Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

MAGAs are losing it

Win McCormack at The New Republic contemplates what makes bullies like Donald Trump cave. It may be, he considers, Trump’s saving grace:

My principal concern right now is the midterm elections, and whether our system of democracy will continue to prevail or be seriously compromised or even snuffed out completely by Trump. I didn’t mention above my conviction that Trump is, above all, a destroyer, and his goal, consciously or unconsciously, is to destroy every good aspect of the American project, top to bottom, in every field of endeavor and accomplishment. But I also didn’t mention what I consider his saving grace, though that might not be the right term for it. I refer to the all-important fact that he is, I believe, quintessentially a coward, with a host of fears that run very deep and haunt him. He can be brutal, but only when it is easy and safe to be brutal—when he thinks the field before him is wide open to such behavior.

What concerns me is not just what Trump will do in the days leading up to and after the November election, but how his ride-or-die supporters will react to Dear Leader and MAGA Republicans gettting body-slammed by voters and facing in a Democrat-controlled Congress honest-to-god, rigorous investigations of adminstration perfidy (fingers crossed). They are painfully aware of how bad the economy is. They know his promise to lower prices “starting on Day One” was a fraud. He’s irrational besides, writes McCormack.

The tariff issue, on which The Donald still refuses to acknowledge that tariffs are paid by the receiver of foreign goods rather than the sender, is one example of the actual operation of his befuddled mind.

His supporters are paying the price for it.

For the first time in 16 years, today's Fox News survey has Democrats holding a four-point advantage over Republicans on the economy, @ForecasterEnten reports. pic.twitter.com/7fX5pznuWl

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) April 24, 2026

Trump has betrayed them on keeping America out of foreign wars. The Iran war has driven up the cost of everything. They know it every time they fill up or buy groceries. Any reminder drives some of them ape-shit.

Ten days ago I recounted the reaction of one driver to a roadside message: PLAN NOW FOR YOUR $5/GAL STAYCATION. The driver of a work truck doing about 35 mph, popped open his door and stepped out onto the running board of the vehicle he was driving to scream at Sign Guy. He risked his life, the life of his passenger, and the lives of surrounding motorists in the process. He was that out of control.

Everyone feels like the wheels are coming off the country. So the point of such a message is not to goad MAGAs (a minority here; the county went 61-37 for Kamala Harris in 2024). It is to acknowledge commuters’ struggles, to help them feel seen. But it’s also a Rorschach ink blot that an unbalanced handful perceive as a poke in the eye.

This week features a sign inspired by the cookie aisle at the grocery store (image above): $4 OREOS IN 2024 NOW COST OVER $6. It’s a product everyone knows, fondly remembers from childhood, and buys for their kids. It’s not an economic abstraction. It’s personal. And in Trump’s economy, it’s become unaffordable. The entire cookie aisle on Sunday was lined with sale stickers. No one’s buying. Guess why.

A driver this week was so incensed at being reminded that $4 OREOS IN 2024 NOW COST OVER $6 that he exited and initiated a physical altercation that ended with the intervention of pedestrians. I asked if he really wanted to explain to a judge that he assaulted a senior citizen over the price of Oreos. But they are that crazy.

It will get worse before it gets better, others have said before me. But if they’re this crazy now, the worse the economy gets for them and for Trump through the summer, and the worse prospects look for Republicans heading into November, they’ll feel even more like cornered animals. Buckle up.

On advice of friends, Sign Guy ordered a body camera.

Update: Photos by Julie Harrison

The come-to-Jesus apology that isn’t

Michelle Goldberg considers the press that Tucker Carlson is getting this week over his admission(?) that he’d “be tormented for a long time by the fact that I played a role in getting Donald Trump elected. And I want to say that I’m sorry for misleading people.”

Carlson went on, speaking to his brother, Buckley: “You and I and everyone else who supported him – you wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him – I mean, we’re implicated in this for sure,” Carlson said. “It’s not enough to say, ‘Well, I changed my mind’. “

That’s the exchange that drew all the headlines. But the brothers Carlson were not done. They went on to construct a conspiracy theory for explaining where Trump went wrong.

Goldberg writes (gift link):

I’m all for embracing converts to the anti-Trump cause. But if you listen to the dialogue between Tucker and his brother, it’s clear that rather than honestly reckoning with their role in America’s derangement, they’re developing a new conspiracy theory to explain it away.

Trump, they strongly imply, has been compromised — maybe even blackmailed and physically threatened — by Zionist or globalist forces seeking the deliberate destruction of the United States. On Tucker’s podcast, Buckley described a systematic undermining of America through the George Floyd protests, mass migration and now the war with Iran.

“It can’t be a confluence of random events,” Buckley said. “It is clearly by design. It’s clearly been a long-term plan.”

So is his brother Tucker’s career. Trump is on his way out. So Tucker Carlson is putting some daylight between himself and Trump without putting daylight between himself and the MAGA audience that keeps him living the celebrity lifestyle to which he’s become accustomed. Tucker will need them to keep buying what he’s selling in a post-Trump America. Knowing they’ll choose a TV huckster rather than a competent lawmaker, perhaps as some speculate, he even sees an opening to run for president himself. This isn’t Carlson’s come-to-Jesus moment some are celebrating. It’s positioning.

Goldberg lets the hot air out of the Carlsons’ ass-covering, “the Jews made Trump do it” theory. The plain truth is, Goldberg explains, Trump has “never been better than this, and he didn’t need to be manipulated to make everything in America worse.”

Nor did Tucker Carlson, as Jon Stewart pointed out on CNN’s “Crossfire” 20 years ago.

Rolling Stone reminds its readers that Carlson’s performative career has always involved presenting one face to the right wing media-consuming public while keeping his real opinions to himself:

In private text messages to his colleagues at Fox News — which were only revealed after the network was sued for defamation by Dominion Voting Systems — Carlson referred to the president as a “demonic” around the time of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. “I hate him passionately,” Carlson wrote at the time. “I can’t handle much more of this.”

And yet within a year, he was campaigning for Trump’s reelection and floating conspiracy theories that the Jan.6 attack on the capitol was simply the work of “tourists.”

If Carlson had reservations about the president — and we know he did — he pushed them down and did what he swore he would never again do after being burned by the Iraq war. He once again set aside his own concerns, his disdain, and his supposed principles, in service of the right-wing movement du jour. Carlson likely did so believing that even though he despised the president, the ends would justify the means, and he could use his platform and connections to influence outcomes and check the excesses of the man he once called the “single most repulsive person on the planet.”

Carlson’s admission that he had fallen for the charlatan figurehead of this movement should not be mistaken for an act of true contrition. His break with the president comes after years of documented disgust of Trump, and at a moment where a public rebuke of the president comes with no severe political cost. The Iran war is unpopular, Trump’s approval is at a historic low, and his conservative allies are becoming increasingly comfortable breaking with him on an issue-by-issue basis — or entirely.

Before I’ll credit him with conversion, I’ll wait until Tucker Carlson apologizes for being Tucker Carlson.

This time Trump has a blank check and it’s a recipe for disaster. Trump wants the government to buy the most detested, failing airline in the country and I have to say, it makes sense for him. After all, he is the most detested failing president.

Catherine Rampell writes:

IF DONALD TRUMP HAS HIS WAY, America’s Worst Airline™ might soon become our national flagship carrier. Yes, I’m talking about Spirit Airlines.

The ultra-low-cost carrier is going bust. It’s been in trouble for a while: It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last summer, for the second time in less than a year, and is now facing the prospect of liquidation. That’s largely because it cannot survive the sky-high1 jet-fuel prices caused by Trump’s Iran war, which is expected to raise Spirit’s costs by an estimated $360 million this year. You can’t sell enough $40 fares to fill that hole in the balance sheet.

One solution Trump is considering? A bailout, on the taxpayer’s dime.

The Trump administration is considering dumping $500 million in taxpayer money into the struggling airline. In exchange, the government would receive warrants allowing it to take up to a 90 percent stake in the company.

“We’re thinking about doing it. Helping them out, meaning bailing them out. Or buying it. I think we just buy it,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Thursday evening. “We’d be getting it virtually debt-free. They have some good aircraft, some good assets, and when the price of oil goes down, we’d sell it for a profit. I’d love to be able to save those jobs. I’d love to be able to save an airline. I like having a lot of airlines so it’s competitive. . . . If we could get it for the right price, I’d do it.”

He wants to save these jobs but presided over the biggest job loss of federal employees in history and laughed about it.

His last foray into this went belly up but this time he has the full faith and credit of the United States behind it. Just watch. He will rename it Trump Air.

By the way:

[C]onsider that Trump actually tried to run an airline before. It was called Trump Shuttle, and it was a spectacular failure, lasting a whopping three years without ever turning a profit. That may have had something to do with his jets, which were decked out with gold-colored bathroom fixtures.

But what finally put Trump Shuttle under was—drum roll, please—high jet-fuel prices, caused by a war in the Middle East. But sure, let’s put another failing airline3 under his purview, or better yet the purview of his Department of Transportation. It’s not like there are any problems over there.4

Is there anything in his life that isn’t a do-over????

Is being an asshole in his genes too?

Politico:

The Trump administration saw yet another high-profile departure Wednesday, with Navy Secretary John Phelan heading to the exits. Senate Republicans are bracing for even more.

President Donald Trump’s recent administration shakeup — the sacking of Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi as well as this week’s departure of Lori Chavez-DeRemer — has created openings for a slew of potential confirmations, and GOP senators are contemplating who might be next and how quickly Trump should make any further changes.

No Republicans are publicly urging any particular oustings. But privately GOP senators believe Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and FBI Director Kash Patel could be at risk of leaving — voluntarily or not.

“He’s in a bad mood,” one GOP senator said about Trump. “He’s preparing to really let a lot of them go.”

So, situation normal.

Norm Eisen, former White House Special Counsel for Ethics and Government Reform, as well as former and board chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), is exactly the kind of American Donald Trump hates: someone with ethics. Especially since Eisen served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee for Trump’s first impeachment.

Trump went after Eisen on Truth Social Wednesday night.

He IS in a mood, isn’t he? I’d missed this (Newsweek):

President Donald Trump has called for Fox News host Jessica Tarlov to be taken off the air, calling her “one of the least attractive and talented people” on television.

Writing on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump said: “Her voice is so grating and terrible, I had to ‘turn her off!’”

Yes, but does Trump run out of the room when he hears her voice like my spouse does with his?

Tarlov, a former Democratic Party strategist and co-host of Fox News’ The Five, said on Thursday that Trump now had a “35 percent approval rating in most polls,” adding that “no Americans wanted the tariffs, they didn’t want the war in Iran, and they don’t want the ballroom.”

That explains his dumping on Tarlov. Eisen told Jennifer Rubin the Department of Justice should be renamed the Department of Trump.

The Trump DOJ attack on @splcenter is a TRAVESTY

We will stand shoulder to shoulder with them in this fight -TN pic.twitter.com/YYrgL4kWDC

— Norm Eisen (@NormEisen) April 22, 2026

The NY Times Tom Edsall published a column this week (gift link)called ‘Easily the Worst President in U.S. History.’ You know who he’s talking about.

He leads with this:

The damage President Trump has inflicted on the United States and the world is so enormous and wide-ranging that it is hard to grasp. It runs the gamut from public and private institutions to core democratic customs and traditions, from the legal system to universities, from innocent targets of fraud to those duped into believing vaccines do more harm than good.

One way to bring home the depth of Trump’s callousness is to look at a specific case. In May 2025, Anjee Davis, the chief executive of Fight Colorectal Cancer, a patient advocacy group, told CBS News:

We have a member who is being treated for Stage IV colorectal cancer. She had just qualified to enter a clinical trial that was going to be her last-chance effort to slow the spread of her cancer.

Her trial was about to start when N.I.H. funding was pulled overnight, and the trial was canceled.

Davis replied to my inquiry about the case by email. “This patient has since passed away without receiving the clinical trial she was counting on,” she wrote.

“What we will never know,” Davis added, “is whether that trial could have given her more time with her children.”

There are thousands of stories like that out there, most of which we will never hear about. But that’s just the introduction to Edsall’s list of grotesque failures, corruption, incompetence and malevolence. A few short excerpts:

“Over the remainder of the period,” the study continues, “the complete defunding of U.S.A.I.D. would cause an estimated 2,450,000 all-age deaths annually, leading to a total of 14,051,750 excess all-age deaths and 4,537,157 excess under-5 deaths by 2030.”

The numbers are mind-boggling. The other day a whistleblower said that when the DOGE boys finally asked for a briefing on what USAID actually did (after they’d already cut it) they were surprised because they’d understand that is was just a ‘woke” slush fund. Oh well. Too bad.

There are the fraud victims who will never get court-ordered restitution because Trump pardoned the guilty. In a June 2025 report, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee found that “Trump’s pardons cheat victims out of an astounding $1.3 billion in restitution and fines, allowing fraudsters, tax evaders, drug traffickers to keep ill-gotten gains.”

Oops.

It doesn’t stop there. America can thank the president for environmental deregulation that could sicken and kill people by the tens or even hundreds of thousands.

And the hastening of climate change could eventually kill billions of people on this planet. They don’t care. Trump said, “we’re going back to fossil fuel, we have to be smart.”

Oh and he’s also on track to completely cripple the medical research sector of the United States:

At the same time, the administration has been canceling funding for lifesaving scientific and medical research. In November, JAMA Internal Medicine published “Clinical Trials Affected by Research Grant Terminations at the National Institutes of Health.”

It said that “in the first half of 2025, the N.I.H. terminated grants supporting 383 unique clinical trials, affecting 74,311 individuals.”

It goes on and on and it’s particularly useful since Edsall’s columns are usually just he said/she said accounts by various experts on a certain topic. This is just a long and detailed list of the horrors the Trump administration is inflicting on the American people.

Read the whole thing and keep it bookmarked. I’m sure we could add new examples every day for the next 3 years. It will certainly help to have a Congress as a backstop and the courts will be able to stop some of this at least temporarily. But Trump will still be president until January 2029 and he can continue to do immense damage all by himself.

It seems like all I’m writing about these days is corruption but it’s such a huge story and covered in such scattershot fashion by the MSM, I feel as if it’s important. Here’s another one.

Trump is busily having the U.S. taxpayers pay off his cronies for staying loyal even though they are criminals:

The Trump administration has agreed to pay $1.25 million to settle claims from 2016 Trump campaign adviser Carter Page that the FBI and Justice Department illegally entangled him in court-ordered surveillance, according to a court filing and a person familiar with the deal.

Page sued the federal government — along with top FBI and Justice Department officials — in 2020, saying they abused their foreign intelligence surveillance authorities after his travel to Russia drew the eye of the FBI and fueled investigations of then-candidate Donald Trump’s ties to the Kremlin. The allegations also provoked Trump’s attacks on the FBI, Justice Department and intelligence agencies, saying they cut corners and broke rules in a single-minded effort to tie him to Russia and damage his presidency.

Solicitor General John Sauer revealed the settlement Wednesday in a filing with the Supreme Court, where Page had pressed his case after losing fights in federal district and appeals courts.

This is a very clever ploy. Sure the government, lose in court and then have Trump’s DOJ “settle” with millions of dollars. Sweet little payoff scam.

And Trump s deploying this for himself as well, having sued the government for a leak of his tax information (despite the fact that every other president has released those voluntarily.) He’ll be approving the “settlement” himself, of course. He personally runs the DOJ and they all admit it:

Lawyers for Donald Trump ​and the Internal Revenue Service are in talks to settle the U.S. president’s $10 billion lawsuit against the tax ‌collection agency for leaking his tax returns to the media in 2019 and 2020.

In a Friday filing in Miami federal court, the lawyers asked a judge to put the case on hold for 90 days “while the parties engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted ​litigation.” A pause “could narrow or resolve the issues efficiently,” they added.

[…]

Trump and the other plaintiffs said the leaks caused them financial ​harm and public embarrassment, and tarnished their reputations and public standing.

Prosecutors charged Littlejohn in 2023 with leaking tax records of Trump and thousands ‌of other ⁠wealthy Americans to the media, saying he was motivated by a political agenda. Littlejohn later pleaded guilty to improper disclosures, and a judge sentenced him to five years in prison.

Any payout in Trump’s lawsuit would likely involve taxpayer dollars. Trump has said he would donate money collected from the case to charity.

“The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information” ​to the Times, ProPublica and ​other “left-wing news outlets,” a spokesperson ⁠for Trump’s legal team said in a statement. “President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”

Think about that. The president and his spawn are claiming that releasing their tax returns caused them “financial harm and public embarrassment.” Shouldn’t the president be so above board that nothing in his taxes could cause him financial harm and embarrassment? Shouldn’t he be an open book?

I’ll be very curious to see which “charity” he gives the money too. Not that it matters. There is no reason for the taxpayers to be on the hook for any of these suits and the nakedly trollish nature of it all should have the American public in total revolt. It appears there needs to be some changes in the law around all of this.

Apparently, we can no longer have even the slightest trust in our leaders that they have enough character not to steal the country blind and say “waddaya gonna do about it?”

Remember, when the NY Times asked why he was ignoring all the ethical norms he (pretended to) follow in the first term, his answer was, “because I found out nobody cared.”

We should care.

Back when Donald Trump was just a New York tabloid fixture and reality show host, his signature tag line was typically rude and nasty: “You’re fired!” During his first campaign, he loved to yell it out on stage at his rallies with a snarling expression, which made the crowds go wild. Even when he ascended to the White House, he deployed the expression liberally, often aiming it at his staff and Cabinet members. His administration was known for its massive turnover, breaking records for a president’s first term. 

According to a Brookings Institute study, when he left office in 2021, Trump’s “A Team” turnover was 92%, a figure that did not include Cabinet secretaries. Even more startling was the turnover there. Most members of his Cabinet were forced out under pressure — fired, in other words — or else they resigned in protest. A similar analysis by the New York Times found that of 21 top White House and Cabinet positions going back to 1992, “nine had turned over at least once during the Trump administration, compared with three at the same point of the Clinton administration, two under President Barack Obama and one under President George W. Bush.” 

As it happens, Trump is known to be a coward when it comes to bringing the hammer down himself, so he often tasks others to do his dirty work. The most famous example of this involves Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, who learned he was fired by a presidential tweet in the middle of a trip to Africa. The story goes that when Gen. John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, called Tillerson to warn the tweet was coming, the secretary was on the john. 

Incidents like this were commonplace during the president’s first term, and now, with a series of three Cabinet firings or forced resignations in six weeks — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on March 5, Attorney General Pam Bondi on April 2 and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer on April 20 — it appears he may be returning to his old ways.

Trump entered office in 2017 unschooled in the ways of Washington, and he knew nothing about how the presidency worked. He expected that members of his staff and Cabinet would be as fawning and obsequious as his employees at the Trump Organization. Instead he found they considered themselves professionals, with a responsibility to give the president their best advice. He soon disabused them of such a notion.

This is not to say that there weren’t some people who deserved to be fired. Trump’s first national security adviser, Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, was found to be chatting with the Russian ambassador on a back channel during the transition, and then lied about it to the FBI. But Trump has harbored regrets about firing Flynn, so much that he recently signed off on a Justice Department settlement of over a million dollars to compensate the former adviser for his trouble — even though he had pleaded guilty and was let off the hook with a presidential pardon. Flynn has stayed loyal to Trump, and the president is rewarding him handsomely.

Then there were people like Tom Price, Trump’s first secretary of health and human services. He was forced to resign because he was traveling around on private jets at taxpayer expense, which seems like a joke today. (Who in the second Trump administration isn’t doing that? Trump himself has accepted a luxury 747 as a gift from a foreign country.) There were alleged domestic abusers forced to resign, and lawyers, ethics advisers and other staffers who disagreed on policy, many of whom Trump just decided he didn’t like. They left under a cloud — each one a scandal for at least one news cycle. 

The main lesson Trump appears to have taken from his first term was to only hire staff who would never dare to cross him or tell him anything he doesn’t want to hear. All you have to do is witness the displays of sycophancy by his appointees during his televised Cabinet meetings to understand the dynamics within his second administration. And until recently, Trump has refused to fire any of them — no matter what they’ve done.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was caught red-handed divulging sensitive information on an unsecured phone app — he even put a very critical journalist on the thread by mistake — and all Trump did as punishment was demote the national security adviser to United Nations ambassador. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. remains in his job, despite presiding over a record measles outbreak, and being a daily embarrassment and ongoing threat to the health of the nation. FBI Director Kash Patel has bungle high-profile investigations and recently filed suit against the Atlantic for reporting there have been “episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s conflicts of interest and ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender, might have caused him to be fired by any other president. But his fidelity to Trump is second to none, and he remains in his job.

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But something has changed in recent weeks. Noem, who presided over the president’s unpopular mass deportation policy, was forced out amid allegations of grifting, self-dealing and carrying on an affair with her top lieutenant Corey Lewandowski. Bondi was fired for botching the Epstein files and failing to effectively prosecute the people on Trump’s lengthy enemies list. And on Monday, Chavez-DeRemer reportedly resigned due to charges of abuse of power, drinking on the job and sexual misconduct charges involving her father and her husband

As the president’s approval ratings have plunged into the low to mid-30s amid rising inflation, the spectacle of his immigration policy and his inexplicable decision to go to war with Iran, Trump appears to be looking for scapegoats — and ways to distract the media and the public. It’s a mark of a presidency on the brink, teetering due to a chaotic and vacillating policy agenda, poor management and outright incompetence.

And if rumors are to be believed, more firings could be in the offing.

The prediction markets have Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the top of the list. She’s working overtime to appease Trump by apparently spending her time creating “evidence” that the Russia investigation, his first impeachment and the 2020 election were all Democratic Party/Deep State conspiracies. Trump needs that to soothe him as he faces even more exposure as a failure in this second term. Whether it will be enough to spare her is an open question. She is, after all, a woman — just like Chavez-DeRemer, Bondi and Noem.

Whatever the case, more scapegoats are almost certainly on the way. If there’s one thing we know about Trump, it’s that he will never blame himself.

Salon

I know it's a bit downmarket these days to point out Trump's crookedness and hypocrisy but MAGA simply cannot stop speedrunning the plot of Animal Farm, becoming everything they claimed to despise about the previous regime, except more so.

Like, for four years, a central attack… https://t.co/lmySZzeAup

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) April 23, 2026

Derek Thompson notes:

I know it’s a bit downmarket these days to point out Trump’s crookedness and hypocrisy but MAGA simply cannot stop speedrunning the plot of Animal Farm, becoming everything they claimed to despise about the previous regime, except more so.

Like, for four years, a central attack on Joe Biden was that Hunter was trading on the family name. They even launched a congressional investigation, iirc. Now they either say nothing or enthusiastically cheer on the president’s kids as they run a cryptocurrency exchange, a bitcoin mining operation, a luxury real estate brand, and a social media company, all of which are getting money from foreign governments and sovereign wealth funds.

Here Eric Trump is appearing on TV as an adviser to a company that just won a $24 million Pentagon contract! And Fox Business is like: “way to go, Eric, we’re proud of you, you really knocked this one out of the park.”

Reporters and Democrats should confront every single Republican about this relentlessly. They stalked and hunted Hunter Biden over something that had happened nearly a decade before, criminally indicted him and tried to destroy him. And they come back with this? They might as well be spitting in our faces.

The corruption is so blatant now that the Democrats simply have to put it front and center. If they don’t the people are going to conclude they’re in on it.

If MAGA can’t have America, no one can

Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, despite its branding, is not about returning to past American greatness or building anything like it in the future. MAGA is throwing a decade-long tantrum over demographic and social change it cannot stop.

Prof. Timothy Snyder dubs it “superpower suicide”:

“Superpower Suicide” is a concept to help understand the approach of the Trump regime to the rest of the world. We are fighting a war for no reason we can name, losing it, and covering our defeat with genocidal and apocalyptic propaganda. This is bad enough on its own; but I think this performance is symptomatic of something deeper — a systematic undoing of American power by Americans. In this video I stay close to very traditional accounts of the accumulation and maintenance of of state power, all of which indicate rapid and catastrophic decline as the result of specific choices in the last year. I don’t even mention one source of US power which is specifically modern: the international structures we built over decades to ensure our centrality, which the Trump people are undoing. Many of the American fundamentals are still very sound, but a better future, or any kind of future at all, will depend on a sober reckoning with the present moment.

Snyder sees a movement with Donald Trump as its figurehead as one separately described as “a regime of the bullies for the billionaires” by Anat Shenker-Osorio. “There is no idea of the future,” Snyder says. “There’s just day-to-day enrichment. We’re pursuing policies inconsistent with being a superpower.”

The “we” in Snyder’s formulation is the people with their hands actually on the levers of power. It is a class of grifters, to be sure, with no commitment either to the American republic or to its founding principles, only to their own enrichment. They are above the law. Above history. Above patriotism. They’ve applied the concept of an extractive economy to the operation of a nation state itself.

Stephen Hinton decsribed it seven years ago in a Medium post, writing, “It is rather surprising that the dominant business paradigm is capitalism and yet it runs on degrading capital. On a finite planet, this is surely not good business let alone good for the planet.” Or for a democratic republic run on extraction, which is the only one Trump and his hangers-on know.

The story is different for MAGA footsoldiers who now see that Trump has betrayed them. He’s pursing his own pecuniary interests and self-aggrandizement with no regard for their well-being. Trump manipulated them for his own interests by performing commitment to theirs. And now that he’s a lame duck, he can drop all pretense. And has.

Readers who have been with me since my early tenure here at Ye Olde Blog may recall that I see another dynamic at work among the kind of people who adopted Trump as their champion. It is the kind of self-destructiveness one see among people with low impulse control, sometimes reflected in less education, and sometimes in proud rejection of it. If they cannot get their way, they start acting out. Or breaking things or setting fires. Trump is both.

I wrote back in 2015:

 I have long said that the Republican Party is acting out one of those dreary murder ballads with America. If they cannot have America for their own, they just might burn it down. John Boehner can relate. That is why Digby quoted Rick Perlstein yesterday: “Take demagogues seriously. Voters love them. And they’re only a joke until they win.”

I took her by her lily white hand

And dragged her down that bank of sand

There I throwed her in to drown

I watched her as she floated down

“Was walking home tween twelve and one

Thinkin’ of what I had done

I killed a girl, my love you see

Because she would not marry me

– from “Banks Of The Ohio” (traditional)

They love their country — it’s THEIR country — and if they can’t have her, nobody can.

Reflections on Virginia mid-decade redistricting

Republicans got their stopped clock cleaned in Virginia on Tuesday when voters approved a new congressional map that — say it ain’t so! — disenfranchises a large swath of voters: theirs. Donald Trump in clockwork fashion declared the election rigged. Republicans were winning earlier in the day (before any votes were counted?), he insisted, before the dreaded “Mail In Ballot Drop” (whatever that is). “Where have I heard that before?” Trump raged. He’s more obsessed with the manner of voting than the outcome. Disenfranchising Republicans is an afterthought.

Tazewell County Circuit Court Judge Jack Hurley barred state officials from implementing the new maps, calling the ballot language “flagrantly misleading” and the process in violation of the Virginia constitution. Virginia Attorney General Jay pledged to appeal the ruling.

“Republicans lost,” says Virginians for Fair Elections. “Now they’re trying to overturn the will of the voters in court and trying to relitigate an election they couldn’t win.”

Where have you heard that before?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez offered a terse rejoinder to Republican howls of disenfranchisement. Essentially, don’t like it when it’s done to you? Then stop doing it to us. Join us and ban partisan gerrymandering.

Reporter: What do you make of Republicans saying that Virginia—

AOC: Wah wah wah.

We have asked Republicans for 10 years to ban partisan gerrymandering. And for 10 years, Republicans have said no. Republicans have fought for partisan gerrymanders across the United States of… pic.twitter.com/BVa9uOH0zq

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 22, 2026

The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer responds to the accusation that the effort by Virginia Democrats disenfranchises Republicans: “That is exactly what the new Virginia map does,” Serwer states bluntly, offering a summary history of partisan gerrymandering.

Republicans justify their rigging of district maps on the grounds that “the votes of constituencies that lean Republican are more legitimate than those that lean liberal.” They state it explicitly. Serwer brings receipts:

“If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority—we would have all five constitutional officers and we would probably have many more seats in the Legislature,” Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the state assembly in Wisconsin, said in 2018. The logic here is clear: Rural votes, more likely to be Republican, should count more than urban votes, which tend to come from Democrats. At the time, Republicans in Wisconsin had managed to draw maps so effectively that even when Democrats won 53 percent of the vote, they won only about a third of the seats in the legislature.

When Democratic states tried to lead by example in adopting nonpartisan redistricting commissions, Republicans saw an advantage. If Democrats would not pursue maximum advantage for themselves, Republicans would in states they controlled.

Republicans’ will to power vs. Democrats defense of democratic principles does not win them the approval one might assume.

Over at Strength In Numbers, Elliot Morris this morning reflects on a recent poll on party favorability. Democrats are -3 on favorability and Republicans -16. But part of that unfavorability for Democrats is, you guessed it:

Even voters who say they have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party often plan to vote for Democrats anyway. And when Democrats’ own voters complain about their party in their own words, the complaint is not that Democrats are too liberal or “weak and woke”, it’s that they’re not fighting hard enough, particularly against Donald Trump.

Morris reflects on his polling’s findings:

As I wrote back in February, the Democratic brand is not predominantly woke, but weak. Respondents to our survey associated the Democrats with traits like honesty and caring about the working class, but they are seen as weak and not particularly effective. The Republican brand, by contrast, is a strong brand that a majority of the country finds extreme.

This takes us back to Virginia. Republicans’ howls do not presage a recommitment to small-d democratic principles any more than Tucker Carlson’s mea culpas about Donald Trump this week reflect a “road to Damascus” change of heart about his embrace of fascism. (Carlson is simply positioning himself to secure a base in a post-Trump MAGA.) Serwer sees it too, writing that Republicans “simply believe that disenfranchising Democrats is good but disenfranchising Republicans is bad.”

Serwer concludes with Justice Elena Kagan:

“The partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her 2019 dissent in Rucho. “If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government.”

Kagan was right then, and she’s right now. If Republicans had listened at the time, they would not be tasting their own bitter medicine today.

What I wonder now is whether in the next poll Democrats’ clapback in Virginia will improve their standing with Democrats and independents who perceive the party as weak in this one. When polled on which Democrats they see as sharing their values, “Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani lead the pack, with more traditional voices including Barack Obama, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, and Gavin Newsom coming in close behind.” AOC’s comments above show why she’s in the first group. It’s a flashing red light that party leaders won’t heed that no Democrat in House or Senate leadership even show up in the chart below.

Morris writes:

The strategic implications here are straightforward. Democrats do not need to reinvent themselves ideologically nearly as much as they need to convince voters they can act with purpose and deliver on their promises. Their own supporters are not begging for moderation so much as urgency; independents, too, have fewer specific ideological qualms with the party as they do personal germane criticism. They are not demanding a lurch left or right so much as evidence of leadership, coherence, and fight.

In a political environment where neither party is broadly beloved, voters must know you stand for something — and for standing up for it, too. The Democrats have made a lot of progress on these numbers over the last year. But a perception of weakness is still its biggest one.

Fight more, libs.