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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
Rolling Stone is reporting today that Trump and Co have revived their plans to invade Mexico. I’m not kidding:
Within Donald Trump’s government-in-waiting, there is a fresh debate over whether and how thoroughly the president-elect should follow through on his campaign promise to attack or even invade Mexico, as part of the “war” he’s pledged to wage against powerful drug cartels.
“How much should we invade Mexico?” says a senior Trump transition member. “That is the question.”
It is a question that would have seemed batty for the GOP elite to consider before, even during Trump’s first term. But in the four years since, many within the mainstream Republican centers of power have come around to support Trump’s idea to bomb or attack Mexico.
Trump’s Cabinet picks, including his choices for secretary of defense and secretary of state, have publicly supported the idea of potentially unleashing the U.S. military in Mexico. So has the man Trump has tapped to be his national security adviser. So has the man Trump selected as his “border czar” to lead his immigration crackdowns. So have various Trump allies in Congress and in the media.
Apparently, no decision have been made yet. Once source told the magazine. However, “if things don’t change, the president still believes it’s necessary to take some kind of military action against these killers.” Another option on the table is to just send in Special Forces to “take out” the cartels, which I’m sure will work. (It’s not like that hasn’t been tried before in South America. It didn’t exactly work.) Apparently, Trump likes this idea, no doubt because it’s like a movie he saw once.
He’s told people that he will tell Mexico that if they don’t fix this problem immediately he will send in the military. Marco Rucio the new Secreatry of state reportedly supports this plan as long as the Mexican government is involved. I’m sure they’ll be just fine with Americans essentially invating. No problema.
Meanwhile, the pending Sec Def Pete Hegseth has thoughts:
Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth, whom Trump chose to lead the Pentagon, said last year that it could be in the national interest to deploy the military against Mexican drug cartels, which he referred to as “terrorist-like organizations poisoning our population.”
“If it takes military action, that’s what it may take, eventually,” said Hegseth. “Obviously, you’re gonna have to be smart about it. Obviously, the precision strikes. But if you put the fear in the minds of the drug lords, at least as a start, [and] they can’t operate in the open with impunity, [it] changes the way they operate. You combine that with actual border security … now you’re cooking with gas and you’ve got a chance.”
What a genius.
This has been on the agenda for a while even as Trump is supposedly the “peace president” who will end all warts forever. Obviously, he is anything but. He just wants his own wars — mostly on Americans and countries he perceives as being shitholes. It’s very disappointing that this never came up during the campaign.
I wrote this a couple of years ago on this subject:
I think Trump just said he’s going to declare war on Mexico if he wins
Published by digby on January 5, 2023
As president, Donald Trump weighed bombing drug labs in Mexico after one of his leading public health officials came into the Oval Office, wearing a dress uniform, and said such facilities should be handled by putting “lead to target” to stop the flow of illicit substances across the border into the United States.
“He raised it several times, eventually asking a stunned Defense Secretary Mark Esper whether the United States could indeed bomb the labs,” according to a new book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. White House officials said the official, Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir, an admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, often wore his dress uniform for meetings with Trump, which led him to falsely think Giroir was a member of the military.
Sadly, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if Ron DeSantis and others agree with this one, at least in the campaign. It’s very popular among the right, particularly among those who think the support for Ukraine should be switched to some kind of war with Mexico because they say we’re protecting Ukraine’s border but not our own. In honest moments they will say that we should be like Putin and invade. I’m not kidding.
This is a real thing on the right. I don’t know how widespread it is. But Trump is making it clear that he, at least, is serious about using military action against Mexico.
They’re serious.
You’re kidding…
This was obvious before the eleciton but Trump’s promise was such music to people’s ears that I guess eveyrone decided to just let his stupid demagoguery hang out there unrefuted:
U.S. oil and gas producers are unlikely to radically increase production under president-elect Donald Trump as companies remain focused on capital discipline, a senior executive at Exxon Mobil (XOM.N), opens new tab said on Tuesday.
“We’re not going to see anybody in ‘drill, baby, drill’ mode,” Liam Mallon, head of Exxon’s upstream division, told the Energy Intelligence Forum conference in London.
“A radical change (in production) is unlikely because the vast majority, if not everybody, is focused on the economics of what they’re doing,” he said.
What he means by “focused on the economics” is that there is a thing called “supply and demand” and they aren’t going to boost production to lower the price and cut into their profits. It’s ridiculous and always was.
58% say he isn’t honest and 54% say he doesn’t care about people like them. 65% don’t think he’s a good role model. And yet he is the president. I guess Biden being seen as senile and Trump calling Kamala Harris an idiot a couple of thousand times made him seem mentally sharp and that was the deciding factor?
Oy.
A few years back on Thanksgiving eve I ran this recipe for Pumpkin Cake and received a very nice note from journalist Karen Tumulty saying that she’d been tooling around the web for something to bake and tried it and liked it very much. Ever since then I’ve called it Karen Tumulty Cake. It’s easy even for non bakers and it really is very good. And while that pan is lovely, you could easily bake it in a regular bundt pan or regular cake pans.
Karen Tumulty Pumpkin Cake
For cake
* (3/4 cup) softened unsalted butter.
* 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour plus additional for dusting pan
* 2 teaspoons baking powder
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1 teaspoon cinnamon
* 3/4 teaspoon ground allspice
* 2 tablespoons crystalized ginger, finely chopped
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1 1/4 cups canned pumpkin
* 3/4 cup well-shaken buttermilk
* 1 teaspoon vanilla
* 1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
* 3 large eggs
Icing
* 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons well-shaken buttermilk
* 1 1/2 cups confectioners sugar,
* 1/4 cup chopped walnuts
* a 10-inch nonstick bundt pan
Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter bundt pan generously.
Sift flour (2 1/4 cups), baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, allspice, and salt in a bowl. Whisk together pumpkin, 3/4 cup buttermilk, ginger and vanilla in another bowl.
Beat butter and granulated sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer at medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, add eggs and beat 1 minute. Reduce speed to low and add flour and pumpkin mixtures alternately in batches, beginning and ending with flour mixture, just until smooth.
Spoon batter into pan, then bake until a wooden pick inserted in center of cake comes out clean, 45 to 50 minutes. Cool cake in pan 15 minutes, then invert rack over cake and reinvert cake onto rack. Cool 10 minutes more.
Icing:
Whisk together buttermilk and confectioners sugar until smooth. Drizzle over warm cake, sprinkle with chopped walnuts (keep a little icing in reserve to drizzle lightly over walnuts) then cool cake completely. Icing will harden slightly.
Easy as pie (easier, actually.)
Pam Bondi is right out of Central Casting
Many Americans were sorely disappointed this week when Special Prosecutor Jack Smith decided to drag up and withdraw the January 6th indictment and the appeal of the classified documents case dismissal against Donald Trump. Smith said in his filings that the government stood by the charges but because of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel’s rule that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted, he had no choice but to drop the charges.The judges in the cases acceded to his requests and dismissed them both without prejudice although the idea that anyone will bring these cases in 2029 when Trump is 82 years old is fanciful. It’s over. He got away with it once again.
It’s not that we didn’t know it was coming one way or the other. In fact, from the moment the Supreme Court issued their shocking opinion about presidential immunity, the writing was on the wall that Trump would face no accountability even if he didn’t win the election. It went without saying that if he won, he would order the cases dismissed and that would be that. So, this wasn’t a surprise but like so much else we’ve experienced with Trump ,not the least of which was this last election, it was just one more depressing, ennervating event seemingly designed to drain the fight out of anyone who sees this man’s lawlessness and corruption as a blight on our nation.
That’s because one of the disturbing consequences of the repeated failures to hold him to account is the fact that he seems invincible, impervious to negative ramifications for his actions and is therefore seen by his followers as a kind of superhero with magical powers. It’s not true, of course. He’s no hero, super or otherwise. He’s just a shameless, corrupt con artist who has lied his way out of trouble his whole life. And now that he knows he has immunity from any criminal acts he might commit as president, he is willing to use his power to punish his enemies. He’s made it clear that Jack Smith and his team are among them.
On a radio show before the election he said that he would fire Smith in “2 seconds” because he now has immunity. He also declared, “we should throw Jack Smith out with them, the mentally deranged people. Jack Smith should be considered mentally deranged, and he should be thrown out of the country.” Do you think he bears a grudge at all?
When former Congressman Matt Gaetz withdrew after Trump’s daft nomination of him for Attorney General there was a great sigh of relief that someone so unfit would not be made the top law enforcement officer in the land. It was obvious that Trump had nominated him with the express purpose of going after his enemies in the DOJ and using the power of federal law enforcement to prove his accusations against the department’s alleged “weaponization.” He has scores to settle and Gaetz was champing at the bit to help him do it.
Unfortunately for Gaetz he’d made so many enemies on Capitol Hill that Trump was forced to tell him he had to go. (It almost certainly wasn’t because of any concerns about the sordid accusation of underage sex and drug use. Those were more likely considered qualifications since Trump related to his legal travails having a similar history himself.) There was hope after he dropped out that Trump might appoint someone more respectable to this important post and one who would be less likely to become his hatchet man. Fat chance.
He didn’t name a hatchet man, that’s true. He named a hatchet woman, one of his impeachment defense lawyers and the former Attorney General of Florida, Pam Bondi.
As David Dayen at the American Prospect has reported, her tenure at Florida AG was notorious for her ruthless treatment of Floridians whose homes had been unlawfully foreclosed upon. But America first became acquainted with Bondi during Trump’s first campaign when it was reported that at Florida AG she had dropped out of the class action suit againt the now defunct Trump University after having received a $25,000 check from the (also now defunct) Trump Foundation.
Bondi was an early Trump supporter when he ran for president, eagerly joining him on the campaign trail as one of his most energetic endorsers and making frequent appearances on Fox News. From that moment on she was always hanging around the periphery of Trump World in one way or another.
She gave a singularly unimpressive performance during Trump’s first impeachment trial but turned up later with Rudy Giuliani and his motley crew contesting the election results in 2020. She was in Pennsylvania insisting that “cheating” was going on and was among those who gathered at that historically bizarre press conference at the Four Seasons Landscaping office, which they had evidently mistaken for the Four Seasons Hotel.
Bondi has also made it clear where she stands on the idea of seeking retribution for the indictments against Trump. As far back as 2023 she has said that the prosecutors should be prosecuted:
Coming from a former prosecutor and state Attorney General that’s quite a statement. It’s clear that this sentiment is one of the main reasons Trump has chosen her for the job.
One of her most important tasks will be overseeing the mass deportation program. Trump’s chosen “immigration czar” Tom Homan, who has been tapped to run it, calls her “one hell of an AG” declaring that they plan to prosecute anyone who stands in the way of their plans:
The Washington Post reports that Trump wants to fire all of the DOJ attorneys who worked with the Special Prosecutors office, including the career civil servants which would require some extraordinary actions on the part of the new AG. She seems up for the task.
And that’s not all. According to the Post:
Trump is also planning to assemble investigative teams within the Justice Department to hunt for evidence in battleground states that fraud tainted the 2020 election, one of the people said.
You can bet that Trump’s new Attorney General will not make the mistake that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions made when he recused himself from the Russia investigation even though she clearly should having been involved in his attempt to overturn the election. She’s no doubt as eager to prove the Big Lie as he is. (If she isn’t Trump will not be happy.)
Bondi is the perfect Trump choice for this particular gig and I’m surprised he didn’t choose her in the first place. She has all the credentials Matt Gaetz didn’t have and will likely be much more competent in her pursuit of Trump’s vengeance agenda. It would be nice to think that she’ll be stopped in the Senate but there’s virtually no chance of that. It will be smooth sailing for her. She’s right out of Central Casting.
Salon
Will the press play ball?
Trumpflation is coming. Better buy your knee pads before Donald Trump’s tariffs kick in after Jan. 20. He’ll expect us all to kowtow, dontcha know.
Greg Sargent’s Daily Blast features Margaret Sullivan, former public editor for The New York Times, regarding Trump’s recent demand that the paper apologize for unspecified bad coverage. “He actually thinks [the Times] should grovel and show submission to him now that he won,” says Sargent. Bad coverage being any story that doesn’t fluff his stuff:
Sargent: I want to read a key part of Trump’s rant about the times. He said, I don’t believe I’ve had a legitimately good story in The New York Times for years, and yet I won in record fashion, the most consequential presidential election in decades. Where is the apology? Now, it wasn’t in record fashion, but either way, Margaret, this neatly captures how Trump understands the media. He actually thinks it should grovel and show submission to him now that he won. I don’t think he accepts on the most basic level that the press’s role is to challenge power. At least he doesn’t accept it when he’s in power. What do you think we can take from that?
Sullivan: In some ways, it’s nothing new. He’s always been very manipulative about the press and he does not understand that the press is there to help citizens hold him accountable. This never entered his mind, or if it has, he’s quickly dismissed it. But yes, he does seem to think that because he won the election and again, of course it has to be put in these superlative and false terms, that therefore, the Times should apologize to him for anything that isn’t what he terms “a good story.” And a good story, of course, is a story that flatters him and makes him look great. We know and your sophisticated listenership here knows that that is not what The New York Times should be doing in any way. He has this thing about, I have a huge mandate here, and everybody needs to get in line and bow. That is worrisome for sure.
What Trump could do to punish journalists is to use the Espionage Act to throw journalists in jail for publishing leaked classified information. He could look to make an example of someone to put the fear of the Orange God into reporters. Sullivan cites the Morning Joe hosts traveling to Mar-a-Lago to make nice with Trump as an example of preemptive submission.
This is what we have to watch for in the Trump 2.0 era as the press tries to cover it:
Sullivan: There’s a strong sense that we don’t want to alienate this huge number of 75 million people in the country who voted for him because we want a big tent. We want all the customers and all the readers and everybody we can get. And we don’t want those people to be alienated by us. That’s the push and pull. And I don’t know how it’s going to play out. The Times made a very strong endorsement of Kamala Harris to their credit. At the same time, some of the coverage of Trump has been very white glove careful. So I guess we’ll see.
I guess we’ll see, indeed.
“Gaslighting of Trumpian proportions”
It’s infuriating. The media narratives post-Nov. 5 focus on what Kamala Harris did wrong in her upbeat, mere three-and-a-half month presidential campaign. What did Democrats do wrong? How did they lose this group, that group, etc. How must they reinvent themeslves after a sufficient period of sackcloth and ashes?
“Democrats Lost Their Base and Their Message,” declares the New York Times’ Nate Cohn. Trump’s reelection means “the end of the Democratic Party as we knew it.”
Really? Millions face violent deportation, Ukrainians face losing their country, Gazans face continued slaughter, and the world faces the collapse of NATO and the rise of fascism American-style because Democrats have a messaging problem? And the 77 million Americans who chose those outcomes (by a “landslide” of 1.6 points)? Their hands are clean?
Mehdi Hasan is not buying it either. He issued this rant against media narratives that Democrats veered too far left:
The ‘moderates’ got *their* candidate in every single election in which the Republicans nominated Trump: 2016 Clinton, 2020 Biden, 2024 Harris… and they lost to Trump two out of three times. And now they’re going to blame *the left* for that? No f*cking way.
“There was nothing left-wing about Harris,” Hasan reminds YouTube.
Clearly, Democrats need to make more inroads in rural America where Republicans eat their lunch.
Democrats need to advertise their accomplishments more. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Tuesday night mentioned how Alaska’s state ferry system will get replacement ferries and on-ship wifi that no one will know arrived because of Joe Biden’s economic policies. Some RW commenter will complain that Joe Biden didn’t give Alaska new ferries, the American taxpayer did. Then he’ll credit Donald Trump with the stimulus checks Congress appropriated to which Trump added his signature.
Democrats’ victories in North Carolina this year came not simply because the GOP slate was so extreme, but because voters are more inclined to trust the Democratic brand with local and state matters than with national ones. That, despite national Democrats’ polices being overwhelmingly popular. Just more popular than federal-level Democrats are.
I hear the regular complaints that the left sat on its collective hands as conservative billionaires consolidated control over the media in the last few decades. Why don’t “our” billionaires fight back? Has anyone asked them?
Vox asks Democrats like Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez where Democrats went wrong (by 1.6 points). She insists, “I think there’s a lot of work to be done on conveying cultural respect and regard for the people that are building our country, that are growing our food, that are keeping the wheels on the bus and conveying that respect sincerely and thinking and listening with curiosity.”
No argument there. Yes, there is a toxic and widening class divide in the country, but given the structure of the Electoral College, bridging the rural-urban divide is perhaps more proximate to Democrats winning back the White House and the Supreme Court.
Blame the notion that Democrats have veered too far left on right-leaning media narratives. But also on Democrats’ failure to recognize that marketing is more effective than messaging.
Americans who chose Trump are not off the hook for what comes next. They need to take a long look into the mirror.
Amazing how prices have suddenly turned around ever since the election and everything is more affordable now, isn’t it?
I guess the whole thing happened in just the last three weeks. We sure didn’t hear about it before November 5th.
Imagine that. I heard on Tv that the TSA says that this Thanksgiving will be the biggest travel day in history. Also, that the top ten travel days in history all took place in 2024.
Dr. David Kessler ran Operation Warp Speed and is a very well known public health expert going all the way back to the George H.W. Bush administration. He is concerned:
I was the Biden administration’s chief science officer during Covid-19. I was co-leader of Operation Warp Speed, which began in Mr. Trump’s first term to accelerate the development of Covid-19 vaccines. I worked on the purchase and rollout of hundreds of millions of vaccines and on developing antiviral treatments. One of my jobs was to assess the trajectory of the virus.
Now I am back at my job teaching at the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. I have been monitoring the spread of bird flu, also known as H5N1, and discussing the situation with colleagues around the country. My concern is growing.
So far, there have been no reports of person-to-person spread of H5N1, though there have been at least 55 confirmed cases of bird flu in humans in the United States, almost entirely among poultry and dairy workers. Those infections are presumed to be primarily the result of contact with animals. In addition, a child in Alameda County in California with minor respiratory symptoms tested positive for H5N1 recently; it is unclear how the child became infected. There are likely other cases out there that are not being diagnosed.
[…]
Here is where matters stand: The most recent risk assessment from the Johns Hopkins Center for Outbreak Response Innovation, issued on Nov. 19, listed the risk of infection to farm workers as high, and the risk of infection to people in contact with affected farm workers and animals as moderate. The Hopkins report said that “while the immediate risk to the general public and health care workers is still currently low, the long-term consequences of continued, uncontrolled transmissions presents a high risk to all populations.”
California has recently seen a significant rise in detections of H5N1 in dairy herds. Experts believe that animals at as many as half the dairy farms in California are infected. That is why it is important to pasteurize milk, which kills the virus. (All milk sold across state lines is pasteurized; 30 states allow the in-state sale of nonpasteurized milk, which is labeled “raw.”) Two states, Colorado and Pennsylvania, have agreed to test pooled milk from all farms before pasteurization to monitor spread. Bulk milk testing should be mandatory in all states with dairy farms to determine the full extent of the infection on these farms and also allow us to contain the virus. As if to underline the importance of such a mandate, bird flu was detected in raw milk bought retail last Thursday from a dairy producer based in Fresno, Calif.
Without mandatory testing, bird flu will continue circulating at farms across the country, which substantially increases the risk that the virus mutates and evolves to allow a human-to-human transmission that will be hard to stop.
There will be no mandatory testing of anything under the Trump administration. Even saying it is like waving a red flag. The word “mandatory” is a curse word, particularly when it comes to pubic health. California will probably do it, if they aren’t already. But this is a big country and this sort of thing can’t be confined to any one state.
No one knows how many mutations will be required to set off human-to- human respiratory spread. That could require many mutations and may never happen. But we could also be just two or three mutations away. If the virus begins to transmit efficiently among humans, it will be very difficult to contain, according to the Johns Hopkins assessment, and “the likelihood of a pandemic is very high.”
The incoming Trump administration needs to be prepared.
That’s not happening. They weren’t prepared the last time and they won’t be this time either, particularly with the new travelling freak show at HHS.
Maybe it won’t happen. But if David Kessler is concerned we should be too.