News bits: TDS is real; Regarding the 2020 census

The radical right refers to Trump Derangement Syndrome as people who criticize DJT. I use it to refer to Trump’s actual mental derangement. For example, Trump recently said Biden threatened to lead the US into “world war two”, and Trump said he thought he had beaten Barack Obama for the presidency back in 2016. That’s nuts.

Elsewhere he says he's a genius but often or usually blithers incoherently:

Trump also remarked that “U.S.” and “us” are spelled the same and noted that he’d “just picked that up.” “Has anyone ever thought of that before?” he asked the crowd. “Couple of days, I’m reading, and it said ‘us.’ and I said, you know, when you think about it, us equals U.S. Now if we say something genius, they will never say it.”  

He says he was never indicted: “We did nothing wrong,” Trump said. “This is all Biden’s stuff … I was never indicted. You practically never heard the word.”

Another example:

Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington said the former president just doesn’t understand why attorneys Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell and Ken Chesboro would plead guilty.

Trump’s Spokesperson says he is “confused” about why Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Ken Chesebro would plead guilty because they are lawyers and should’ve known there was no case. pic.twitter.com/57SF8uUai8 — Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski)  October 29, 2023

“I think [Trump is] a little confused because if you’re a lawyer, you know there’s no crimes here,” said Harrington, who is a journalist, not a lawyer. “According to the law, there’s literally nothing to plead guilty to because there’s nothing that was — no laws that were broken.

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At Detailed Demographic and Housing Characteristics File A, the US census bureau  released detailed 2020 census data for Native American groups or tribes. The result was surprising, but hard to explain. The NYT comments about the data:

The report provides the most detailed data we’ve ever had on America’s racial and ethnic origins, including stunningly exhaustive data on nearly 1,200 tribes, native villages and other entities. We hoped it would shed light on one of the biggest mysteries in the 2020 Census: Why did the Native American population skyrocket by 85 percent over the past decade?  

From the 1870s until the 1960s, the federal government ran brutal boarding schools designed to assimilate Indigenous children. Then came the tribal-termination era of the 1950s and ’60s when the government encouraged Indigenous people to pack up and move to the city. Under the so-called Voluntary Relocation Program, Maxim told us, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs would terminate a tribe’s federal recognition, “divide up the reservation, sell it off to the settlers and give the tribal members a one-time cash payment and a one-way ticket to the city.” It broke Native social ties and led to more marriages to outsiders.

That heartbreaking history helps explain why Native Americans are more likely to have a mixed heritage. But it doesn’t explain the giant increase in numbers in recent years. 

Slightly muddled counts of Native American origins