I’ve just heard one Democrat after the other go on television and say that they will reach out their hands to work with Trump to lower prices and crime and illegal immigration (I’m not kidding) but they will oppose him if he goes over the line.
Will they reach out their hands like Musk does above?
Here is a typical blurb from the MSM in the last few days that I think is worthwhile to unpack. It’s from Semafor’s newsletter:
US President-elect Donald Trump will begin his second term with political momentum, but his sweeping promises may come back to haunt him. His November victory was “by any historical measure… a squeaker,” wrote Ezra Klein in The New York Times, “but the vibes have been a rout.” Silicon Valley embraced him and the Trumpian right won social media, allowing Trump a “cultural victory” larger than his political one. But he needs to be careful: He has promised an end to inflation and a rapid economic boom, despite policies that economists think will actually accelerate price rises and slow rather than aid growth. Polling already finds Americans skeptical that he can fulfil those promises.
It’s true that in the vibes economy (I can’t believe I’m writing that) Trump has been pretty triumphant during the interregnum. And yet many seem to think that the minute people realize that the price of eggs isn’t going down they will turn on him.
I suppose if you believe that it really was the price of eggs that made people vote for him then that might make sense. Let’s just say I’m skeptical it was that simple. But if it was then I’m pretty sure they’re going to find out quite soon that Trump lied. But then one of Trump’s superpowers is that he’s such a liar that nobody believes anything he says, whether they support him or not. Reality isn’t really salient in politics at the moment.
I hope the American Prospect won’t mind that I am reposting this entire piece by Rick Perlstein from a while back. It’s really important on a day like today. (Be sure to click over to read all the other great stuff on the site all of which are equally important as we face the coming apocalypse.)
What will you do if men in uniforms arrive in your neighborhood, and an immigrant neighbor gets a knock on the door and is led away in handcuffs?
Or if the uniforms are not police uniforms, and there is not even a knock?
What if the knock is for your daughter, and they’re coming for her because of a pill that she took? Will you open the door?
Or if your teenage granddaughter, alone and afraid, calls you and begs you to drive her to a state where abortion is legal? Your governor has signed a bill making such “abortion trafficking” illegal, stipulating a penalty of 15 years.
What will you do if you’re called to serve on the jury hearing the grandmother’s case? She is guilty beyond a hint of a reasonable doubt; no way around that. Do you vote to convict her, or do you hold out against 11 of your peers?
LET’S SAY YOU ARE AN ATTORNEY in North Carolina, working out of your home. You sometimes serve as a court-appointed lawyer. Mysterious figures from something called “Gov Ops” appear at your door and claim power to rifle through your files without a warrant or any deference to attorney-client privilege.
They do not say what they are looking for. It could be public records proving government malfeasance, or private medical records of a client seeking an abortion, or communications involving legislative redistricting, or anything else they want to take. This is all because of a provision snuck into the state budget by the Republican legislative leadership that authorizes this new secret police force to seize “any document or system of record” from anyone who does work for the state. You are also advised that if you say anything about this raid to anyone, you will be breaking the law.
Do you let them in or do you refuse? Do you tell them they can arrest you if they want?
What if you work in the North Carolina legislature, and your boss hands you a document to shred? It shows him to have broken the law. Given that the same budget provision lets any legislator unilaterally decide whether to “retain, destroy, sell, loan, or otherwise dispose of” any public record, what is your choice?
A BREWPUB IN A WISCONSIN NORTHWOODS TOWN falls afoul of the local right-wing power structure. The owner is an outspoken progressive with a political action committee committed to electing Democrats. He called the publisher of the town newspaper names, so the publisher sues him, in a state without a statute to protect the innocent against nuisance lawsuits, because the far-right-controlled state legislature values such suits as a weapon to preserve the state’s authoritarian power structure.
An elected judge, a member of that Republican power structure, refuses to dismiss the case, even though it is plainly meritless. A slick out-of-town lawyer being groomed by that power structure for higher office deposes the restaurateur, asking him to name the mother of his child born 15 years ago out of wedlock, a question he has no legal option but to answer. They are upping the stakes, forcing him to reveal embarrassing information about his private life that the newspaper can use to humiliate him, because their first tactic, bleeding him dry financially with frivolous lawsuits, is thwarted when they learn his insurance company is paying for his defense.
Also, in apparent coordination with this legal harassment campaign, county zoning officials demand the man pave his driveway before the opening weekend of the tourist season, though there is no time to get a permit, and no law requiring paved driveways. They ban his beer garden from allowing outdoor seating. They are determined to make him understand that they will never give up until their ideological enemy is drummed out of town.
That’s what is happening in Oneida County, Wisconsin. If something like it happens in the town where your family’s weekend cabin is: What would you do?
WHAT IF YOU ARE IN THE ARMY, and are ordered to the border to transport children to deportation camps? Or shoot peaceful protesters?
What if you are a law enforcement officer ordered to arrest more Black people by a city administration that fears federal intervention should the police fall below a certain quota of minority arrests? After all, Project 2025 recommends that local officials face “legal action” if they “deny American citizens the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions,” and refuse to arrest “those who … actually commit crimes.”
What will you do if you are a federal prison guard shipped from Texas to police a protest in some faraway city, and are ordered not to identify yourself, nor wear any identifying badge?
Or if you are a federal bureaucrat, and ordered not to authorize spending for a highway that Congress requires by law that you spend, because the president wants to punish the local congressman, the better to “crush the deep state”?
Or if you are a university administrator, ordered to bulldoze a religious structure: What will you do?
HOW ABOUT IF YOU’RE A WORKER BEE in the office of a Republican prosecutor who follows the call of Stephen Miller after Donald Trump’s criminal conviction to use “[e]very facet of Republican Party politics and power” to “go toe-to-toe with Marxism and beat those Communists”? Your boss presents you his draft of a frivolous indictment of a Democratic officeholder, say for some fantastical accusation of supposed “electoral fraud.” He asks you to draft the indictment. What do you do?
Or maybe you are an IRS auditor, ordered to pick through the tax returns of a White House critic; a State Department bureaucrat ordered to cancel the passport of a White House critic; an NSA technician ordered to listen in on the conversations of a White House critic; a CIA officer harboring suspicions that evidence smearing a family member of a prominent Democrat may be the product of a foreign disinformation campaign that has not been investigated for political reasons.
In all of these cases, your civil service job classification has been moved to “Schedule F.” You serve at the pleasure of the president now.
What will you do?
DONALD TRUMP SAID, BEFORE A JEWISH AUDIENCE this past September 19, that “the Jewish people would have a lot to do” with his loss, if he loses. Let’s say Donald Trump loses. You are a rabbi leading a congregation with prominent Trump supporters among its members. Now, for the Sabbath after the election, you have a sermon to write, which some of those members will be present to hear. Meanwhile, strange, scary men have been seen lurking about the grounds.
What do you say?
You work in the National Security Agency and hear the president offer a quid pro quo to a foreign leader in exchange for crushing a political rival. Do you go public with what you know? And if you do, and the death threats get hairy, do you accede to the pleading of your spouse to leave the country for your family’s safety, or do you defiantly stay put?
You are walking down the street when people assault a trans person only hours after the president of the United States explains matter-of-factly that “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.” Or you see attacks on a couple speaking Spanish, or on a passerby who calls out someone’s MAGA hat. In each case, there are more of them than there are of you, and no cops in sight—or the cops are on the side of the thugs. What do you do?
You are a magazine publisher, and federal agents raid your office. Acting on the orders of CIA director Kash Patel, who has promised, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” and that “we will go out and find the conspirator not just in government, but in the media” who abetted the crime of letting Biden be inaugurated. What do you do?
You are a columnist at a newspaper owned by a billionaire with many government contracts who chooses not to endorse the candidate for president who is not a fascist. You have made your reputation, ever since the 1970s, as a scourge against “tyranny” and “appeasement.” What do you do?
Your professor, on a temporary work visa, is seized for deportation as a “Marxist.” What do you do?
Your kid’s high school history teacher is fired for teaching students about slavery. What do you do?
Your pacifist son is forced to take the military entrance exam. What do you do?
You see someone set fire to a ballot drop box. You have just enough time, maybe, to pull out the contents, though perhaps at the risk of third-degree burns. What do you do?
You’re in the National Guard, and you hear someone in your unit fantasize about gunning down kids at the Jewish religious school where he works as a security guard, and another reply that he’d like to pilot a plane into the factory where they make the beer that featured a trans spokesperson. Do you drop the dime?
By the way, your unit is about to be federalized to move in on a New Jersey sanctuary city and bust down doors in Baghdad-style house-to-house raids because the migrants living there are “not civilians.” Do you follow orders, or do you risk the stockade?
Or you are a National Guardsman in Texas, and breathe a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, draws the line against your governor’s interpretation of Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution, claiming that because refugees from Venezuela “actually invaded” that state, literal war can be waged against these poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But your heart sinks when the governor acts anyway, replying with a piece of apocrypha credited to President Andrew Jackson: The court has made its decision; now let them enforce it. What’s your decision?
Or the Supreme Court goes a different way: You are a clerk for a right-wing federal judge, an uncontroversial stepping stone for young lawyers on the make whatever their own ideology. You’re asked to draft an opinion that generals can no more be disallowed from mowing down women and children wading across the Rio Grande with machine guns than they could prevent a baby’s testicles being crushed, should the president of the United States wish it so. Do you write it?
Your wife is a teacher, and her heart sinks too when the governor says the same thing in the face of a Supreme Court ruling upholding a 1982 precedent that states cannot deny students free public education on account of immigration status. Let migrants in her kindergarten classroom, she’s told, and she’ll be fired. How do you advise her?
Or, hell, you just drive a bus for a living, and your company has been hired to fill a bus with those selfsame “invaders,” drive them across the country, then dump them out in a parking lot—right next to the contents of the vehicle’s septic tank. Do you start the engine?
Or consider the scenario related to The New Republic’s Greg Sargent by a senior Department of Labor official: evaluating a proposed regulation for a federal safety standard protecting workers in outdoor jobs from the increasingly prevalent risk of fatalities from heatstroke; “loyalists installed in key positions could easily ensure that quality science on the impact of heat on workers is ignored or downplayed during later stages of the rulemaking process. Meanwhile, career government officials—suddenly more vulnerable to firing—would surely hesitate to challenge or expose political appointees who are manipulating the process.”
Say that career official is you. Do you risk your job? Or do you choose complicity?
Donald Trump is elected president.
What are you prepared to do?
This is a gift to the opposition if only they are smart enough to accept it.
Andy Borowitz: Inauguration Forecast Shows Temperature and IQ in the Twenties
Here with the wind chill, it’s like 2 deg outside. And still I think I’ll attend our local MLK peace march and rally (if it’s still on) rather than throw shit at my TV. I need a stiff shot of not-crazy. I just need to remember to leave the TV on tuned to Animal Planet. He’ll lie about his inauguration’s ratings anyway, but what the hell. Make the “blackout” meme trend. It’s like chicken soup….
I know several couples of means who’ve already fled the country. But for the rest of us, Brian Klaas (okay, from England) offers suggestions for surviving the next four years now that tweets about “shooting shoplifters without a trial and executing America’s top general” barely register, and the Saudis can now bribe Trump without needing “to pretend to stay at a Trump hotel.”
Klaas, with a Ph.D. earned in studying authoritarian regimes, knows whereof he speaks. He offers a few suggestions:
Never Doomscroll: Smarter Engagement, Real “Self Care”
Stay informed, but not constantly. Post online—or don’t—but not constantly. Remember that your personal resilience is a proxy for your effectiveness as a citizen. And when you find yourself consumed by the foaming, angry spectacle of politics, step away and go for a walk. Isolated outrage isn’t just individually destructive, it’s also counterproductive in the fight for the common good.
A four-mile walk is how I decompress after doing this for hours every morning. But with unusually cold January temperures lately, I’m not doing it. And I feel it.
Picking Our Battles
Democratic politicians should—to borrow the phrase from Jason Linkins of The New Republic—try to “shove the presidency down Trump’s throat.”
I covered that here. Klaas continues that while clicktivism and posting are not much use, mass protests are most effective only if used sparingly. Yet, because the American opposition was too worn out to take to the streets on January 7th, 2021, it was a lost opportunity to reinforce temporary vertebrates like Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell. Without a “mass movement in the streets demanding action,” theirs rapidly evaporated.
Klass offers two tests for whether mass protests are worth doing. January 6th passed both:
- Are we protesting against something that the overwhelming majority of Americans also objects to?
- Are we protesting against something that, if left unchallenged, would result in the permanent erosion of democracy itself?
As we’ve seen with the Liz Cheneys and the Lincoln Project:
And don’t be afraid to make strange bedfellows in politics. The most effective opposition movements to authoritarian populism organize as big tents, not jettisoning their own policy values, but inviting those who disagree with them on policy to make common cause on decency and democracy.
Building power is more effective than outrage:
Smarter Organizing, Supercitizen Communities
Finally, my advice is to think about the political landscape as an aggregation of incentives and disincentives. Only then can you realize where leverage exists, and how to exploit it.
Don’t spend money with Trump enablers. Start now to target “House Republicans in competitive districts for 2026.” But don’t forget that not all politics is federal. Support local and state races. (In case you’ve forgotten, we’re still fighting tooth-and-nail to secure a NC state Supreme Court seat a Democrat won here in November.)
Support your local communities.
Supercitizens—those who volunteer to improve their communities and lift others up—continue to add restorative stitches into our fraying social fabric. The most poetic imaginable response to the return of callousness and cruelty in the White House would be a resurgence of volunteering, community support, and fresh initiatives to help strangers who are our neighbors.
That’s why I donate to these guys:
View on Threads
I’m sure Los Angeles has tons of helper groups that need help to help neighbors.
Spring can’t get here soon enough.
Political adversaries cannot disappoint me. I expect nothing of them except more of what I oppose. Friends and allies, on the other hand, can disappoint me because I expect better of than I often get.
Perhaps the slagging of Democrats by the press is not so much conservative bias (or billionaire service) as disappointment among members of a profession known to lean left. The press and the public have come to expect outrage and an eyeball-catching circus from MAGA Republicans. When like Linus Van Pelt, Democrats fail to live up to their potential, complaints rain down like Charlton Heston’s burning hail. Except without the same uniformity.
Such as complaints raised at a post-election forum in Saginaw, Michigan. Vincent Oriedo, a biotechnology scientist, questioned what Democrats had learned from their loss to Donald Trump (The Guardian):
As the town hall with Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, and the local representative in the state legislature, Amos O’Neal, came to an end, Oriedo said he was disappointed with their answers, which amounted to bland statements about politicians “listening” to the voters.
“They did not answer the question,” he said.
“It tells me that they haven’t learned the lessons and they have their inner state of denial. I’ve been paying careful attention to the influencers within the Democratic party. Their discussions have centred around, ‘If only we messaged better, if only we had a better candidate, if only we did all these superficial things.’ There is really a lack of understanding that they are losing their base, losing constituencies they are taking for granted.”
Ph.D. biotech-scientist Black Latinos? Or anyone who feels taken for granted?
Other complaints: Too much focus on white, middle-class women. Too much focus on abortion rights in a state where voters passed an amendment protecting it. Too much reliance on polling over policy. Too little talk about the cost of groceries and kitchen-table issues. Too much “talk about the economy and kitchen-table issues” (without promising anything). This last critique allegedly shows Democrats “don’t have any principles.” This clearly explains why Michiganders handed their electoral votes to a 34-time felon.
Or this criticism:
“We have set ourselves up for generational loss because we keep promoting from within leaders that that do not criticise the moneyed interests. They refuse to take a hard look at what Americans actually believe and meet those needs.”
Today at noon, a twice-impeached, career con artist and adjudicated sex offender convicted of 34 felonies and investigated for 31 charges of espionage plus conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election retakes the Oval Office after winning it again last November. Just what is it Americans actually believe?
Just as with the flurry of pundits’ post-election analyses, complaints made against Democrats by people frustrated over Kamala Harris’s loss are, as I’ve noted, all over the place. Too little focus on this and too little on that. Paying too much attention to this group and not enough to another. That doesn’t mean the criticisms are wrong. People feel what they feel. But they don’t provide a roadmap either.
I’ve surely done my share of complaining. Senior Democrats talk a good game about fighting for the little guys, but the public rarely catches them doing it. Senior Democrats on Capitol Hill are too senior. Too much policy, not enough marketing.
Former U.S. Attorney and pundit, Joyce Vance, says the U.S. needs more civics education.
Mike Lux offers 5 things Democrats must do:
- Leading, always leading, with populist economics.
- We need to seize the day on the big fight coming up about the budget and economy.
- Doing year round community organizing on both issues and politics.
- Better messaging is great, but we need a major plan ASAP urgently to deal with a broken media landscape. (What I’ve called Democrats’ “when a tree falls in the forest” problem.)
- We need to build on the coalitions we have, but figure out different language to talk about some issues.
There are lots of suggestions, but no answers. I certainly don’t have any. Answers on offer by people MAGA Republicans cannot disappoint but Democrats can are over the place and point in different directions.
Woke up this morning from a very vivid dream. Dark, pre-dawn on a misty battlefield. Troops were completing their preparations and aligning just below a ridge waiting for the order to advance. Along the ridge above us were a line of cannon. Figured it was time to get the hell out. Walked up past the cannon in the mist to my car. Pulled onto the highway as the light was coming up and there were troops there, too, lining my side of the road. Cavalry. Only then did I realize they were all dressed in blue. Union troops.
I braced for the sound of the cannon.
Joe Biden is bracing as well:
Among those receiving the pardons were Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the longtime government scientist; and all the members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, including former Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming.
“I believe in the rule of law, and I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics,” Mr. Biden said in a statement. “But these are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing. Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety and financial security of targeted individuals and their families.
The pardons won’t stop flying monkeys.
Trump’s inauguration rally tonight:
*sigh*
I mentioned this this other day but it’s worth repeating. Stephen Miller has accumulated real power within the Trump inner circle and he’s going to use it. I quoted this from a NY Times article about his plans for the second term:
As he works out his priorities, Mr. Miller appears to have learned two key lessons from the first Trump term.
The first is to flood the zone. He believes that those he regards as Mr. Trump’s enemies — Democrats, the media, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and portions of the federal bureaucracy — are depleted and only have so much bandwidth for outrage and opposition. Mr. Miller has told people that the goal is to overwhelm them with a blitz of activity.
The second lesson has been to operate with as much secrecy as possible to prevent anyone from finding ways to obstruct the Trump agenda. As a congressional staffer, Mr. Miller was freewheeling in his digital communications. But since working for Mr. Trump, who doesn’t use email and regards people who take notes with suspicion, he puts almost nothing in writing. Instead, he works through emissaries.
The protectiveness around the executive orders is particularly notable. An incoming administration would usually send the drafts to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, where a career lawyer — walled off from the outgoing administration’s political appointees — reviews them for form and legality and suggests improvements. For the most part, Mr. Trump’s first transition is said to have followed that practice.
Punchbowl reports on specifically what that flood is going to look like. MIller gave a rundown to the House and Senate leadership on Sunday:
The scale of executive orders that Miller described to Republican lawmakers and aides was stunning, despite the fact that Trump had talked about many of them on the campaign trail for months. They cover immigration, energy policy and overhauling federal government operations.
Miller didn’t provide a tremendous amount of details to the 40-something lawmakers and aides on the call. Incoming Trump administration officials say many of these orders are “moving targets” and not finalized yet. But this is what Miller discussed:
Government reform. Trump wants to issue an executive order that provides a process for removing insubordinate employees; rewrite federal hiring rules; issue an executive order on the so-called Department of Government Efficiency; reform the rules for Schedule F federal employees; brush back on DEI in the private sector; and rescind DEI and gender-related orders from the Biden administration.
Energy. Halt spending on the “Green New Deal” and other climate-related priorities from the Biden administration; speed construction of pipelines; orders dealing with energy permitting, especially coal, natural gas and shale projects; open up offshore drilling; repeal rules on electric vehicles; open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling and speed the development of energy production from Alaska; and declare a national emergency related to energy.
Immigration and the border. Trump will classify drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations,” a dramatic move he never took in his first term; declare an emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, which will allow Trump to deploy military forces to the border; stiffen interior enforcement; move toward reinstatement of the “Remain in Mexico” policy; end “catch and release”; and generally restrict entry into the United States.
I wish I had faith that the Democrats and their advocacy groups have gathered everything they have to resist and repel all this by any means they have at hand but I really don’t. Maybe they will surprise us. But it does appear that this is just going to be a full blown blitz of terror in the first hundred days and I honestly don’t know how much of it they can get away with.
The good news is that the Congress is paralyzed by idiocy so anything that needs money will at least be delayed. But there is an awful lot of damage that the Executive branches can do on its own and Miller and the Project 2025 folks have been thinking about how to do it for years now. Get ready.
It’s not just that Trump is personally stealing his followers blind and accepting vast sums in untraceable bribes. He’s also making sure his cyberbaron buds are working on behalf of special interests and zillionaires everywhere. All the lobbyists have found a perfect end run around regulations by going directly to President Elon’s shadowy DOGE:
The Musk-run initiative, dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, is supposed to advise President-elect Donald Trump on spending cuts and regulatory reform. It doesn’t yet — and may never — have any formalized responsibilities or authority. So far, its recruits have been organizing in clandestine meetings blocks from the White House.
But already, companies and industry groups have started looking to the DOGE, above the more traditional committees of Congress and federal agencies, to advance their agendas and protect their interests.
The urgency to make inroads with Musk’s group underscores how special interests see the billionaire as a shortcut to Trump, a way to push their issues to the front of the line. It also shows how an entity ostensibly created to disrupt politics as usual is quickly becoming a target for Washington’s seasoned advocacy apparatus.
They don’t have to disclose these contacts because for all intents and purposes DOGE doesn’t really exist. How convenient. Burt some are just openly announcing their corruption:
Some are doing that work in plain sight. This week, defense contractor L3Harris Technologies Inc. sent a letter to Musk and his partner, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, and posted it on the company’s website.
L3Harris urged them to endorse four technical changes to the federal contracting process “to unleash American industry and make defense acquisition more efficient.”
Why not? Who’s going to stop them?
Apropos of nothing, President Elon has a whole bunch of defense contracts himself.
