Month: May 2025

Over the Memorial Day weekend, Trump spent some time with the people he called suckers and losers of both the future and the past. He delivered the commencement address at West Point, and rambled on for a good hour reprising the trophy wives and yachts story he told the Boy Scouts back in 2017 and boasting about his felonies saying “I went through more investigations than Alphonse Capone, and now I’m talking to you as president, can you believe this?” This was his lesson in perseverance to the graduating seniors: no matter how many crimes you commit, you too can become president.

He said he didn’t have time to do the traditional handshake of the graduating seniors because he’s dealing with important national security issues in Russia and China. Luckily, he is able to do that from the golf course where he was apparently seen later that afternoon.

The next day he delivered a Memorial Day address at Arlington National Cemetery in which he shared with all the people who were there mourning their loved ones that he was glad that he hadn’t won his second term until now because he “got the World Cup and the Olympics.” I’m sure that was very comforting.

I know all Americans were very moved by his Memorial Day message to the country:

Trump is very interested in military pomp and circumstance these days. A couple of weeks ago he declared May 8th a holiday, celebrating the Victory in WWII as they do in Europe and Russia, stating that it “was only accomplished because of us.” No one advised him, I guess, that America also fought the Japanese in WWII and they didn’t surrender until August. But whatever. I guess we’ll just change that. Nobody will notice. He also declared that November 11th would be called Victory in WWI Day but was later told that we already celebrate it as Veterans Day. Apparently veterans are very touchy about changing that and Trump seems to have dropped it.

We’ve never been a country that ritually staged big military parades yearly, although it’s not unprecedented to do it in the wake of specific military victories. Certainly, we’ve never done it to show off military gear to impress our adversaries and allies with our massive manly equipment. There’s no word on whether we’ll be doing that every May 8th going forward but we’re going to be celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Army on June 14th which just happens to land on Trump’s 79th birthday. How serendipitous.

The New York Times reports:

The current plan involves a tremendous scene in the center of Washington: 28 M1A1 Abrams tanks (at 70 tons each for the heaviest in service); 28 Stryker armored personnel carriers; more than 100 other vehicles; a World War II-era B-25 bomber; 6,700 soldiers; 50 helicopters; 34 horses; two mules; and a dog.

It’s estimated to cost somewhere in the vicinity of 45 million, not counting the clean-up and repairs of the streets the tanks are likely to destroy. I’m sure they can cut some more children’s health care somewhere in the budget to pay for it.

There are no plans for the soldiers to sing “Happy Birthday Mr President” but the Golden Knights, a paratrooper team, will land in front of the reviewing stand and present him with a flag. And who knows, maybe they’re planning a surprise.

The lore has it that Trump saw the Bastille Day celebration in France in 2017 and has been agitating for one ever since. According to he Times, in the first term, the Pentagon pushed back with then Defense Secretary Jim Mattis quipping that he would he would “rather swallow acid” but this time everyone figures they’d better give him what he wants. However, I think his desire for the big military parade goes back much farther than that.

Trump’s father sent Donald to military school, because he was spoiled and out of control. But he still made sure that his son had plenty of privileges that other students did not have. He even got him a big promotion to one of the top ranks despite not having done anything to earn it. According to the great book “Lucky Loser” by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, he failed in that job but not by being belligerent and abusive as you might imagine. He failed because he was negligent and didn’t do the job, locking himself in his room and letting the lower ranks run roughshod over the younger kids. After one of his charges roughed up a lower classman and Trump was nowhere to be found he was finally removed from his post.

But daddy intervened again. According to this excerpt of the book in Vanity Fair, he actually ended up leading the parade. Literally. The cadets marched every year in the Columbus Day parade and somehow the orders came down that Trump would be leading it, despite the fact that it was traditionally given to the top officer in the school which he certainly was not:

Whatever the reason, on October 12, 1963, Donald led the specially assembled company of cadets down Fifth Avenue, past some of the premiere addresses in the city of his birth. Some of the cadets marching behind him wondered how it could be that Trump was in front and Witek, the highest-ranking cadet in the school and the senior class president, marched behind him. Trump arrived first at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where he met Cardinal Francis Spellman. Donald would always claim marching in the front of the parade was evidence of his “elite” status at the academy.

Trump famously avoided the Vietnam war and the rumors are that, once again, his father paid for a doctor to say he had bone spurs. Years later he told Howard Stern that avoiding STDs during the 90s was his personal Vietnam. He said he felt “like a great and very brave soldier.” So it’s not as if he never served.

As President he doesn’t much care for underachievers in the ranks and has no respect for military leadership. He’s not interested in history, tradition or what the armed services really do. He once marched down 5th avenue leading the cadets and to him that’s real military service. He just loves a parade and now he’s going to get one on his birthday. Maybe they’ll surprise him with the medal of honor he was talked out of giving himself in the first term.

Salon

MAGA’s medieval dream

Drew Pavlou’s Iceberg Journal considered back in April how Chairman Mao’s crackpot war on “the humble Eurasian tree sparrow” resulted in a famine that “killed at least 40 million people in a disaster of world-historic proportions.”

Donald Trump’s cult is a kind of MAGA Maoism, Pavlou suggests:

Like Chairman Mao, President Donald Trump subscribes to a wide range of bizarre crackpot theories about economics, politics and world affairs. And like the Great Helmsman, he too has managed to concentrate an extraordinary amount of power in his hands, building up an immense personality cult so as to terrify other figures in his party into submission.

Pavlou argues:

Honestly, the right way to think about MAGA is through the lens of Maoism and other Third Worldist political movements and personality cults. It uniquely draws upon the dumbest, shittiest and most repulsive parts of each: Peron’s economic illiteracy; Mao’s ideological wars on reality; Juche’s exaltation of economic pain and hardship in service of national self-reliance; Idi Amin’s ethnic expulsions of minority groups.

I believe that the central motivating force behind the movement is a rejection of the Enlightenment and liberal modernity. In place of reason it exalts superstition, magical thinking and primitive suspicion of anything beyond direct experience. It is the ideology of the medieval peasant, the goat herder, the cab driver who blames all world problems on the Jews. Its motivating essence is simple: ‘‘Burn anything I can’t understand.’’

His conclusion:

These people have nothing in common with the civilisation they claim to speak for. They demand America abolish its 250 year old Constitution, abolish its liberal democratic heritage, so that the government can run Latin American tin pot dictatorship style paramilitary death squads.

This is MAGA Maoism. They hate everything good about Western civilisation: freedom of thought, freedom of expression, rule of law, presumption of innocence, trial by peers. They want death squads and struggle sessions against political enemies because they want to make America a Third World country.

They are going to fail, but my God they will inflict an insane and psychotic amount of destruction and suffering in the process.

Yes, but that’s mostly the plebs. The rich elite backing Trump want a kind of neofeudalism. I wrote over a year ago that Democrats want an American economy that serves you. Republicans want an America in which you serve the economy.

Karoline Leavitt just reinforced that point again for me.

View on Threads

Evan Koch opined in January 2024 in the Coeur d’Alene Press (Idaho):

This past week Sen. Chuck Winder (R-Boise) said that abortion contributes to Idaho’s workforce shortage.

Winder told the Idaho Statesman, “We complain that we don’t have enough service workers. There’s a reason, it’s not just the low birth rate. It’s the number of abortions that have occurred.” (https://bit.ly/GOPQuote)

Winder, who speaks for his party, believes women should produce more babies to create more service workers.

When I first arrived here, I recalled the first time I drove through a Beverly Hills neighborhood decades earlier. I was suprised to see beat-up pickup trucks parked in front of so many grand homes. It took a moment to realize they belonged to groundskeepers and gardeners. Service workers:

Yup. Like Robocop, your kids are product. Maybe. Allstate CEO Thomas Wilson explained that globalization means, “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business … American businesses will adapt.” So unless the little darlings offer some upside to the bottom line, they add no value. Why should the 1% pay to educate American children when other nations will pay to educate theirs for us? And besides, how much education do waiters and gardeners really need, anyway?

(h/t BM for the graphic)

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

No Kings Day, June 14th
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Saith The Lord Trump

Give Republicans their due. They are relentless.

They lost a North Carolina Supreme Court seat by 734 votes after fighting in court for six months to overturn the 2024 election lost by Judge Jefferson Griffin (R). Incumbent Justice Allison Riggs (D) was sworn in on May 13. Now the GOP wants vengeance.

Election-watchers knew (or should have) that that was not the end of it (WRAL):

North Carolina has failed to comply with federal law requiring accurate voter lists and isn’t doing enough to fix those deficiencies, the U.S. Department of Justice alleged in a lawsuit Tuesday against the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

The lawsuit, filed by the administration of Republican President Donald Trump, says the state should’ve done more to verify the identity of voters in the state to ensure no fraud is occurring. It specifically hones in on thousands of people from whom the state’s database of registered voters doesn’t include a driver’s license number or Social Security number.

If you think the complaint is about preserving election integrity, preventing voter fraud, voter confidence in elections, etc., I’ve got a condo at 725 5th Ave. to sell you.

The complaint echoes the lawsuits filed by the RNC, the North Carolina Republican Party and Griffin, citing the Help America Vote Act and, of course, Trump’s Executive Order 14248 entitled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.”

Griffin and Trump have each focused on a state database that’s supposed to contain the driver’s license number or Social Security number of all registered voters, to prove they are who they say they are. Such lists are required by a federal law called the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, passed in 2002 to modernize voting rules and administration nationwide.

That law was the focus of the federal lawsuit filed in the Eastern District of North Carolina, which says the state isn’t doing enough to stop voter fraud. Trump has repeatedly made false claims about voter fraud, including about his loss in the 2020 election. Although those claims were thrown out in court by the dozens after the 2020 election, polls show many Republican voters still lack faith in American elections.

Do tell?

The filing demands an order for the State Board to draft a plan within 30 days for updating its digital voter file. The DOJ insists that the state contact all registered voters whose DL or SS numbers do not appear in the record. Never mind that the state already has those numbers on file for perhaps half of those voters. But due to clerical errors, local laziness, or lack of time, those numbers were never populated into the state’s database.

The state also insists that, owing to the GOP-controlled legislature’s passage of a photo ID requirement, “that everyone who voted in 2024 had to show photo identification to vote, or provide their Social Security number if they lacked ID. State and county elections officials have also encouraged people on the list of voters with missing information to provide it again.”

The lawsuit does not expressly ask that voters who do not reply to the state’s request for the information be purged from the rolls. “A spokesperson for the DOJ did not respond to CNN’s request for clarity.” But it “takes issue with the ‘ad hoc’ plan the state board has put forward for updating the existing registrations missing the information – by having county officials collect it if and when those voters show up at polling places to vote.”

They are relentless. Griffin demanded after the election was over that the votes of “incompletely” registered persons be deleted from the count in his race. It was a trial balloon for how Republicans might overturn elections everywhere that don’t go their way. It failed. This is the next gambit.

On first glance, I thought it ironic that the Trump DOJ was demanding remedial action from the State Board. It fell under GOP control as of this month. But the State Board is already underfunded by the GOP-controlled legislature. Should the DOJ lawsuit prevail, do not expect the legislature to provide additional funds for fully complying. This will ensure that the database issue will remain alive for the next general election cycle. Purging voters then will be much more impactful. And beneficial to the GOP.

My suspicion based on language contained in the filing is that their next target is eliminating early voting with same-day registration. Stay tuned.

Update: Added “with same-day registration” in para. above.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

No Kings Day, June 14th
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

This week there were LOTS of examples of Trump’s rapid mental decline. On my friend Cliff Schecter’s YouTube channel (which you should totally subscribe to) David Shuster discusses concerns from anonymous Trump White House staff regarding President Trump’s worsening irritability, confusion & memory loss, pointing to cognitive decline.

The video includes multiple examples, like the Oval Office meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa, where Trump made crazy statements. Then there is the time he claimed, without evidence, that Qatar was giving the United States 1.2 trillion or six times GDP, which is preposterous. And he didn’t back down, he’s now claiming $5.1 trillion worth of investment!

Watch the video. It’s short. Like. Subscribe. Then pick your favorite story to share with everyone.

As MrWittyBanter wrote:

This video single handedly demonstrates beyond any shadow of a doubt that he has got to GO!! This is reaching all new heights of absurdity.

Make a comment, like someone else’s comment and share on Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, WhatsApp, KakaoTalk, Reddit, VK, OK or even LinkedIn.

For example, on LinkedIn someone could post “As a professional who cares for people with dementia, I’m really concerned for the health of Donald Trump. I see all the same signs in his behavior as I do in my clients.” (Several people commented about seeing the same signs in their parents and relatives. )

You could share on Facebook, “When I saw this video of Trump, with the repeating phrases, the loss of words, and the making up of numbers that aren’t grounded in reality, it reminded me of when Uncle Dave in his last days of his dementia. Someone needs to get Trump help.”

We can share with others our serious concerns. Like @R.Rigsby5319 did when he asked:
“Does this president have direct individual authority to initiate nuclear weapon strikes? Are there fail safe protocols in place if he makes any dementia associated “impulsive” launch orders?”

The point is to keep talking about this to multiple people in a way you feel comfortable with.

I don’t make jokes about my father-in-law’s short term memory loss and mental decline, but I can and will with Trump. Maybe share your favorite nickname for him. My friend Jeff Tiedrich has a bunch of them from his newsletter, Everyone is entitled to my own opinion.

Sundowning Grandpa Fuckface, Boy King or Mad King Donny.

We share our concerns and it gives the media a chance to bring it up to Trump’s cabinet. Then we watch them squirm, trying not to acknowledge reality.

As Jeff wrote, the first reporter to stand up and ask “what the fuck is wrong with you” should get a lifetime Pulitzer. I wonder if S.V Date got one?

Military expert Thomas Ricks has some thought on our muy macho Whiskey Pete:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is fond of talking about the need to focus on “warfighting.” He wants “lethality,” bigtime. That sounds tough, so it plays well on Fox News.

But let me tell you why it is wrong. The more you know about military operations, the more you understand that you don’t want to focus on fighting. That gets people killed — like your kids or grandkids.

Why? Well, as General George Patton supposedly said, “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.” The worst way to go to war is by flinging your people into combat — “warfighting,” as the tattooed and tough-talking former TV commentator puts it. You don’t do frontal assaults against an entrenched and bunkered enemy — as happened on “D- Day” — because you want to, but because you absolutely have no other choice.

Yes, force readiness is great. But the best way to win wars is by helping other countries be ready. You train them, you equip them, you supply them. You conduct joint maneuvers in peacetime with them, so everyone understands each other. Preparing our allies also makes them less susceptible to being overrun by their (and our) enemies. A lesson that the world is learning the hard way in Ukraine.

[…]

The three most important aspects to helping allies win wars are producing such goods, getting them where they are needed, and training people to use the stuff you send them.

Of these three, training foreign militaries is especially important. They need to know how to use our weaponry and communications equipment. That reduces friction in actual combat, which in turn lessens bad things like “friendly fire” casualties. It also makes foreign soldiers more effective — especially if we let them fight according to their knowledge of the terrain, instead of trying to turn them into replicas of the 82nd Airborne. I emphasize training because one of Hegseth’s early cuts was to the Army’s “security assistance” brigades. One of the absolutely essential skills is to train people such as the Ukrainians in how to interpret intelligence information — what can be gleaned by reconnaissance satellites, for example — and then to convey that information to the front lines as quickly and as accurately as possible in a form that is easy to use.

Freeloaders, nothing but freeloaders. Our suckers and losers need to be macho war fighters and that’s it!

Also:

Another Hegseth target is too many officers at big military commands. He wants to “downsize, consolidate, or close redundant headquarters.” It is easy to mock such staffs in peacetime. It plays well with the masses.

But when you get yourself into a real war, you know what is essential? Smart, well-trained staff officers who know how to write, calculate and plan on the fly. A classic example of this was the Casablanca conference of January 1943, at which the American officers were caught short by British preparation. The Brits arrived with rough drafts of a variety of war plans. Indeed, they literally sent a shipload of staff officers to the summit meeting, aboard the HMS Bulolo. Those well-educated, nimble-minded soldiers stood ready to churn out position papers on any subject the Americans raised.

We don’t need no stinkin’ staff officers. Trump will tweet the orders on a nightly basis and they’ll be brilliant. He went to military school, after all. And Pete plays an expert on TV. So, it’s all good.

Pete is the guy who persuaded Trump to pardon the war criminals. I’m pretty sure we know exactly what he thinks war is all about. He’s this guy — assuming he’s sober:

“Thank you again. Thank you again. Won’t forget,” President Trump says as he shakes the hand of Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. pic.twitter.com/uFrvem6rUj

— Tom Dreisbach (@TomDreisbach) March 5, 2025

I hope the Supremes come through for us on the big abuse of power cases that are rolling through the system, I really do. I wish I was more confident that they would.

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate reminds us:

As the first Supreme Court term of Donald Trump’s second presidency draws to a close, one particularly alarming throughline has emerged: The court’s decision in Trump v. U.S. nearly one year ago has emboldened the president to challenge the limits of judicial authority to their breaking point. The Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision granting Trump sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution looked disastrous from the moment it was released in July 2024. Its impact has only grown more dire since then, as a string of emergency orders and late-night rulings from the court in response to Trump’s daily assaults on the Constitution makes plain. At the time, the most immediate consequence of Trump v. U.S. appeared to be its derailment of special counsel Jack Smith’s effort to try Trump for his attempted subversion of the 2020 election. And that outcome undoubtedly bolstered Trump’s successful campaign to retake the White House by taking a Jan. 6 trial off the table before November 2024.

The true ramifications of this have only begun to be clear. I don’t think I need to reiterate the massive abuse of power and corruption we’ve seen in just these first four months. Did the majority fail to see the possibilities? Do they care? I think they should …

The majority may have also failed to foresee the ways that Trump would use the decision to diminish the court’s own power. Having freed the president to burst past existing constitutional restraints, the justices must now try to preserve their own authority from executive encroachment. In case after case since Trump’s restoration, the court has tried to have it both ways, reeling in some of his most extreme actions—while still giving the GOP most of what it wants—without entirely ceding its own power to tell the president “no.” And so a malignant dynamic is now unfolding between an imperial court and the president whom it crowned “a king above law.” The conservative supermajority continues to pursue its own agenda, which includes an aggressive expansion of executive authority. But it is doing so at the worst possible time, when the presidency has been captured by an aspiring authoritarian who defies all constitutional constraints. So the Supreme Court is caught between its own desire to shift the law rightward and its fitful inclination to shoot down Trump’s most extreme moves—if only to preserve its own power.

Stern goes into the immunity ruling, written by Roberts that set the state for all this. It’s truly stunning that he didn’t see this coming and since he’s not an idiot I have to assume he may have. Or perhaps he just didn’t think anyone as stupid, avaricious and unstable as Donald Trump would ever be elected again and in any case, it seemed clear they were working off of the fantasy that the Democrats were “weaponizing” the system to get Donald Trump. Fox News Brain Rot. And they were anxious to take the opportunity to enshrine the Unitary Executive Theory into law. But as Stern points out, Roberts took it much further, creating whole new adventures of “unitary” powers that hadn’t been part of the argument:

As Harvard Law’s Jack Goldsmith has detailed, Roberts then went much further: He declared that much of the president’s misconduct was not only immune from prosecution, but also from any kind of regulation or oversight by Congress or the courts. By doing so, the chief justice placed a patina of constitutional legitimacy over Trump’s conspiracy to steal the 2020 election, announcing that some of his most notorious abuses of office could not be halted or punished by the other branches, except through impeachment and removal. These novel claims, Goldsmith points out, were not even briefed by the parties or addressed by the lower courts. It appears that the chief justice simply spotted an opportunity to enshrine them into precedent and decided to shoot his shot. This rushed and reckless approach created a roadmap that Trump would easily exploit from the moment he returned to the White House.

If that’s the case they almost certainly didn’t anticipate that it would end up threatening their own power to restrain the executive, creating a form of dictatorship.

Stern points out that there has been some pushback. Unfortunately, it’s been halfhearted and intermittent:

The majority seems at once delighted that Trump is creating opportunities to shift the law rightward yet distraught that he sometimes pushes to the point of encroaching on the court’s own power. Its solution, for now, is to continually stake out middle ground when conflicts between the two branches’ agendas arise. By doing so, the court is all but encouraging the administration to test, if not blow past, the limits of its own decisions. It has repeatedly endorsed the president’s interpretation of Trump v. U.S. as a near-boundless grant of executive authority. No one should be surprised when Trump concludes that the bounds of his power extend well beyond the Supreme Court’s own rulings.

Maybe they should have thought of that before. They had to know that Trump was, at best, an imperfect vehicle for their precious unitary executive theory. They knew he was running and had a good chance to win again. I’d guess most of them thought that would be great. Did they honestly not see what he was promising to do? Or is it that they just didn’t care? Maybe they like the idea of being rubber stamps for a madman. Let’s just say I wouldn’t be surprised.

If you have a sub. to Slate I urge you to read this. It’s quite good, if somewhat depressing. I hope they do the right thing. But I’m done listening to anyone who says “they’ll never go along with that…” We’ve seen exactly what they’ll do.

Services —which Trump doesn’t know exists

Trump thinks trade is only about widgets. It is not. As Catherine Rampell points out, it’s also services and in that the United States is the undisputed leader:

President Donald Trump says he wants to reduce our trade deficit. Yet he’s destroying one of our winningest exports: higher education.

Colleges and universities are among America’s most competitive international exporters. In dollar terms, last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined.

We also run a huge trade surplus in this sector, meaning that foreigners buy much more education from the United States than Americans buy from other countries. In the 2022-2023 school year, more than three times as many international students were enrolled in the United States as there were American students studying abroad. Translated to cash: Our education-services trade surplus is larger than the trade surplus in the entire completed civilian aircraft sector.

Why? Regardless of what Trumpland claims, America is really, really good at higher education.

[…]

As with many politicians, Trump’s trade agenda fetishizes 1950s-stylemanufacturing rather than21st-centuryservices, even though it is the latter that the United States excels at producing and selling abroad. (Think not only education, but also software, engineering, entertainment, financial services, etc.) We run a huge trade surplus in the services sector, which Trump perplexingly excludes when quantifying our trade balance.

The idea proposed by the free trade promise was that as manufacturing moves offshore to places where production costs were lower and their workers would benefit while here in the U.S. we would sell services in return and our workers would benefit. It didn’t always work out that way for certain sectors of workers in either place, which is why there is a backlash among those who were left behind. But overall, this did benefit the economy as a whole even in the U.S. which grew smartly over this period. Had the accompanying promises of re-training and the like come through, it would have been even better.

But Trump doesn’t acknowledge any of this because he doesn’t understand trade. He thinks it’s all about goods and completely ignores services acting like it isn’t part of the equation. And while it it’s no doubt useful for the U.S. to manufacture more of certain types of goods in the U.S. for national security purposes (Biden and the CHIPS Act????) on the whole this idea is sure to fail. The American people do not all want to be factory workers and that goes triple for those who want to get a college degree and work in a white collar or service industry. I really don’t think telling scientists to build iPhones is a winning strategy unless he really plans to go fully Maoist Cultural Revolution (which he might!)

This is all just dumb, dumb, dumb and maybe we’ll get through it but the damage is incalculable. Despite what you’re hearing for many of the excited, over-stimulated commentators on TV today in light of the stock market going up because Trump got a nice phone call from the EU president on Sunday an economy based on Trump’s whims is the worst of all possible worlds.

Our Nation is staging one if the greatest and fastest comebacks in history. In just 4 short months, we are respected again, respected like never before, and just wait, with many Trillions of Dollars of Investment in Plants and Factories, until you see the numbers on GROWTH. This…

— President Donald J. Trump – Parody (@realDonParody) May 27, 2025

Actually we opened it and invited them in

I have had these thoughts recently but dismissed them because I was afraid of sounding too hysterical. But Adam Serwer (who was ironically, one of the people who made me a little paranoid about that...) has a compelling case to make that this era is more than just Trump’s crazy and a bunch of cowards, it’s an attack on knowledge itself. Gift link here.

The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.

Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.

These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.

By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.

It’s a seriously great piece and you should read the whole thing.

The truth is that this project has been a long time coming. We have chronicled the return to superstition, the assault on science, the conspiracy theories and more for a long time. The primitive tribalism has been on full display. But the arrival of Trump and his clear agenda to sack the U.S. Government and all the institutions that undergird our 21st century society is next level. We will no longer be a world leader in anything but arms sales and shitty entertainment.

I mentioned this the other day and it looks like it’s true. Trump is reportedly increasingly nervous about the midterms:

President Trump‘s team has launched an early and aggressive behind-the-scenes effort to maintain the GOP’s tenuous grip on the House in 2026 — and avoid his third impeachment.

Trump allies believe — with good reason — that a Democrat-controlled House would launch investigations of the president and move to impeach him. That’s exactly what happened after Democrats seized the chamber during Trump’s first term.

Midterm elections are historically tough for the party occupying the White House, and senior Republicans privately acknowledge that retaining the speaker’s gavel won’t be easy.

The twice-impeached Trump “knows the stakes firsthand. He saw what can happen. It’s clear he doesn’t want that again,” said Matt Gorman, a top official for House Republicans’ campaign arm in the 2018 midterms. “Investigations, impeachment — he knows it’s all on the table with a Speaker [Hakeem] Jeffries.”

Already, some Democrats have signaled they want to investigate Trump’s overhaul of the U.S. government, whether he manipulated markets and fostered insider trading with his tariff announcements, and whether he’s helped Elon Musk secure deals for Starlink. Then there’s that $400 million jet from Qatar. Democrats and other critics say Trump violated the Constitution by accepting the gift.

Oh that’s just for starters. It’s a smorgasbord of corruption and abuse of power. Almost too much to wrap your arms around.

But they had better do it. Yes, I know they’ll need to do the “kitchen table issues” and all that but honestly, if they win and then decide to let bygones be bygones I think we’re gone.

Anyway, Trump plans to prevent this by preventing retirements, spending big, stopping all primaries, raising a boatload of money and recruiting good candidates. I guess that’s supposed to be some kind of innovative approach?

Trump has not traditionally been very good at anything but the money part and as Elon proved in Wisconsin a couple of months ago, that’s no guarantee of anything. In fact, he’s been the kiss of death in plenty of races they could have won.

I’ll never predict another election, I don’t care what the polls or common sense tells me. But I will say this: I don’t think the midterms are going to be easy for the Republicans. All the money in the world can’t make up for what a trainwreck he has already been and will continue to be. So good luck with that.