Former Ambassador Caroline Kennedy sent a litter to Senators about her cousin Bobby. If they care to listen there is no way they could ever even dream of putting him in charge of anything:
He is a sociopath: “he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks. It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.”
Sadly, I won’t be surprised if that actually cinches it for him. Republicans will love him all the more.
It’s not a kitchen table issue so …
For over a week now, Donald Trump and the Justice Department have been flouting the law meant to shut down TikTok. The legislation was unambiguous and was passed by large, bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress; it was affirmed by a unanimous Supreme Court less than two weeks ago. And for the most part, both Republicans and Democrats have sat quietly by as Trump has waved away their previously stated concerns, as well as the constitutional powers and institutional prerogatives of Capitol Hill.
He has also broken the law pertaining to the process for firing Inspector Generals and is ignoring the Impoundment Act by shutting down funding of programs he doesn’t like. He’s discriminating against all kinds of people.
But that’s what you get when you allow a criminal to become the most powerful man on earth and imbue him with immunity for virtually any crime he commits. He has demonstrated that he will pardon anyone who backs him if they run afoul of the law as well and having been impeached twice and saved by his GOP lackeys, he has no fear of being accused of abuse of power. He’ll never have to run again. He is completely unaccountable.
He is to all intents and purposes a dictator. Who’s going to stop him?
It’s happening:
There was some question as to whether student loans would be allowed to continue and from what I can see at the moment that, like everything else in the federal government,that decision is being decided by some flunky political appointee but nobody knows if it’s going to work or not.
This situation is developing rapidly so who knows whether this will last past the day. If you look at the memo that went out suggesting that it’s being done because of “Marxist” policies, transgenderism and the green new deal, it’s pretty clear that the memo was written by a moron. So who knows?
Meanwhile, as Trump is contemplating taking food away from children and old people, ending cancer research and HIV funding as well as dozens of other atrocities, he’s prepared to reward his buddies in the Tech and Military Industrial Complexes with a big pile of money to develop some bullshit:
President Trump has ordered the development of a next-generation missile defense system he likened to Israel’s Iron Dome in an executive order he signed on Monday that described ballistic missiles and other advanced aerial weapons as “the most catastrophic threat facing the United States.”
But experts immediately raised questions about whether an Iron Dome-style system was feasible for the United States, which is more than 400 times the size of Israel.
He apparently thinks we need to have a defense from Canadian and Mexican rocket attacks. Maybe he really is planning on invading them too.
I’ve written a boatload about Russ Vought over the past couple of years. He’s the architect of all this and I suspect that the “shock and awe” of is is pleasing him greatly. After all, he said out loud that he wants to traumatize federal workers so they will quit. Also he’s a sadistic, Christian nationalist weirdo.
Remember this?
NEW We went undercover in Project 2025. Our investigation uncovered details of the secretive second phase of Project 2025 being led by a Trump insider, with plans to feed hundreds of highly-confidential battle plans directly into the Trump transition team. Watch here.
By the way, if you were thinking that the GOP Congressional appropriators would be miffed since the Constitution gives them the power of the purse, think again:
In the face of a massive assault on the basic functions of the federal government, the Democrats have decided they are going to ignore it and talk about kitchen table issues, crime and the border.
Less than 48 hours after President Donald Trump was inaugurated, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries held a closed-door meeting with Democratic lawmakers to issue a warning and a clarion call.
The new administration was going to “flood the zone,” and Democrats couldn’t afford to chase every single outrage — or nothing was going to sink in for the American people, Jeffries told them, according to a person in the room who requested anonymity to discuss the private meeting.
Jeffries, D-N.Y., urged members to focus their message on the cost of living, along with border security and community safety.
“The House Republican Contract Against America is an extreme plan that will not lower costs for everyday Americans,” Jeffries told reporters the next day, referring to the GOP agenda and spending cuts it is weighing. “It will make our country more expensive.”
Burned by their failures to end the Trump era the first time, Democrats are crafting a new playbook for his second administration that departs from the noisy resistance of his first presidency. The new approach, according to more than a dozen party leaders, lawmakers and strategists, will be to zero in on pocketbook issues as they lay the groundwork for the 2026 midterm elections and beyond. And they plan to focus less on his cultural taunts and issues that don’t reach the kitchen table.
Yeah, ok fine. Basically, this is just crossing your fingers and hoping that Trump and the Republicans will implode and somehow the democracy will survive and you’ll be all that’s left standing. But sure, whatever. Maybe they’ll make some good “deals” with the Republicans to lower taxes for rich people in exchange for only putting a 20% tariff on food. Very kitchen table.
They told him he would have to switch to a midnight show despite his ratings being the highest on the network in daytime. So he left.
This is CNN.
This oligarch cover of “All Over the World” won’t be spawning flash mobs. At least not the dancing kind.
Anne Applebaum writes in The Atlantic:
During an American election, a rich man can hand out $1 million checks to prospective voters. Companies and people can use secretly funded “dark money” nonprofits to donate unlimited money, anonymously, to super PACs, which can then spend it on advertising campaigns. Podcasters, partisans, or anyone, really, can tell outrageous, incendiary lies about a candidate. They can boost those falsehoods through targeted online advertising. No special courts or election rules can stop the disinformation from spreading before voters see it. The court of public opinion, which over the past decade has seen and heard everything, no longer cares. U.S. elections are now a political Las Vegas: Anything goes.
That is not how it works in other countries, Applebaum explains. Campaign spending in European countries is limited by law, and such barricades against the influence of Big Money exist elsewhere. Donor transparency, equal time, rules against hate speech, etc., are intended “to create conditions for fair debate, to build trust in the system, and to inspire confidence in the winning candidates.”
Tech billionaires with enough money to control the weather threaten popular sovereignty. They are aided by a system of cryptocurrencies that can channel dark money into anonymous disinformation accounts across social media. Both have undermined our democracy here and are now at work internationally. What was once a Cold War practice of nation-states surrepetitiously funding foreign political parties is now practiced by an impossibly rich class of transnational oligarchs seeking “agenda setting” power beyond the legal reach of popular will to bring them to heel.
Only one institution on the planet is large enough and powerful enough to write and enforce laws that could make the tech companies change their policies. Partly for that reason, the European Union may soon become one of the Trump administration’s most prominent targets. In theory, the EU’s Digital Services Act, which took full effect last year, can be used to regulate, fine, and, in extreme circumstances, ban internet companies whose practices clash with European laws. Yet a primary intent of the act is not punitive, but rather to open up the platforms: to allow vetted researchers access to platform data, and to give citizens more transparency about what they hear and see. Freedom of speech also means the right to receive information, and at the moment social-media companies operate behind a curtain. We don’t know if they are promoting or suppressing certain points of view, curbing or encouraging orchestrated political campaigns, discouraging or provoking violent riots. Above all, we don’t know who is paying for misinformation to be spread online.
Enter Trump-Vance:
In November, the European Commission fined Meta more than $800 million for unfair trade practices. But for how much longer will the EU have this authority? In the fall, J. D. Vance issued an extraordinarily unsubtle threat, one that is frequently repeated in Europe. “If NATO wants us to continue supporting them and NATO wants us to continue to be a good participant in this military alliance,” Vance told an interviewer, “why don’t you respect American values and respect free speech?” Mark Zuckerberg, echoing Vance’s misuse of the expression free speech to mean “freedom to conceal company practices from the public,” put it even more crudely. In a conversation with Joe Rogan in January, Zuckerberg said he feels “optimistic” that President Donald Trump will intervene to stop the EU from enforcing its own antitrust laws: “I think he just wants America to win.”
I read that twisted use of “free speech” and thought “To Serve Man.” They’re using our own principles against us.
Where once Vladimir Putin was the most prominent player seeking to undermine European sovereignty, Applebaum explains, now it’s über-rich Americans:
… because they don’t want to be regulated—and they may have the American president on their side. Quite soon, the European Union, along with Great Britain and other democracies around the world, might find that they have to choose between their alliance with the United States and their ability to run their own elections and select their own leaders without the pressure of aggressive outside manipulation. Ironically, countries, such as Brazil, that don’t have the same deep military, economic, and cultural ties to the U.S. may find it easier to maintain the sovereignty of their political systems and the transparency of their information ecosystems than Europeans.
In my earlier post, I cited a Laura Clawson comment that “Once again I feel like this reality is brought to us by a writer badly in need of an editor.” For myself, this growth of tech oligarch power resembles the plot of a bad 50s sci-fi flick I saw as a kid. Anne Applebaum suggests it’s spreading all over the world.
(h/t DJ)
Donald Trump is already making America “great again” … for lowlifes.
This first gentleman’s demise predates Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons, but he might have received one if he’d still been in jail. Plus, if he’d owned a GMC Denali, it would now be a McKinley, January 4:
A man who fired an assault rifle inside a Washington, D.C., restaurant in December 2016 while claiming to investigate the “pizzagate” hoax died this week after being fatally shot by police during a traffic stop in Kannapolis, North Carolina.
On the night of Jan. 4, Edgar Welch was a passenger in a 2001 GMC Yukon that was stopped by officers, Kannapolis police said Thursday in a news statement.
The traffic stop was conducted after officers linked the vehicle to Welch, who was wanted at the time on an outstanding arrest warrant, police said.
When officers recognized Welch and moved to arrest him, he produced a handgun from his jacket and pointed it at one of the officers, police said, and after refusing commands to drop the gun, two officers opened fire on him.
“Florida Man” revisited, January 22:
A Florida man who prosecutors alleged attacked police with an explosive device during the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol — and whose case was dropped following President Donald Trump’s sweeping pardons and commutations issued Monday, was arrested Wednesday on pending federal gun charges, according to court records.
Daniel Ball, 39, was taken into custody Wednesday morning, according to an arrest warrant, on a separate indictment returned by federal prosecutors in Florida last summer that charged him for unlawfully possessing a gun as a felon.
“Indiana State Police did not provide additional details,” January 26:
An Indiana man who was recently pardoned for his participation in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was shot and killed during a traffic stop by a sheriff’s deputy Sunday.
Matthew Huttle, 42, was involved in a traffic stop at 4:15 p.m. by a Jasper County sheriff’s deputy, authorities said in a news release. It alleged that Huttle resisted arrest and was found to have a firearm on him.
“An altercation took place between the suspect and the officer, which resulted in the officer firing his weapon and fatally wounding the suspect,” the release said.
Still wanted after all these years, January 27:
A Houston man who was pardoned by President Donald Trump after being convicted of assaulting police officers during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was released from a federal prison last week but is now wanted in Harris County on a pre-existing charge of online solicitation of a minor.
Andrew Taake, 36, was sentenced to six years in prison in June 2024 after pleading guilty to assaulting officers with bear spray and a whip-like weapon during the attack in Washington D.C. Taake was released from a federal prison in Florence, Colorado, on Jan. 20, after he and more than 1,500 others involved in the insurrection were pardoned by Trump on his first day in office.
[…]
On Monday, Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare confirmed in a statement to Houston Public Media that Taake is still wanted under a pending state warrant for the alleged online solicitation of a minor in 2016.
How many of the Trump “very special” 1,500 will be back in headlines and/or obituaries in the coming months?
Please review Digby’s post from last night about Donald Trump’s freezing of “all federal grants and loans, domestically and internationally.” Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck remarks ominously, “If presidents can impound appropriated funds at any time and for any reason, then there’s not much point to having a legislature.”
Then again, maybe that’s Trump’s point … or ultimate goal. Is this just the start?
He’s obviously nuts. I can’t even imagine what that’s all about.
But get a load of this.
Trump has apparently frozen all federal grants and loans, domestically and internationally—hitting the pause button on what may potentially amount to hundreds of billions of dollars of money appropriated by Congress for a dizzying array of specific, pre-ordained purposes.
From constitutional lawyer Steve Vladek tonight. I’m sharing the whole thing because I suspect you may need a thorough explainer. I know I did:
The move was announced in a cryptic and thinly reasoned two-page memo that went out over the signature of Matthew J. Vaeth, the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. And the consequences are potentially cataclysmic—for virtually all foreign aid (including the distribution of HIV drugs in poor countries); for medical and other scientific research in the United States; for tons of different pools of support for educational institutions; and for virtually every other entity that receives federal financial assistance. (The memo excludes funds paid directly to individuals, like student loans or Social Security—although it offers no principled basis for the distinction.)
The freeze purports to be temporary—and only “to the extent permissible” by law, whatever that means. Thus, the Vaeth memo directs all agencies that administer affected funds to submit detailed lists of projects suspended under the new order by February 10. Those agencies in turn must assign “responsibility and oversight” to tracking the federal spending to a senior political appointee, not a career official. But there is no guarantee that the spigot will be turned back on in two weeks; and in the interim, the withholding of so much money will almost certainly cause irreparable harm to at least some of the affected parties even if it’s fully restored at the end of the “pause.” Thus, even if this measure is a stopgap (and that’s debatable at best), it’s one that is likely to cause numerous crises all its own.
Even as the Trump administration has embarked upon a flurry of controversial initiatives over the past week, I’ve been reluctant to swing at every pitch. But this action belongs in a category unto itself. In essence, the Trump administration is claiming the unilateral power to at least temporarily “impound” tens of billions of dollars of appropriated funds—in direct conflict with Congress’s constitutional power of the purse, and in even more flagrant violation of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 (ICA).
When, not if, recipients of the frozen funds sue to challenge agencies’ compliance with the Vaeth memo, it’s a virtual certainty that the Trump administration will argue that the ICA is unconstitutional and that the President has inherent constitutional authority to impound. That argument is a loser, but it’s a good bet that it’s going to be up to the Supreme Court to say so—and probably a heck of a lot sooner than we might have predicted as recently as yesterday.
A Brief Overview of Impoundment
The question of whether a President can refuse to spend—to “impound”—funds Congress has appropriated for a designated purpose is one that has come up every so often in American history, albeit not on this scale. Sometimes, Congress passes statutes that give at least some spending discretion to the President. But absent such authorization, the prevailing consensus has long been that Congress’s power of the purse (the Spending Clause is the very first enumerated regulatory power that the Constitution confers upon the legislature) brings with it broad power to specify the purposes for which appropriated funds are to be spent—and that a broad presidential impoundment power would be inconsistent with that constitutional authority. If the President can accomplish Congress’s intended goal by spending less money, that’s one thing. But simply refusing to spend the appropriated funds because the President is opposed to why Congress appropriated the money in the first place is something else, altogether.
Even the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which tends to err on the side of the President in these kinds of separation-of-powers disputes, concluded in 1988 that the overwhelming weight of authority “is against such a broad power in the face of an express congressional directive to spend.” As OLC explained,
There is no textual source in the Constitution for any inherent authority to impound. It has been argued that the President has such authority because the specific decision whether or not to spend appropriated funds constitutes the execution of the laws, and Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution vests the “executive Power” in the President alone. The execution of any law, however, is by definition an executive function, and it seems an “anomalous proposition” that because the President is charged with the execution of the laws he may also disregard the direction of Congress and decline to execute them. Similarly, reliance upon the President’s obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” Article II, Section 3, to give the President the authority to impound funds in order to protect the national fisc, creates the anomalous result that the President would be declining to execute the laws under the claim of faithfully executing them. Moreover, if accepted, arguments in favor of an inherent impoundment power, carried to their logical conclusion, would render congressional directions to spend merely advisory.
Thus, even without the Impoundment Control Act, the kind of across-the-board impoundment the OMB memo is effectuating, even temporarily, should pretty plainly be unconstitutional.
But the Impoundment Control Act appears to resolve the illegality of this move beyond dispute. Enacted in response to an unprecedented volume of impoundment efforts by President Nixon, the Act creates a procedural framework within which the President can attempt to impound certain appropriated funds. Specifically, the ICA creates a fast-track procedure for Congress to consider a President’s request (a “special message”) to rescind funds he identifies for reasons he specifies.
Under the statute, the President may defer spending those funds for up to 45 days following such a request (which, it should be noted, he hasn’t made yet).But if Congress does not approve the President’s rescission request within 45 days of receiving it, then the funds must be spent. What’s more, the ICA specifically exempts certain appropriated funds from even the ICA’s impoundment procedure—those that are “required” or “mandated” to be spent by the relevant statute. At least some of those funds are necessarily encompassed within the pools of funds frozen by the Vaeth memo.
Ironically, as the GAO has long explained, adherence to the ICA is thus the only legal way for a President to impound appropriated funds. President Trump clearly hasn’t followed that procedure here (again, for much of the funds at issue, he couldn’t). But that pathway hasn’t stopped those who have been clamoring for President Trump to take this kind of action from arguing that the ICA is unconstitutional—by purporting to limit the circumstances in which the President can otherwise exercise a unilateral, constitutional impoundment power (that no one else believes exists). Again, there may be contexts in which the President can impound modest chunks of appropriated funds—but only because (and pursuant to how) Congress has authorized it under the ICA. And there’s just no argument that that’s what has happened (or that that could happen) here.
Impoundment and This Supreme Court
It stands to reason that, unless this directive is quickly rescinded (and perhaps not even then), there will quickly be lawsuits by those who were entitled to the frozen federal funds challenging agencies’ compliance with the Vaeth memo on both constitutional and statutory grounds. (Even relatively narrower views of Article III standing would look favorably upon plaintiffs who had been relying upon frozen federal funds.)
Such lawsuits would almost certainly move quickly—perhaps generating some kind of injunctive relief in which lower courts order the relevant agency officials (that is, the officials responsible for disbursement of the specific funds withheld from the plaintiffs) to cease withholding appropriated funds. Those rulings, in turn, would likely provoke Trump’s Justice Department into seeking emergency relief from intermediate appeals courts—and, eventually, from the Supreme Court itself.
It’s too soon to say, at this juncture, exactly which case will get to the justices first. But the longer the Vaeth memo stays on the books, the more likely it is that some dispute arising out of it will reach the Court very quickly. Indeed, I wrote shortly after the election that this Supreme Court term could very well end up being dominated by emergency litigation involving Trump administration policies. I had thought, until yesterday, that the birthright citizenship executive order would get there first. But given that that lawless nonsense isn’t supposed to go into effect until next month (and has already been blocked by a lower court in the interim), impoundment may well beat it to One First Street.
More than just getting there first, the impoundment issue also presents an even more fundamental question about the structure of our government—one that goes beyond even the enormous moral and practical implications of the birthright citizenship issue. If presidents can impound appropriated funds at any time and for any reason, then there’s not much point to having a legislature.
That’s also why I’m not as skeptical of this Court being hostile to a broad claim of presidential impoundment power as I suspect many readers are—even after the broad embrace of Article II power in last summer’s presidential immunity ruling. For as much as this Court has embraced the “unitary executive” theory of executive power, impoundment has never been a central feature of that school of thought—as reflected in, among lots of other places, the OLC opinion referenced above. It’s one thing to believe that the President must have unitary control of the executive branch; it’s quite another to believe that such control extends to the right to refuse to spend any and all money Congress appropriates. (One can see at least some view of the significance and breadth of Congress’s appropriations power in last term’s ruling in the CFPB funding case—which Justice Thomas wrote, and from which only Justices Alito and Gorsuch dissented.)
And even for judges and justices who might be somewhat more sympathetic to nuanced impoundment claims, the Vaeth memo … ain’t it. Instead of a carefully calibrated argument against the compulsory nature of a specific appropriation, the Vaeth memo is a clumsy (“Marxist”?!?) broadsword. Perhaps it’s so transparently harmful, preposterous, and unlawful that we’ll see the administration walk it back in the coming days. If not, it stands to reason that the Supreme Court will have to settle the matter within the next few weeks—and that even this Court is likely to oblige.
WTF?????
Update– In case you were wondering about President’s Loopy’s comment about the water:
The DOJ is now going to be MAGA or else:
The Justice Department is firing more than a dozen key officials who worked on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team prosecuting President Donald Trump, after Acting Attorney General James McHenry said they could not be trusted in “faithfully implementing the president’s agenda,” Fox News Digital has learned.
McHenry has transmitted a letter to each official notifying them of their termination, a Justice Department official exclusively told Fox News Digital.
It is unclear how many officials received that letter. The names of the individuals were not immediately released.
“Today, Acting Attorney General James McHenry terminated the employment of a number of DOJ officials who played a significant role in prosecuting President Trump,” a DOJ official told Fox News Digital. “In light of their actions, the Acting Attorney General does not trust these officials to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda.”
These are all non-partisan, career prosecutors who were assigned the job. They are not people who are supposed to be enacting anyone’s agenda. Or they weren’t anyway. Now, everyone in the government is required to be a MAGA hat wearing freak or they’re out.
Edward R. Martin Jr., interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., has asked two top prosecutors in his office to undertake an internal review of its handling of Capitol riot prosecutions, a move that follows a White House executive order to the Justice Department and intelligence agencies to hunt for political bias in their ranks.
In an email to staff Monday morning, Martin stated that he had appointed Denise Cheung, chief of the Criminal Division, and Jon Hooks, chief of the Fraud, Public Corruption and Civil Rights section, to lead a “special project” investigating the office’s charging of more than 250 Capitol riot defendants with obstructing an official proceeding of Congress, a statute the Supreme Court ruled last June was too broadly applied.
“Obviously, the use was a great failure of our office … and we need to get to the bottom of it,” Martin wrote in the email, saying he expected a preliminary report by Friday. A copy of the email was viewed by The Washington Post.
[…]
Martin’s tasking of two of the highest-ranking supervisors in the office of 300 federal prosecutors — the nation’s largest U.S. attorney’s office — to carry out the review is likely to stoke criticism from Democrats that he is helping the Trump administration sow discord in the office, divert prosecutorial resources and punish prosecutors making reasonable legal judgments. Prosecutors’ use of the obstruction statute was approved by nearly all judges who reviewed it before it reached the high court.
All the lower court judges and out of three appellate judges backed the DOJ’s use of the statute. Only the rank partisans on the Supreme Court believed it was overreach and we know why.
It will be interesting if the DOJ tells their prosecutors to go soft in political cases against Democrats going forward. Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Here’s the piece de resistance. Martin himself is an insurrectionist:
But his focus on prosecutors’ charging decisions is likely to cheer President Donald Trump and other right-wing supporters who have called for prosecutors to be prosecuted. Martin, 54, was a “Stop the Steal” organizer for Trump after his 2020 election loss and a board member of a nonprofit group that raised money for Jan. 6 defendants as victims of political persecution; he was a defense attorney for three such defendants, including a Kansas City Proud Boys leader who pleaded guilty to assaulting police with an ax handle.
Wow. Just wow. I guess the idea of conflict of interest has been completely abandoned for all time. (Well, unless it’s a Democrat being accused, of course.)
The Trump administration on Monday ordered former staff members for as many as 17 fired inspectors general to immediately arrange for the return of work laptops, phones, parking decals and ID cards — even as questions remained over whether President Trump broke the law in dismissing independent watchdogs.
Some of the fired officials were seeking to raise alarms about what had happened. Among them was Mark Greenblatt, whom Mr. Trump had appointed as the inspector general of the Interior Department five years ago and who had led an interagency council of the watchdog officials until the new year.
“This raises an existential threat with respect to the primary independent oversight function in the federal government,” Mr. Greenblatt said in an interview. “We have preserved the independence of inspectors general by making them not swing with every change in political party.”
He left the DOJ IG, Michael Horowitz, in place, likely because he’d been quite good to him during his first term. All the rest are gone.
I don’t know what to say about any of this. The Republicans in Congress are completely docile and the Democrats aren’t much better, at least not yet. The media is reporting this but then it goes into the bonfire of other Trump atrocities and we’re on to something else.
At this point, I’m not sure I can even imagine anymore what might be a breaking point. I have to believe there will be something or I’ll go mad. Will a Democratic rout in 2026 even do it? I’m not sure and the way Trump is going I can’t help but wonder what they’re planning to do with elections. Why would they even think of allowing them to be free and fair?
Maybe that’s too dark. It’s just the first full week and they’re feeling drunk with power. Perhaps this will calm down and it will be the usual Trump blather and bullshit. But I am not sanguine.
As Tim Miller points out in this video,(warning, it’s on X) this indicates that one of the best line of attack against Trump is this oligarchy he’s assembled and which he personally adores. As that 12% approval indicates, there’s a split somewhere in the Trump coalition and it’s pretty clear that it’s between the Wall Street types and the MAGA populists, many of whom are listening to the likes of Steve Bannon. This is a very rich political vein to mine.
