Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Republicans are at war with America. Do Democrats know?

Democrats are reactive, not proactive. They don’t think outside the box. They built the box.

That’s what provoked an exasperated Anand Giridharadas to tell Ruth Ben-Ghiat in a livestream last Monday, “I just feel so profoundly undefended right now by the well-meaning people [meaning the Democratic Party and people with small D democratic values in “the big powerful press”]. And even more pointedly, “I feel so fucking undefended by these people. Like what are they doing, any of them?”

I watched most of the DNC’s 12-1/2 hour winter meeting days earlier. Most of the speeches were dispiriting. They could have been written 30 years ago. Members said what they what they were expected to say as good lefties, what they learned to say years earlier then stopped learning. However idealistic they started out, by the time many Democrats go from being enthusiastic interns or staffers to institutionalized players, they have imperceptibly “become the kind of politicians people love to hate. And once they achieve power, they’re not leaving. You see that in the faces of those still there after decades.”

Part of that enculturation makes them not only reactive but boring. That’s especially awful in a period in which attention is the coin of the realm. Michael Tomasky hears it from others: “They’re weak. They’re divided. They’re letting themselves get steamrolled.” It’s the wrong headspace for the times:

The truth is simple: Far too many Democrats don’t want to think of themselves as fighters. This is a self-conception that has some deep historical roots; but far more importantly, it’s a potentially self-fulfilling prophecy of passivity that will have grave consequences for tens of millions of Americans, and for the Constitution and the republic, if they don’t get over this fast and come to terms with the reality they are in.

[…]

Movement conservatives had a vanguardist mentality—they were insurrectionists assaulting the liberal establishment’s castle. Newt Gingrich embodied and advanced this outlook more than anyone. The outlook set in train a dynamic that still holds true today: Conservatives are disruptors who constantly question the status quo; liberals are defenders of the existing order.

Boring.

So I ask you: Who’s more interesting to your average person? Disruptors, of course. And who likes the existing order? Practically no one, at any time, ever. Trump and Elon Musk are the biggest disruptors arguably in the entire history of the country. Biden was about as conspicuous an order-defender as exists—and Kamala Harris became such by extension, since vice presidents can’t walk too far outside the footprints left by their presidents. That’s another one of those “established order” rules, by the way.

None of this is about policy, Tomasky writes. Democratic ballot initiatives pass regularly. Democrats themselves are less popular.

Most speeches at the DNC meeting were predictable and stale. There are Democrats in Congress who are exceptions, naturally. The AOCs and Jasmine Crocketts and Max Frosts. They tend to be Millennials or younger and more comfortable on a podcast than behind a lectern. They possess skills necessary to fight a war for attention. For all their experience, the Democrats’ gerontocracy is bringing 20th-century knives to a 21st-century gun fight. Too many learned politics in the 1980s. Even if they could learn new tricks, they’re not the ones to bring it now. People on social media last week asked Chuck Schumer to please not lead chants anymore. It’s a public embarrassment, and he doesn’t know it.

I just don’t even know what to say anymore when I see this kind of stuff. Is it Saturday Night Live or real life? Does anyone really think this is the future of the country? This is the only alternative to Trump’s America? It’s just so depressing. https://t.co/5qJihgREAt

— Tim Ryan (@TimRyan) February 5, 2025

But even Tomasky’s prescription for Democrats reflects his age (64). Remarking on the predations of Project 2025, Tomasky suggests, “How about a weekly press conference, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, bringing the public up to speed on this?” <yawn>

In Idiocracy (2006), an America 500 years into the future has fallen into cultural decline. The president is a former professional wrestler. We’re not there just yet. Ours is a former professional wrestling “owner.” He knows how to capture and hold attention. Democrats hold press conferences.

Musk-Trump and the Project 2025 wrecking crew are waging war on the republic. Some are bent on creating a Christian theocracy. Others mean to extract wealth the way private equity wrings the life out of companies acquired through leveraged buyouts. Others like Musk and Trump are drunk on power and out for revenge.

On this, Tomasky and I agree:

[Democrats] need to think of themselves as going to war, because it’s sure clear that their opponents think this is war. And not for the sake of scoring political points—they need to do it for the sake of the tens of millions of Americans upon whom Trump and MAGA actively want to impose suffering. They are counting on Democrats as never before to fight for their rights and defend our laws. If that can’t rouse them, they’ve forgotten what their job is.

And those Americans feel pretty fucking undefended right now.

Gabe Sherman at Vanity Fair has many contacts in Trump world. He reports on Elon Musk’s crazed rampage in detail and asks whether Trump’s on board:

“Trump is the king on the chessboard and Elon is a bishop. Sometimes the bishop takes the lead,” the Republican said. Plus, it’s useful for Trump if Musk takes political heat. “Trump can let the public hate Elon and Elon doesn’t care. So then Trump can come in and save a few programs and look like the restrained one. He can be ‘Trump the Merciful King.’”

But other Republicans I spoke to said Trump can’t––or won’t––challenge Musk because Trump understands Musk’s unprecedented power. Musk is reportedly worth nearly $400 billion and has more than 216 million followers on X. (Trump has less than half that follower count on X, plus an audience of 8.8 million on Truth Social.)

“How can he say no to Elon?” a former Trump campaign staffer said. “You think he wants to go to war with him?”

It’s ironic that Trump finds himself unable to control Musk, as Musk is doing to Trump what Trump did to the Republican Party. Trump gained control of the GOP by pushing the outer limits of what behavior the GOP would tolerate. Trump’s grip on the MAGA base eventually made it impossible for the establishment to rein him in. Musk has a similar psychic hold over his massive fan base, which gives him significant leverage over Trump. Trump also knows that Musk is willing to out-crazy him.

“Elon is autistic and that scares people. He’s unpredictable and prone to tantrums,” another Trump ally said. (In 2021, while hosting Saturday Night Live, Musk disclosed publicly that he had a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder.)

That said, the longer the “President Musk” memes continue, the more Trump might be motivated to act. It’s been a truism since Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015 that there can only be one star in the Trump show. “Trump has a limit to others getting credit,” a prominent Republican strategist told me. Musk’s falling popularity could also hasten Musk’s defenestration. An Economist/YouGov poll recently found that Musk’s Republican support has dropped 21 points since shortly after Election Day. “Elon is going to blow himself up,” the Trump ally said.

I think we all expected Trump to tire of him before now and he hasn’t so who knows? I do think it gives Trump way too much credit to say that he’s strategically allowing Musk to take the heat so he can be the good guy. There’s no evidence that Trump thinks like that at all. I think it’s far more likely that Trump just doesn’t care much about what Musk is doing and until it causes him a problem he’s happy to let him do it.

Remember, Trump didn’t run on slashing and burning the entire government. He ran on destroying the Deep State which he sees as anyone in the government who isn’t 100% loyal to him personally. He wants vengeance. He wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He wants to make money.

Musk is destroying the government to reorder the way the world is structured for his own benefit. Those aren’t the same things.

Musk knows exactly how to play him:

I think we can see where this is leading: “let them enforce it”

Ever since Justice it was understood that the ultimate interpreter of the executive’s “legitimate power” under the Constitution (specifically Article II) was the Supreme Court. I think we’re about to see that concept contested, which has kept our system more or less stable short of civil war, in a way we’ve never seen. It could be the whole ballgame.

By the way, Elon responded to that tweet:

The gall.

Say it ain’t so…

Somebody made a killing on Trump’s memecoin scam, somebody who obviously knew it was coming. Gosh I wonder who it might be?

The curious trade came a little past 9 p.m. on Jan. 17 — a $1,096,109 bet less than two minutes after the soon-to-be president of the United States posted on his social media account that his family had issued a cryptocurrency called $Trump.

In those first minutes, a crypto wallet with a unique identification code beginning 6QSc2Cx secured a giant load of these new tokens — 5,971,750 of them — at the opening sale price of just 18 cents each, starting a surge in the $Trump price that would soon reach $75 per token.

This early trader, whose identity is not known, walked away with a two-day profit of as much as $109 million, according to an analysis performed for The New York Times.

But the fast profits for early traders, whose names are unknown but some of whom appear to be based in China, came at the expense of a far larger number of slower investors who have cumulatively suffered more than $2 billion in losses after the price of the token crashed.

As of the middle of this week, more than 810,000 wallets had lost money on the bet, according to an examination that the crypto forensics firm Chainalysis performed for The New York Times. The total losses are almost certainly much larger: The data does not include transactions that took place on a series of popular crypto marketplaces that started offering the coin only after its price had already surged.

The price of $Trump hovered around $17 this week, less than a quarter of its $75 peak value.

Whether people made or lost money, it was stellar business for the Trumps. Nearly $100 million in trading fees have flowed to the family and its partners, although most of that has not yet been cashed out, the Chainalysis data shows.

Imagine that. And it’s all perfectly fine, apparently. It’s basically a vanilla Pump and Dump scheme dressed up in techno spin.

I think we’re supposed to feel pity for the victims:

In the days before Mr. Trump was sworn in, Shawn M. Whitson, 40, of Walnut Cove, N.C., owner of a small computer repair business, had celebrated Mr. Trump’s return to the White House. “Today, we take our country back!” Mr. Whitson wrote, with a photo of Mr. Trump, on Inauguration Day. He also expressed hope that $Trump would rise in price.But by the end of January, Mr. Whitson was fed up. “Done with this $Trump crap,” he wrote in a social media posting. Mr. Whitson, reached by The Times on Friday expressed disappointment. “That coin is a joke.”

I can’t say I feel sorry for him. Trump’s schemes are legendary. He should have known better.

How many Trumpers will lose their shirts on this one and come back for more?

Last week, Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Mr. Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, announced that it was moving into the financial services industry by creating a brand known as TruthFi that will offer investment products tied to Bitcoin.

Trump Media’s chief executive, Devin Nunes, called the offerings “a competitive alternative to the woke funds and debanking problems that you find throughout the market.”

He’s a barrel of laughs

He’s a real comedian:

Prince Harry can breathe freely in Montecito, because President Donald Trump has ruled out deporting the self-exiled British royal.

Harry’s immigration status is the subject of litigation in Washington DC, with the Heritage Foundation alleging that he may have concealed past illegal drug use that should have disqualified him from obtaining a US visa.

But the president told The New York Post Friday that he isn’t interested in throwing Harry out of the country.

“I don’t want to do that,” he said.

“I’ll leave him alone. He’s got enough problems with his wife. She’s terrible.”

If there was ever a reason for Harry to mend fences with his family this is it. I know Ted Cruz’s ilk are fine with the president of the United States crudely insuring their wives but there’s not reason for Harry to put up with it.

This is the schoolboy bully part of Trump that the right just loves which says everything about them. Look at the way they celebrated:

I didn’t realize they were thinking of deporting Harry over his past drug use. But Elon Musk using every drug in sight is just fine. GTK.

Just as awful as they ever were

Bill Cohen at Puck surveyed some of the Masters of the Universe about Trump’s first moves and they are fine with it. Who are these jerks?

One Wall Street executive, who almost went to work for Trump this time around, artfully told me that the president was simply using the Oval Office and the media as his bully pulpit, itself a form of performance art. “Bullies love to see people cower in fear,” he said. “Why be a bully if you can’t do that? So how much of this is just, ‘Justin Trudeau, I’m gonna fuck with him,’ or ‘Mexico didn’t really do shit to stop immigration, time for them to shit their pants a little bit. Let’s get a reset’?”

A former Wall Streeter who did a stint in Washington described the first two weeks of Trump II as “a giant blender” of “fog and chaos” stirred up to distract people from three of Trump’s near-term goals: getting his “idiot cabinet picks” through the Senate; positioning Russ Vought, Trump’s pick to head the O.M.B., to “take the shit out of the budget”; and getting congressional approval for the extension of the about-to-expire Trump I tax cuts. And, he said, Wall Street is on board. “[The tax cut extension] is what they really want,” he explained. “Until he can’t do that, they’re perfectly happy to back him and focus on the things that warm their hearts, like shutting USAID. But if this goes on too long and/or the stock market goes down, they’re not going to be so pleased.”

Oh really? What a great group of guys. They’re also as puerile and idiotic as Trump and Musk:

Wall Street doesn’t like or want tariffs, per se—“There are only losers with tariffs,” the banker said—but many accept them as part of the price of doing business with Trump. Indeed, many machers preferred Trump II over Biden or Kamala Harris. “To me, it was a prisoner’s dilemma,” this person continued before articulating the internal monologue in the highest ranks of the banking industry. “We had an anti-business Biden opportunity, or a pro-business Trump, who may put tariffs on, or may not. But if he puts them on and he realizes they’re bad, he may take them off within 24 hours. So they said, ‘We’d rather deal with Donald Trump because he’ll take our phone calls and we can tell him how bad these are, whereas Joe Biden won’t take our phone calls.’ Corporate America felt like we could sway Trump. We could get to him, and convince him that these tariffs are wrong.” 

In fact, other than the blanket pardons for the January 6 offenders, and Trump’s press conference where he blamed the fatal helicopter-jet collision near the Potomac on D.E.I., the donor class on Wall Street is generally happy with Trump II, according to this banker, a reality that much of the media still refuses to comprehend. “There are very good reasons to criticize D.E.I., but in this context, it’s a little insane,” he said, referring to Trump’s post-crash commentary. “And insulting and in bad taste.” On the other hand, he continued, “everyone is thrilled” that the “apple cart” at USAID is getting turned over and that people are seeing who is getting paid what from the Treasury—“sort of all that DOGE stuff,” he said, which Wall Street types are giving “a standing ovation.”

Uh, that is not a prisoner’s dilemma. He must have been high on Adderall and Ayahuasca on the day they taught that at the Wharton School of Business. How much do you want to bet he’s the same guy who celebrated because he can now say the word “pussy” in the workplace again?

It’s not about money anymore:

But given the largely foreseeable chaos of the past few weeks, was there anything else that motivated the Wall Street donor class to lean so heavily into Trump last November, I wondered? “They don’t think being rich is enough,” one of my sources told me. “They think they need to be venerated for being rich, and Biden didn’t venerate them for being rich. The idea that wealth equals merit tends to be appealing to the wealthy. They want wealth accumulation to be seen as making them like Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci. These guys are trying to be Averell Harriman, but they’re going to end up being Bebe Rebozo.”

I think this is obviously right. Recall that after the financial crisis they were all whining like 5 year olds about being criticized for destroying the economy. At heart they’re all whiny little bitches.

Trump is one of those guys. He’s desperate to be loved and actually is by millions of people, cementing his grandiose delusions about himself and his personal power. Musk, on the other hand, has a slightly different need. He’s an edgelord, defined as “a person who affects a provocative or extreme persona, especially online — ‘edgelords act like contrarians in the hope that everyone will admire them as rebels.'” In another life, he could have been a mass shooter. I suspect more of those Wall St guys are like Musk than Trump — overgrown adolescent bullies.

We really have to do something about these people. We let it go way too far and now it may destroy us all.

Pizzagate for Trump 2.0

Why Elon Musk’s 20-something vandals aren’t tagging federal buildings the way male dogs mark trees is a mystery. A major goal of the DOGE effort is to publicly demonstrate who’s in charge.

Donald Trump still thinks he is.

“It’s good to be the king,” said Mel Brooks as the king of France in History of the World, Part 1. Donald Trump thinks so too. He pretended to be a successful business tycoon on TV. Now he’s pretending to be king. As powerful as Trump’s job is, he’s still just the president.

The question is for how long? Trump has conferred on oligarch Elon Musk authorities the presidency does not have. Plus, Trump has been too busy playing king to have figured out he’s empowered Musk to usurp the presidency while he’s out ransacking Washington, D.C.

It is clear that the Muskovites are bludgeoning anything and everything they perceive as left of center. It is also clear that they have little idea how government actually works and no regard for rule-following. They approach their federal targets with the kind of conspiracy mindset that spawned Pizzagate. (They’ll be searching sub-basements for evidence of child sacrifice soon enough.)

Musk’s behavior recalls another character who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know:

“America is the greatest country ever invented to be completely out of your mind,” Charlie Pierce wrote in 2015. Pierce was reacting to Ben Carson’s crank theories about the pyramids.

When Erich von Daniken’s “Chariots of the Gods?” was a best-seller (speaking of pyramids), Johnny Carson asked a NASA astronaut what he thought of von Daniken’s theories about aliens influencing human history. After a pause, the astronaut replied that when von Daniken looks around the world and sees something he doesn’t understand, he attributes it to aliens. And since there’s a lot in this world von Daniken doesn’t understand, he finds them everywhere.

Elon Musk is as childlike and tantrum-prone as the president he just purchased. So Muskovites are slashing and burning with abandon everything they don’t understand, especially anything that smells like order.

Subtlety is not something they grasp. Like USAID as a projection of U.S. soft power.

The Washington Post explains what the strength-obsessed Trump and his Muskovites do not seem to grasp about their freezing U.S. foreign aid:

Without U.S. support, humanitarian experts warn that already precarious global aid efforts could collapse, putting millions of lives at risk. Some former government officials said the sudden changes would undercut U.S. foreign policy and national security.

“We are not only less safe, but we have abandoned people all over the world,” said Brittany Brown, a former USAID official.

On Wednesday, Trump’s former USAID counselor Chris Mulligan condemned the funding pause. “Every minute that assistance is frozen weakens America, makes us less secure and costs us jobs,” he said.

U.S. foreign aid builds relationships. stems famines (that drive migration?), feeds red-state farm families by paying them for food sent as aid, and keeps competitor states at bay, etc. Not that the Muskovites stopped to ask.

A counter-movement is forming

A physician friend just yesterday asked me where her donations would have the most impact for stopping Musk-Trump. She was thinking of a couple of nationally known nonprofits. I didn’t have an answer but said I would try to get her one. There are likely many more of you who would send cash to fight the Muskovites if you knew best where to send it.

Here are two lists of pending court cases against the Musk-Trump self-coup:

Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions (Just Security)
Lawsuits Related to Trump Admin Executive Orders (Court Watch)

But the two long lists of court cases linked above are a diverse mix of governments not set up for directed donations and private groups that may be. The name-brand nonprofits my friend mentioned are not among them. There are too many NGOs, and it’s hard to know where to focus fire.

Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) spotlighted several groups involved in just one of the lawsuits launched against against the Muskovites, but also key players like Democracy Forward fighting behind the scenes:

Democracy Forward is part of a group, Democracy 2025, formed last year to challenge Trump’s assault on democracy.

So the plaintiffs are here because they have standing and because they’ll be able to tell compelling stories about the injury they’ve suffered. Democracy Forward will be doing the heavy lifting of fighting this legally.

One reason I’m making this point is to emphasize the import of civil society, including groups that have been preparing for these legal challenges for months. As I and others have pointed out, the battle over fascism often centers on the battle over pre-existing networks of civil society, networks that often are not themselves political.

And sustain or build your networks. Not just your political networks, the folks with whom you’ve worked to try to elect Kamala Harris or restore reproductive rights. But your other networks, too. Sometimes, after fascists break political networks, it’s the choirs or the knitting clubs where civic discourse can regrow.

The very first thing authoritarians try to break are the networks of civil society, because isolated people are easier to terrify. So make sure yours are as strong as they can be before the wrecking crew comes.

Here, civil society stood up, asserted its membership in a society linking small businesses in rural communities to aging LGBTQ people, and succeeded, for now, in pausing Trump’s attack on parts of civil society that Russ Vought and Acting OMB Director Matthew Vaeth are attacking.

In those moments you’re feeling particularly helpless, you might focus your energy on shoring up the strength of civil society within your own local community, even if it’s no more than the knitting club.

Self care is going to be important to keep from burning out.

I read and post for maybe four hours each morning. Then I go to half a dozen social media sites to punch back against the failed Republican candidate and his attorneys who are in court trying to steal a state Supreme Court seat they lost to incumbent Justice Allison Riggs, the Democrat. After that, I spend several miles walking it off. The end of the cold snap that kept me inside for weeks means a reduction in my stress level.

Manage yours as best you can. Send money. I’ve got to text my friend.

(h/t DJ, MW)

How ’bout them eggs, MAGA?

Oh heck, look at this:

The Trump bump in consumer confidence is already over. 

Tariff threats, stock market swings and rapidly reversing executive orders are causing Americans across the political spectrum to feel considerably more pessimistic about the economy than they did before President Trump took office. 

Consumer sentiment fell about 5% in the University of Michigan’s preliminary February survey of consumers to its lowest reading since July 2024. Expectations of inflation in the year ahead jumped from 3.3% in January to 4.3%, the second month in a row of large increases and highest reading since November 2023. 

“It’s very rare to see a full percentage point jump in inflation expectations,” said Joanne Hsu, who oversees the survey. Republicans have come off a postelection surge in confidence, she said, and Democrats and Independents also seem to believe that economic conditions have deteriorated since last month. 

Morning Consult’s recent index of consumer confidence, too, fell between Jan. 25 and Feb. 3, driven primarily by concern over the country’s economic future. 

“I don’t like the turbulence. I don’t like the chaos in the market,” said Paul Bisson, a 58-year-old, who writes proposals for a flight safety company and co-owns a dog daycare in San Antonio. Bisson voted for Trump, but feels “his policies have led to that chaos.” 

Bisson is hoping to retire in the not-too-distant future, and is worried that won’t be possible if Trump follows through with his tariff threats rather than just using them as a negotiating tactic. 

“That will make the economy worse, and that’s not what we signed up for.”

Yes it is what you signed up for you moron. He said tariffs were his favorite word in the English language! He talked about them incessantly! They aren’t a negotiating tactic as we just found out when he backed down once Canada and Mexico told him they agree to do what they’d already planned to do before he became president. He just likes to throw his weight around and, in his mind, they’re a way to make the country rich like it was in the 1890s. Whether he follows through on any of them time will tell but you can bet he’ll be issuing more threats and causing more turmoil in any case.

If these people like Trump and voted for him because he owns the libs (which is the real reason they like him) they should just admit it. Saying they didn’t sign up for him to wreck the economy is ridiculous. That’s exactly what they signed up for — and much, much worse. he didn’t try to hide it.