“That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above.” — Hermes Trismegistus, The Emerald Tablet
As a bemused observer of the New Age movement in the 1990s, the mystics’ phrase “As above, so below” became familiar. It originates with the Emerald Tablet. (Wikipedia has an entry suitable for further explanation.) The phrase comes to mind this morning in the context of the madness of the Donald Trump elite (above) as well as that of MAGA footsoldiers (below).
Here is Chasten Buttigieg, spouse to former Biden Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, commenting on Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s (above) Sunday appearance on “Meet the Press”:
Take it from the billionaire! All you need to do to get ahead is sell your home or break your lease, quit your job, move your kids’ school, hire movers (across the country? come on, that’s only a few thousand dollars!), find a new job, find a new place to live (put first and last month plus security deposit down), and leave your family, friends, and community behind. It’s that easy!
My god, these people are so un-serious.
Bessent: "You know the best way to bring your inflation rate down? Move from a blue state to a red state. Blue state inflation is half a percent higher." pic.twitter.com/FVL9AMS2BE
Nicholas Kristoff scoffs, “You know the best way to bring your life expectancy down? Move from a blue state to a red state. Red states have a life expectancy 2.2 years shorter than blue states.”
MIAMI — picking up on the open racism Trump has unleashed, racist lady blocks brown Americans from leaving a garage and tries to wait for ICE to get there pic.twitter.com/50ncH68Sbm
Now for the below. A video posted Sunday and shot in a Delray Beach, Florida parking garage. Marissa explains how an older white woman blocked her exit and called ICE to come arrest her and her passenger:
This is the new America! I’m an American Citizen born and raised here. This women tried to open my car door and asked me what country I was from, and to go back home. I guess I’m not white enough for this country anymore!
The moral/political sins of which the right accuses the left are quite familiar. They annoy Frank Bruni as much as they do me. We recognize them as the very disingenuous and fact-averse behaviors that confound our own attempts to perfect the union here on Earth One. So when the right flings their own misbehaviors at our feet with such bold indignance, one wonders sometimes if there might be something to the accusations. Or if Alzheimer’s is setting in and we simply do not remember lefty sins that the right seems to recall so clearly.
Frank Bruni views the he who smelt it, dealt it asymmetry of bothsidesism as “equivalences not merely false but fantastical.” They arise from “the perverse moral arithmetic of more than a few Trump apologists.”
One matter in particular that’s dogged Bruni as it has me are the claims that the Biden administration “weaponized” the Justice Department against Republicans. The junior partners in Trump 2.0’s federal law firm justify their exacting revenge on his enemies with all the schoolyard authority of “He started it!”
That isn’t some random, cherry-picked absurdity. That’s practically every hour of Fox News. Trump’s supposed mimicry of Biden when it comes to politically motivated investigations and prosecutions is more than an article of faith on the right. It’s the dogma that washes Trump’s authoritarianism clean.
And it’s bunk. I don’t recall evidence that Biden ordered the prosecutors who filed charges against Trump to do so. In contrast, Trump’s commandments that Attorney General Pam Bondi and her unctuous underlings go after James Comey, Letitia James and others are a matter of Truth Social record.
Show me where, during Biden’s presidency, you find anything analogous to Trump’s purge of Justice Department lawyers who have failed or might fail to quench his thirst for vengeance. Anything like the series of events by which Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, was pushed out of his job in September after he hadn’t produced the indictments against Comey and James that Trump so fervently desired.
I clearly recall the Bush II purge of U.S. attorneys for failing to prosecute voter fraud where none existed or for their prosecuting Republican officials. One of the fired attorneys, John McKay, reminded Vox in 2017 in the wake of Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey that the Bush firings were an “effort to turn law enforcement into an arm of the White House’s political wing.”
(Maybe my memory is not failing. Who started it?)
Trump replaced Siebert with Lindsey Halligan, a Florida insurance attorney lacking any prosecutorial experience. She had worked for Trump personally, appears unflinchingly loyal and, coincidentally, has that certain je ne sais quoi, that made-for-TV look that Trump routinely seeks out in lieu of genuine competence. Her performance to date, Bruni writes, has been “an embarrassment of errors and a mockery of jurisprudence.”
He adds, “Try to locate Halligan’s doppelgänger in the Biden administration. Best of luck.”
To explain Trump’s wholesale retooling the Department of Justice as a weapon of MAGA payback, one must “erase the photographs of classified documents keeping company with a commode at Mar-a-Lago…. delete the recording of Trump telling Brad Raffensperger, the top election official in Georgia, to figure out some way to reverse Biden’s victory there in 2020,” etc. Fortunately, MAGA Republicans can muster the magical thinking to manage that.
The rationalization that most infuriates Bruni is MAGA’s “Biden crime family” narrative. It’s not as if Hunter Biden was not “an unmitigated ethical calamity.” But to equate that with the most blatant self-dealing that nation has seen under any prior president is insane. The meme coins, the cryptocurrency, the Qatari jet, etc. What’s as infuriating is watching his supporters accept it as the price of a less-porous border, owning the libs, and punishing random brown people for not looking “American,” etc.
But then there are the voters who respond to Trump’s antics and outrages — whether those involve executive overreach, defiance of Congress, brazen pardons, suppression of dissent — as familiar transgressions in festive new attire. Hardly. They’re more and worse than that. But cynicism and tribal loyalty have a way of replacing discernment with delusion.
Photos by Julie Harrison.
A few MAGAs (albeit too few) may be finding their way out of that delusion. During one of my rush hour sign protests last week (above), a youngish pedestrian waiting for the Walk signal told me that one of his MAGA acquaintances finally had begun to question his allegiance to Trump.
I replied with a line from Independence Day, “Welcome to Earth!”
Trump told Fox News on Friday that Ukraine had “got to give up some land that they have not lost in the war”. He added: “We are in it for one thing, we want the killing to stop . . . They lost 25,000 people last month, between the two countries . . . It’s out of control. It’s a bloodbath.”
Later on Friday Trump responded to Zelenskyy’s comments, saying the Ukrainian president would “have to like” the US plan.
“At some point, he’s going to have to accept something,” he added. The president also referred to his confrontation with Zelenskyy in the White House in February, when he and vice-president JD Vance berated the Ukrainian leader. “You remember not so long ago, right in the Oval Office, I said ‘you don’t have the cards’ . . . I thought he should have made a deal a year ago, two years ago.”
[…]
Trump told Fox that “we think [that Thursday] is an appropriate time” but suggested the deadline could be extended.
In a sign of the increasing pressure on Kyiv, the American side had “signalled” that vital US intelligence and weapons deliveries could be halted if Zelenskyy did not sign up to the proposal, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Zelenskyy’s administration has told allies that Kyiv felt it needed to engage with the proposal, but wanted European capitals to oppose it and attempt to convince Trump to change course, according to officials briefed on the discussions.
Following an hour-long phone call with Vance, Zelenskyy said they had discussed the plan and “we’re working to make the path forward dignified and truly effective for achieving a lasting peace”.
In a day of frantic diplomacy, Zelenskyy and the leaders of France, Germany and the UK insisted that the current front line between Ukrainian and Russian-controlled territories should be the “starting point for any understanding”.
They added that “the Ukrainian armed forces remain capable of effectively defending Ukraine’s sovereignty”.
The call between the leaders is set to be followed by in-person meetings at the G20 summit in Johannesburg. It came as European capitals reeled at the scale of US pressure on Ukraine to agree to it, according to people involved in the talks.
“We’re all still analysing it, but it’s moving much faster than we had realised,” one of the people said. “It basically means capitulation.”
A senior European official said: “We’re back to square one,” referring to widespread fears at the start of this year that Trump would force Kyiv to accept Russia’s peace demands or lose US military support.
The US cut off intelligence sharing and slowed weapons deliveries this year, but later provided intelligence to help guide Ukraine’s strikes on Russian energy sites.
The latest plan has alarmed European governments not just because of the proposed recognition of the Ukrainian territories of Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk as “de facto Russian” but also because of a suggested ban on Nato forces in Ukraine.
Under the proposal, US sanctions would be lifted in stages and Moscow would be invited to rejoin the G8 group of highly industrialised nations — ending its years of international isolation after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and forced annexation of Crimea in 2014.
This is just amateurish buffoonery that confirms this Administration’s foreign policy is alternatively Russian-directed and totally directionless. Such an embarrassment. Our enemies delight. pic.twitter.com/m28uQYlH1q
On Saturday, Marco Rubio called in to a meeting of national security Senators and confirmed that the plan was actually written by Russia. We later found out that it had been delivered to Jared Kushner and Steve Wikoff in a secret meeting in Miami in October and they didn’t tell Rubio or Trump. (I suspect Witkoff and Kushner were high on their great Gaza peace deal and decided to run their own foreign policy. And Trump was busy redecorating so he didn’t mind.)
Bloomberg:
GOP Senator Mike Rounds went before the cameras and said:
Secretary of State Rubio did make a phone call to us this afternoon. I think he made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives. It is not our recommendation, it is not our peace plan. It is a proposal that was received. And as an intermediary, we have made arrangements to share it. And we did not release it. It was leaked. It was not released by our members or our representatives.
He said they’d present it to the Ukrainians for some input which was awfully generous.
He walked that back later that night, making it clear that he had been out of the loop and somebody told him to get with the program:
Who was really pulling the strings?
This is apparently a JD operation to usurp Rubio. And JD’s man in the Pentagon, Army Sec. Driscoll is usurping Hegseth. (He’s participating in the talks.)
JD’s been on the phone with various players and Marco wasn’t informed.
The fight for the 2028 nomination has begun. We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t result in nuclear war.
Meanwhile. the orange freak is still ranting about the 2020 election and trying to cover his ass for being unable to end the war with one phone call like he promised.
Stay tuned. This crazy story is still unfolding. I hope it goes well but it will be a miracle.
I assume “them members of Congress” was a typo not a fall back to Clem Caddidlehopper grammar, but the rest of it is just as ignorant — and dishonest. They did not tell the military to “defy the president” they reminded them that they are not allowed to follow illegal orders.
And the idea that what they said is “by definition illegal” is fatuous in the extreme. He went to Yale Law. They need to ask for the diploma back.
The more these people hang around with Trump the dumber they sound.
The reason that Republicans always say Democrats cheated when they win is because it’s what they do:
Former Republican state legislator Austin Smith pleaded guilty Monday to what he previously called “ludicrous” charges that he personally forged more than 100 signatures on his petitions for reelection last year.
The Republican from Surprise was a member of the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus, which has a history of spreading false claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election and pushed for election law changes in the state legislature.
“As a part of his guilty plea today, Smith admitted signing the name of a deceased woman on one of his candidate nomination petitions in March of 2024,” Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a statement. “He also admitted that he attempted to deceive the Secretary of State’s Office by knowingly filing petitions containing forged signatures of purported supporters of his nomination for the Republican primary for State Representative from LD 29.”
And check this out:
At the time he was indicted, Smith was strategic director of Turning Point Action, Turning Point USA’s advocacy arm. TPUSA is a far-right organization based in Phoenix that aims to mobilize young conservatives founded by Charlie Kirk, who was shot and killed in September while speaking to a group of college students in Utah.
Shhhh. Don’t even think anything rude about Turning Point Action or you’ll lose your job and be run out of town.
Bolts.com makes a point I don’t think many of us have fully grasped — if the Supreme Court does what we think it will do when it finally guts the Voting Rights Act, the consequences won’t just be for the loss of Black representation in the U.S. House of Representatives. The negative consequences will be much more profound on the state and local level.
Here’s just one example:
It has been nearly two years since Fayette County officials shuttered the Bernard Community Center, in rural West Tennessee. The closure has devastated the mostly Black residents who frequented the space to host after-school tutoring sessions for students, breakfasts for senior citizens, movie nights, knitting classes, and private events like birthdays and memorial services. “People used it for 20 years to help each other, to help themselves, and now that is just gone. It has had an emotional toll on people,” says Christine Woods, who served on the community center’s board and fought its closure.
Since the center was shut down, Woods and other advocates have organized protests and pled at public meetings for Fayette County’s board of commissioners to reopen it. But Woods says nobody seems to be listening on the board, whose 19 members are all white despite the county’s large Black population.
“If we had different representation on the county commission board, we would have had someone to stand up and fight for us,” Woods told Bolts and MLK50. “They don’t have to be someone Black, just someone who cares about our community. Someone who can see things from our eyes and feel our pain. Someone who knows what this center means to us, who thinks we deserve to have it. Right now, I think no commissioner feels that way.”
The make-up of the Fayette County board is by design. The county in 2021 drew a map with no majority-Black district, even after the board’s own counsel advised that the plan illegally diluted the power of Black voters, who make up roughly a quarter of the population.
Black residents won a reprieve this year, after Woods and other residents joined with the local NAACP to sue Fayette County, claiming the map violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Under the threat of their lawsuit, which followed another complaint filed by the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden, county officials relented in July and adopted a revised map for the 2026 elections that includes three majority Black districts.
The new map could significantly boost Black representation in Fayette County next year, but those gains already feel fragile. The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to deliver a ruling in the coming months that could gut the VRA, threatening this county’s new districts and undermining similar challenges elsewhere.
That is, of course, the point. The Republicans (not just MAGA by any means) simply cannot live with the fact that they have to share any power with racial minorities (and Democrats more broadly).
Read the whole thing. It will break your heart. But then, what doesn’t these days?
Bessent: "No, no…Inflation hasn't gone up. And the one thing that we're not gonna do is do what the Biden administration did and tell the American people they don't know how they feel. They are traumatized." pic.twitter.com/TwDoPXqFmu
“I want for people to recognize a great job that I’ve done on pricing, on affordability, because we brought prices way down,” he said at an event billed as the McDonald’s Impact Summit on Monday.
Trump defames Zelenskyy: "He's always looking to purchase missiles. Listen, when you start a war, you gotta know you can win a war. You don't start a war against somebody that's 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.pic.twitter.com/jI2eEO4Jvk
The “plan” appears to have come about at a secret meeting with Kushner and a Russian oligarch in Miami where they received Trump’s Russian orders:
U.S. officials and lawmakers are increasingly concerned about a meeting last month in which representatives of the Trump administration met with Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian envoy who is under U.S. sanctions, to draft a plan to end the war in Ukraine, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
The meeting took place in Miami at the end of October and included special envoy Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Dmitriev, who leads the Russian Direct Investment Fund, one of Russia’s largest sovereign wealth funds.
A close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Dmitriev has taken a leading role in talks with the U.S. about the war and has met with Witkoff several times this year. The Trump administration issued a special waiver to allow his entry, a senior U.S. official told Reuters.
Dmitriev and his fund were blacklisted by the U.S. government in 2022 following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The sanctions effectively bar American citizens and companies from dealing with them.
The meeting resulted in a 28-point plan for ending the war, two people familiar with the situation said. The plan, which was made public this week by Axios, came as a surprise to U.S. officials in various corners of the administration and has stirred confusion at embassies throughout Washington and in European capitals.
Get this part:
His visit also included a sit-down with U.S. Representative Anna Luna, a Florida Republican. In the meeting, Dmitriev and Luna spoke about increasing trade ties between the U.S. and Russia. Luna’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
The meeting between the two was set earlier in the month amid statements by Luna that she had received Russia’s files on assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
In a video by RIA, one of Russia’s state news agencies, Luna is seen accepting a box of chocolates with Putin’s face inscribed on the front.
The images appear to show Luna and Dmitriev in a conference room at the Faena Hotel in Miami.
The Bizarro World in which MAGA lives descended another level last week with the response to the video by six Democratic members of Congress reminding servicemembers that they are duty bound not to carry out illegal orders. While never mentioning Donald Trump, they caution that “this administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens.”
The rage from the right was as telling. As was their lack of listening comprehension. Repeatedly, one might say deliberately, many GOP congress members and online trolls claimed that the Democrats had urged servicemembers to disobey legal orders and Donald Trump himself. That is, just the opposite of what the video said.
I’m struck this week with the image from Charlotte of CBP agents violently arresting a worker reportedly doing restaurant construction. He is in a chokehold here and his face is bloodied in another photo.
ICE in Charlotte. The guy in the headlock is a restaurant worker. Barbarians. pic.twitter.com/CbR4N1YuJQ
It’s what the MAGA right sees in the photo that impresses. Good luck seeing what they are seeing. I see a cell phone in his right hand and nothing in his left. The Latino man is, by their photo analysis, holding a knife.
If he were really holding a knife, CBP would have shot first and asked questions later.
The responses to the Charlotte arrest photo on X include a string of photos of a Latino man accused of statutory rape in Wake County (Raleigh). They just see what they want to see.
Already real-looking AI videos of anthropomorphic wild animals litter my social media feeds. None of them can be trusted. My reaction to them aligns with my policy toward conspiracy theories: I believe none of them and I accept the risk of missing one somewhere in the pile that is real and being out of the know. Knock yourself out doing your own research. Life’s too short.
The number of daily fundraising texts to which I now reply “Stop” or “End” then “delete conversation” now nearly rivals the number of texts from friends and family. They come from candidates and causes and lists I’ve never heard of and for which I never never signed up.
The emails that pop in every day that spam filters miss has increased. The routine is rote now. Spot the no-name domain either gibberish or having no connection to the subject line, then hit “Block all senders using @blahblahblah” followed by “Trash all previous email from this sender.”
The annoying digital flood on our devices is out of control. But at least one retains some control. It’s the digital intrusion that leads to a police stop that one cannot simply ignore with a keystroke.
The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious, The Associated Press has found.
The predictive intelligence program has resulted in people being stopped, searched and in some cases arrested. A network of cameras scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took. Federal agents in turn may then flag local law enforcement.
Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar.
While masked Border Patrol thugs stop people for shopping at Home Depot or driving while brown, the same kind of algorithms that target your devices with unwanted spam now may result in a pretextural roadside police inquiry.
Border Patrol has a surveillance program tracking millions of drivers by name and then gets them pulled over for lies. Listen to the officer admit that he is careful to conceal the reason for the stop so if it ever gets questioned, no one will know that there was NO PROBABLE CAUSE.
The Border Patrol has for years hidden details of its license plate reader program, trying to keep any mention of the program out of court documents and police reports, former officials say, even going so far as to propose dropping charges rather than risk revealing any details about the placement and use of their covert license plate readers. Readers are often disguised along highways in traffic safety equipment like drums and barrels.
Intelligence services bug rival nations’ embassies. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol bugs I-35 and its siblings. Its algorithms monitor your daily comings and goings. For your safety, of course.
