Brief Thoughts on the Thing
By 
This is at least one more post than the subject requires, but I do diverge a bit from both Cheryl and Scott on the Ryleigh Cooper question.
On the issue of how much sympathy we should have for the person who just got her face eaten by a leopard… I’m less sympathetic than either Scott or Cheryl. I know a lot of federal employees and federal employees-adjacent and just about every single one of them (even of the GOP persuasion) was aware of the danger that the Trump administration posed to their federal jobs. Not understanding that a Trump victory was putting her own job at risk was blind, willful stupidity and I have little sympathy for the willfully stupid. Moreover, her justification for voting Trump (free IVF!) in exchange for allowing Trump to harm all of the people that Trump promised to harm is, in a phrase, fucking sick. It’s a trade I would never consider making, and that she not only considered it but in fact pulled the trigger makes her a piece of shit, to borrow a term from the field of moral philosophy. The outcome is effectively a wish from the Monkey’s Paw, in which she might win cheaper IVF in exchange for losing the financial stability needed to start a family.
Where I diverge a bit from Scott (and from the greater portion of Bluesky) is in how consequential I think the media was in facilitating misconceptions about Trump policy and with Trump’s victory. As a general rule I think we’re way too inclined to overstate the impact of MSM (or elite media, if you prefer) coverage of the race to its outcome. On the one hand, we know that people who consume traditional media vote overwhelmingly Democratic, meaning that there aren’t necessarily a ton of votes being lost by an insufficiently acidic description of Trump’s perfidy. On the other hand, NYT/WaPo/CNN coverage doesn’t have the queuing effect that it used to; right wing media just doesn’t cover the same issues as the NYT, and to the extent it does it’s often in explicitly oppositional terms.
With regard to the specifics of this discussion I think we need to disaggregate by issue area, because I think that Project 2025, abortion policy, and IVF policy occupy very different spaces on the truth-to-journalism space. Trump saying that Project 2025 didn’t involve him at all is a flat lie… and most MSM accounts of his relationship with Project 2025 showed that to lesser or greater extent. Trump claiming to be a moderate on abortion is pretty standard cross-coalition politicking, and to be honest Trump handled both the internal management of the coalition and the outreach to moderates pretty well. It surely doesn’t hurt that approximately no one believes that Trump actually cares about abortion. Explaining those coalitional politics isn’t incredibly complicated but it does take space and time, making it deeply unlikely that elite media coverage is going to actually reach any of the low-information voters that might matter.
With respect to IVF, it’s not obvious to me that Trump is even lying. IVF is complicated in the Republican coalition because there are important voices on either side of the argument. It’s true enough that the deeply committed pro-lifers are anti-IVF, but it’s not obvious (and in fact it’s probably unlikely) that this position captures even a plurality of the GOP coalition as a whole. A lot of Republicans who are fine with abortion restrictions don’t feel the need to follow the rabbit all the way down the hole. Moreover, while well-off suburban women have been deserting the GOP the party still has a LOT of them and still needs their votes, and this is precisely the constituency that wants cheaper IVF. The hospitals and the medical associations love any additional medical procedures, and while the libertarians don’t like paying for other peoples’ babies the pro-natalist wing is growing in strength. It shouldn’t be necessary to mention, moreover, that hard right/fascist parties have a history of pro-natalist policy preferences.
This is why I found some of the conversation in comments puzzling; Trump may indeed be trying to reduce the costs of IVF for a variety of coalitional and ideological purposes, and if that expansion happens it will likely be on terms that most clearly benefit pro-GOP demographics. It’s true enough that his executive order hasn’t had much of an impact yet, but the administration is barely six weeks old. If Biden had not yet accomplished a campaign commitment 38 days into his administration I doubt that many here would conclude that he had given up on it. Trump may end up failing to do anything at all (this requires legislation and Trump isn’t good at that), but it’s possible Ryleigh Cooper will get her £200.
That’s way too much on Ms. Ryleigh Cooper. I do think that some of Cheryl’s point are valid and that space needs to be made for forgiveness (if there’s a true political cost to whatever “cancel culture” was it probably lay in making rehabilitation so difficult) but I nevertheless don’t feel the need to shed a tear for her lost job.