why?
You hear a lot less from them about Mexico — a country with a leftist Jewish socialist woman in charge.
Why?
November 21, 2025 at 7:31 PM
It’s not the main point, but what’s with this administration’s insane animus toward Canada?
You hear a lot less from them about Mexico — a country with a leftist Jewish socialist woman in charge.
Why?
You hear a lot less from them about Mexico — a country with a leftist Jewish socialist woman in charge.
Why?
People have called anti-semitism “the socialism of fools”: a pseudo-intellectual prejudice masking as total political economy.
Anti-immigration has become that for the American right. It’s their uni-cause.
Anti-immigration has become that for the American right. It’s their uni-cause.
this defies parody. also helps explain why Sec Bessent bizarrely blamed immigrants when confronted with a question about high beef prices
November 21, 2025 at 2:23 AM
People have called anti-semitism “the socialism of fools”: a pseudo-intellectual prejudice masking as total political economy.
Anti-immigration has become that for the American right. It’s their uni-cause.
Anti-immigration has become that for the American right. It’s their uni-cause.
Reposted by Benji
The US continues to lose manufacturing jobs—payrolls are down 94k over the last year, & another 6k jobs were lost in September
Transportation (especially auto manufacturing) and electronics/electrical manufacturing are the biggest losers, but almost no subsectors are doing well
Transportation (especially auto manufacturing) and electronics/electrical manufacturing are the biggest losers, but almost no subsectors are doing well
November 20, 2025 at 1:37 PM
The US continues to lose manufacturing jobs—payrolls are down 94k over the last year, & another 6k jobs were lost in September
Transportation (especially auto manufacturing) and electronics/electrical manufacturing are the biggest losers, but almost no subsectors are doing well
Transportation (especially auto manufacturing) and electronics/electrical manufacturing are the biggest losers, but almost no subsectors are doing well
Reposted by Benji
Strangling the world-beating export industry which cross-subsidizes higher education for Americans. The White House says that's good news!
The White House just blasted this out under the headline "Good News You May Have Missed"
November 20, 2025 at 1:12 AM
Strangling the world-beating export industry which cross-subsidizes higher education for Americans. The White House says that's good news!
Reposted by Benji
The president said “Quiet, piggy” to a female reporter who asked him about the Epstein files—a continuation of his long-standing pattern of denigrating women. www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...
Trump Told a Woman, ‘Quiet, Piggy,’ When She Asked Him About Epstein
The comment continues the president’s long-standing pattern of denigrating female journalists.
www.theatlantic.com
November 19, 2025 at 12:32 AM
The president said “Quiet, piggy” to a female reporter who asked him about the Epstein files—a continuation of his long-standing pattern of denigrating women. www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...
Reposted by Benji
It's all been leading up to the "President Donald Trump is a white-hat pedophile, actually" gambit. All of American history has been leading up to it.
Nancy Mace: "You can see in the Epstein emails that he's clearly targeting President Trump as retribution for him being a good man ... he's a good man who protects women. That's what real men do."
November 18, 2025 at 5:33 PM
It's all been leading up to the "President Donald Trump is a white-hat pedophile, actually" gambit. All of American history has been leading up to it.
Depending how bad conditions on the ground get, I wouldn’t be surprised if Fuentes (or similar) beat Vance in a primary.
There’s a reason Gore ran in 2000 but Cheney didn’t in 2008.
There’s a reason Gore ran in 2000 but Cheney didn’t in 2008.
November 18, 2025 at 2:31 PM
Depending how bad conditions on the ground get, I wouldn’t be surprised if Fuentes (or similar) beat Vance in a primary.
There’s a reason Gore ran in 2000 but Cheney didn’t in 2008.
There’s a reason Gore ran in 2000 but Cheney didn’t in 2008.