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Month: January 2026

Picked The Wrong Day To Give Up Distractions

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 30, 2026

Like drinking news from a firehose

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice released another 3 million Epstein documents Friday morning. I’m seeing comments (unconfirmed) that they’ve padded the release with some old materials. Whatever. What’s appearing on social media proves why Trump did not want these released:

The files released Friday appear to contain at least 3,200 documents that mention President Trump. The Times is going through the documents and that number could increase.

The White House will claim that a lot of these mentions are hearsay, unauthenticated tips, etc., and some may be. But it’s going to be hard to convince a majority of the public that all these women made up such detailed tales of debauchery and sexual violence out of whole cloth.

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https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00622303.pdf

Those 3,200-plus references to Trump are perhaps why the administration is filling the air with lots of brightly gleaming chaff today:

Will there be casino gambling like Monte Carlo?

Pay no attention to the Epstein files release!

There Is No Silent Majority

Published by digby on January 30, 2026

The majority is speaking out loud and clear

No they do not. The new Pew Poll:

  • Trump’s approval rating stands at 37%, down from 40% in the fall.
  • By more than two-to-one, Americans say the administration’s actions have been worse than they expected (50%) rather than better (21%).
  • Only about a quarter of Americans today (27%) say they support all or most of Trump’s policies and plans, down from 35% when he returned to office last year. That change has come entirely among Republicans.

A new Pew Research Center survey of 8,512 U.S. adults, conducted Jan. 20-26, also finds that – across six key qualities and abilities needed to serve as president – more Americans express little or no confidence in Trump than say they are extremely or very confident in him.

Confidence is down on all six measures since last year, particularly among Republicans.

Those numbers are much too high on every question. But this is interesting:

Only 66% saying he has the mental fitness is pretty telling. His lunacy is becoming obvious even to them.

This too:

Notice, the decline in support has come exclusively among Republicans. Last year, 67% said they supported all or most of Trump’s plans and policies. Today, 56% do.

Considering that Trump’s approval ratings are down in the 30s and sinking fast, it should be obvious that Democrats must stand up. After all, he is trying to destroy the country — and the world.

G. Elliot Morris commented on this poll this morning:

A new poll from the Pew Research Center out this week finds that 37% of Americans approve of the job Donald Trump is doing as president, but only 27% say they support “most” or “all” of his policies.

This reminded me of an article I wrote at FiveThirtyEight (RIP) in Feb. 2025 titled “Americans voted for Trump, but don’t support his agenda.” Since I wrote that piece, according to Pew, the percentage of adults who support most or all of Trump’s policies has fallen eight points, including a nine-point drop among Republicans. Now, just a bare majority of Trump’s own party says they support all or most of his plans and policies.

[…]

On Immigration and Customs Enforcement in general, a new Fox News survey this week found 59% of voters now say immigration enforcement has been “too aggressive,” similar to YouGov’s 60%. But Americans haven’t turned against the idea of immigration enforcement. YouGov found 87% still support deporting immigrants who committed violent crimes. The problem is everything else: only 22% support deporting long-term residents with no criminal record, only 21% for parents of U.S. citizen children, only 17% for people who came as children. (Here’s a piece from me on similar numbers from last April.)

The atrocities are piling up and the American people do not like it. Even Republicans are getting queasy and Democrats have an obligation to oppose them vociferously. Some of them are doing that very effectively, others not so much. There’s no room for tepid, moderation when a democracy is under siege.

Lindsey Graham’s Wet Dream

Published by digby on January 30, 2026

I’m pretty sure this is all Graham’s doing. He’s been licking Trump’s boots about the “peace president” bs and has no doubt convinced his that they will not be able to deny him the Nobel Prize if he bombs Iran into submission. Trump is losing what’s left of his mind so he probably believes it:

U.S. President Donald Trump is weighing options against Iran that include targeted strikes on security forces and leaders to inspire protesters, multiple sources said, even as Israeli and Arab officials said air power alone would not topple the clerical rulers.

Two U.S. sources familiar with the discussions said Trump wanted to create conditions for “regime change” after a crackdown crushed a nationwide protest movement earlier this month, killing thousands of people.

To do so, he was looking at options to hit commanders and institutions Washington holds responsible for the violence, to give protesters the confidence that they could overrun government and security buildings, they said. Trump has not yet made a final decision on a course of action including whether to take the military path, one of the sources and a U.S. official said.

The second U.S. source said the options being discussed by Trump’s aides also included a much larger strike intended to have lasting impact, possibly against the ballistic missiles that can reach U.S. allies in the Middle East or its nuclear enrichment programmes. Iran has been unwilling to negotiate restrictions on the missiles, which it sees as its only deterrence against Israel, the first source said.

You may recall that we had a deal like this which Trump trashed in his first term on the word of the likes of Lindsey Graham who really just wants to bomb Iran into submission.

We are a very short trip to Trump becoming the worlds biggest neocon, invading other countries to “free” them. I’m sure Graham’s got him believing they’ll greet him with flowers.

Update —Not his only wet dream apparently:

Saving Lives Is No Longer On The Menu

Published by digby on January 30, 2026

You may have heard that Moderna is no longer going to be funding vaccine trials:

Moderna chief executive officer Stephane Bancel said the company does not plan to invest in new late-stage vaccine trials because of growing opposition to immunizations from health officials in the United States. 

His comments were made last week during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 

“You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market,” Bancel told Bloomberg TV. He said the vaccine market in the United States is much smaller as more anti-vaccine guidelines have become the norm.

Since last May, the Department of Health and Human Services under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership has greatly reduced general recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines, and most recently cut the number of recommended childhood immunizations from 17 to 11. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, also in attendance in Davos, remarked Kennedy’s policies are “almost like a religion” and “anti-science.”

Economic analysts said Bancel’s comments mean Moderna’s phase 3 clinical trials for vaccines will likely be on the chopping block. Moderna has already been facing declines in sales after a boom during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

This is a tragedy:

The COVID vaccines saved millions of lives but because we have a stupid, superstitious, conspiracy-addled faction in America that’s pulling the strings, we’re going to deny the world anything like that in the future. We’re just determined to kill the human species one way or another.

I Do Not Regret To Inform You

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 30, 2026

“that we are going to win”

https://bsky.app/profile/thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3m7ikj3hdx22b

Looking back through the archives, I’ve advised celebrating little victories again and again and again and again. Just not recently.

But over at The New Republic, Perry Bacon interviews Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, on keeping our eyes on the prize, as it were.

Táíwò began garnering attention last fall for saying repeatedly, “I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win.”

The point of hyper-violence, Táíwò tells Bacon, is to keep us back on our heels and “to keep us from realizing how much power we have to resist.”

I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win

— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) 2025-10-21T23:40:12.060Z

But why this phrase and not “we are winning,” asks Bacon:

Táíwò: Yeah, I think that phrasing is important because one of the things that I alluded to when I first explained why I use that phrase is: what I’m not trying to do is look at these heinous murders, look at this mass campaign of ethnic cleansing, and say nothing bad is happening or “this is what victory looks like.”

That is absolutely not the impression that I’m trying to give. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. Why I’m saying this is because things look so dire. And the ability of federal forces to concentrate on slivers of the country and generate these spectacles of hyper-violence is part and parcel of their political strategy to make it look like they have power that they don’t, in fact, have.

Donald Trump is a creature of reality TV. He’s about creating spectacle. Of course, he’s choosing cities he targets not only for maximum media coverage, but also for political payback. The strategy cannot work everywhere, Táíwò believes:

This is a massive country. They’re facing massive resistance even in the large cities that they target—and that resistance is effective, by the way. They can’t deploy this strategy everywhere, right? So they depend on generating these spectacles, generating a social media environment of fear and capitulation as a force multiplier.

If they can just harass and attack this many children, they think they can convince people that their victory is inevitable. And it is important now, more than ever, to remind people that’s not, in fact, true. The brave people risking their lives on the streets of Minnesota are in fact doing something that is effective; they are in fact doing something that we can and must learn from and are in fact doing something that can work at scale.

The more we pay attention to how they’re resisting, rather than just the evil they’re resisting, the likelier we are to realize that we can win, we must win—and we will.

Not unlike Donald Trump’s attempts as we speak to rewrite the history of his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, the right has spent decades trying to reverse its “world-historical defeat of the politics of segregationism and apartheid.”

And this hysterical, comic-book villainy is their attempt to spectacle and meme and “earned media” their way out of the reality that no one likes what they stand for.

I’d quibble with that last bit, considering that, as I noted earlier, Americans as a people elected Trump not once but twice, the second time as a twice-impeached, convicted felon. Or perhaps a portion of his 2024 national majority know what he stands for and simply don’t care.

The rest is at TNR (subscription req’d), but the video above has it all.

Do We Have Any Decency?

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 30, 2026

Have a look in the mirror

Osama bin Laden is applauding from his watery grave.

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff famously argued (contra liberal “best interests” arguments) that people do not vote their interests; they vote their identities. So, just who are we? Americans should do some soul-searching and ask themselves. Do we have any decency? We elected Donald Trump not once but twice, the second time as a twice-impeached, convicted felon. We knew just who and what he was and installed him back in the Oval Office, some say over the price of eggs. (Jonathan Swift could write a biting satire.) What kind of people do that?

The world is asking (The Washington Post, gift link):

Outside the U.S., the perceived havoc wrought by federal agents has also left its mark. This week, Giuseppe Sala, mayor of Milan, spoke out against the expected arrival of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as part of a routine deployment of U.S. personnel to the Winter Olympics in Italy. “I’m sure that the Milanese are unhappy with having this sort of militia” here, “which kills people in the U.S., entering houses without permission,” Sala told my colleagues, referring to recent events in Minneapolis. Of the Italian government, he asked: “Is it possible that you could say ‘no’ once to Mr. Trump? Once! Quite simply.”

Then of course there was the attempted breach of the Ecuadorian consulate in Minneapolis this week. Nations from around the world with diplomatic missions stationed here must be questioning the safety of their personnel.

Trump’s Interior Ministry

Germany has issued a travel advisory to its citizens.

Trump officials balk at criticism of their actions, and have cast descriptions put forward by Democratic lawmakers and activists of ICE as a modern-day “Gestapo” as endangering U.S. federal officers. But viewed from afar, the developments in the U.S. seem familiar. “You have your own Interior Ministry,” an Arab business executive told me on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week.

They were gesturing to the all-powerful policing apparatuses that exist in other countries, especially autocracies where strongmen leaders lean on security forces distinct from the army to consolidate control and suppress dissent. During the upheavals of the Arab Spring more than a decade ago, for example, it was the notorious Interior Ministry of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak that was the focal point of popular rage.

The whole world is watching.

In its cover story this week on the excesses of ICE, the Economist pointed to three “warning signs” of states giving way to “paramilitarism”: “One is when governments start to rely on armed force as a first resort, rather than the last. Another is when internal disciplinary mechanisms cease to function properly,” noted the British publication. “A final red flag is when forces looking for bad guys treat local civilians ‘as support networks of the enemy,’ perhaps because polarizing politicians describe them as such.”

I’ve entertained the notion of creating a protest sign reading HONK IF YOU’RE A DOMESTIC TERRORIST.

Joy Reed early this morning posted a collection of political cartoons inspired by current events. The one at the top struck a nerve and inspired this post.

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We Built It, They Are Using It

Published by digby on January 29, 2026

Here’s the creepiest thing you’ll read all day:

Federal immigration officers fanning out across Minnesota and other parts of the country are newly equipped with an array of state-of-the-art surveillance technologies, thanks to a bill passed last summer thattransformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the country’s most highly funded law enforcement agency. ICE has wasted no time spending its war chest, buying new tools ranging from biometric trackers to mobile phone location databases, spyware and drones, while loosening restrictions on how it uses some of these technologies.

These new surveillance powers come at a time when ICE is also pushing the bounds of its traditional role of immigration enforcement. In recent months, ICE leaders, backed by top Trump administration officials, have asserted the authority to use all available tools to monitor and investigate anti-ICE protester networks, including U.S. citizens. Democratic lawmakers and civil rights groups say the agency’s expanding use of its surveillance tools infringes on privacy and free speech rights of immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.

The Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, disclosed in an annual report on Wednesday that the agency has significantly expanded the operational scope for its use of facial recognition, AI and other advanced technologies. In a statement to the Washington Post, DHS said ICE’s use of innovative technologies in investigations is “no different” than other law enforcement agencies. “We are not going to divulge law enforcement sensitive methods,” it said.

This is a gift link to the whole article. The Post lays out the full array of tools they are using and it is beyond chilling. It’s like something out of a dystopian Sci-Fi novel.

But what did we expect? They have basically given a secret police agency and unlimited budget and they are going to spend it.

And it’s not only on high-tech spying equipment against Americans. Get a load of this:

Despite protests in small towns and cities across the US, the Trump administration is pushing ahead with the purchase of warehouses it plans to convert into immigration jails in what could be the largest expansion of such detention capacity in US history.

The cost for acquiring two warehouses alone was $172 million. A third in El Paso, Texas, could be among the largest jails of any kind in the country if completed as envisioned, with 8,500 beds. The deals mark the latest turn in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plan to use as many as 23 warehouses for detaining thousands of immigrants arrested by federal agents in Minneapolis and other cities. Those aggressive enforcement actions have ignited clashes with protesters and led to agents killing two US citizens.

On Jan. 16, the administration paid $102 million for a site near Hagerstown, Maryland, according to a local court filing. A week later, the government paid $70 million in cash for a warehouse in Surprise, Arizona. The price tags — roughly in line with the industry average for the warehouse market — cover just the acquisition of the sites, which are currently empty shells. ICE still has to pay companies to outfit the buildings with toilets, showers, beds, dining and recreation areas and then run them as detention centers.

The El Paso site was purchased by the Department of Homeland Security recently, according to people familiar with the transaction who asked not to be named discussing a confidential process. But the sale price hasn’t yet been made public. Other transactions appear to be near completion. Canadian billionaire Jim Pattison’s company said in a statement that it had accepted an offer to sell its 550,000-square-foot warehouse in Ashland, Virginia, to a US government contractor. “Some time later, we became aware of the ultimate owner and intended use of the building,” it said. “This transaction is still subject to certain approvals and closing conditions.”

It’s a massively corrupt boondoggle. As we knew it would be when they passed that grotesque bill last summer.

They have to get rid of this agency and start over. The expense is obscene and the power they’ve vested in it is enormous. We won’t survive as a democracy if we don’t.

Tulsi’s Busy

Published by digby on January 29, 2026

Apparently, she’s also involved in Trump’s 2020 Big Lie project as well. She showed up in Georgia yesterday when the FBI seized the 2020 ballots.

I just like to give a big shout-out to all the lefties who boosted her career because she was cute. The evidence was always there that she was a snake but they didn’t want to see it. (Howie Klein did...)

Trump Antoinette Strikes Again

Published by digby on January 29, 2026

He needed a good fluff session today

He really hates that affordability message:

The rest was no better. He’s promising much more pollution and a nuclear accident and took credit for things that happened before he became president. RFK Jr is pushing a health care bill that doesn’t exist, Lutnick showed why they call him Nutlick, Bessent said the economy is roaring and Witkoff said the Russians deserve a lot of credit.

And he repeated almost word for word an earlier anecdote about telling Macron that he’d better raise drug prices on the French people or he’ll hit them with tariffs on French wines and he fat-shamed an anonymous friend of his again, which he seems to be doing at every appearance these days for some reason, also word for word. That’s very weird.

Anyway: