Readers of this newsletter are savvy, so I’m sure most of you saw this story about acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claiming Americans need to show ID to eat at restaurants. He dropped this blatant falsehood in the middle of a diatribe about voter ID, and it was so dumb that I think most people just assumed he was tired or confused. 

I’d like to offer an alternative theory: MAGA leaders have reached such levels of contempt for Americans that they don’t even bother to make their lies sound plausible. Maybe it’s laziness. Maybe it’s a flex, as if Blanche was showing his boss that the base will back him, no matter how stupid he sounds. Donald Trump often enjoys telling outrageous lies, just to enjoy how much the people around him will pretend to believe him. Perhaps the sickness is spreading. 

In all the chaos of the week, I worry this story will be overlooked, but it’s so crucial: the Justice Department, under Blanche’s leadership, is trying to take away E. Jean Carroll’s legal victory against Trump in a 2024 defamation case. That case was actually the second time that a jury found Carroll was telling the truth when she said Trump sexually assaulted her in the ‘90s. Blanche’s DOJ now wants to argue that because Trump was president when he falsely accused Carroll of lying, the U.S. government should have been the defendant, rather than Trump personally. 

This is terrible for a couple of reasons. The goal here is to vacate this legal victory, because the U.S. government cannot be sued for defamation. Carroll went through hell to clear her name after Trump lied about her. It’s monstrous to re-victimize her after all of this. 

But the damage extends beyond Carroll or any sexual abuse victim facing similar obstacles to justice. Trump was clearly not acting on behalf of the government when he lied about her. To assert otherwise is to equate his personhood with the state. That’s not just monarchical, but tyrannical on the level of the apocryphal assertion of Louis XIV that “I am the state.” Trump may deny thinking of himself as a king, but this legal filing says otherwise. 

We should all be personally offended, as well. The office of the president represents the people. So when the DOJ says that the office, not the man, defamed Carroll, he’s making all of us complicit. Hell, it’s making Carroll, who is an American citizen, complicit in her own abuse. That’s not just legally dangerous, but morally reprehensible. Trump said vile things about her. He should own them. 

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I enjoyed my colleague Joy Saha’s article about the rapid spread of the term “maxxing,” which has spread from fringe communities online to ubiquitous slang. “It’s shorthand for ‘maximize’ and is often used alongside a noun or a specific aspect of life that needs improving,” she writes. Joy decries how “proteinmaxxing” has become a trend, especially since we really don’t need to cram protein into every molecule of food we eat. 

I just wanted to add some context that often gets overlooked in discussions of this slang, mostly because people like Joy aren’t giant honking nerds like myself. “Maxxing” didn’t really start as incel slang. It comes from the world of role-playing games, and originally refers to the practice of trying to max out your character’s attributes — or if you prefer the insider term, “stat block.” 

Say you play Dungeons & Dragons and your character fights with a broadsword. You’d want him to be stronger, so you’d practice to “max” the points you put into your “strength” column, so his sword strikes hit harder. It’s also a game mechanic in video games where characters level up. 

I mention this because it shows Joy is right to be worried that all this talk about “maxxing” is insidious. It’s part of a larger and toxic trend of gamifying everything. Yes, that mentality can be helpful if you, like your D&D character, want to get stronger and so you keep lifting heavier weights to max out your real-life statistics. But now the concept is drifting into spaces where it doesn’t belong. 

“Looksmaxxing” is dumb because attractiveness is subjective. There's no objective way to measure how hot someone is. As Joy points out, “proteinmaxxing” could harm you by interfering with a balanced diet. Beyond that, it’s dehumanizing to reduce our complex, messy selves to stat blocks. The eagerness to believe otherwise is a social poison. 

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