Don't fall for Donald Trump's quantum games

The news, in brief …

• Trump says troops “going in” to Chicago after judge rules use of National Guard illegal

  On the same day a judge struck down similar deployments in L.A., Trump threatened federal action in the Windy City. Read more.

• Google can hold on to Android, Chrome: federal judge

  A judge ruled that the search giant would not be forced to sell off Chrome and Android. Read more.

• Barrett defends Dobbs decision in new book: “Right to abortion” not “fundamental to liberty”

  The justice argues Roe short-circuited debate. Read more.

• Sheriff faces “difficult” investigation after man found dead in pool of blood at Burning Man

  "Witnesses, suspects, or accomplices could be on the other side of the world" as festival ends, sheriff says. Read more.

Make me smarter …

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Oh, what a quantumly entangled web we weave …

Erwin Schrödinger was looking for a comical way to say his fellow theoretical physicists were missing the forest for the trees. Because he hailed from Austria, the funniest bit he could think of was poisoning a cat.

Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment on quantum superposition placed a cat in a sealed box with a flask of hydrocyanic acid. A Geiger counter inside the box measured a radioactive particle and was rigged to break the flask and kill the cat if it decayed. According to prevalent theoretical models at the time, the particle would be both decayed and undecayed until it was observed, leaving the unfortunate cat both dead and alive.

Building the system up from the realm of the infinitesimal to something as clear to the naked eye as a cat made the premise absurd. Things that work on the quantum level or in theory do not necessarily scale to the level of observable reality.

President Donald Trump went through his own bit of superposition vis-à-vis this mortal coil over the long weekend, with his critics preemptively celebrating his demise as unverified reports trickled out about supposed shutdowns near Walter Reed Hospital and a conspicuously empty schedule. This weekend wasn’t the first time the 79-year-old president has inspired days of rumors about his death, and it likely won’t be the last. Crucially, it’s not just Trump’s obviously declining health that can put us in mind of a doomed and thriving feline. This bit of semi-true and outwardly inscrutable hypotheticalism is everywhere you look in Trump’s second term.

You can see it when you look at Trump’s justification for unleashing the troops on the streets of Los Angeles. It’s something the president, under a very precise set of circumstances, has the authority to do. It fell apart in reality when those circumstances weren’t present in SoCal.

It’s there to be observed in Trump’s mass deportation scheme. The people swept up off the streets by empowered and faceless ICE agents are both undocumented immigrants and citizens. They’re placed in government facilities, but their exact location is notoriously hard to pin down. If a judge happens to look into it and collapse the experiment, whoopsie, they’ve already been deported to a black site out of the country. Meanwhile, the superposition shuffle continues for thousands of others.

MAGA loves to trot out the theoretical and hold it up as better evidence than our own lying eyes. In the confusion, it’s helpful to heed the words of Albert Einstein, a force for objective reality even as he was upending ideas about how the universe worked.

“One cannot get around the assumption of reality,” he wrote to Schrodinger, “if only one is honest.”

Trump might have surrounded himself with a living buffer of sycophants, but he can’t get away from the fact that he’s a 79-year-old man in rapid decline, pushing an incredibly unpopular agenda on an increasingly irate public. Read the rulings from judges outside of the Supreme Court. Observe the “No Kings Day” uproar. Peep the bruising on the back of his hand. The evidence that this will all one day end is there for anyone willing to lift the lid and look.

What do you think? Can Trump’s constant attempts to have it both ways hold up through 2028? Will the courts or the Reaper catch him first? And, how good was “Oppenheimer”? I mean, right? Click the speech bubble icont to sound off in the comments.

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