Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

He’s itching to do it

The Republicans in Congress are also very, very thirsty for a shooting war. Normally, they’d be agitating for something in the middle east, maybe China, maybe even Ukraine. But since Trump took over they have to pretend that they’re pacifist isolationists. So Mexico it is, at least at first. I wrote about this earlier, based on a lot of reporting by Rolling Stone. They are taking about a “soft invasion” in which they drop in Special Forces to “take out” the leaders of the cartels. (The other option is an actual invasion force at the border.)

They just published an update:

Rolling Stone talked to half a dozen former special operations soldiers and intelligence agents to see what this saber-rattling might look like in practice. On paper, they argued it was an easy operation to dismantle the cartel leadership, something that our military — particularly units like SEAL Team Six and Delta Force — has mastered after two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. To a man, all said they’d volunteer for the mission.

But Carolyn Gallaher, a professor studying guerrilla and paramilitary violence at American University’s School of International Service, calls the idea folly. She researched cooperation between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement in the mid-2000s and says one takeaway from the Mexicans was that it was a mistake to target cartel leaders.

“All you do is create a succession crisis,” she says. “And a succession crisis in a drug cartel looks different than a succession crisis in, like, [Rupert] Murdoch’s empire, right? It’s basically settled with violence.”

Case in point: After Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a longtime leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, was taken into custody in July, rival factions have been clashing in the state of Sinaloa.

Trump’s proposal is doubling down on a failed strategy, Gallaher says.“You have to go back and think of a new strategy,” Gallaher tells me. “And going and killing capos is not only not a new strategy, but it is the most failed part of the strategy on both sides of the border.”

Mexico has already said it will not accept an “invasion” by U.S. forces, with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum describing the strategy as “entirely a movie.”

RS quotes a former Green Beret saying that this is the only way to defeat the cartels and that the Mexican government would be on board in back channels. Ok.

Plans presented to Trump have included airstrikes on cartel infrastructure, assassinating cartel leaders, and training Mexican forces, Rolling Stone reported. The scheme would most likely include covert operations and patrols just over the border to stem the flow of drugs across the frontier.

“That sounds a whole lot like what we did in Afghanistan for 20 years unsuccessfully,” says a former Marine officer who worked with special operations in Afghanistan.

The former Marine officer says the Hollywood part is attractive, pointing to Harrison Ford’s Clear and Present Danger as a movie that tickles the imagination.

“Who doesn’t want to throw a satchel charge into an underground drug lab?” he says, laughing. “That’s super sexy stuff that we sign up to do. But if you’re going to door-kick, you know what people forget is that gunfighting ultimately comes down to guns in the fight.”

Some experts say that cartels are actually very competent paramilitaries saying, “such a move would not just force the American military into another quagmire; it would drop them into a morass up to their metaphorical waist.” Others pooh-pooh this notion insisting that they are no match for US Special Forces.

I really felt like I was in the middle of a Hollywood studio pitch meeting as I was reading this. It’s absurd. Regardless of the relative competence of cartels and Special Forces, the consequences of these operations could be extremely dire:

The real fear is that the violence wouldn’t stay confined to south of the border. A Green Beret-turned-CIA operator says past administrations considered using CIA Ground Branch — hybrid intelligence agents and commandos usually made up of former special operations soldiers — to combat the cartels, but the fear of cartel retribution against the operators and their families in the U.S. made it too risky. But the bigger danger could be to the estimated 1.6 million U.S. citizens living in Mexico, All Source News tells me.

Americans in Mexico as targets for terror campaigns?” asks All Source News.

There are a LOT of Americans living and working in Mexico. To think they wouldn’t go this way is insane. But I suppose the Trump administration probably thinks they get what they ask for if they live in a shithole country.

Apparently, most of the special forces people argue for a Plan Columbia type of operation which is based upon cooperation with the government and working through the local security forces, not dropping Rambo into the country to mow down cartel leaders. It’s a very expensive operation and would take a long time and I suspect Trump just wants some exciting video and the chance to thump his chest so anything covert is unlikely to be on his agenda.

RS concludes by pointing out that we should know by now that our desire to shoot out way to a quick victory is a fools game:

“If it’s to kill the cartel, how do you know when you’ve accomplished the mission?” the former Marine officer says. “What’s the metric that these people are going to use that says, oh yeah, we’ve achieved a victory? We’re not fighting an army. We’re fighting poverty. Let’s fight desperation. Let’s fight hopelessness.”

That starts with determining an end state — something the United States didn’t do during its last foreign adventures.

The country’s longest Forever War isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s the War on Drugs and it looks as though Trump and his cronies are intent upon turning it into a hot war. This is very bad news.

Chief Justice John Roberts is mad as a hornet about all the criticism:

Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday blasted what he called “illegitimate activity” aimed at undermining the independence of the judiciary.

While facing criticism of contentious court rulings is part of the job for judges, some recent actions have crossed the line, Roberts said in his annual end-of-year report.

He outlined four areas of concern: violence, intimidation, disinformation and threats to defy court judgments.

All four “undermine our Republic, and are wholly unacceptable,” Roberts wrote.

It’s pretty clear from the report that what he’s really angry about is the criticism that some of the Justices are corrupt and partisan. But it’s also highly unlikely that he’s talking about Trump who calls them every name in the book if they rule in a way he doesn’t ‘t like. Perhaps that explains this:

When we say that Trump “won” this election, it should always have an asterisk – because his candidacy would never have been viable if not for the shameless, repeated, illegitimate interventions by MAGA-aligned, Federalist Society-approved justices on the Supreme Court and the federal bench. In any other country, we would understand those interventions as part of an autocratic takeover, not a democratic victory.

These interventions include cases from before Trump’s time that were designed to empower Republicans and the ultra-wealthy, and that laid the groundwork for the MAGA blitzkrieg against our democracy.

These charts helped make clear the egregiousness of the abuses.

As the following chart makes clear, in the last two years:

• Every time he has faced a grand jury, Trump has been indicted;
• Every time he has faced a trial jury, Trump has been found guilty;
• Every time his cases have come before judges he didn’t appoint, including those appointed by previous Republican presidents, Trump has lost;
• Whenever surveys have asked, a majority of Americans say Trump has committed crimes;
• But every time he has come before the justices and judges he appointed, Trump has had his way.

He actually claims in his report that they have absolutely no political bias.

As recently as 2000, three quarters of Americans approved of the Supreme Court. Even more remarkably, there was no partisan divide; Democrats and Republicans were nearly equally approving. But, in stair steps since then, approval has plummeted, dipping below fifty percent. Unsurprisingly, though, the Court has retained its credibility with Republican voters – while plummeting to historic lows with Democrats and Independents.

As I explained in “Tipping the Scales: The MAGA Justices Have Already Interfered with the 2024 Elections” and “Breaking the Law: Trump Is the Means, Not the End,” Roberts stands alone in bringing no one outside of his ipse dixit majority along for any of his most significant rulings.

Those are excerpts from a superb post from Michael Podhorzer and he makes quite a case that the Supremes are at the heart of our problem with democracy. It’s well worth reading.

Roberts’ whiny screed really is beneath him. He has a huge problem with credibility and corruption on the Court and all he could do is complain that the people are being mean to them. Obviously, there’s no room for violence and intimidation. But the Court is behaving in ways that are inviting distrust and disdain. He needs to clean his own house.

This is terrifying:

This is even more terrifying:

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was one of President Joe Biden’s chief legislative victories and the largest investment to fight the climate crisis in U.S. history. Trump and congressional Republicans have taken aim at the law to unwind much of Biden’s legacy and spur domestic fossil fuel production.

Among the moves that could raise revenue: revoking the law’s $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit, new vehicle emissions rules and other incentives for clean energy production. Trump and the GOP could also green-light a major expansion of energy production on protected federal lands. Together, the CRFB projected, that could produce $700 billion in cost savings and new revenue over the next decade.

One step forward two steps back. It’s a terrible, terrible mistake but I’m fairly sure this will be a priority.

More infighting in MAGAworld:

Billionaire Trump surrogate Elon Musk defended his decision to strip critics of their ability to monetize content on X after cracking down on dissent on the social network.

Responding to a supporter who defended “people getting demonetized for their inexcusable behavior,” Musk declared, “Exactly. The first amendment is protection for ‘free speech’, not ‘paid speech’ ffs.”

He demonetized people who criticized him specifically. I don’t know why anyone would be too surprised by that. He’s essentially an employer of people making money on X and employers have every right to muzzle speech on the job. Of course he did that. All you have to do is read his Twitter feed to see what an onanistic, self-indulgent, narcissist he is.

In any case, his “free speech” crusade is very contingent on whose speech should be protected, not what or where. He likes to have it both ways. He argued that Twitter should not be in the business of censoring people at all — that it’s something of a town square — when it applied to Donald Trump or extremists he believed should have been allowed to post disinformation during the pandemic. But he also exercises his prerogative as an owner to censor (suspend)and demonetize people who criticize him personally. It’s all about his whims.

I’m a little bit curious about what Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and authors Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig and Alex Berensons have to say about all this. They wrote the so-called investigation of the infamous “Twitter files” alleging that the service censored people during the Trump administration. I haven’t heard a word about any of this from them. Odd.

Fuentes is one of the top white supremacists on the site. He wasn’t censored. His racist views aren’t a problem. But he has defended some of his groyper buddies who criticized Musk’s immigration views.

Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at the Yale Budget Lab who in March wrapped up a three-year stint on the White House Council of Economic Advisers was asked by Business Insider, “was the “vibecession” fake?  He replied:

  “The short answer is no. The vibecession was not fake. The long answer is no, but … ,” he said. Perceptions of the economy have to do with more than the economy itself. That doesn’t mean that people were lying or that their answers didn’t have some real economic motivation, but there’s clearly more to it than the material conditions in front of them — it’s also about their ideological leanings and how that shapes what they believe is ahead.”Perceptions of the economy are definitely deeply partisan,” Tedeschi said.

That’s right. Republicans are now very rosy on the economy and Democrats are gloomy (although the GOP voters’ abrupt switch is far more dramatic.) BI continues:

It’s easy to say the shift in sentiment is partisan flag-waving — now that Donald Trump is headed to the White House, Republicans are going to say everything’s great, and to the Democrats, it’s all terrible. But that’s not really what’s happening, said Joanne Hsu, the director of consumer surveys at the University of Michigan. When people say their expectations are better or worse, it’s not simply the outcome of the election they’re responding to but the policies they believe are on the horizon.

“With the election of Trump, people have an idea of how economic policy might change over the next year and over the next four years. So people are expecting tariffs. They’re expecting action on immigration,” Hsu said. “The thing is that people across the population really disagree on whether or not these policy changes are a good thing or a bad thing for the economy.”

Democrats are worried that Trump’s threatened tariffs and promise to undertake mass-deportation efforts will make things pricier. Republicans, on the other hand, think that these policies will be good for the economy and that Trump will help bring down inflation. Independents, Hsu said, are in the middle.

Democrats beliefs are shaped by economic experts who are evaluating the policies based upon empirical evidence and history while Republicans are basing their beliefs on a shared worship of their cult leader they erroneously believe is a self-made businessman when he is actually a spoiled heir to a fortune he squandered and then created a fake image on reality TV.

But sure, both sides…

Businesses don’t love the idea of tariffs, but many are hopeful that there are ways they can get around them or that the president-elect isn’t so serious about them. Or they just plan to pass along any price increases to consumers anyway. (There may be some amount of denial going on among corporate executives and Wall Street investors, all of whom seem to be ignoring some of the potential downsides of Trump’s policy promises and the instability he could represent.)

Ya think?

No, they’re excited about their tax cuts and deregulation and very likely the fact that they can gouge their customers with tariff rationales if they are enacted. Whatever works.

The Real American MAGAs will pay, one way or another, but they’re fine with that. After all, these are people who happily send their life savings to a billionaire.

I don’t mean to sound hopeless. I’m really to the point that I’m just hoping Trump can be stopped from doing his worst even if he pretends he’s hugely successful. I keep my fingers crossed that world events don’t catapult out of control and that we get out of this without a catastrophe like the COVID pandemic or war. That’s about it.

Right now, we just need to survive this with as little damage as possible. It’s a huge lift but it can be done.

I don’t know what comes after him, but I don’t think anyone has quite the constellation of talents and flaws that Trump does so there’s little point in anticipating Trumpism as an ongoing political force. It will be something different.

Not Gonna Happen

To quote Joey from Blossom, "Whoa!"…

We're underselling the smallness of the new GOP House majority. It won’t be the smallest since 1931. Due to vacancies, it will be the smallest at the start of a 1st session since at least 1917!

Johnson's speakership is very precarious. pic.twitter.com/l9cwpVLxGu

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) January 2, 2025

Trump has a tremendous amount of power as the executive (some of it still subject to judicial interpretation.) But anything he wants to do that requires Congress is going to be an extremely heavy lift. Notus reports:

But as Republicans try to shake off a close call with a government shutdown and prepare for Donald Trump’s first 100 days, lawmakers are starting to grapple with a simple reality: They may not be able to do much of anything.

“They can’t even extend government funding,” a frustrated Sen. Josh Hawley told NOTUS in December, as the House GOP nearly imploded over a stopgap spending bill. “They’re going to do this all over again in March. There’s a debt ceiling fight coming up,” he said. “Good luck.”

Before Trump even takes office on Jan. 20, House Republicans must elect a speaker — a delicate, historically difficult task given the mutiny currently on Mike Johnson’s hands. Republicans then had to agree to a rules package, which was released on Wednesday. Those rules are rife with potential trip wires, like the nine members required to hold a vote to oust a speaker, and are already under negotiation as Johnson tries to secure the votes he needs for the speakership.

That’s just the beginning. In the first hundred days, Trump wants to confirm his rogues gallery of unqualified, dangerous miscreants to the cabinet, they want an expensive, draconian immigration package to fund mass deportation, drill baby drill and a huge increase in defense spending all done through reconciliation.

Or maybe Republicans plan to first do a tax bill through reconciliation. Or maybe they plan to do just one reconciliation bill for the whole lot. There hasn’t been clarity on the plan, but there’s already a lot of debate.

The continuing resolution expires on March 15th and they will have to negotiate some kind of budget to fund the government for the rest of the year. Maybe.

Throughout those early days, Republicans and Democrats will also be negotiating a larger spending package to carry the government through the rest of the fiscal year, until October. They will likely need Democratic votes for that but it doesn’t look good, especially if Trump lets ELON and Vivek play with their toys. There could easily be a government shutdown in the first 100 days.

They wanted destruction and they may get it. I hope the elected Republicans understand that they’ve entered into a career suicide pact.

Chuck Schumer weighs in on DNC chair race

This is new (Politico):

Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer is endorsing Ben Wikler to lead the Democratic National Committee, a boost for the Wisconsin state party leader in a race that has drawn little attention and few big names.

Schumer’s endorsement — shared first with POLITICO — comes as Democrats prepare for a month-long campaign to run the DNC, with four candidate forums in January. Following the party’s bruising losses in November, members of the committee will elect their new chair on Feb. 1.

Schumer, the most prominent Democrat so far to weigh in publicly on the race, called Wikler a “tenacious organizer,” a “proven fundraiser” and a “sharp communicator” in a statement. He emphasized Wikler’s work in 2024, when Democrats in Wisconsin held on to their Senate seat and flipped 14 state legislative seats, even though Kamala Harris did not win the state.

“Ben has what Democrats need right now — proven results — and that’s why I’m backing Ben,” Schumer said.

Kudos to Wikler, 43, who I met in 2019. But the Democratic Party needs more than a solid field guy running the DNC.

There is a serious discusssion going on among friends about decades-old narratives deeply embedded in people’s preceptions of the country, their place in it, what Democrats have to offer, and whether people can even hear that offer, however well-crafted, amid the din of what early bloggers once called the right’s Mighty Wurlitzer. That’s a long-term challenge not easily addressed by swapping out personnel.

(Still, I can think of more than a few personnel I’d like to see Democrats swap out on Capitol Hill.)

After stinging losses like Democrats experienced in November, the finger-pointing and plethora of hot takes on what Democrats did wrong obscures what (and where) Democrats did right. That’s where Wisconsin comes in, as Peter Slevin writes at The New Yorker. “How Much Do Democrats Need To Change?” reads the headline. Not that much, if they emulate Wisconsin (or North Carolina, I’d argue; emphasis mine):

The mood among Democrats on a December morning in the Wisconsin state capitol was celebratory. Ten Assembly candidates—among them a school administrator, a tavern owner, an accountant, and a county politician—had flipped Republican seats after the state Supreme Court threw out a heavily gerrymandered map. “I am super excited. Who else is super excited?” Representative Lisa Subeck, the caucus chair, said. Some of the newly elected spoke about what they hope to deliver: affordable housing, broadband, clean energy, and more money for public schools. One said he wants to show “that government can be a force for good.”

In addition to the Assembly candidates, four Democratic state Senate candidates won Republican-held seats. Though the G.O.P. still controlled the state legislature, its margins narrowed significantly. Further up the ticket, Senator Tammy Baldwin, a widely liked Democrat, won a third term. Though Kamala Harris lost her Presidential bid, the popular vote, and seven swing states to Donald Trump, the message—even in Wisconsin, which Harris lost—is not so straightforward. The same is true in North Carolina, where Harris was defeated by Trump but Democrats swept the other six statewide races. Of the five battleground states where a Senate race was on the ballot, Democrats won four, losing only Pennsylvania’s, and that one by a mere fifteen thousand votes, or 0.2 per cent. Looked at another way: Donald Trump won the national popular vote, but if one hundred and fifteen thousand of the eight million Trump voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania had voted instead for Harris, she would be headed to the White House.

“I’m not setting fire to any playbooks around here,” says Ryan Spaude, 30. He flipped a Republican-held seat near Green Bay. “We nudged this district to the left on a day when the whole country was moving to the right,” adding that an idological pivot is not what’s needed.

“Just tell working folks how you’re going get more money in their pockets,” says Ryan Spaude. Telling working folks is the rub. Democrats have no billionaire owned and funded Wurlitzer.

Rebecca Cooke who lost her bid for WI-3 by three points thinks national Democrats have a branding problem. If so, it is among their problems.

Organizer Bill Hogseth thinks branding is not it exactly:

What struck him most as he knocked on doors this year was how few voters even mentioned the Presidential race. “I can count on my hand the times where I heard people say, ‘Well, hopefully So-and-So gets elected and then this will change,’ ” he told me. “More often than not, it was, ‘Something needs to happen in my local community,’ ‘We need to take on the landlords,’ or ‘There needs to be rent control.’ ”

Wikler’s influence and staffing a year-round organizing effort has been what’s pivotal.

Donald Trump plans to upend government within hours of his inauguration. He’ll pardon Jan. 6th convicts and arrestees and launch a deportaion program that will besmirch whatever positive brand America has left in the world.

That will be followed by a raft of other combative moves, including a Republican attempt to extend the 2017 tax cuts that favored corporations and the wealthy. As Wikler put it, “We’re about to have a big defining battle that gives us a chance to show who we are.”

Same-old at the DNC won’t cut it. Even Schumer seems to understand that. There is too much focus on what Democrats (Harris) might have done wrong in an otherwise impressive short-schedule campaign, and too little being learned from states where things went right and why.

Coincidences or not?

As authorities investigate Wednesday’s New Orleans truck attack on Bourbon Street and the Cybertruck explosion in front of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, one odd detail links the two. Or doesn’t. Both vehicles were rented using the peer-to-peer rental app, Turo.

Axios reports that Clark County/Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Sheriff Kevin McMahill said “there was no immediate indication of a connection between the two events, but ‘we are investigating every aspect of this.’ “

The New York Times reports:

The owner of the Ford pickup truck used in New Orleans recognized his vehicle when he saw footage showing the truck and license plate on the news. He had rented the truck to a 42-year-old Army veteran who then used it to ram into crowds on Bourbon Street, killing at least 15 people and injuring dozens more.

[…]

In Las Vegas, the police said during a news conference that the Tesla Cybertruck that exploded outside the Trump Hotel’s lobby entrance, killing one and injuring at least seven others, was also rented from Turo. Officials called it a “coincidence” and said they were continuing to investigate any possible connections.

The driver in the New Orleans attack, identified as Texas-born Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was killed in a shootout with police.

In another blurb from The New York Times:

The Army veteran who rammed a pickup into New Year’s revelers on Bourbon Street was “inspired by” the Islamic State terrorist organization, President Biden said Wednesday night in a short address from Camp David. In videos posted to social media shortly before the attack in New Orleans that killed at least 15, the man indicated that he had a “desire to kill,” Mr. Biden said.

Elon Musk and Tesla are issuing statements and doing spin control, as is Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization.

Turo issued a statement saying, “We do not believe that either renter involved in the Las Vegas and New Orleans attacks had a criminal background that would have identified them as a security threat.” The company is cooperating with the FBI on the New Orleans investigation, reports the Associated Press.

That’s two coincidences

A Colorado man rented the Cybertruck and drove it to Las Vegas. Police were still working on extracting the body late Wednesday. Like Shamsud-Din Jabbar, Matthew Livelsberger of Colorado Springs was an Army veteran. He was 37.

Denver7 fills in some details:

The driver of the Tesla Cybertruck that exploded in front of a Las Vegas hotel on New Year’s Day has been identified as an Army veteran who lived in Colorado Springs, multiple informed sources told Denver7 Investigates.

Those sources tell Denver7 the driver was Matthew Livelsberger, who has multiple Colorado Springs addresses associated to him. FBI agents were staking out one of those addresses on Marksheffel Road late Wednesday awaiting a search warrant.

Make that three coincidences

Denver7 adds this:

Late Wednesday, Denver7 Investigates learned that Livelsberger served at the same Army base as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the suspect in a New Orleans truck rampage hours earlier.

A lot of people serve in the Army. There is no reporting that Shamsud-Din Jabbar and Matthew Livelsberger served at the same base at the same time. Authorities and reporters are scouring the men’s social media accounts for evidence of motive and/or radicalization.

Newsweek:

Jeremy Schwartz, acting FBI Special Agent in Charge for the Las Vegas office, at a news conference: “I know you have a lot of questions.”

“We don’t have a lot of answers,” he added.

If you were going to choose a metaphor for our current state of politics, a Tesla Cybertruck exploding and burning in front of a Trump Tower in a city where millions of Americans go each year to lose their money, is pretty spot on.
pic.twitter.com/xOwXImUIgM

— Melanie D'Arrigo (@DarrigoMelanie) January 1, 2025

ABC News:

Authorities are investigating a Tesla Cybertruck explosion on Wednesday outside the Trump Las Vegas hotel in Nevada as a possible act of terror.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said it was investigating a fire at the entrance to the tower. The public was told to avoid the area, though the police noted the fire had been put out.

The driver pulled into the valet area of the hotel and the vehicle exploded, according to an official. The driver is apparently dead and, so far, the only casualty from the incident. Seven bystanders had minor injuries, authorities said.

Investigators do not know what caused the blast, such as whether something was wrong with the vehicle or whether something external prompted it. Determining what was behind the explosion is the key focus of the probe.

An official briefed on the probe told ABC News that the Tesla Cybertruck had a load of fireworks-style mortars onboard. Investigators are urgently working to determine a motive and whether the driver intended to set off an explosion and why.

You CANNOT make this shit up.

Will they finally catch on?

I keep saying that reality is going to bite Trump eventually. I refuse to believe that his con game isn’t going to catch up with him and I don’t think for a moment that he’s got some kind of magic that transcends all reason. He’s a very lucky guy who happened into the political world at a time when celebrity, social media and right wing propaganda outlets were ascendant in our society and he exploited it like the grifter he is. But the cult he built is like all cults — it’s strong until it isn’t. And its strength is about to be tested.

The New Republic’s Robert McCoy took a look at the weird phenomenon as well as the possible reckoning ahead:

Consider these archetypal dispatches from the 2024 campaign trail. “A lot of people are happy to vote for [Trump] because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will,” an October New York Times “campaign notebook” entry observed. The following week, The Washington Post noted of prospective Trump voters: “Some read between Trump’s lines about how he would govern, while others disregard parts of his past or present platform.”

Then there was the phenomenon Paul Krugman, the retiring Times columnist, dubbed “Trump-stalgia,” which could just as well have been called “Trump-nesia.” Most Americans are undoubtedly better off than they were four years ago, he wrote in May. “But for reasons that still remain unclear, many seem disinclined to believe it.” This sentiment held true through the election. As TNR’s Greg Sargent reported on November 9, citing internal Democratic polling, “It proved disturbingly difficult to persuade undecided voters that Trump had been a bad president.”

As the author writes, people just projected onto him whatever they wanted him to be regardless of the stupidity, the inconsistency, the hypocrisy or the incoherence. Pick one from column A and one from column B.

But the chimerical allure that helped propel Trump to the White House has an expiration date. He sold myriad, and often conflicting, fantasies to voters. In three weeks’ time, he’ll face reality. And many Trump voters will undoubtedly start to realize that he is not at all the person they thought they were voting for.

Already, there are two major contradictions emerging in the nascent Trump administration, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp argued in November. “The first centers on economic policy—or, more fundamentally, the role of government itself,” he wrote, noting that some Trump picks are proponents of unfettered capitalism while others are economic nationalists who want to “transform American society, including by attacking the practices of large corporations.” The second contradiction, meanwhile, “centers on foreign policy—or, more fundamentally, the purpose of America in the world.” The advocates of hard power versus the isolationists, essentially.

These diverse allies found common cause on the campaign trail in opposition to the left, but “when governing, the administration will be forced to make choices in areas where its leaders disagree at a fundamental level, leading not only to internal conflict but potentially even policy chaos.” In other words, Trump will have to pick sides. In some ways, he’s already doing so based on the balance of his nominees: His Cabinet is shaping up to be rather interventionist and plutocratic.

Many cultists will find ways to rationalize these betrayals. They already are. But the activist right sees their influence with Trump waning and they are already working to wrest control of the movement from the tech-bro interlopers. Those are the people to keep your eyes on and they are more influential than people realize.

McCoy points out that there’s always some backlash in any new administration, asserting that “according to the well-demonstrated theory of thermostatic politics, public opinion tends to move in the opposite direction of policy. ” But he says that if he overestimates his mandate (which is certainly is) it could produce a historically “fierce” backlash.

For example he observes that the draconian deportation plan could elicit a massive backlash. We’ve seen an awful lot of anecdotal evidence (and some polling as well) showing that people just didn’t think he’d actually deport anyone but the vicious criminals he insists are roaming on every street in America. It’s possible that he’ll just stage a few deportations of tattooed gang members, point to the already low crime numbers and say Mission Accomplished. But again, you have to wonder how his hardcore MAGA cultists will respond. They really wanted that mass deportation of immigrants. That Haitian Springfield story proved that.

I do think that prosecuting his enemies and mass pardoning the J6 rioters could have an effect though. The true believers will be on board but I have a sneaking suspicion that at least some of the slightly less cultist types who thought he was going to lower the price of eggs might start to see through his phony promises and wonder why he’s focusing on petty vengeance. If the Congress starts talking about cutting Social Security and Medicare with Elon and Vivek dominating the conversation I think the backlash will indeed be fierce.

If the Democrats and their allies have any tactical sense they will remind people of stuff like this:

Take his improbable vow to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, which he recently walked back in a Time interview, acknowledging that “this is trickier than he let on.” In the same interview, he also managed expectations about lowering the cost of groceries, saying doing so will be “hard” and, if he fails, he would not consider his presidency a failure. It’s a stark pivot from his September pledge: “Vote Trump, and your … grocery prices will come tumbling down.”

On those issues and more, Trump has, as a recent Times headline put it, promised the moon with “no word on the rocket.” On many issues, though, not only is there no rocket, but there are instead blueprints for a deep-sea submersible: Trump’s core policy proposals are poised to do the opposite of what he says, exacerbating the economic discontent he tapped into. Between his proposed tariffs, deportations, and tax cuts, Time reports that if Trump “enacts many of the policies he proposed on the campaign trail, voters may see prices continue to rise.”

This is one of the weird advantages Trump has because everyone knows he’s a pathological liar. The people who like him see that as a sign that he’s a smart politician who wisely tells people what they want to hear in order to get elected.They don’t believe him any more than the rest of us do but they think his threats and promises are good politics anyway. The question is whether what they actually get — this billionaires revolution — is what they thought they were getting:

Or, to return to Trump’s words in The Art of the Deal: “You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.” Trump has proven, in business and politics, that in fact he can con people for a very long time. But, come 2025, when he’s confronted with the reality of governing—and, one can hope, a reinvigorated opposition—Trump may finally be exposed to his newfound supporters as the huckster we’ve long known him to be.

We’ll see. Those swing and unreliable voters might be disappointed. Or they might just lose interest and leave the polarized country where it’s been stuck for almost a decade. I do hope that reality still means something — I have to. I just wish I was more sure that it will catch Trump before he does his worst.