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Advice for our times

Donald Trump wants to create spectacles, Josh Marshall observes (Thunderdome). His professional wrestling instincts are not a mere joke. “That whole bombast is not only made to make people feel afraid, particularly the people they’re threatening directly, but to create this aura of power and uncheckable power and to knock people back on their heels and make them feel disoriented, demoralized, and all those things,” Marshall tells Greg Sargent’s Daily Blast podcast:

It’s typical Trump to threaten 10 things a day. And his opponents, his enemies are feeling overwhelmed with all the different threats, and he doesn’t actually have to do anything. So it is really important for people both to be prepared for him to do all sorts of crazy stuff, but also to be attuned to that spectacle, which is his greatest power.

Trump’s goal is an America cowed, Marshall says. Maybe he jails people. Maybe he just threatens. Maybe be actually does bring lawsuits, launch investigations. He doesn’t need to follow through on many for people to cower behind silence.

Trump creating chaos and confusion, Trump’s bombast and menace, is meant to keep his adversaries off balance like a ship tossed at sea (my analogy). “It’s all out of the world of professional wrestling.” Democrats need their version of gyroscopic stabilizers if the Democratic ship expects to maintain way and fire back.

Marshall suggests something like that at TPM:

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory and promised revenge tour, a number of individuals have proposed the creation of an organization or fund which would take on the job of defending the various lawsuits, prosecutions and generalized legal harassment Trump will bring to the table in the next four years. It’s a very good idea. It’s a necessary one. Over the last six weeks I’ve had a number of people reach out to me and ask who is doing this. Where should they send money to fund this effort? This includes people who are in the small-donor category and also very wealthy people who could give in larger sums. So a few days ago I started reaching out to some people in the legal world and anti-Trump world to find out what’s going on, whether any efforts are afoot and who is doing what.

What I found out is that there are at least a couple groups working toward doing something like this. But the efforts seem embryonic. Or at least I wasn’t able to find out too much.

(Readers, if you run across efforts like this, send me links, please.)

Marshall want to see the left counterpunch, now more than ever. Embarrass Trump. Humiliate his attorneys. “That’s the language they understand,” Marshall says:

Marshall: All of these things are baseless, but most of these things are so baseless that you want to embarrass them. That’s the language they understand. Outrage and very normal and understandable reactions, that’s what they’re looking for. It’s the whole cry-more world. They want people to be outraged: How can you do this? This shouldn’t be possible. And I hope that a group like this, and the opposition to Trump more generally, can cultivate a degree of bring it on. Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s do it, dude, because you will be embarrassed and we love embarrassing you.

Old-line Democrats raised in the pre-internet era of network news eschew any spectacle livelier than a press conference. They want to look dignified. They want to achieve their policy goals even if it means “working across the aisle” with people trying to shiv them. They’d rather front Gerry Connolly than more camera-friendly, more social-media savvy AOC.

Donald Trump couldn’t give a flying f*ck about dignified. He just named Herschel Walker ambassador to the Bahamas, for God’s sake.

Marshall: We need to think big picture. What is the big goal here? It’s creating a population of cowed people. One way you do that is to actually jail people, but there’s a lot of different ways you do that. A lot of this is have the money for the actual court stuff, but also have what is in essence a public communications campaign that is contesting the ground where a lot of this is going to be taking place. You don’t personally need to be subpoenaed or called into a courtroom to make the decision in your head, Man, I better lay low because a lot of bad stuff is happening. You need people who are fighting that fight in the public square, not just in the courtroom.

Or in front of a press room podium. And we need them organized, prepositioned, and properly funded.

We must all hang together, as they saying goes.

Thank you sharing this Sanctuary of Sanity with us each day.
Happy Hollandaise!

“A moment of genuine madness.” — MSNBC’s Chris Hayes

Max: Thunderdome. How do I get in there?
Aunty Entity: That’s easy. Pick a fight!

Two important points this morning.

First, like it or not, the public wants Thunderdome. The press covers Thunderdome. Thunderdome draws eyeballs in this attention economy. Again, and again and again: How many Rocky movies did Stallone make?

Brian Beutler responds both to ABC’s capitulation to Trump and congressional Democrats’ preference for Rep. Gerry Connolly over progressive star AOC for top Oversight Committee post.

“Democrats should imagine how Fox News would fill its airtime if this were a Democratic transition, and then speak and react as if they were creating soundbites for a big, aligned, signal-boosting media company,” Beutler writes. “Democrats should be unashamed to fight [Trump]. In this conservative-dominated media environment? Attract eyeballs, for God’s sake! Pick a fight! (emphasis mine):

Instead, the Democratic leadership has organized against handing the top seat on the House oversight committee to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in the hope of installing Gerry Connolly, a 74-year old cancer patient, to the position. Connolly might not be a bad option in normal times. But over the next two years, Democrats should want an energetic, hungry figure in that role; the leaders prefer a committeeman they can control. If AOC were to become the committee chair in 2026, she would conduct freewheeling oversight; Connolly will heed the leadership and its stubborn aversion to conflict.

Donald Trump gives the people Thunderdome. But Democrats, with their “stubborn aversion to conflict,” won’t pick a fight or promote (in two senses) their best fighters.

Americans want to root for a fighter, to cheer for the underdog who punches back. The fictional George McFly who meekly takes it is cringe-worthy. Nobody wants to vote for him. The guy who cold-cocks Biff Tannen elicits cheers.

Let Republicans shout victimhood to the rooftops.

Slow Learners

Second, congressional Democrats on Tuesday voted to make “old and busted” Connolly the ranking member on the incoming House Oversight Committee over “new hotness” AOC.

Now, there is ageism and there is realism. I’m an old fart by now, just a few years younger than Connolly. I’m done. I’m an adviser. But I know that for a political party to remain vital, vibrant, and competitive, it has to have regular infusions of young blood. (See yesterday’s post.) That’s why two years ago I helped elect Anderson Clayton (then 25) state chair in North Carolina. (Like she needed much help.) But it’s a lesson slow learners among Democrats’ gerontocracy are loathe to accept.

It’s why Democrats should elect WisDems chair Ben Wikler, 43, the next chair of the Democratic National Committee on February 1. And I’d advise all y’all to tell your DNC members to support him. Clayton is up for reelection later in February.

If we’re going to take on Trump, Republican extremists, and move our country forward, the Democratic Party needs to be stronger. I'm running for Chair of the Democratic National Committee to unite the party, fight everywhere, and win. Join me. 🧵

— Ben Wikler (@benwikler.bsky.social) 2024-12-01T14:14:07.554Z

MSNBC’s Chirs Hayes Tuesday night called the choice of Connolly over AOC “a moment of genuine madness.” Democrats’ “old guard” are slow learners.

Update: Kate Aronoff of The New Republic concurs, “The elderly are not too old to govern. But they may, in this case, be too attached to a failed way of doing things…. Pelosi and the old guard’s continued opposition to younger talent seems breathtakingly counterproductive in the face of the Democratic Party’s numerous challenges right now.”

Thank you sharing this Sanctuary of Sanity with us each day.
Happy Hollandaise!

This piece in The Atlantic takes a look at the election results with a fresh eye:

Five days after last month’s election, Senator Chris Murphy rendered a damning verdict on his party’s performance. “That was a cataclysm,” the Connecticut Democrat wrote on X. “Electoral map wipeout.” Donald Trump had won both the popular vote and the biggest Electoral College victory—312 to 226—for any Republican since 1988; Democrats had lost their Senate majority and appeared unlikely to retake the House. The Democratic Party had lost touch with far too many American voters, Murphy concluded: “We are beyond small fixes.”

Other prominent Democrats saw a similarly sweeping repudiation of the party’s brand. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Senator Bernie Sanders wrote in a statement issued less than 24 hours after the polls closed. At the time of those reactions, millions of votes had yet to be counted, and several of the nation’s closest House races remained uncalled. Now a clearer picture of the election has emerged, complicating the debate over whether Democrats need to reinvent themselves—and whether voters really abandoned them at all.

Trump’s popular-vote margin has shrunk to about 1.5 percent—one of the tightest in the past half century—and because some votes went to third-party and independent candidates, he’ll fall just short of winning a majority of the vote nationwide. Compared with incumbent governments elsewhere in the world, Democrats’ losses were modest. And in the House, they gained a seat, leaving the GOP with the second-smallest majority in history. A trio of Republican vacancies expected early next year will make passing Trump’s agenda even more difficult, and Democrats are in a strong position to recapture the chamber in the midterm elections, when the incumbent party typically struggles.

The final results are prompting some in the party to push back against the doom-and-gloom diagnoses of Murphy, Sanders, and others who say the Democratic brand is in tatters and needs an overhaul. “If the Democratic brand was fundamentally broken and needed to be thrown out, this election would have been a complete blowout. And it was not. It was way too close,” Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of Swing Left, a Democratic organizing group, told me. Another Democrat, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly, put it this way: “We lost an election. We didn’t lose the country.”

As is usual after a Democratic loss to the Republicans, many on the left insist that the problem was that the party was too far to the right and the centrists all insist that the party was too far to the left. There is worry on all counts about the loss of the working class and white voters (and the erosion among voters of color) as well as pressure to change direction on everything from abortion to immigration to LGBTQ rights.

If you’re like me, this whole crypto craze is somewhat mystifying. And I really don’t understand the necessity for it. Paul Krugman at his Substack has the answer: crime.

The tech bros who helped put Trump back in power expect many favors in return; one of the more interesting is their demand that the government intervene to guarantee crypto players the right to a checking account, stopping the “debanking” they claim has hit many of their friends.

He goes on to point out that this is actually the opposite of what the whole Bitcoin revolution was supposed to do which was eliminate the need for banks:

What’s going on here? Elon Musk, Marc Andreesen and others claim that there’s a deep state conspiracy to undermine crypto, because of course they do. But the real reason banks don’t want to be financially connected to crypto is that they believe, with good reason, that to the extent that cryptocurrencies are used for anything besides speculation, much of that activity is criminal — and they don’t want to be accused of acting as accessories.

He goes into the fundamentals of crypto and discusses the only positive aspect of it which is that it may end up being the digital equivalent of gold which underlies the value of money in a purely symbolic way. But who needs it? What’s not working with the current system? Obviously speculators are just seeing the possibility of a big windfall hopefully before the whole thing crashes in which case they’ll probably get a big government bail out.

But the real necessity, as it turns out, is for crime. Having to launder big piles of hundred dollar bills is very cumbersome. He writes:

I don’t know how many people know this, but the great bulk of U.S. currency in circulation, at least in terms of value, consists of $100 bills:

But while the sheer value of $100 bills in circulation suggests that there are still plenty of tax evaders and drug dealers with safes full of cash, banknotes are an awkward medium for really large-scale criminal activity. True, $1 million in $100 bills only weighs 22 pounds; but a million isn’t that much money nowadays. When Bashar al-Assad sent $250 million to Moscow in the form of $100 and 500-euro notes, the cargo weighed two tons.

Enter crypto. British authorities recently broke up a big money-laundering scheme involving exactly the villains you’d expect:

Presumably not everyone in crypto is participating, even unknowingly, in criminal activity. But the use of crypto for money laundering appears to be rising rapidly. And if I were running a bank, I’d be reluctant to host a bank account belonging to someone who might be involved in unsavory activities.

And guess what?

Howard Lutnick, Trump’s choice for Commerce secretary, has close ties to Tether, the company that is at the heart of the scheme the UK just uncovered and is rumored to play a large role in money laundering in general.

Huh. It certainly appears that the new administration may be considering making life easier for criminals. Would you be surprised?

As Tom mentioned this morning in this excellent piece, it sure feels as if whatever resistance there was to Trump during the past 8 years is evaporating. Most of those who haven’t decided to jump on the MAGA bandwagon just don’t want to hear about it. CNN reported yesterday that its latest poll shows that 72% of those polled say they’re paying little to no attention to Trump-related news.

I wrote about one early bright spot in all this a while back: the Blue State Governors. At the moment they seem to be the only ones showing a willingness to fight. Rolling Stone took a deep dive into their plans:

Among governors, [Illinois Governor] Pritzker has been out in front — positioning himself as the blue-state anti-Trump. The Hyatt hotel heir is a billionaire himself, worth nearly $4 billion, which counts as fuck-you money in an age when opposing Trump can carry significant costs, from increased security to the risk of retaliatory litigation, or “lawfare.”

In November, Pritzker launched a new organization, called Governors Safeguarding Democracy, that seeks to unify state-based opposition to Trump’s agenda. Unveiled with co-chair Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, GSD is built for “pushing back against increasing threats of autocracy,” Pritzker says. Polis expanded on the group’s purpose in an interview with Rolling Stone: “We’re all facing a potential onslaught; let’s pool together so we can share a common response.”

That “onslaught” includes Trump threats to revoke funding from states that don’t follow his reactionary agenda on erasing transgender identity from public education, or to block federal disaster aid from states that don’t loosen environmental protections. Safeguarding residents from ICE is also a priority. “We won’t cooperate with any federal efforts — especially illegal federal efforts that separate families — to deport hardworking, de facto Americans who’ve been here for decades,” Polis says. The group will also focus on “fortifying the institutions of democracy that our country and our states depend upon,” Pritzker says — whether that’s local election boards or state courts.

The governors group has not unveiled a roster of member states, but Rolling Stone has learned that more than 20 are involved. The group’s advisory board includes a formidable, bipartisan brain trust of former governors — Deval Patrick (D-Mass.), Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kan.), Bill Weld (R-Mass.), and Arne Carlson (R-Minn.) — as well as former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.

GSD is currently probing how states can lock down databases to prevent the Trump administration from tracking undocumented immigrants who have received state driver licenses, for example, or from targeting activists who are arrested while protesting. Behind the scenes, GSD has been prepping states for the fallout from Supreme Court rulings that have undermined federal regulatory agencies, says Julia Spiegel, a former aide to Newsom who is GSD’s top administrator. “Anything from clean air and water to safe medication is potentially under attack now,” she says. “What are states going to do to create the regulatory infrastructure if the federal government is no longer going to be able to do it? Governors are working together to address these big questions — to make sure their state institutions can protect and provide the things of daily life that matter to people most.”

GSD is modeled on the Reproductive Freedom Alliance, which saw Democratic governors unite in defense of reproductive rights after the reversal of Roe v. Wade. That included organizing bulk purchases of abortion drugs — negotiated at a discount by the state with the largest purchasing power, California. The alliance also developed legislation, for introduction by member states, to safeguard the privacy of women who travel for abortion care and that of the doctors who treat them.

At the press conference launching GSD, Pritzker emphasized the need to remain agile and “swiftly respond to emerging threats.” Pressed for details, he insisted that a proposal by Trump adviser Stephen Miller to deploy National Guard troops from Republican-led states inside “unfriendly” blue states, as part of a mass deportation regime, represented “exactly the kind of question that [GSD] would be considering.” Pritzker insisted that the proposal was illegal — and Illinois “would certainly not cooperate.”

The article goes into the work among activists to hold them to it and it sounds like some serious organizing is going on at the state level.

I truly hope this is true. If these Governors are willing to be the leaders of resistance to Trump then, thank God. And good for the activists too. Somebody needs to do it. The Washington Dems appear to be paralyzed at the moment.

Obviously, many of these governors are planning to run for president so it’s even more gratifying if they’ve decided that going up against MAGA and Donald Trump is good for them and good for the party. I can’t say that I’m hearing much of that from anyone else.

Go Govs!

Public Notice’s Noah Berlatsky analyzed Trump’s TIME interview so I didn’t have to. It truly is astonishing that he is apparently considered some sort of political savant considering how incoherent he is. Here’s an excerpt of the Public Notice piece:

To quote from our analysis of his previous Time interview, “even after four years as president, Trump has virtually no grasp on any policy issue beyond empty talking points, most of which are lies.” And he ain’t changing.

Even when Trump is trying to sound reasonable, he’s hampered by the fact that his knowledge of issues never goes deeper than talking points. Perhaps even worse, he’s clearly in thrall to the world’s worst conspiracy theorists and authoritarian rulers.

Obviously, his admission that it’s “hard” to bring down prices is the takeaway from this interview and Berlatsky gives it the full treatment, But there’s more. Here he was on abortion:

I’m not sure he even knows what the abortion pill is but he most certainly was not “strongly against” stopping it. Right now he’s struggling to appear “presidential” so he thinks he’s being moderate but it’s pretty clear he really doesn’t give a damn about reproductive rights and as a result will very likely allow his right wing zealots to have their way.

Berlatsky writes that Trump is weirdly trying to distance himself from the harsh transgender stance he took on the campaign trail. This is a man who ran vicious ads against trans people on a loop and said daily that schools were performing gender reassignment surgery against the parents’ wishes! But here he is dismissing the issue as

Cute. He goes into Trump’s discussion of Ukraine and Israel in which he proves once again that he is completely uneducated on the subject and has no interest in learning anything about it. It’s all about how it “never would have happened” if he had been president and that it will all stop once he is simply because he declares that it will or very bad things will happen. Same old same old.

He went on and on about expelling immigrants and as Berlatsky writes, he talked about how he would punish any foreign country that refuses to accept them:

Time also asked Trump where he would send migrants if their home countries do not want to accept them. He tried to dodge, saying “I’ll get them into every country, or we won’t do business with those countries.” But when pressed, he acknowledged he might in fact might have to build concentration camps to house them.

“I don’t care,” he said. “Whatever it takes to get them out.”

“I don’t care” is not generally what you want to hear from a president, especially when he’s discussing plans to conduct militarized deportation raids in parts of the country that don’t want them. But based on this interview, and on the entire rest of his political career, “I don’t care” does seem to sum up Trump’s approach to most issues that don’t directly involve puffing up his ego.

After a decade at the center of Republican and American politics, Trump continues to barely pretend to understand the broad outlines, much less the nuances, of his own agenda. When he talks about abortion, or tariffs, or trans people, or concentration camps, or Ukraine, or Gaza, he cheerfully flatters himself and talks about how great he’s going to make everything. But he offers few policy details, and when he does, those details are almost always conspiracy theories and lies.

By contrast here’s a 15 minute interview with the president everyone says is demented. Joe Biden is no Barack Obama or Bill Clinton when it comes to oratory or political analysis. But he’s not Donald Trump either. It’s amazing that America hates this man and loves the addled weirdo who clearly has no idea what he’s talking about.

It’s a damn shame Joe Biden isn’t getting a second term.

Watch him actually answer questions like an adult with depth—then compare it to Trump’s word salads. The downgrade is almost comical.pic.twitter.com/czlHEThc8e

— Chris D. Jackson (@ChrisDJackson) December 18, 2024

It looks like Kash Patel isn’t the only one implementing the vengeance agenda and Russ Vought won’t be the only ones demanding total loyalty in the executive branch. Others are helping with the dirty work:

Staffers working for the DOGE duo, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have contacted some of Trump’s first-term cabinet secretaries and asked them to prepare two lists of people they served with: one for political appointees and the other for career officials. The listmakers are then to write an “A” by the names of those they believe Trump should bring back or keep, and a “B” by the names of those they think should be blacklisted or fired.

Of course, civil servants (the career officials) are typically protected from political raids at agencies, but Trump has vowed to use Schedule F, an executive order that would make them fireable—and these plans for mass layoffs will almost certainly wind up before the courts.

I would have thought those two would be huddled over spreadsheets and policy papers deciding the BIG QUESTION of how to slash a third of the government in the first year. Spending time figuring out which members of the last administration were disloyal to Dear Leader seems a bit trivial for the DOGE. But then Musk seems to be spending most of his time socializing at Mar-a-Lago so it’s hard to say what they’re really doing.

By the way, Musk isn’t content with meddling in American government. He’s got his sights set on the UK too. (And he’s hosting his own events at MAL, apparently.)

As rumors swirl that Musk is planning to throw his wealth behind the UK's right wing, Nigel Farage was hosted by the MAGA billionaire at Mar-a-Lago.https://t.co/JDU0HunCUV

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) December 17, 2024

Farage is the face of Brexit which is very unpopular now. I wonder if Musk’s big bucks can get him over the top like they did Trump? Does his massive wealth make him believe he can take over the world? It kind of looks that way…

Nancy Mace says she is concerned that the drone sightings off NJ is either aliens from another planet or Russia/Iran/China searching for a missing nuclear warhead. pic.twitter.com/Uf6GiEm84v

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 17, 2024

"Something strange is going on" — Trump suggests that the government is covering up that the "drones" over New Jersey are actually UFOs pic.twitter.com/1ii7Lu9QUe

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 16, 2024

These are elected GOP officials. They are not fake tweets.

How many Democrats does it take to change a light bulb?

Lefties’ fondness for novelty goes only so far. Democrats are policy liberals (sort of) and campaign conservatives. Party culture is built around seniority and whose “turn” it is to move up the organizational ladder. There is ageism in that, but also resistance to generational change. (I wrote about our local changing of the guard a few years back.) That’s visible in real time in the contest for ranking member of the House Oversight Committee between Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.).

Politico:

House Democrats have solidified the generational shake-up at the top of their committees, after significant behind-the-scenes influence from both current and former leaders of the caucus.

The caucus faced tough races for the Agriculture, Oversight and Natural Resources Committees. Rep. Angie Craig (Minn.) won the nod for the top party spot on Agriculture, beating incumbent Rep. David Scott (Ga.), who’d faced long-standing questions about his health, and Rep. Jim Costa (Calif.). Rep. Gerry Connolly (Va.) won the Oversight recommendation over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.). And Rep. Jared Huffman (Calif.) earned the nod for the Natural Resources Committee against Rep. Melanie Stansbury (N.M.) after Rep. Raúl Grijalva (Ariz.) stepped down.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.) is also poised to take the top Democratic spot on the Judiciary Committee, though Steering will now take votes on uncontested panel spots on Tuesday.

AOC did not win the recommendation during a Monday meeting of the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee (Axios):

What we’re hearing: Connolly defeated Ocasio-Cortez 34 to 27 on Monday, according to multiple lawmakers present.

• Ocasio-Cortez said after the vote that she will continue to contest the role when it goes to a vote of the full caucus.

Democrats’ interest in change goes only so far.

A friend observed pithily, post-election, “Any Dem leader or consultant who blames the party for turning a deaf ear to the working class, of being too elite, is not to be trusted. Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester lost their well-earned, populist seats to carpetbaggers, monied grifters.”

Yet Democrats who have spent long careers on Capitol Hill still insist the key to winning elections is more focus on kitchen table issues in a political era fueled by right-wing billionaires and the disinformation ecosystems they (not the RNC) constructed over decades. Nonetheless, “kitchen table issues” might as well be Democratic catechism in an age in which politics isn’t really politics anymore.

Democratic power-players in Raleigh two years ago lined up to reelect the incumbent state chair (a former state legislator). Under her tenure, Democrats left 40 percent of legislative seats uncontested. Democrats also lost two state supreme court seats. The new Republican majority swiftly overturned the previous court’s ruling establishing representative congressional districts and allowed the GOP-controlled legislature to draw three more congressional seats for Republicans. Yup, leading state Democrats wanted to reelect that chair over feisty 25-year-old Anderson Clayton, the eventual winner and soon media darling.

Wonder of wonders, David Graham wrote in The Atlantic on Nov. 7: Democrats Actually Had Quite a Good Night in North Carolina.

Organizers believe change has to come from the gound up. We changed the guard in our county almost 20 years ago. The guard changed in Raleigh two years ago. It’s only now changing on Capitol Hill. And at that, slowly.

Thank you sharing this Sanctuary of Sanity with us each day.
Happy Hollandaise!