Month: December 2025

WTF was that?

‘Tis the season for the murderous Hans Gruber to steal $640 million in bearer bonds from the Nakatomi Corporation under the guise of being an international terrorist with an ideological agenda. Just in time for Christmas, the money-grubbing Gruber in the Oval Office is preparing for war with Venezuela under the guise of stopping illegal drug exports.

Criminal, murderous, and far less intelligent than Hans, the president of the United States Wednesday night delivered a jaw-dropping, ideological speech most notable for the red-alert pace of it. I haven’t spoken that fast since my first grade-school book report.

Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel called it a “liar side” chat.

“Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it,” Trump began. Nevertheless, whatever economic stress you feel, whatever grocery store sticker shock you experience, he didn’t do it, nobody saw him do it, you can’t prove anything.

America under Joe Biden, was “laughed at from all over the world. But they’re not laughing anymore,” Trump said, reprising one of his 40-year-old greatest-hit complaints. The world in fact “alternates between laughing and crying. Neither in a good way,” responded Ron Filipkowski.

“At times he seemed to be yelling,” reports The New York Times, “almost as if he didn’t believe he had to take the time to convince his audience of how well his first 11 months had gone.” The speech “included a long list of exaggerations and misleading statements” and no mention of consumers’ affordability concerns Trump has described as a Democratic “con job.”

Nor was there any mention by the “peace president” of his “armada” that’s “completely surrounded” Venezuela in preparation for the kind of “stupid war” Trump regularly condemns.

Mr. Trump argued he cut drug prices by 400, 500 or 600 percent, all mathematical impossibilities. He claimed that inflation had dropped significantly since he became president, without mentioning that in September, the last month for which the government has numbers, it had returned to 3 percent, exactly where it was on Mr. Biden’s last weeks in office. He argued that gasoline was now under $2.50 a gallon in much of the country; his own department of energy reports it was $2.90. And he claimed there were states where gas was $1.99; in fact, no state average gas price was that low, AAA reports.

The Associated Press calls the 18-minute speech by the president “politically charged.” Amid tanking approval ratings, Donald Trump sought “to pin the blame for economic challenges on Democrats while announcing he is sending a $1,776 bonus check to U.S. troops for Christmas.”

The check amount is a nod to next year’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Per The Hill, “It wasn’t immediately clear what the source of funding would be, nor under what legal authority the payments could be made.” Maybe stolen bearer bonds?

But Trump’s frantic pace stole the show (NBC News):

He spoke at a faster clip than usual and for the most part appeared to stick to the prepared text. He rattled off the price of eggs, Thanksgiving turkeys and airline tickets to amplify his argument that costs are dropping on his watch and to persuade the nation that former President Joe Biden left behind “a mess” that will take time and effort to fix.

On that score, voters need some convincing. A wave of recent polls has shown that Americans are distressed by the cost of living and unhappy with Trump’s efforts to steer the country toward prosperity.

That was some weird shit

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) December 18, 2025

It was a Gish gallop of lies that CNN’s Ana Navarro described as the “wah, wah, wah” teacher voice from Charlie Brown cartoons. CNN fact checker Daniel Dale, no stranger to rapid-fire debunking, had a go at Trump’s fictions and too little airtime to touch on them all. Here’s more.

BREAKING: CNN’s Daniel Dale fact checks the most outlandish lies in Trump’s speech. There’s so much that Trump yelled that wasn’t true that Dale can barely get through it all. Make sure everyone sees this and gets the facts.
pic.twitter.com/vbqRIJ73pT

— Trump Lie Tracker (Commentary Account) (@MAGALieTracker) December 18, 2025

Trisha Hope, a self-described January 6 activist from Texas, tweets:

Trump is speaking so fast he seems panicked, I've never seen him like this, and I have attended 42 of his rallies.

— Trisha Hope – National Delegate-TX (@JustTheTweets17) December 18, 2025

Tom Nichols of The Atlantic saw it too, writing, “Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job.”

Trump is not falling from the 30th floor just yet, but we got a preview last night, and Christmas Eve is less than a week away.

Yippee-Ki-Yay, MAGATrumper.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Trump on ordering a blockade of Venezuela:

“Getting land, oil rights, whatever we had. they took it away…We want it back. They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there. They threw our companies out. And we want it back.”
pic.twitter.com/2G8oIC8HS5

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) December 17, 2025

That oil belongs to the Venezuelan people. It is their oil and their land, not ours. Trump is declaring war, using Vladimir Putin’s rationale for invading Ukraine.

Apparently this bellicose rhetoric is in reference to the nationalizing of the oil fields under Hugo Chavez. How this translates to them “taking our land and our oil” I don’t get. In fact, Chevron is still operating in Venezuela.

I suspect this is just a way to convince Trump to start killing lots of Latinos to give Miller a big thrill up the leg. That’s what he’s always been after.

But the oil companies aren’t so high on this idea:

The Trump administration is asking U.S. oil companies if they’re interested in returning to Venezuela once leader Nicolás Maduro is gone, three people familiar with the discussions told POLITICO.

And so far, the answer is a hard “no.”

The administration’s outreach to the industry, previously unreported, is the latest sign the White House is dreaming of a post-Maduro future for Venezuela — and how the world’s oil markets are both helping and hindering that goal.

The markets, glutted with supply and with prices at nearly five-year lows, are giving President Donald Trump an unusually free hand to tighten military pressure on the South American OPEC member, much the way they largely shrugged off U.S. and Israeli missile strikes on Iran in June. But those prices are also way too low to entice companies to take the risk of pouring huge investments into the crumbling Venezuelan oil facilities that former strongman Hugo Chávez seized decades ago, industry officials and analysts said.

The U.S. benchmark oil price was around $56 a barrel Wednesday afternoon, the lowest since January 2021. That means Trump has only limited reason to worry that an attack on Venezuela would send gasoline prices spiraling upward — but it also means U.S. oil companies have better investment options elsewhere.

It’s likely that the oil companies don’t see any good reason to try to do business in a country that’s going to be sabotaging its efforts at every turn. They understand even if Trump and his henchmen don’t that people are unlikely to be thrilled that the U.S. has invaded their country, talking about taking their oil and land and killing their people. It tends to be upsetting. .

Chevron spokesperson Bill Turenne directed all questions about the security situation in Venezuela to the appropriate authorities in the U.S. government. Chevron has been the sole major oil company to continue working in Venezuela, operating under a special license to produce oil in the country and export it to the United States.

“Chevron has operated in Venezuela for over a century, and we believe our presence continues to be a stabilizing force for the local economy, the region and U.S. energy security,” Turenne said in a statement. “Chevron’s operations in Venezuela continue in full compliance with laws and regulations applicable to its business, as well as the sanctions frameworks provided for by the U.S. government. Our top priority is the safety of our personnel, the communities in which we operate, the environment and the integrity of our joint venture assets.”

We’ll soon see whether he has the brass to actually do this. I suspect he will. It’s a classic wag the dog scenario in any case and he’s half out of his mind. Stay tuned.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Just a quick note today to say thanks once again for your generous support. It is truly a Christmas miracle and I am very grateful.

I want to give a shout out today to some of the podcasters and radio hosts whose shows I’ve had the privilege of contributing to all year (in some cases for many years.) I’m absolutely terrible about promoting this work and it’s very unfair to these great political analysts who have been kind enough to have me on.

For many years I’ve been appearing with Sam Seder on Majority Report and, back in the day, Ring of Fire. I come on casual Fridays once a month or so where we have a free wheeling take on the current atrocities and (and rare victories.) We’ve known each other a long time and remember where a lot of the political bodies are buried so it’s often an interesting conversation. I’ll be on this Friday to wrap up the year and I have no doubt it will be fun.

Likewise, I do The Bradcast with my fellow Angelenos Brad Friedman and Desi Doyen at least once a month and often more depending on the political crisis of the day. (There are a lot of them lately.) This past year I’ve been teaming up with my fellow OG blogger driftglass of the Professional Left Podcast for some good humor and analysis with Brad and Desi and it’s always a delight. We’re doing an hour on Thursday. (Check that link for ways to listen.)

I also appear with my old pal Nicole Sandler with some frequency. The two of us basically have a fabulous hour of political chit chat often just expressing our astonishment and how insane everything has become. I always enjoy it.

John Fugelsang at Sirius XM Progress invites me on for some late night chatter from time to time and it’s always a joy to talk to him. His show is one of my favorites.

Finally, I appear at least once a week with my good friend Michaelangelo Signorelli at Sirius XM Progress. He is one of the great mensches of the progressive left and it’s an honor to be one of his frequent guests. We also get together with his fellow Sirius XM Progress host Joe Sudbay, another class act, for a Friday afternoon roundup of everything that’s gone down in the past month. We all agree that it actually serves as a form of necessary therapy to compare notes to make sure we aren’t losing our minds. I’ll be on this Friday at 5est for our last session of the year. I can’t wait.

There are some others who call up from time to time and I’m almost always willing to talk to anyone who isn’t a right wing crank. (I’m not very good at that — I get too emotional.) I

Thanks to all of these wonderful friends for being so generous and promoting my work. I suspect many of my newer readers each year find me that way. And I promise to be a better person in 2026 and promote my appearances and their work in general. My bad for failing to do more of that.

If you’d like to leave a little something in the Christmas stocking, you know what to do. Thanks again for supporting what we do and being awake and aware of everything we need to do to try to salvage our democracy.

cheers,
digby

Happy Hollandaise!

The Christopher Anderson photos for Vanity Fair are brilliant. Amazing work. pic.twitter.com/6guKvXdolw

— mignac (@mignac_) December 17, 2025

Were there moments that you missed? Anything that happened that’s on the cutting room floor?

I don’t think there’s anything I missed that I wish I’d gotten. I’ll give you a little anecdote: Stephen Miller was perhaps the most concerned about the portrait session. He asked me, “Should I smile or not smile?” and I said, “How would you want to be portrayed?” We agreed that we would do a bit of both. And then when we were finished, he comes up to metoshakemy hand and say goodbye.

And he says to me, “You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people.” And I looked at him and I said, “You know, you do, too.”

Here’s a gift link for the whole interview and all the pictures. Wow.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Yes

The new Quinnipiac Poll says that voters really hate the Democratic Party and think they’re worse than the Republicans on the economy and immigration but better on protecting democracy and health care. It’s hard to believe they’ve won all those races in the off-year elections. However, they really don’t like Trump and I suspect that’s the motivating force. They want to create some kind of block on his agenda which is extremely unpopular.

Here are some highlights:

POWER OF THE PRESIDENCY

When it comes to using the power of the presidency, 54 percent of voters think Donald Trump is going too far, 37 percent think he is handling it about right, and 7 percent think Trump isn’t going far enough in using the power of the presidency.

“Is the often described ‘most powerful person in the world’ wielding too much power? More than half of Americans believe President Trump has crossed that line,”added Malloy.

TRUMP JOB APPROVALS

Forty percent of voters approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president, while 54 percent disapprove, unchanged from Quinnipiac University’s October 22 poll.

Voters were asked about Trump’s handling of eight issues:

• the military: 46 percent approve, while 51 percent disapprove;
• immigration issues: 44 percent approve, while 54 percent disapprove;
• deportations: 42 percent approve, while 55 percent disapprove;
• foreign policy: 41 percent approve, while 54 percent disapprove;
• trade: 40 percent approve, while 55 percent disapprove;
• the economy: 40 percent approve, while 57 percent disapprove;
• the Russia – Ukraine war: 35 percent approve, while 55 percent disapprove;
• health care: 34 percent approve, while 59 percent disapprove.

THE ECONOMY

Thirty-four percent of voters describe the state of the nation’s economy these days as either excellent (3 percent) or good (31 percent), while 65 percent describe it as either not so good (35 percent) or poor (30 percent), which is similar to Quinnipiac University’s September 24 poll.

Nearly half of voters (48 percent) think the nation’s economy is getting worse, 30 percent think it’s getting better, and 21 percent think it’s staying about the same.

BIDEN VS. TRUMP: THE ECONOMY

Asked who they think is more responsible for the current state of the economy: Joe Biden or Donald Trump, 57 percent of voters say Trump, 34 percent say Biden and 10 percent did not offer an opinion.

IMMIGRATION

A majority of voters (55 percent) think the Trump administration is being too harsh in its treatment of undocumented immigrants in the United States, 36 percent think the Trump administration is handling this about right, and 6 percent think the Trump administration is being too lenient in its treatment of undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Fifty-seven percent of voters say they would prefer giving most undocumented immigrants in the United States a pathway to legal status, while 35 percent say they would prefer deporting most undocumented immigrants in the United States.

BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP

Seven out of 10 voters (70 percent) think the Supreme Court should keep the 1898 ruling in place that under the U.S. Constitution anyone born in the United States is a U.S. citizen, regardless of their parents’ citizenship, while 24 percent think the Supreme Court should reverse the ruling.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS

Job approval ratings for four Trump administration officials:

• Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: 39 percent approve, 53 percent disapprove, with 8 percent not offering an opinion;
• Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: 38 percent approve, 49 percent disapprove, with 14 percent not offering an opinion;
• Director of the FBI Kash Patel: 35 percent approve, 51 percent disapprove, with 14 percent not offering an opinion;
• United States Attorney General Pam Bondi: 31 percent approve, 51 percent disapprove, with 18 percent not offering an opinion.

Forty percent of voters are either very confident (17 percent) or somewhat confident (23 percent) in vaccine information cited by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while 57 percent are either not so confident (10 percent) or not confident at all (47 percent).

Forty-five percent of voters are either very confident (25 percent) or somewhat confident (20 percent) in Pete Hegseth’s leadership of the U.S. military, while 47 percent are either not so confident (7 percent) or not confident at all (40 percent).

EPSTEIN FILES

Twenty-six percent of voters approve of the way the Trump administration is handling the Jeffrey Epstein files, while 65 percent disapprove and 9 percent did not offer an opinion.

SUSPECTED DRUG BOATS & VENEZUELA

Voters 53 – 42 percent oppose U.S. military attacks to kill suspected drug smugglers on boats in international waters.

Voters 63 – 25 percent oppose U.S. military action inside Venezuela.

RUSSIA – UKRAINE

When asked about the war between Russia and Ukraine, 48 percent of voters think Donald Trump is favoring Russia too much, 36 percent think he is striking about the right balance, and 3 percent think Trump is favoring Ukraine too much. Thirteen percent did not offer an opinion.

There are some more confusing stats showing that around 50-55% of people feel that the they are personally not having problems affording the cost of living which suggests that the same dynamic that was present in the Biden years is still at work: many Americans are doing ok themselves but perceive that other people are not. Trump took full advantage of that during the campaign. Now he has to deal with it himself.

This poll does not give anyone much hope about the Democratic Party since everyone, including Democrats, apparently hate their elected officials. But I suspect that’s reflexive at this point — they have looked weak in the face of the GOP onslaught and, let’s face it, Americans don’t like losers. I don’t think that means they won’t vote for them next November.

Negative partisanship is a powerful thing and people really hate Trump and they see the GOP as the party of Trump enablers, which is correct. The off-year elections show that while they may hate “the Democrats” write large, they are fine with the Democrat they are being asked to vote for — from Mamdani to Spanberger. I’m not worried about that.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Per MS NOW’s Vaughn Hillyard:

The White House has installed a series of plaques under Trump’s new “Presidential Walk of Fame.” On Biden: “Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President” On Obama: “One of the most divisive political figures in American History…creation of the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax”

How long are they going to let this continue? The man is demented. And it’s very dangerous to the country and the world.

Between this and the Reiner post, I think it’s clear that we have reach a pivot point. He’s going down fast and we are in trouble. Apparently, no one can stop him (and that’s assuming anyone wants to. I suspect they all share his puerile mindset by now.)

Here’s today’s happy holiday message from the White House:

Jingle bells, jingle bells,
Jingle all the way!
Oh, what fun it is to ride
on a free flight out of our country! 🎶✈️ pic.twitter.com/yUKePUQ2Sp

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) December 16, 2025

I don’t know what 12 year old they have hired to do those videos but they’re disgusting. But then everything they do is now on the level of the average 7th grade bully. Even the war we are about to start.

Trump is staging a prime time address tonight. The word is that it’s going to be one of his grotesque onanistic celebrations of himself so I think I’ll just watch the clips later. I suggest your do that too. If he announces the invasion of Venezuela I’ll let you know.

Try to enjoy this holiday season, folks despite all this. The government has gone mad but the country is still functioning and people are awake to what’s going on. We can survive this if we keep our heads and stick together.

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

Say it ain’t so

After being yelled at by Donald Trump a pensive Marco Rubio quietly cries in the corner, away from public view. pic.twitter.com/qRYJVUbbGs

— Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) December 17, 2025

In that Susie Wiles expose, Chris Whipple asked Marco Rubio about Putin’s intentions:

“There are offers on the table right now to basically stop this war at its current lines of contact, okay?” he said. “Which include substantial parts of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which they’ve controlled since 2014. And the Russians continue to turn it down. And so…you do start to wonder, well, maybe what this guy wants is the entire country.”

Ya think?

Wiles told Whipple that Trump has always believed Putin wants the whole thing. Considering his behavior toward Zelensky, it’s pretty clear he’s fine with that. Indeed, he’s probably happy to see it — he hates Ukraine because Rudy Giuliani told him that they were behind the strategy to expose his Russia ties.

Meanwhile, we have the Secretary of State sounding like the most naive man on the planet. I’m sure he knows exactly what Putin is after and it certainly appears that he too is fine with it.

Meanwhile, here is Putin this week:

If Ukraine refuses to engage in "substantive" talks, russia will achieve the liberation of "its historical lands" by force — Putin.

"The goals of the 'special military operation' will undoubtedly be achieved. We would prefer to do this and eliminate the root causes of the… pic.twitter.com/mPnqnZ5Bn8

— EMPR.media (@EuromaidanPR) December 17, 2025

Happy Hollandaise everybody!

As Trump unilaterally disarms

The Trump administration is busy with its ethnic cleansing campaign (someone told Trump to call it reverse migration) and trying to keep an expanding set of controversies in the air. Still, it was not too busy to issue a new National Security Strategy. Anne Applebaum believes it is anything but.

In his drive to overturn all things Biden, Trump terminated a series of agreements worked out last year between diplomats from “places as varied as Italy, Australia, and Ivory Coast” and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center to “jointly expose malicious and deceptive online campaigns originating in Russia, China, or Iran.”

Applebaum writes in The Atlantic (gift link):

The center’s former head, James Rubin, called this decision “a unilateral act of disarmament,” and no wonder: In effect, the United States was declaring that it would no longer oppose Russian influence campaigns, Chinese manipulation of local politics, or Iranian extremist recruitment drives. Nor would the American government use any resources to help anyone else do so either.

The recent publication of the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy showed that this decision was no accident. Unilateral disarmament is now official policy. Because—despite its name—this National Security Strategy is not really a strategy document. It is a suicide note. If the ideas within it are really used to shape policy, then U.S. influence in the world will rapidly disappear, and America’s ability to defend itself and its allies will diminish. The consequences will be economic as well as political, and they will be felt by all Americans.

Applebaum perceives several authors behind the effort the way scholars see the Bible. Those authors do not reflect the views of the Republican Party as a whole, nor of the U.S. government, but of “a particular ideological faction” now influencing foreign policy. It cannot (or refuses to) identify any countries that wish to harm the U.S. or any actions they are taking to do so.

The document portrays China not as a geopolitical competitor but as a trading rival. It dismisses other adversaries as weakened or else ignores them.

The U.S. spent the decades after World War II competing against geopolitical rivals and gaming out how to counter challenges to world peace and American power. Not anymore. It views the world, as Trump does, through a business lens. It directs our national security experts to focus instead on trade threats, to “control over our borders,” “natural disasters,” “unfair trading practices,” “job destruction and deindustrialization.”

Who does this document see as a threat? European liberal democracy:

This is what this radical faction really fears: people who talk about transparency, accountability, civil rights, and the rule of law. Not coincidentally, these are the same people whom the MAGA ideologues hate and dislike at home, the same people who are fighting to prevent MAGA from redefining the United States as a white ethnostate, who oppose the corruption of America’s democratic institutions, and who object when Trump’s friends, family, and tech allies redirect U.S. foreign policy to benefit their private interests.

Because kleptocrats gonna kleptocrat.

European and American liberal democracy is so dangerous to their project, in fact, that the MAGA ideologues seem to be planning to undermine it. They don’t want to meddle in anyone’s internal politics anywhere else on the planet: “We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change.” The glaring exception to this rule is in Europe. Here, it is now American policy to “help Europe correct its current trajectory,” language that implies that the U.S. will intervene to do so.

The Great Replacement Theory may go unmentioned, but is there in spirit. Europe is in fact on the verge of “civilizational erasure.” It worries that “certain NATO members will become majority non-European,” meaning less white and less Christian. Applebaum points out the irony that it is more likely that the United States could be “majority minority” first. Unless Stephen Miller has his way.

“The only possible conclusion”? Applebaum proposes:

The authors of this document don’t know much about Europe, or don’t care to find out. Living in a fantasy world, they are blind to real dangers. They invent fictional threats. Their information comes from conspiracist websites and random accounts on X, and if they use these fictions to run policy, then all kinds of disasters could await us. 

If the U.S. survive this period, JV Last writes at The Bulwark, the right will accuse those like Applebaum (and we here at Hullabaloo) who raised the alarm about Trumpism of being alarmist:

Look how overwrought you were, they’ll say. You spent a decade telling us that Trump was trying to overturn democracy. But the fact that we don’t live in a dictatorship proves that Trump was normal and that we should never listen to you hysterics.

Our success will be used to discredit us, like a quantum theory of suicide:1 If democracy survives, then that is proof that it was never under threat in the first place.

Trump and Trumpism was never really a threat, see? Right-wing COVID survivors insist the same. Just a flesh wound. I’ve had worse. “The people who did this to America will never pay a price. And if we defeat them, our success will be used as an argument against us,” Last laments.

You know what? I’ll take that risk.

(h/t PM for catching misspellings.)

Happy Hollandaise everyone

We’ve got you surrounded

Donald Trump has ordered Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro to come out with his hands up. More or less. In one of his Truth Social posts, Trump boasts, “Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America.”

It’s a wonder he bothered to qualify it with the words following armada. For the short-fingered vulgarian, everything is about size.

Trump added his signature like-nobody’s-ever-seen verbiage: “It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” That last bit about “Land,” etc. appears completely delusional.

The Associated Press reports:

President Donald Trump said Tuesday he is ordering a blockade of all “sanctioned oil tankers” into Venezuela, ramping up pressure on the country’s authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro in a move that seemed designed to put a tighter chokehold on the South American country’s economy.

Trump’s escalation comes after U.S. forces last week seized an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast, an unusual move that followed a buildup of military forces in the region. In a post on social media Tuesday night announcing the blockade, Trump alleged Venezuela was using oil to fund drug trafficking and other crimes and vowed to continue the military buildup until the country gave the U.S. oil, land and assets, though it was not clear why he felt the U.S. had a claim.

The White House is in damage-control mode over 1) the Pentagon’s Sept. 2 double-tap strike on two defenseless survivors of its (illegal?) missile attack on an alleged drug boat (26 such strikes to-date), 2) Trump’s Truth Social post about Rob Reiner’s murder (a “combination of preposterous grandiosity, obsessive self-regard and gratuitous spite,” per conservative columnist Bret Stephens), 3) the too-revealing Susie Wiles interview with Vanity Fair, and 1) in preparation for the by-law deadline on Friday for the administration to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. And still the peace-prize-envious, “no more stupid wars” president finds time when not watching TV or issuing noxious posts to prepare for a war of choice in South America.

The prospect must make Pete Hegseth’s bikini shorts moist. Hegseth is already under fire from Republican senators for refusing to release the full Sept. 2 follow-up video.

The New York Times has an update this morning:

Where Things Stand

• Blockade: President Trump announced that the United States would impose a blockade on all “sanctioned oil tankers” going to and from Venezuela, in an escalation of the administration’s monthslong pressure campaign against Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela. The move could lead to a drop in revenues that the Venezuelan government and its state-owned oil company get from oil exports. But the announcement left much unclear, including how many oil tankers would be affected. Read more ›
• Boat strikes: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to share video of a heavily scrutinized Sept. 2 military strike on a suspected drug boat during briefings with Congress on Tuesday. Mr. Hegseth faced calls to share unedited video of the attack, in which a follow-up strike killed two survivors, but said he would play it only for the House and Senate Armed Services committees. Mr. Hegseth added that it would not be made public. Read more ›
• Travel ban: President Trump expanded his broad travel restrictions to 20 more countries on Tuesday, limiting travel from several African nations and fully blocking travel from Syria and four other countries, as well for people with travel documents issued by the Palestinian Authority. Earlier this month, officials blocked immigration applications for people from the 19 initial travel ban countries, causing panic and canceling citizenship ceremonies.

Tonight is the fourth night of Hanukkah.

Happy Hollandaise everyone

In that Vanity Fair bombshell, Susie Wiles describes Trump as someone who “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.” It’s the truest thing she said. He is completely unleashed and is just saying “fuck it, I’m doing it” to anything that passes through his vacuous mind. And he’s getting away with a lot, either because nobody anticipated that we would ever elect such a delusional ignoramus or because others with power are letting him.

It’s dangerous but in the hands of someone with an agenda it would be even worse. The fact is that Trump is so inept that it keeps him from fully enacting the tyranny he already thinks he has. Zack Beauchamp at Vox has this:

If you want to understand how the US government works today, you should study President Donald Trump’s attempt to pardon a woman named Tina Peters last week.

Peters is a former Colorado election clerk and a die-hard believer in the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. In 2021, Peters committed a series of crimes in an attempt to “prove” election fraud occurred — including, most seriously, allowing a fellow 2020 truther to make copies of the actual hard drives of Mesa County voting machines. A Colorado jury convicted her of seven crimes last year, and a judge sentenced her to nine years in prison.

Last Thursday, Trump intervened on Peters’s behalf, declaring he was “granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election.” On its face, this is menacingly authoritarian: the president abusing his powers to protect a woman who literally compromised the integrity of America’s vote-counting on his behalf.

Yet, Trump’s order is also something else: impotent.

The Constitution explicitly states that the presidential pardon power only applies to crimes committed “against the United States,” meaning federal rather than state crimes. Peters was convicted in a Colorado court under state law, and, thus, cannot be pardoned by the president. The state’s governor, attorney general, and secretary of state have all rejected the legality of Trump’s order; Peters remains incarcerated.

Trump’s actions were reported, in the New York Times and elsewhere, as a “symbolic” pardon. But that framing gives Trump too much credit. If you read his full post on Truth Social, there’s no indication that this is anything but a genuine attempt to do something clearly illegal. He genuinely seems to think that he can pardon her for state crimes, even though he very obviously cannot.

The Peters case represents an especially clear example of what I’ve come to see as the defining style of the second Trump administration: an incompetent form of authoritarianism that can best be described as “haphazardism.”

Haphazardism is authoritarianism without vision, a governing style defined by a series of individual attacks on democracy without any kind of overarching logic, strategic structure, or clear end state in mind. These attacks can do (and indeed have done) real damage to the American political system, but they are often poorly executed and even self-undermining — preventing Trump from ruling in the truly unconstrained manner he seems to desire.

“Is he succeeding at breaking democracy? Yes,” said Steve Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and author of How Democracies Die. “Is he succeeding at consolidating autocratic power? No.”

The whole article is interesting, particularly his insightful analysis of how the authoritarian ambition interacts with the ignorance and encroaching senility.

So, is the United States under Trump’s haphazardism a democracy or an authoritarian state?

Harvard’s Levitsky is one of the leading voices arguing that America is already living under a form of authoritarianism. Indeed, he published a new piece with frequent coauthors Dan Ziblatt and Lucan Way making this case just last week.

Yet, when I spoke to Levitsky on the phone, he distinguished between an authoritarian government and an authoritarian regime. The former refers to the way in which the people in power are ruling at the present moment; the latter refers to whether they are taking steps to permanently change the political system into something in which they and their allies can hold power indefinitely.

For Levitsky, Trump’s “systematic and regular abuse of power” is enough to establish that America currently has an authoritarian government. But, he does not believe that we are living under an authoritarian regime — believing that Trump’s authoritarian actions were likely to be “reversed” in the near future. He, thus, characterizes the current American situation as most likely to be a “mild and short-lived burst of authoritarianism” (with the major caveat that even “mild” authoritarianism is still quite dangerous).

Like Beauchamp I think we are still a democracy even if we’re hanging by a thread. And Al it depends upon what the Supreme Court decides to do. But I’ve always thought that our greatest defense is probably Trump’s stupidity so at least we have that.

Happy Hollandaise everyone