As Francis Collins, longtime director of the National Institutes of Health, took to the steps below the Lincoln Memorial on Friday for a sound check before speaking at the Stand Up for Science rally, he was confronted by an agitated protester who warned, “You’re going to prison.”
The incident was witnessed by a reporter from STAT, and the man afterward identified himself only as “Jeff” and said he was there to protest Collins’ oversight of NIH, and specifically the agency’s funding of gain-of-function research at a lab in Wuhan, China, where some believe the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have originated. “He’s an indicted felon, he lied before Congress,’’ Jeff, baselessly, told the reporter.
The confrontation was the latest public manifestation of the dramatically altered public image of Collins, from a near-legendary geneticist who led the Human Genome Project and was beloved by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle — and was asked to stay on by President Trump in his first term — to a target demonized by Trump’s Make America Great Again followers.
Collins told STAT he is so concerned for his personal safety that he has hired security at his home.
“If I become more outspoken now, as I was on Friday, about the harms that are being done, it probably increases my visibility and the chances that such threats or maybe even real actions will become more likely,” he said. “I don’t know what to do about that. I can’t go hide under my desk.”
“So we’re disappearing people now? Nice to know,” Charlie Pierce writes at Esquire. He’s responding to the Department of Homeland Security over the weekend arresting Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and green card holder, over his participation in protests against Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Donald Trump’s DHS is now creating Desaparecidos.
According to the advocates, at around 8:30 PM, Khalil and his wife – who is eight months pregnant – had just unlocked the door to their building when two plainclothes DHS agents pushed inside behind them. The agents allegedly did not identify themselves at first, instead asking for Khalil’s identity before detaining him.
The agents proceeded to tell Khalil’s wife that if she did not leave her husband and go to their apartment, they would arrest her too. The agents claimed that the State Department had revoked Khalil’s student visa, with one agent presenting what he claimed was a warrant on his cell phone. But Khalil, according to advocates, has a green card. Khalil’s wife went to their apartment to get the green card.
“He has a green card,” an agent apparently said on the phone, confused by the matter. But then after a moment, the agent claimed that the State Department had “revoked that too.”
DHS had already sent him to a detention facility in Louisiana before a federal judge issued an order blocking Khalil’s deportation.
Are we now allowing the rendition of legal residents to black sites in the United States? Where would he be in Louisiana? Angola? That would be fun. There are six federal prison facilities in that state. One of those facilities in Oakdale was the subject of a Department of Justice report in 2020 for refusing to follow the Covid protocols mandated by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons during the pandemic. Eight prisoners died there.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement on Sunday night that Mr. Khalil had been arrested “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.”
“Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” she said. “ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump’s executive orders and to protecting U.S. national security.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared a link on X to a news article about Mr. Khalil’s arrest and issued a broad promise: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
“Aligned”? So, Khalil was arrested for wrongthink. One hopes Khalil wasn’t flown to Louisiana by helicopter.
Whether or not one agrees with the Gaza protests, the action of Trump 2.0 against Khalil appears to be part of a systemic attack on the First Amendment that is now S.O.P. for the Trump administration.
Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin last week sent a letter to Georgetown University — a private university — threatening that “that his office will not consider hiring anyone affiliated with a university that utilizes DEI,” the Washington Post reported:
Martin added two questions: “First, have you eliminated all DEI from your school and its curriculum? Second, if DEI is found in your courses or teaching in any way, will you move swiftly to remove it?”
William M. Treanor, the dean and executive vice president of Georgetown Law, responded:
The First Amendment, Treanor wrote, “guarantees that the government cannot direct what Georgetown and its faculty teach and how to teach it,” noting that the Supreme Court “has continually affirmed that among the freedoms central to a university’s First Amendment rights are its abilities to determine, on academic grounds, who may teach, what to teach, and how to teach it.”
Martin, Treanor wrote, was threatening to deny students and graduates of Georgetown opportunities until Martin approved its curriculum, and he said the school looked forward to confirming that applicants for employment would receive “full and fair consideration” in the future, adding that the Constitution was clearly on Georgetown’s side.
“Given the First Amendment’s protection of a university’s freedom to determine its own curriculum and how to deliver it, the constitutional violation behind this threat is clear, as is the attack on the University’s mission as a Jesuit and Catholic institution,” Treanor wrote.
All of which has landed the United States of America under Donald Trump on a watch list of countries with “faltering civic freedoms” (The Independent):
CIVICUS, a nonprofit organization that serves as an advocate for democracy, added the U.S. to the list on Monday. It’s the first watchlist of the year.
Claiming the U.S. was “once a global champion for democracy and human rights,” CIVICUS said Trump’s attempts to remake the federal government in his vision and remove the U.S. from global participation have raised concerns that it is infringing on democratic freedoms.
The U.S. joins the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Chile, Slovakia and 37 other countries on the list of countries with “narrowed” civic freedoms.
How’s the water in that pot, froggies? Warm enough yet?
All the silicon valley tech bros worship Ayn Rand and see Elon Musk as our own John Galt. Actually, not so much. Paul Crider at the Bulwark:
MANY AMONG THE SILICON VALLEY ULTRA-RICH dominating the news think of themselves as heroes out of an Ayn Rand novel. Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen prate on about how we are living in Atlas Shrugged now. Peter Thiel has spoken at the annual gala of the Randian Atlas Society. These figures and their peers are discussed in the popularpress with frequentreference to Rand. Meanwhile, many (though by no meansall) devotees of Rand’s writings idolizeMusk…
But a deeper examination reveals these oligarchs resemble Rand’s heroes far less than her villains. Elon Musk in particular is a grab-bag of Randian vices. […]
A central virtue in Rand’s ethics is self-esteem. Musk’s arrogance, his apparent conviction that he is the main character of history on a quest to take humanity to Mars, may seem like an overabundance of self-esteem… Musk’s compulsive attention-seeking is a sign not of self-esteem but of a desperate need for external validation. This is a man who cheats at video games to look impressive.
No doubt about it. He’s as much of a cheating narcissist as Trump and that’s saying something.
Musk is unquestionably a looter in Rand’s schema. Musk’s companies rake in billions of government subsidies, and Tesla has only been able to stay solvent with government assistance. One might forgive this in the interest of ramping up electric vehicle production in order to replace internal-combustion vehicles. But Musk uses his coziness with the state as an economic weapon. Musk himself has said, “Take away the subsidies, it will only help Tesla,” a clear admission that he would use state power to cripple his competitors. […]
Both Musk (through SpaceX) and Thiel (through Palantir) are major defense contractors, which means their financial interests are in the hands of the politicians they fund. Rand in Atlas Shrugged calls this the “aristocracy of pull” to describe how power in Washington operated by crooked deals and favors between connected insiders—business leaders and politicians.
Many of the villains in the book thrive in this environment.
Then there’s the sick quest for domination:
As the article points out his current Twitter feed is filled with that sort of talk. Here’s today’s gem:
Isolated, this could just be shitposting, itself a venerable enough craft. But Musk’s blitzkrieg through the federal agencies, shuttering offices and firing career employees with jocular contempt, lays bare the truth: He enjoys the feeling of hurting those he considers his enemies, along with bystanders, in the knowledge that everyone is powerless to stop him. Whether it’s his Twitter takeover or dismantling government agencies, Musk takes an arsonist’s delight in destroying things that people value, and have reason to value.
This author describes Rand’s heroes this way and it’s not that:
The heroes of Atlas Shrugged take no such pleasure in destruction or in the subjugation of others, even when it is necessary. Led by Rand’s fictional mouthpiece, John Galt, each of the heroes gives this oath: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine” (emphasis added). To dominate others is to sacrifice their rational interests and happiness for the sake of your own.
Frankly, that may have been the idea but I’ve never seen a Randian who wasn’t a domineering asshole. Still, the point stands. By Rand’s own telling Musk is no John Galt.
Paul Krugman did a great job of running down the backlash that’s rapidly developing among the public that says it all in this piece called “The Paranoid Style in Maga Policy”. This was the most interesting observation, however:
As the economy stumbles and the stock market tanks, consumer confidence lags, and even some Trump voters are losing faith, what I find particularly revealing is how the Trump cabal are responding. They aren’t rethinking their policies; they aren’t even making major efforts to justify their policies to an increasingly skeptical public. Instead, they’ve instantly descended into a pit of insane conspiracy theories.
Thus, according to Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, those rowdy audiences at town halls aren’t citizens sincerely concerned about government layoffs and looming cuts to Medicaid; they’re “paid protestors” hired by “George Soros-funded groups”.
Gotta say, those Soros people are pretty impressive if they’ve managed to secretly hire fake protestors for town halls all across America.
What about those Tesla protests? According to Musk, they aren’t a response to his Nazi salutes and the chainsaw DOGE has been taking to crucial public services. In his mind they’re a conspiracy organized by five people, three of whom happen to be Jewish and two of whom happen to be dead:
And that big decline in the stock market? According to Trump, it’s not a response to concerns about his zigzagging tariff policies. “I think it is globalists that see how rich our country is going to be and they don’t like it.” Yep, globalist Trump-haters have tanked a $48 trillion market.
If all of this sounds crazy, that’s because it is. What we’re hearing from the Musk-Trump Administration sounds, if I can use the term, distinctly un-American. It’s the kind of rhetoric you expect from an authoritarian regime that attributes every setback to sabotage by rootless cosmopolitan enemies of the state.
Then again, why should we be surprised? An excellent recent analysis by John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times, using data from the World Values Survey, shows that at this point the U.S. Right’s values are in fact very similar to those of authoritarian regimes like Russia and Turkey, and not at all like those of Western democracies, or for that matter its own values a generation ago:
While rule by crazy conspiracy theorists is an unquestionably bad state of affairs, let me lay out two specific reasons it’s bad.
First, it means that the people in charge won’t learn from failure. When things go wrong — when planes crash, or forests burn, or children die of preventable diseases, or the economy enters stagflation — it won’t be because policies should be reconsidered. It will be because sinister globalists are plotting against America. And the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Second, there will be a search for scapegoats. Much of the federal government is already in the midst of a de facto political purge, with professional civil servants replaced by apparatchiks and job cuts falling most heavily on agencies perceived as liberal. These purges will intensify and broaden, increasingly extending to the private sector, as the administration proves itself incapable of governing effectively.
They’re already saying this as you can see with Trump’s daft bullshit about the “globalists” tanking the stock market. He’s clearly spooked but he’s in so deep that he can’t get out. Apparently, none of them can.
I’m so old I remember when a president’s son trading on his father’s name to make money for the family was a scandal of such epic proportions that it led to congressional and DOJ investigations for years and calls for impeachment. But that was a different time. You know, a year ago.
The names lining up behind Elon Musk read like a who’s who of big money: BlackRock, Fidelity, venture-capital giant Sequoia.
And then there’s 1789 Capital.
The upstart investment firm scored a hot ticket recently with Musk, Donald Trump’s wealthiest backer: a rare chance to invest directly in his AI venture, xAI, and his roughly $350 billion startup, SpaceX.
Turns out, 1789 has a big attraction: Donald Trump Jr. — son of the US president, crown prince of MAGA and now frontman for what fans hail as a “parallel” US economy aimed at the Trump faithful.
Trump Jr. is clear: At 1789, his role is not to crunch the numbers or kick the tires the way most investors do. Instead, he’s looking to make the firm money by tapping into the MAGA ecosystem and its network of profit-minded believers like Musk.
Few have arrived at this moment with a better sense for President Trump — and where his second administration might take the nation and the world — than his eldest son. Only now, Trump Jr. is trading Washington to focus on a new mission: monetizing his father’s vision for America.
At a time when businesses big and small are trying to navigate all things Trump, Trump Jr.’s stamp of approval can mean the difference between access to lucrative opportunities – such as an in at Musk’s xAI and SpaceX — or a cold shoulder. Like his father and brother Eric, who runs the Trump real estate business, Trump Jr. has brushed aside concerns about the seemingly unprecedented number of conflicts the first family is facing.
They are building what they like to call “the parallel economy” which is essentially a right-wing only commerce venture under the assumption that they can make billions catering to “the movement.” The article points out that this isn’t the first time right wingers have attempted to monetize their “movement” and they have often crashed and burned in the past.
But barely two months into the second Trump administration, 1789 Capital is in a position like few others. Based in Palm Beach, two miles from Mar-a-Lago, the firm today sits near the epicenter of Trumpworld with ties both broad and deep.
They’re practically doing it out of the White House.
Trump Jr., 47, formally signed on in November, less than a week after his father won the White House again. The move took many in Washington by surprise: Beltway insiders had expected him to stay close to the administration given his role in championing Vance for vice president. He says he hasn’t been to the White House since the inauguration…
Trump Jr.’s role at 1789 will be a sort of MAGA magnet, sourcing deals as well as investors into the firm.
Gee, I can’t imagine how he would do that, can you? It’s not as if he has a line to Trump and Musk. After all, he hasn’t been to the White House since the inauguration.
They liken the potential of MAGA-style investing “to the late boom in the environmental, social and governance space, which conservatives deride as part of a “woke” liberal agenda that threatens American capitalism.”
For instance, they’ve “poured more than $50 million directly across Musk’s xAI and SpaceX, opportunities.” I sure hope they’re doing better than his flagship Tesla stock. It’s lost 15% just today.
It’s down over 37% over the last month. Also, his rockets are blowing up.
Other recent investments include a stake in Happy Dad hard seltzer, founded by right-wing YouTubers the Nelk Boys (they packaged their drink to look like a beer because “we are tired of the skinny can bullsh*t”) and the Enhanced Games, a startup looking to host an Olympics-style competition where athletes are allowed to take performance-enhancing drugs; and Polymarket, the crypto-based prediction site that gained widespread attention during the 2024 presidential campaign.
Winners all, no doubt about it.
Trump Jr., for his part, has plenty of balls in the air. In addition to his role at 1789, he’s an adviser to Kalshi, another prediction market, and to Unusual Machines, a manufacturer of drones and related components. He and his brother Eric are also personal investors in biotech-startup-turned fintech Dominari Holdings Inc. (news in February that the Trumps were joining the company’s advisory board sent the stock soaring). On top of that, he maintains his title of executive vice president at the Trump Organization.
He isn’t on the board of an obscure foreign energy company so there’s no reason to suspect corruption. The Trumps are as honest as the day is long.
Think about how much more the federal government is tasked with doing since 1960.
When I hear virtually every reporter and Democratic politician issue a disclaimer in every discussion of the DOGE cuts that “of course the government is too bloated and needs to be cut, we just need to do it more thoughtfully” I want to scream. It is NOT bloated. Considering what it is tasked with doing for the American people it is actually too lean and we should be hiring more people not firing them.
Yes, there are the proverbial $1000 toilet seat examples in the defense department and I’m sure there is some “waste fraud and abuse” elsewhere as there is in any large organization. But the idea that there are too many workers is ridiculous. And I’m afraid we’re about to find out just how ridiculous that is.
They came in aggressively, a former official who witnessed Elon Musk’s team take over the Social Security Administration said, demanding access to sensitive taxpayer data and refusing briefings on how the agency ensures the accuracy of its benefit systems. They recklessly exposed data in unsecured areas outside Social Security offices, the official said, potentially disclosing personally identifiable information on almost every American to people not authorized to see it.
And representatives sent by the U.S. DOGE Service refused to explain why they needed taxpayer information that is protected by law, the former official said. Despite their status as political appointees, the secretive members of the cost-cutting group overseen by Musk ignored the normal chain of command, instead communicating directly with DOGE.
These and other allegations are included in a sweeping declaration filed as part of a federal lawsuit Friday from Tiffany Flick, the agency’s acting chief of staff until she was forced out in mid-February.
[…]
Flick and acting commissioner Michelle King, another career leader, abruptly retired on Feb. 16 after resisting demands from DOGE to provide access to three massive databases containing sensitive taxpayer information. In their place, the White House elevated acting commissioner Leland Dudek, a mid-level data analyst who the career leaders believed had been improperly sharing information with DOGE. The career leaders had placed Dudek on paid leave and opened an investigation into his actions before he was promoted.
Dudek is now the acting Social Security administrator, eagerly doing Trump’s bidding.
But why are the DOGE boys doing what they’re doing? Well, I don’t want to go too far down any rabbit holes, but there may be a reason beyond the desire to simply destroy everyone, which I wrote about last week:
Tech reporter Kara Swisher appeared on The Focus Group podcast a week or so ago and had a very interesting theory about what’s actually going on. We all know that AI is where all the action has been for the last few years with the “Magnificent 7” Big Tech companies leading the impressive growth in the stock market. Swisher claimed that Musk has been behind on the AI boom, having had his partnership with Sam Altman of Open AI blow up over his desire to monetize the free service, and was almost certainly on a hunt for data to use for his own AI purposes. She said:
What Elon is after, from what I can guess, if I had to guess, is… He is behind. One of the big debates going on right now in AI is we’re running out of data. All the LLMs have sucked in all the data. Now they need more to have an advantage.
And so that means that all the LLMs have become a commodity because they’re all parsing the same information, right? That they’ve scraped everything they can. Government is the biggest trove of information on the planet. U.S. government is at this point, would be my guess, or China would be.
The only other country that has it all consolidated is China, because it’s a surveillance economy and it’s a communist country, and so they want great control over their citizens. Our government data is siloed all over the place. What if someone could bring it all together and then load it into an LLM? What if…
I dunno. But it sure seems weird that they were so intent upon getting the data even before they figured out what the agency or the system even does. Getting into the system was job one, nothing else mattered. Why?
People have always wondered what it is about now former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that Donald Trump just cannot stand. His politics aren’t demonstrably different from any other center-left leader Trump has dealt with around the world and the US Canadian relationship until now had been the most congenial, peaceful, cooperative relationship in the history of both countries. I happen to think it’s personal, as is so much of Trump’s behavior toward his global counterparts.
Just as he admires Russian President Vladimir Putin for his strongman image or North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for his (plainly insincere) obsequiousness, he likewise loathed German Chancellor Angela Merkel for being a plain, dumpy woman and currently hates Volodymyr Zelensky for being in his mind, the instrument of the humiliation of his first impeachment. With Trudeau I think it’s always been simple, juvenile jealousy of his youthful good looks. Trump is not a complicated man when it comes to his judgments of other people. He is, after all, a person who commonly hires people because they are “out of central casting.”
During Trump’s first term his antipathy for Trudeau was evident from the start and it began with one of Trump’s famous handshakes. He likes to try to dominate his peers by violently yanking their hands toward him and it often makes for bizarre awkward situations. But a couple of weeks after his inauguration, during the traditional visit between tour two leaders, Trudeau resisted the “yank” at the White House door and then hesitated before taking Trump’s weird palms-up outstretched hand in the oval office. The picture went viral.
The BBC even published a long disquisition on English physician John Bulwer’s 1644 “eccentric tome Chirologia: Or the Naturall Language of the Hand, Composed of the Speaking Motions, and Discoursing Gestures Thereof.” to explain what had happened. (It said Trudeau’s hand position wasn’t disdainful but rather dejected while there was no explanation for Trump’s odd gesture at all.)
It also didn’t help that when Trump brought in Trudeau to a meeting with businesswomen, including his daughter Ivanka, the swoon was heard around the world. Trump clearly believed, and still does, that he was the leader with the movie star good looks and he didn’t like it one bit.
From that point on, Canada was in Trump’s cross hairs and he refused to meet with Trudeau at various meetings or shake his hand and he constantly threatened to throw tariffs on everything whenever he felt he was being disrespected. They did finally agree on an update of the NAFTA treaty which Trump had characterized during his campaign as screwing the U.S. (It did, but not in the way Trump said it did.) In the end they basically just ended up tweaking it so that he could strut around like a hero.
I suspect that the straw that broke the camel’s back was this moment caught on tape at that G7 where Trump absurdly announced that it had been decided that the very best location for the next meeting, scheduled to be held in the U.S., would be his Doral Golf Club in Florida.
Considering all that, I suppose it’s not a big surprise that Trump would still be holding a grudge and would give Trudeau a hard time when he became president again. But never did anyone imagine that he would launch a full scale rhetorical assault on Canada itself, insult its people and proclaim that he wants to annex the country and make it America’s 51st state,
Trump had said he planned to throw huge tariffs on Mexico and Canada during the campaign but nobody knew if it was just the usual Trump bluster or if he meant it. He went forward with them as promised and since then has gone back and forth so often that nobody knows what he’s really after.
It’s obvious that his deep antipathy toward Mexico stems from immigration and his belief that it is just another sh**hole country. He is sending combat troops to the border and has previously entertained plans to invade the country ostensibly to “take out” the drug cartels. As grotesque as it is, it isn’t exactly a surprise. But this ongoing threat to make Canada the 51st state, even repeatedly calling Trudeau “governor” is entirely unexpected.
According to the NY Times, what they first considered a typical Trump insult joke is now being taken very seriously by the Canadian government. They report that the phone calls between Trudeau and Trump as well the trade talks between the two countries are extremely acrimonious, beyond anything previously experienced. Trump has even said explicitly that he does not believe that he doesn’t believe that the treaty that officially declared the borders between the two countries is valid and he intends to change them.
The Times writes:
“The excuse that he’s giving for these tariffs today of fentanyl is completely bogus, completely unjustified, completely false,” Mr. Trudeau told the news media in Ottawa. “What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us,” he added.
They seem to think he means it.
Yesterday Justin Trudeau stepped down as Prime Minister after 10 years as he had promised to do. He was very unpopular over the past year and his Liberal party was expected to lose to the conservatives in the next election. That is, until Trump started talking about making Canada into the 51st state and Trudeau started telling it like it is. The Liberals have surged in the polls and will probably call elections very soon to take advantage of it. The people of Canada, across the political board, are infuriated by Trump’s audacious threats and they are not in any mood to cater to his insane impulses regardless of his tariff threats. Even those who were supportive of him have changed their tunes:
Ontario Premier Doug Ford: I’m putting a 25% tariff on electricity to 1.5 million homes and businesses in the US on Monday…Trump has created a mess. I thought he’d do a good job, man was I wrong. pic.twitter.com/fnIbwRPwAL
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) March 10, 2025
The Liberal party elected former central banker Mark Carney as the new Prime Minister and should they win the elections he will be the one to deal with Trump’s antics going forward. Luckily, although he is a nice looking fellow, he isn’t likely to inspire the extreme jealousy Trudeau inspired in Trump. But if Trump thinks that he will kow-tow to him, he may have another thing coming. His acceptance speech was a barnburner. Among other things, he said:
“My gov will create new trading relationships with reliable partners” “My gov will keep tariffs on till America shows us respect” “All the proceeds from our tariffs will be used to protect our workers” “Canada will never ever be part of America in any way shape or form” “Donald Trump thinks he can weaken us to divide and conquer” “We can give ourselves far far more than Donald Trump can ever take away”
As I write this Trump has not written anything on Truth Social or offered a statement. If he expected that Trudeau’s replacement was going to come crawling for forgiveness it appears that he was wrong.
Don’t know anything about the new Canadian interim PM Mark Carney but I like what he’s saying here:
"A person who worships at the alter of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him" pic.twitter.com/kzrUOG29DL
— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) March 10, 2025
The Republican Party and the vast majority of American elites have certainly been a perfect illustration of that. It’s a shame that Americans have to look to our neighbor to the north for inspiration but we’re grateful for it.
BTW: Eat your heart out Trump. He’s still 25 years younger than you are
All the personality of “wet cardboard,” a friend said over the weekend of Democrats’ House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.). It wasn’t a comment on his abilities as a legislator. I’m sure Jeffries can count and whip votes with the best of them. Democrats’ problem is their insistance on making their legislative leaders their spokespersons when the skill sets are not necessarily (and frequently are not) coincident.
A raft of postings describing Democrats flailing and failing to respond to Trump 2.0’s march to dismantle the republic appeared over the last week. “Democrats Voice Regret on Scattered Responses to Trump’s Speech,” declares The New York Times. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) told Fox News that Democrats’ scattered response to the president’s Tuesday address was “not a good look” and the backlash to Texas Rep. Al Green’s heckling Donald Trump “was ‘a distraction’ from Democrats’ economic messaging.”
The conservative Politico describes ‘Potty mouth’ Democrats as “cursing up a storm” and at the same time being no good at it. “If the first time you’ve used a cuss word in public is reading off a script, it’s probably not authentic and not something you should do,” says Democratic adviser Lis Smith.
What they should have done with those little signs is mock Trump. “Stormy Daniels Says Hi.” “E. Jean Carroll Wants Her Money.” “Convicted Felon.” “43 Counts.” “2029 = Prison.” “Orange You Ashamed?” Whatever. And, reviving the old Spy magazine classic, “Short-Fingered Vulgarian.”
That would have rattled him. He doesn’t care about lies or Medicaid. He cares about his vanity and never being wrong. It also would have completely outraged the right-wing propaganda complex. It would have dominated the news coverage for days. In fact we’d still be talking about it.
Here’s something you’ve read here before: “Democrats just can’t seem to think outside the box,” Tomasky complains. “The public language of liberalism has become so timid, so afraid to offend, that too many forms of humor are just out of bounds.” They are “over-cautious and over-earnest in how they talk about almost everything.”
Semafor reported last month that the party is scrambling for a new communications strategy. It doesn’t exactly come off as authentic, writes the Bulwark’s Laura Egan:
But those efforts have led, often, to online mockery. And Democratic officials acknowledge that a lot of the content is still giving off a “How do you do, fellow kids?” vibe.
[…]
FOR THOSE ADVISING DEMOCRATS ON HOW TO GET a better footing in the social media space, the general belief is that the only way through is to rip off the band-aid. That might mean enduring a number of cringe attempts at social media posts until someone figures it out, or until more dynamic and online officials emerge as national leaders.
Democrats’ aging leadership is “living in the past, it’s a new generation,” as Joan Jett sang 45 years ago. They haven’t kept up and they “ain’t gonna change.” Their risk-aversion not only makes their efforts feel inauthentic, but they come off as trend-followers not trend-setters. And it does not smell like leadership to voters, especially younger ones now registering as independents in droves.
“It is more dangerous to be ignored than it is to get yelled at,” said Pat Dennis, president of American Bridge 21st Century.
You get the idea. I’m of a certain age and I get it.
NEW: I just asked Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett if she had a message to Elon Musk.
Democrats’ attempts to adapt to the new media environment and to master the attention economy fail miserably, in part, because the leadership’s politics dates from the age of 5-1/4″ floppy disks. Caucus leaders like Jeffries mistakenly resent younger caucus members like AOC and Max Frost to whom social media engagement comes naturally. And “potty mouth” Jasmine Crockett of Texas who don’t give a damn ’bout her reputation. She brings it, the newsies report it, and social media spreads it.
This party is not going to recover lost ground until it retires officials who are past their best-by dates. That’s not about age but about skill sets.
