Daily Bafflements

• Bafflerites in D.C.! Come and join Barbara Ehrenreich, Rafia Zakaria, Dean Baker, and Hussein Ibish for a Tax Day appraisal of the Age of Trump so far. It’s free, and there will be drinks.

• Since Rep. Steve King is tweeting his endorsement of Hungary’s far-right leader, Viktor Orbán, now’s a good time to read Susan Faludi’s Baffler no. 31 salvo, which anticipated the slide rightward in America by observing Hungarian politics. Here’s a warning to Trumpists, from that prescient piece:

Along with self-pity, victim-mongering, and a myth of historic loss that feeds identity, another feature seems to be an essential part of the fascist mix: a confidence among the established leaders that they can inflame the mob without ultimately becoming its victims too.

• To represent the riots over the weekend in Berkeley as pro-Trump and anti-Trump groups clashing is deafeningly reductive. As Natasha Lennard writes over at Esquire, “A media narrative that overlooks significant white supremacist presence de facto demonizes the counter-protesters who came to confront it.” Vincent Bevins wrote about such centrist equivocation on the Word Factory, too.