Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

It’s all part of the show

Season 2 of “The Apprentice Goes To Washington” will be filled with characters whose major qualification is television experience. In Season 1, Donald Trump hired only “the best and most serious people” for his administration. And them he fired them one by one. See, it’s not good TV to fire them all at once. You have to build the suspense, keep the audience coming back week after week to see who goes next. That’s how you keep your ratings up.

For Season 2: “Trump Unbound,” the aging actor elected to play a president on TV hopes to bring higher production values to the show by casting more television veterans (The New York Times):

President-elect Donald J. Trump, whose rise was fueled by reality TV stardom, is once again turning to television to recruit the key cast members of his new administration.

The latest was Dr. Mehmet Oz, the former syndicated TV host, who was picked by Mr. Trump on Tuesday to oversee Medicare and Medicaid.

Dr. Oz follows Pete Hegseth, who could move straight from co-hosting the weekend edition of “Fox & Friends” to overseeing 1.3 million active-duty troops as defense secretary, and Sean Duffy, a Fox Business host and former star of MTV’s “The Real World,” who is now poised to run the Transportation Department. (His wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, is Mr. Hegseth’s erstwhile “Fox & Friends” co-host.)

Mike Huckabee, Mr. Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel, hosted a live Fox News show for seven years. Tulsi Gabbard, whom Mr. Trump has said he plans to nominate for national intelligence director, was a paid Fox News contributor until August. His choice for border czar, Tom Homan, was a contributor at the network until last week.

At this rate, the second season of the Trump administration may end up with more television stars than the first one.

Stars in quotes. The reality-show president is obsessed with surrounding himself with characters straight out of central casting, with his ratings, and with “crowd sizes,” but he has not cast particularly popular actors to fill roles in Season 2. Perhaps that is by design. We’ll start an online poll to predict who is first to hear “You’re Fired.”

The Associated Press provides this callback to Season 1:

Choosing TV personalities isn’t that unusual for the once-and-future president: A number of his first-term choices — John Bolton, Larry Kudlow, Heather Nauert and Mercedes Schlapp, were all on TV — mostly also on Fox. Omarosa Manigault Newman, a confrontational first-season member of Trump’s NBC show “The Apprentice,” was briefly at the White House before she was fired.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican who ran Trump’s 2016 transition team until he was fired, said that eight years ago, Trump held “Apprentice-like interviews at Bedminster,” summoning potential hires to his club in New Jersey.

On a call on Tuesday organized by the Council on Foreign Relations, Christie said this year’s Cabinet choices are different than 2016’s but it’s still “Donald Trump casting a TV show.”

“He’s casting,” Christie said.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder (“On Tyranny“) explains that Trump’s cheesy reboot of the fictional “The West Wing” represents the only reality Trump knows. It’s all fiction, even his concocted image as a successful businessman.

Timothy Snyder is spot-on about the fictional reality the serial lying psychopath inhabits. 😳👇 pic.twitter.com/PulaxsUyUc

— Bill Madden (@maddenifico) November 21, 2024

Trump turned daily COVID-19 briefings into more airtime for his vacuous ramblings. Trump needs the spotlight like plants need sunlight, and he withers without it. Sadly, the media — Fox News and beyond — is more than happy to coddle him. And his fans are more than happy to tune in. God help us.

This is what people are saying on Fox News in the wake of Mike Johnson passing a law that bans transgender Rep. Sarah McBride from using the women’s bathroom:

Jeanine: Whether he has his— thing or not, I don't want him in my bathroom. I don't want to think about him. I don't want to wash my hands near him. pic.twitter.com/lHOgAvNbzr

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 20, 2024

I can’t properly convey how horrified I am by this grotesque bigotry. It is reminiscent of what I heard people say about Black people living in the south in the 1960s. And frankly, I don’t think anyone would have said this out loud on Fox News even a few months ago. Their evil is unleashed.

I fear for the safety of Sarah McBride, right there in the US Capitol. They’ve lost all sense of humanity.

JV Last at the Bulwark discusses the fact that lefty influencer/podcaster Cenk Uyger (with whom I once had a passing acquaintance back in the early blogger days) seems to be cozying up to right, specifically Elon Musk. I won’t attempt to question what his motives might be — it could be any number of things. But Last makes an observation with which I totally agree out of hard won experience:

You know about horseshoe theory, right? It’s the idea that the political spectrum is not a straight line but a U-shape, where the far left and far right end up nearly touching.

Usually when people talk about horseshoe theory, it’s in terms of policy preferences—how the policies of the far left and far right can start to overlap. But I think it’s driven much more by temperament.

If you are the kind of person who tends toward conspiracy theories, you will gravitate toward the far end of the horseshoe. The same is true for people who are driven by grievance.

And also for populists. If you disdain expertise and despise the opinions of “elites” who happen to know a lot more than you do about, say, military logistics or the actuarial side of force planning, then you will tend to make common cause with people like Elon Musk. Or Musk’s boss.

My advice is to keep this in mind when evaluating potential allies. Just because a person seems like they’re on one side at the moment doesn’t mean they’ll stay there. Personalities and character matter.

Once you understand that, it’s not all that hard to predict who will end up where on the horseshoe.

No, it is not. I have learned that the people who have this particular personality and temperament can be very appealing when they’re on your side. They’re often fighters who are brave enough to do and say things that others won’t. But in the end, you can almost always bet that their sense of grievance, attraction to conspiracy theories or hatred for elites will drive them to make common cause with the right. It’s happened over and over again.

Temperament matters more in politics than you think it should.

You know all those new regulations requiring that airlines pay you for cancellations and advertise the full price of fares upfront, including mandatory fees and taxes? They’re very popular and seem to have made the airlines more responsive. Well, the airlines are very happy that Trump is promising to roll all that back:

The chief executive of Delta Air Lines says the incoming Trump administration will be a “breath of fresh air” for airlines after what he called government “overreach” under President Joe Biden.

The airline industry has chafed under consumer-protection regulations imposed by the Biden administration. And Delta is facing a federal investigation into its slow recovery from a global technology outage this summer.

[…]

On Monday, the airline industry trade group praised Trump’s pick for transportation secretary, former Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy. Duffy, a former reality TV star who is co-host of “The Bottom Line” on Fox Business, lobbied for U.S. airlines and their unions during a dispute with Persian Gulf carriers.

I’m sure that when they roll back those consumer protections the media will somehow blame the Democrats but I hope that the Democrats fight back hard on things like this. When there’s another travel crisis, as is likely they need to hammer the Republicans and force the media to cover it properly instead of going along with the Trump lies. These are the sort of things that people feel in their own lives and the Democrats cannot allow the Republicans to escape responsibility for them anymore.

There’s going to be a lot of this sort of thing. It’s not going to be enough for AOC and jasmine Crockett to give good speeches during hearings. The Dems need a concernted plan to hammer again and again that the Trump administration is rewarding it’s corporate buddies at people’s expense. These are the specific sorts of things that bring that home.

I wrote about the things I think are missing from the Dem discourse: 1) scope of the losses (you'd think this was 1984)2) how media struggles to explain a second Trump win; easier to yell at Dems 3) there might not be a grand theory. it might be uninformed voters' vibes.njour.nl/s/726851?unl…

— Natalie Jackson (@nataliej.bsky.social) 2024-11-19T22:17:23.408Z

Josh Marshall replied:

Pretty sure all three are true. But 2 is the biggie. Because it’s application is so wide. People are confused by, upset by, outraged by Trump. And they don’t know what to make of or do with those feelings and the easiest course is vent about Dems. Full stop. 2/3 of contemporary political commetnary.

Absolutely correct. The “bad vibe” election, expertly exploited by Trump, was caused by Trump himself. He persuaded his own followers that the country was in the worst shape it’s ever been including the Great Depression and that the previous election had been stolen from them. Democrats were upset and frustrated that he was out there lying about all this. Bad vibes all around. In the end, the election was decided by the small slice of voters who just felt the vibes and had no idea where they were coming from. They just went with the general vibes they heard and felt in passing and believed it was necessary to throw the bastards out.

Here’s an excerpt of the National Journal piece:

Explaining a Harris win would have been easy: Voters rejected Trump and his ilk, just as they did in 2020. A Trump win seems more difficult to explain. Everyone knows who he is now! Surely the majority would reject him, even if he won the Electoral College. But instead, Trump not only won the Electoral College, he won the popular vote.

And now we get a zillion media think pieces on what Democrats did wrong and what the ideological fights are between the center and the Left.

[…]

The explanations are not cut-and-dried; they never are. But it’s also not difficult to see that swing voters rejected an administration they felt didn’t help them. As for what they knew about Trump—well, I hate to break it to you, but the vast majority of swing voters only pay attention to politics long enough to cast their ballots. They are not watching rallies. They are annoyed by political ads and ignore mailers. This is why searches of “did Joe Biden drop out” surged on Election Day.

Logically, voters who didn’t even know who was on the ballot were probably unlikely to cast a ballot for the candidate they didn’t know (Harris). They did know Trump, and they knew their perception that the economy was better—mostly because prices were lower—during his term.

Those swing voters who did know enough to have the right candidates in mind, but not much more, went with a gut feeling of some sort. In an environment where the current administration is unpopular and people think the country is on the wrong track, that vote wasn’t going to Harris. Plus, isn’t Trump a great businessman or something?

These are the stories you only rarely see in the media. It is uncomfortable to learn how swing voters actually make decisions. It is also uncomfortable to think about how much money was spent trying to sway their decisions, when they came down to a gut feeling or something they only saw in passing. We spend a lot of time and money trying to catch them in passing.

Eventually, more data will help us sort out what happened. In the meantime, all of the media explainers would do well to consider that there might not be some grand theory of what happened. Maybe we just have a low-information swing electorate that is busy living their lives and votes on a whim. It’s just not what we want to see from inside our political bubbles.

The consequences of all this are profound. As with so much else, Trump has exposed the flaws in our democratic system as well. Flood the zone with bullshit and the people who don’t pay attention until the day they vote will probably go your way.

I’m sure the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents are dangerous. But right now that sounds more like the contemptuous, unpitying masters of this country…

The Dems also lost only the most red state GOP Senators (which was not unexpected) and won a whole bunch of state legislators and judges. But sure:

I feel like I’m losing my mind.

Former US Attorney Joyce Vance wrote in her newsletter last night:

There are lots of attempts to explain the 2024 election. Many voters said something along the lines of, they were unhappy with the government and wanted to try something new. These voters were concerned about the economy (although even The Wall Street Journal conceded it was the strongest in the world), the price of gasoline, and other similar issues that amounted to little more than a permission structure for voting for Trump. It was all summed up for me a few days after the election, in a conversation with an acquaintance who said they’d voted for Harris, but at least “my portfolio is doing great this week.”

Voters who ignored the facts about the economy and used them as an excuse to vote for Trump weren’t people who wanted a change. They were people who, actually, didn’t want any change at all. They didn’t like new policies advanced by the Biden-Harris administration, a more inclusive vision of America where traditionally marginalized people had equal opportunity. They didn’t want a new generation of leadership. They wanted the “old stability,” the patriarchy that has run the country for generations. In many ways, that’s what’s at the heart of the conservative coalition. It’s not a rejection of the established order; it’s an embrace of it.

[…]

Thinking a vote for Trump was a rejection of “elites” is part of the weak tea biography Trump sold to far too many Americans—the idea that he, the guy who started out on third base, hit and would continue hitting homes runs for them. Trump appeals to people who want to slide into home without having to run all the bases; that’s his ultimate appeal, the cheat who somehow manages to succeed, surrounded by his billionaire friends.

Two things there that ring especially true to me. The votes for Trump on the economy “amounted to little more than a permission structure for voting for Trump.” Yes. It was a rationale that people used to be respectable. It was not the real reason. And that reason was that they admire Trump because he is the cheat who manages to succeed. He slithers out from all accountability and they love him for it. It makes him supernatural, invincible.

How do you fashion a political strategy around that? I don’t know but I do know that coming up with a better set of 10 point plans on the economy isn’t gonna do it.

WTF are we seeing with this body-double Trump? pic.twitter.com/E43Sa1fcnr

— Jeremy H🇺🇸 (@jeremyfromga) November 20, 2024

You may recall during the campaign Donald Trump waxing on interminably during “the weave” about the time he watched Elon Musk’s picture perfect spacecraft landings. He would say, ” Elon with his rocket ships that land within 12 inches on the moon where they want it to land…” Trump travelled to Texas yesterday with his bff Musk to observe the latest Starship SpaceX test of one of those perfect landings. He and the rest of his entourage watched as the spacecraft aborted its second attempt to catch the returning booster at its launchpad and splashed in to the Gulf of Mexico instead.

I think we’re all hoping this is a metaphor for Trump’s administration: lots of hype but they just can’t stick the landing.

It’s certainly possible. Virtually none of the people he is choosing to lead the various departments have any qualifications for the jobs he’s putting them into and little or no management experience of any kind. He’s generally named people he’s seen on TV which I suppose makes sense since that was his only qualification for the presidency and in his mind he’s the greatest leader the world has ever known. What other qualification do you really need?

On Tuesday he even chose another reality show veteran and Fox Business host former congressman Sean Duffy as Secretary of Transportation and TV talk show host Dr. Oz to head up the CMS which administers Medicare and Medicaid. Oz promised to work closely with the equally unqualified conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr who has been tapped to head the Department of Health and Human Services, so that’s double helping of kookiness.

All of the other nominees we’ve seen thus far, with a small handful of exceptions, are quacks and hucksters chosen for their loyalty to Trump and their stated eagerness to take a wrecking ball to the departments they’ve been hired to oversee. The question at this point is whether or not they are capable of doing that or will spend most of their time on Fox News sucking up to the big boss, which is how they got the nod for their jobs in the first place. They will go in knowing next to nothing and will be staffed with cranks and scammers who know even less. Perhaps the best we can hope for in some of these agencies is that they’ll flounder about for a while without any serious results.

There is some talk that many of these choices are actually designed as much to keep the Senate in line as anything else. The idea is that by forcing his own Republican caucus to vote for these extremists and buffoons against their will Trump will have demonstrated his dominance once and for all. One Trump transition member told Rolling Stone, “He wants to bend them to his will until they snap in half and then thank him for the privilege.” I doubt they’re going to give him any trouble. They’ve shown over and over again that the quaint notion of an equal branch of government with its own prerogatives is something for the history books.

But for all the nuts and kooks Trump is appointing to some of the top jobs to accomplish his revenge agenda there are some areas where he’s stocking the administration with some people who are determined to fulfill their own. Many of them are Project 2025 veterans.

It’s clear that the tag team of Stephen Miller and Tom Homan are prepared to initiate Trump’s mass deportation program immediately upon taking office. Trump has said there’s no price tag so there is already a tremendous amount of activity taking place in the private sector, with private prison and airplane businesses gearing up for some major government contracts. These people are serious about doing this. It’s unlikely that they can accomplish their goal of deporting every undocumented person in America but they’re going to destroy a lot of lives in the attempt, including those of citizens who “harbor” them, according to Homan.

incoming Trump border czar Tom Homan threatens people in blue states with prosecution if they hide migrants from ICE pic.twitter.com/VenTqWTKdv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 19, 2024

Then there is the promotion of FCC chair Brendan Carr, another one of the authors of Project 2025, to head the commission. Carr told Fox News on Tuesday that he may obstruct the planned merger between Paramount Global and Skydance because CBS refused to release the transcript of the Kamala Harris 60 Minutes interview, a silly Trump conspiracy theory suggesting that they were covering for her. And you will not be surprised to learn that he is a big promoter of expanding internet access through low-earth satellite technology—including Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s Starlink and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon’s Project Kuiper.

Trump has also appointed his good pal and transition chief Howard Lutnick to head the Commerce department. As the longtime CEO of the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald he is at least experienced at running a large organization so that appointment makes some sense. He had reportedly wanted to be Treasury Secretary, and was backed by Musk for that job, but according to the NY Times has annoyed Trump in recent days by hovering too closely and seemingly cozying up for his personal benefit. And anyway, Trump is still looking for that perfect man out of Central Casting who can simultaneously keep the markets calm while helping Trump implement his monumentally idiotic tariff scheme, a job for a magician rather than afinancial expert. That appointment is still to come.

And then there is Russell Vought, one of the real movers and shakers of Project 2025. I wrote about him back in June, concerned that the self-described Christian nationalist was going to wind up in an important position in a possible Trump administration. At the time people were talking about him as a good bet for Chief of Staff but Trump chose his campaign manager Susie Wiles instead. Vought was the person charged with writing the chapter on the executive office of the president for Project 2025 and was said to be in charge of the planning for the first 180 days of a new Trump administration.

Politico reported on Tuesday that he may be tapped for the Office of Management and Budget, the job he held in the previous Trump administration in the final years. Vought would be working closely with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy:

On [Tucker]Carlson’s show, Vought said he expects to work with their new agency — the Department of Government Efficiency — to use recent court decisions limiting federal agency powers to pursue a “massive deregulatory agenda.” They will also be “as radical or aggressive as you can” in reducing full-time federal employees and contractors, he added.

We knew Trump was lying when he said during he campaign that he’d never heard of Project 2025 while simultaneously insisting that he didn’t agree with it. He certainly never read it personally but he knew many of the people involved because they had been in his first administration. They were among the most loyal of the loyal and there was never any doubt that Trump would hire many of them in a second term.

These are not the instruments of vengeance like Gaetz, Gabbard et al, who Trump wants to use to pay back his enemies. These are people for whom Trump is their instrument to achieve their own long standing goals. It looks like they’re going to have free rein.

Salon

Billionaire hedge fund managers

As X swirls around the Musk sewer, social media users not of the MAGA persuasion are fleeing to Bluesky. What was a sleepy outpost with little traffic (at least for me) is now surging as an alternative. My follows have over tripled since the election.

That means it’s time for a culling by billionaires with more money than sense.

Case in point: Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and big Democratic donor. He proposes buying and shutting down Bluesky to “prevent further fracturing of the town square.”

Every day is a like a new fork to the brain by people with lunatic money and absolutely no f***ing sense

— Molly McKew (@mollymckew.bsky.social) 2024-11-20T14:48:01.958Z

On October 19, Axios considered America’s gullibility crisis and found Ackman there:

Bill Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire with 1.4 million followers on X, obsessively promoted allegations from an ABC News “whistleblower” that the network had given Harris questions in advance of her debate with Trump. On Wednesday, more than a month later, Ackman admitted it was “fake.”

Zachary Basu wrote:

The big picture: The misinformation crisis may be playing out online, but the real-world implications are vast.

• The deadly hurricanes that swept across the Southeast in recent weeks exposed the staggering extent to which people have become prone to conspiracy theories, spurring threats against emergency responders.
• “The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality,” The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote in an article about hurricane conspiracies headlined: “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is.”
• 54% of respondents in an Axios Vibes survey published last month agreed with the statement, “I’ve disengaged from politics because I can’t tell what’s true.”

The bottom line: Never before have so many people been so exposed to so much misinformation. Given the increasing ubiquity of AI-generated content, this may be only the beginning.

Thank you, Dear Readers, for sustaining this humble little island of sanity.

Update: Melissa Ryan shares her take on why “people are rediscovering that social media can only be social if there are consequences for antisocial behavior.”