Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Uh-huh

Can we stop parroting that we can’t normalize Donald Trump? Or autocracy, kleptocracy, oligarchy, etc.? Look around.

Anyone who says, “Well, that’s never going to happen,” to warnings that some batshit insane event might happen under the coming Trump administration has not been paying attention over the last decade. “Well, that’s never going to happen” keeps happening.

A brief review (in no particular order):

• Americans elected Donald Trump, a reality TV star with no political experience, a man with a reputation in his home town as a con man, a repeat adulterer and sexual predator, to be president of the United States. Backed by Bible-believing, evangelical Christians.
• After Trump’s dark, “American carnage” inauguration speech, former president George W. Bush remarked, “That was some weird shit.”
• The world watched Trump reject the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community and take Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s word that Russia had not interfered with the 2016 election. In front of the world’s press. After meeting the former KGB officer in private with no advisers or note-takers.
• An American president ordered immigrations officials to separate migrant parents and children, losing track of the children and/or locking them in cages.
• The same president attempted to withold appropriated weapons from an American ally fighting off a Russian invasion unless Ukraine launched (or at least announced) an investigation into a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter. He was impeached (but not convicted) for it.
• The world watched the United Nations General Assembly laugh at the president of the United States.
• At a NATO summit, Trump was caught on camera “shoving aside Montenegro’s Prime Minister Dusko Markovic in what appeared to be an attempt to get to the front of the photo line.”
• At a meeting with The world watched the United Nations General Assembly laugh at the president of the United States.
• Trump dismissed the COVID-19 plague that had already killed hundreds of Americans as going away on its own by Easter 2020, then promoted quack remedies as tens of thousands more died.
• The America president told so many blatant lies that a major newspaper kept count, discontinuing its tally at somewhere over 30,000.
• Trump wanted to buy Greenland and talked about nuking hurricanes.
• Trump and Republican allies around the country attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election after Trump lost to Joe Biden.
• On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump “summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack” on the U.S. Capitol. The mob battled the police for hours, breached and sacked the building, theatening to lynch lawmakers, as Trump sat for hours watching on TV, doing nothing. Several people died. Trump told rioters he loved them. He was impeached but not convicted a second time.
• Trump left the White House after stealing hundreds of classified documents. It was just one of the many acts for which he’s been federally indicted, including the Jan. 6 insurrection.
• New York juries convicted Trump on 34 felony counts for business fraud and found him guilty of rape in a civil lawsuit.
• Trump held a xenophpobic, misogynistic rally in Madison Square Garden that echoed the German American Bund rally held there in 1939.

After all of the above and much, much more — and yet still more — Americans elected Donald John Trump as president for a second time on Nov. 5, 2024.

Let’s contemplate some of what may come next.

• Trump means to staff his administration with anti-democracy, extremist cranks and weirdos.
• He will direct the Department of Justice to prosecute and jail his political enemies, and demand military tribunals for generals who crossed him.
• He will ethnically cleanse the country of millions of (face it) nonwhite, undocumented residents using perhaps active-duty troops.
• Trump hopes to denaturalize others and strip birthright citizenship from U.S.-born children of the undocumented, and the Roberts Supreme Court will let him.
• He plans to abandon Ukraine to Russian annexation and preciptate the collapse of NATO.
• He plans to wholesale fire dedicated, career civil servants, and staff what’s left of the government with inexperienced, fawning sychophants led by anti-democracy, extremist cranks and weirdos.
• Women’s rights will be under more threat than in the past half-century.
• Trump’s administration will, in effect, declare open season on the LGBTQ+ community and allow Christian nationalists to impose their beliefs on the nation, including on Christians who find their beliefs abhorrent.

Look, fighting back against what’s coming is not just righteous, but patriotic. I’m tired. You’re tired. We’re all tired. But for all its flaws, the ideal of America that MAGA Republicans want to unmake with extreme prejudice is worth fighting for. I’m sorry I’m not more upbeat about it like James Fallows or Rebecca Solnit. That doesn’t lessen the imperative, especially since there is no guarantee how low the foes of freedom won’t stoop once they get rolling.

Tell me again, “Well, that’s never going to happen.”

S-O-P for M-A-G-A

Now that campaign season is almost over (our N.C. state Supreme Court recounts, lawsuits, etc., could drag into December), I’ve scheduled my Covid booster and flu shots for later this morning. With quacks and cranks poised to take over the health system on January 20, hoarding your necessary meds is a good idea. As is getting your shots, advises Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse. She got hers on Friday:

Increasingly, I’m contemplating the issues we are going to face at the intersection of public health and the rule of law. Dr. Vin Gupta posted on BlueSky today, “We need as many healthcare professionals to be courageous and speak to truth, for our patient’s sake and for the sanctity and credibility of our profession. That starts now. We cannot allow the highly abnormal to be normalized.” He said it in the context of the qualifications, or lack thereof, of Trump’s nominees for key positions in the health sector, including Marty Makary as FDA commissioner, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat for surgeon general, and Dr. Dave Weldon for CDC director, all of whom would work for Kennedy. Each of them is controversial. And, of course, there’s Mehmet Oz for CMS, which oversees agencies including Medicare and Medicaid.

Gupta is naive. Normalizing the abnormal was pretty much complete after the vote count on Nov. 5. Horse, barn, etc. Not to mention that if you don’t get those immunizations at federal expense now, you may be paying for them out of pocket (if still available) once Dr. Brainworm & Co. move into their new offices.

That is, if they can find their new offices (Raw Story):

According to an expert on public policy, members of Donald Trump’s incoming administration may already find themselves behind on their jobs the moment that they take over for the outgoing President Joe Biden administration.

Appearing on CNN early Saturday morning, Professor Heath Brown of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice raised alarms that the Trump transition team has yet to submit much-needed documentation to the General Services Administration (GSA) which would allow senior members of the president-elect’s team to have access to information they will need on day one.

Speaking with host Victor Blackwell, Brown was asked, “So this agreement with the General Services Administration allows them to get some office space, get some money but also there are documents related to ethics agreements and anti-conflict of interest commitments. Is this abnormal, disruptive or is it more than that?”

“I think it’s very worrisome for two primary reasons,” Brown replied. “If the agreements aren’t signed that means the key information that the incoming administration needs about the major threats, challenges facing our country are not going to be shared in the same way as if the agreements were signed.”

I-O-K-I-Y-A-R will be S-O-P for M-A-G-A more then ever this time around, starting even before Dictator on Day 1 takes and violates his oath of office in the same breath. Rules established to ensure government transparency and accounatbility are out the window. Not quite half the country voted for abnormal.

Without those signed agreements, Brown worries, we won’t know who is funding this transition.

“Those agreements establish caps on the amount of money that can be donated to the transition team as well as requiring public disclosure of who those donors are,” Brown continued. “If we don’t see those agreements signed, we’ll never know that information and I think many people would worry about that.”

But that’s the point. Donations to the transition become another lucrative grift for Trump. Again, not quite half of “many people” couldn’t care less about that.

Will they when the next Covid variant or the flu strikes down a family member? Doubtful.

Trump seems to genuinely believe that he can rule the world through tariffs by using them as a cudgel to make foreign countries stop laughing at us. But there’s another reason he loves them. They give him power over American businesses and a massive opportunity for corruption:

The sweeping tariffs that President-elect Donald J. Trump imposed in his first term on foreign metals, machinery, clothing and other products were intended to have maximum impact around the world. They sought to shutter foreign factories, rework international supply chains and force companies to make big investments in the United States.

But for many businesses, the most important consequences of the tariffs, enacted in 2018 and 2019, unfolded just a few blocks from the White House.

In the face of pushback from companies reliant on foreign products, the Trump administration set up a process that allowed them to apply for special exemptions. The stakes were high: An exemption could relieve a company of tariffs as high as 25 percent, potentially giving it a big advantage over competitors.

That ignited a swift and often successful lobbying effort, especially from Washington’s high-priced K Street law firms, which ended up applying for hundreds of thousands of tariff exemptions. The Office of the United States Trade Representative, which handled exclusions for the China tariffs, fielded more than 50,000 requests, while the Commerce Department received nearly 500,000 exclusion requests for the tariffs on steel and aluminum.

As Mr. Trump dangles new and potentially more expensive tariffs, many companies are already angling to obtain relief. Lawyers and lobbyists in Washington say they are receiving an influx of requests from companies that want to hire their services, even before the full extent of the president-elect’s tariff plans becomes clear.

He will use taxpayer money to make whole the companies that play ball with him just as he did with the farmers in his first term.

While Mr. Trump has often promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington, some have argued that these trade rules did the opposite. Tracking by OpenSecrets, a nonprofit organization, showed that the number of clients lobbying Congress on trade issues ticked up noticeably once Mr. Trump took office, growing more than 50 percent from 2016 to hit a record high in 2019.

First of all, when he says “drain the swamp” he means anyone who is hostile to him. It has nothing to do with corruption. He believes in corruption and frankly makes no bones about it. There’s no reason to pretend otherwise. In fact, this scheme is largely just another grift opportunity. Trump will have leverage over many companies and he will use it.

One recent economic study also found evidence that Trump officials had used the exemption process to reward their supporters and punish opponents.

The study, which looked at nearly 7,000 company applications, found that an increase in past contributions to Republicans raised the likelihood of a company’s receiving an exemption. A history of past contributions to Democrats, meanwhile, decreased a company’s chances of winning a lucrative exemption.

“I would not be surprised at all if this happened again,” he said.

It’s guaranteed. The only losers in this scheme will be the people who are buying goods, but at least half the ocuntry will be convinced that they’re actually paying less because Dear Leader tells them so.

Jamelle Bouie sent this along in his newsletter today and I thought is was perfect for the moment:

Most Americans who know of Frederick Douglass know that he lived to see the destruction of chattel slavery and the liberation of Black Americans from the despotism of human bondage. Less well known is the fact that Douglass would also live long enough to see the slave stand free, stand a brief moment in the sun, and move back again toward slavery, to paraphrase W.E.B. Du Bois in his book “Black Reconstruction.”

Douglass died in 1895 as the counterrevolution to Reconstruction and the agrarian rebellions of the 1880s and 1890s took final shape. In 1890, Mississippi imposed its Jim Crow Constitution. Other states in the South soon followed suit. In 1896, the Supreme Court would affirm “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, a landmark ruling that would stand until 1954, when it was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education.

In 1894, at Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington D.C., Douglass delivered the last great speech of his career. Titled “The Lessons of the Hour,” it was his attempt to make sense of the rise of Jim Crow and the violent retrenchment of the era. I want to share a little of the speech with you because I think it is worthwhile to read the perspective of someone who continues to fight for their ideals even in the midst of profound reversal and defeat.

Here’s Douglass, moving toward his conclusion.

I have sometimes thought that the American people are too great to be small, too just and magnanimous to oppress the weak, too brave to yield up the right to the strong, and too grateful for public services ever to forget them or fail to reward them. I have fondly hoped that this estimate of American character would soon cease to be contradicted or put in doubt. But the favor with which this cowardly proposition of disfranchisement has been received by public men, white and black, by Republicans as well as Democrats, has shaken my faith in the nobility of the nation. I hope and trust all will come out right in the end, but the immediate future looks dark and troubled. I cannot shut my eyes to the ugly facts before me.

He continues:

Strange things have happened of late and are still happening. Some of these tend to dim the lustre of the American name, and chill the hopes once entertained for the cause of American liberty. He is a wiser man than I am, who can tell how low the moral sentiment of this republic may yet fall. When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline and the wheel of progress to roll backward, there is no telling how low the one will fall or where the other may stop.

As much as Douglass intends to stand in the way of those would destroy the victory of an earlier age, he knows that, for him, “Time and strength are not equal to the task before me.” And yet:

But could I be heard by this great nation, I would call to mind the sublime and glorious truths with which, at its birth, it saluted a listening world. Its voice then, was as the trumpet of an archangel, summoning hoary forms of oppression and time honored tyranny, to judgement. Crowned heads heard it and shrieked. Toiling millions heard it and clapped their hands for joy. It announced the advent of a nation, based upon human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality. Its mission was the redemption of the world from the bondage of ages.

Douglass concludes:

Apply these sublime and glorious truths to the situation now before you. Put away your race prejudice. Banish the idea that one class must rule over another. Recognize the fact that the rights of the humblest citizen are as worthy of protection as are those of the highest, and your problem will be solved; and, whatever may be in store for it in the future, whether prosperity, or adversity; whether it shall have foes without, or foes within, whether there shall be peace, or war; based upon the eternal principles of truth, justice and humanity, and with no class having any cause of complaint or grievance, your Republic will stand and flourish forever.

I hope you find this as useful as I do.

Or we could keep coddling insecure white people who feel their privilege is threatened whenever those who don’t look like them get a share of the American dream. And sure, let’s let the oligarchs openly pull the strings of our supposedly democratic system for their own benefit. What could go wrong?

I’m just going to leave this here. If you have a few minutes, listen to Project 2025 author Russell Vought, Trump’s budget chief, talk about what he plans to do in the new administration. He’s not just a faceless bureaucrat. He’s got a vision. A Christian Nationalist vision.

I’m sure Pam Bondi will be more than happy to do this. She wouldn’t have been chosen for the job if she wasn’t:

President-elect Donald Trump plans to fire the entire team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith to pursue two federal prosecutions against the former president, including career attorneys typically protected from political retribution, according to two individuals close to Trump’s transition.

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.

The proposals offer new evidence that Trump’s intention to dramatically shake up the status quo in Washington is likely to focus heavily on the Justice Department, the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, and that at least some of his agenda is fueled not by ideology or policy goals but personal grievance.

Asked about Trump’s plans to fire prosecutors on Smith’s team and investigate the 2020 election, a Trump spokeswoman echoed the president-elect’s frequent claim that the Justice Department cases against him were politically motivated.

[…]

As he again becomes president, Trump “wants to clean out the bad guys, the people who went after me,’” said one of the individuals familiar with the plans, who like the other person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations about the incoming Trump administration.

I guess we knew he was going to go after the prosecutors who were involved in his federal cases. And that won’t be all. There are political enemies and others that will need to be paid back for opposing him. But I didn’t anticipate investigations into the 2020 election, although I should have.

He knows he lost and his psyche is so fragile that he can’t deal with it even though he won this time. Maybe he can find some flunkies to put together a phony report validating his claims and he and his cult can pretend that proves it. But we’ll always know that he lost that election and lied about it and he’ll know we know it. It will torture him until the day he dies.

Start hoarding your necessary meds right now. It’s going to be a long 4 years:

President-elect Donald J. Trump announced on Friday that he would nominate Dr. Martin A. Makary, a Johns Hopkins University surgeon with a contrarian streak, to be commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

Mr. Trump announced two other top health picks on Friday evening as well. He chose Dr. Dave Weldon, a physician and former congressman from Florida, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For years, Dr. Weldon championed the notion that thimerosal, a preservative once used widely in vaccines, caused an explosion of autism cases around the world. In 2007, he backed a bill proposing to take vaccine safety research out of the hands of the C.D.C. Health officials reject the idea that research shows any link between thimerosal and autism.

Mr. Trump also put forward Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a physician and Fox News contributor, to be surgeon general. She worked caring for patients after Hurricane Katrina, an announcement from Mr. Trump said, and on the front lines of the Covid pandemic in New York City. She also markets vitamin B and vitamin C dietary supplements.

Dr. Makary, 54, rose to prominence more than a decade ago as a critic of the medical establishment, speaking out about patient safety and working with hospitals to improve practices. He also gained attention during the pandemic, weighing in on herd immunity, vaccines and masks in 2021, roiling some doctors who were still contending with packed I.C.U.s and hundreds of deaths a week.

[…]

Dr. Makary would oversee an agency that regulates a vast swath of the economy, including prescription and over-the-counter drugs, revolutionary cell and gene therapies as well as food, medical devices, tobacco and cosmetics.

Every last one is a Fox news crank, a quack or a snake oil salesman. Good luck to all of us.

Update —

In recently unearther video, RFK Jr calims that his organization financed “Plandemic” the conspiracy theory documentary that killed a bunch of people during COVID:

We also have a film platform. We have a film division at Children’s Health Defense. We’ve produced two films. One of them is VAX 2, which was, you know, a huge success. And then Plandemic, which we financed, which is now by some metrics the most successful documentary in history. I think it’s had 25 million views. Even though they threw us off all the social media, we were able to still get a lot of people to see that film.

Out of the news but not out of the woods

A friend last night asked how recovery was coming along here in Asheville. The truth is we are out of the news but a long way from out of the woods. 

Some friends were in the Oval Office on Thursday to ask President Joe Biden to add a zero to the end of federal recovery aid already approved for Western North Carolina. Or at least for another $25.5 billion. The group also met with congressional budget staff on Capitol Hill to promote a larger aid package.

Locals are hoping the supplemental aid passes quickly because the next occupant won’t be as friendly to ye olde Cesspool of Sin™. The GOP-dominated legislature in Raleigh is already cutting us off. More on that in a moment.

Recovery will take years. Downtown Asheville normally would be bustling with shoppers this time of year. For a local economy overdependent on tourism (don’t get me started), empty hotels and shops are dead weight on the city’s economy and on out-of-workers’ lives. Some storefronts are empty and for rent. Residents who left the area during the seven-week water outage may have found work where they relocated already, and may not return.

Recovery depots are still in operation for people (fewer now) from more remote areas of the county still without power or with contaminated wells needing testing, or with homes too damaged to be habitable.

It’s not in the news but it is still the reality on the ground. The town may look normal but normal will not return soon.

Disaster victims still need showers, laundry facilities, supplies, etc. A Board of Elections members told me on Friday relations are still camping out in her house eight weeks after Tropical Storm Helene dropped off a disaster.

A FEMA map I obtained on Friday (dated 11/19) displays the numbers of privately owned and rental residences impacted across Western North Carolina. The largest concentrations are in Buncombe County (Asheville metro). 

• 542 homes destroyed
• 1,600 homes with major damage
• 18,102 homes requiring habitability repairs

There are another 6,000+ rental residences destroyed, damaged, or requiring habitability repairs, meaning structural repairs and/or replacement of appliances and heating/cooling/plumbing/electrical systems.

We mentioned this week North Carolina Republicans’ scramble in the lame-duck session to snatch power from Democrats who defeated their candidates under the guise of a disaster recovery measure. The GOP-dominated body remains “dead-set on refusing to provide meaningful relief for mountain communities hit hard by Hurricane Helene,” reports Smoky Mountain News.

“I’m deeply concerned that instead of help for Western North Carolina, that they used this storm as a front to engage in yet another power grab that I think hurts North Carolina,” Cooper told The Smoky Mountain News Nov. 22.

Three WNC Republicans voted against the bill but are likely to vote to sustain an expected Cooper veto. Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers, whose town flooded just three years ago, had stern words for Raleigh:

Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers praised the three western reps for sticking up for a region that consistently feels overlooked by Raleigh — perhaps for good reason.

“What you saw was fundamental, principled leadership and doing right by the people of Western North Carolina. That was not a hurricane relief bill; it was a bill that was trying to be marketed as one. Even when talking about the money, it just shifts money. It doesn’t allocate where it goes,” said Smathers. “It was a bill that was done behind closed doors, very quickly and not involving even the Republicans, even our own legislators. This is a bill that should not have been passed and should not exist and should be vetoed. And if it was Democrats doing it, I would say the same thing.”

Plenty of videos and podcasts (some of them sensationalized) show destroyed homes, crushed cars and piles of debris and downed trees along roadsides in residential neighborhoods and in more outlying areas. The destruction is not just along the rivers but on hillsides hit by slides and flattened by tornadoes or microbursts. Sometimes only a few yards and a few feet of elevation separate devastation and “normal.” No one really knows how long the cleanup will take.

Officials report 103 deaths across WNC, with 43 in my county, Buncombe. Our house painter reports he lost one of his best crew members to the storm.

A friend just returned from Hawaii reports that a year later the burned city of Lahaina is still a wasteland. They feel us, he said. We feel them.

“Who will be the targets tomorrow?”

This speech by then-Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in November 1994 was prophetic.

Did anyone listen?