"You can be the most worthless Republican in America, but if you kiss the ring, he’ll say you’re wonderful." – Ron DeSantis, literally a week ago. pic.twitter.com/gOq3hBOzGw
Whether Trump abandons Pete Hegseth for Ron DeSantis, the reports that he’s been in talks with DeSantis about a cabinet position since last summer is a sad comment on Ron Desantis. Like so many others, he abandoned all sense of personal pride and integrity to suck up to a man who humiliated him in the most grotesque ways possible:
Donald J. Trump plumbed new depths of degradation in his savage takedown of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a yearlong campaign of emasculation and humiliation that helped force one of the party’s rising stars out of the presidential race after just one contest and left him to pick up the pieces of his political future.
In front of enormous rally audiences, Mr. Trump painted Mr. DeSantis as a submissive sniveler, insisting that he had cried and begged “on his knees” for an endorsement in the 2018 Florida governor’s race.
In a series of sexually charged attacks, Mr. Trump suggested — without a shred of proof — that Mr. DeSantis wore high heels, that he might be gay and that perhaps he was a pedophile.
He promised that intense national scrutiny would leave Mr. DeSantis whining for “mommy.”
Mr. DeSantis shied from fighting back, which only inflicted more pain on his campaign. The governor had portrayed himself as one of the Republican Party’s fiercest political brawlers, but he pulled his punches in the most important race of his life.
Ick. I will never understand how people can be so willing to come crawling to this disgusting bully after he does that to him. There are other jobs, other paths in life than politics. The fact that they are so willing to completely debase themselves for this monster says everything about their character. They’re the last people I would want to see in charge of national security. They’re cowards.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vented his displeasure Monday after two Democratic-appointed federal judges reversed their decisions to retire in what appear to be efforts to stop President-elect Trump from nominating their successors.
McConnell called the unusual decisions to forgo retirement following Trump’s sweeping victory last month a “partisan” gambit that would undermine the integrity of federal courts.
“They rolled the dice that a Democrat could replace them, and now that he won’t, they’re changing their plans to keep a Republican from doing it,” McConnell said on the Senate floor.
You cannot make this shit up. McConnell is the guy who held open a lifetime appointment Supreme Court seat until Trump could fill it and then rushed through another one so that he could again allow Trump to fill it. Shamelessness is their superpower.
As Digby wrote earlier, Republicans ought to think twice about confirming Kash Patel, “Hoover had everyone under his thumb, not just the liberals. ”
On Cliff Schecter’s Youtube channel today is a video about Kash Patel, “a very emotionally and intellectually damaged “person,” has long been a fave of Trump’s bc he’s a Stalinist to the core. Not very bright, but very vengeful & very loyal to whichever authoritarian he serves. He was installed at the Defense Dept in 2020 to help w Trump’s coup. Gee, why would Trump want him running “his” FBI??”
Yesterday I watched hours of Kash Patel videos on Rumble and YouTube. The things that people on the left find horrifying, the right LOVES. “Drain the SWAMP! Fire everyone! Prosecute TRAITORS!” But what we have seen is that what upsets the RW is the only way we can stop Trump’s nominees. In the video I watched, Patel on The Shawn Ryan Show September 2, 2024, I found the comment that will get the RIGHT to push him out.
Patel’s plan is to take a way the money making power of 51 intelligence community people by revoking their security clearance.
I think THIS is what will crush his nomination. The intelligence community won’t be obvious that they want to protect their revenue streams, but they will find something bad enough to upset the GOP. Like how they got rid of the DEA sheriff nomination because he was too tough on some mega church pastor in Florida that didn’t follow the COVID laws. THAT is how you get rid of someone on the right. YOU SHOW the times they were too LEFTY.
What people need to prepared for is that Patel will blame the LEFT for losing the nomination for FBI. But he won’t go away. Just like Matt Gaetz won’t go away. I expect Patel to lash out at EVERYONE, so the RW won’t want their fingers on the leaks/ story. But this is one way government employees will protect themselves against Trump’s nutballs.
As I said on the Nicole Sandler show, we need to keep finding ways to knock down Trump MAGA, the media isn’t going to do it for us. The Dems are afraid, the Republicans are afraid. So we look for who will LOSE money because of Trump’s minions. They can see this as a zero sum game for revenue and play the hardball that we can’t.
To try and understand Patel better, I listened to every episode and clip tagged with “Kash Patel” on the War Room website — and a few others that Bannon’s team missed. The overwhelming impression is that Patel is a man whose entire worldview revolves around paranoid conspiracy theories — specifically, conspiracies against both America and Trump, which for him are one and the same. It’s a specific kind of obsession that reminds me of the FBI’s first director: J. Edgar Hoover, a man who infamously abused his power to persecute political enemies.
During his various appearances on Bannon’s show, Patel and/or his interviewees declared that:
-China is funding the Democratic Party and sending “military-aged males” across the Mexican and Canadian borders to prepare for a preemptive strike.
-Barack Obama directs a “shadow network” that is quietly directing the intelligence community and Big Tech to persecute Trump.
-Attorney General Merrick Garland wants to throw “all of us” — which is to say, Trump allies — in prison.
He wants to fight fire with fire:
In one episode, he called on the Republican majority in Congress to unilaterally arrest Garland — invoking an obscure legal doctrine called “inherent contempt” that has never been used in this fashion in the entirety of American history. In another, he outlined a plan for a MAGA blitz of American institutions focused on getting loyalists into high office.
[…]
Patel, in short, is the kind of man who could become Trump’s Hoover: a man willing to push federal law enforcement into dangerously anti-democratic territory in pursuit of alleged domestic enemies.
That’s exactly what Trump wants. And these Republicans ought to think twice about confirming him. Hoover had everyone under his thumb, not just the liberals. That’s why he was given a lifetime appointment.
On November 25,Chinese Crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun purchased $30 million in crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial, a new crypto venture backed by President-elect Donald Trump. Sun said his company, TRON, was committed to “making America great again.”
World Liberty Financial planned to sell $300 million worth of crypto tokens, known as WLF, which would value the new company at $1.5 billion. But, before Sun’s $30 million purchase, it appeared to be a bust, with only $22 million in tokens sold. Sun now owns more than 55% of purchased tokens.
Sun’s decision to buy $30 million in WLF tokens has direct and immediate financial benefits for Trump. A filing by the company in October revealed that “$30 million of initial net protocol revenues” will be “held in a reserve… to cover operating expenses, indemnities, and obligations.” After the reserve is met, a company owned by Donald Trump, DT Marks DEFI LLC, will receive “75% of the net protocol revenues.”
So before Sun’s purchase, Trump was entitled to nothing because the reserve had not been met. But Sun’s purchase covered the entire reserve, so now Trump is entitled to 75% of the revenues from all other tokens purchased. As of December 1, there have been $24 million WLF tokens sold, netting Trump $18 million.
$18 million as a straight up gift from a crypto billionaire who has already been charged by the SEC with violating the Securities act. Sun’s tokens are worthless to him — well, except as bribes to the soon to be most powerful man in the world.
And nobody gives a damn. None of the major papers have written major stories about this graft (well, they don’t have a lot of resources to devote to it with all the reporters covering the Biden pardon scandal so…)
In the leadup to the 2016 election, there was extensive coverage from every major media outlet concerning how foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation created conflicts of interest for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. This was a legitimate subject of journalistic inquiry but differed in several respects from Sun’s enrichment of Trump:
1. Nearly all of the payments to the Clinton Foundation at issue occurred when Clinton was not in public office. Most of the coverage centered around donations made after Clinton left the State Department and before she launched her presidential campaign.
2. The foreign money was donated to benefit the Clinton Foundation, a charity, and not Clinton personally. The money did not go into Clinton’s bank account, but to the foundation’s charitable activities.
3. The Clinton Foundation disclosed its donors, even though it was not required.
4. Clinton had not been elected president.
An analysis by Popular Information reveals that between January 1, 2015, and November 8, 2016 (Election Day), the New York Times published 79 pieces that were about or referenced foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation. That is nearly one story a week for 22 months.
In a February 20, 2015, column by the New York Times Editorial Board — before Clinton had formally announced her candidacy — the paper emphasized why even an indirect connection between a presidential candidate and foreign dollars was deeply problematic:
Foreign nationals are banned by law from contributing to American politicians’ campaign coffers. This ban does not apply to private foundations, but the idea behind it — that influence should not be bought — is relevant to a political campaign, where appearances can count for much.
…Substantial overlap was found between foundation contributors and familiar Clinton campaign donors and money bundlers. Considering the Clintons’ popularity and influence in their party, this is no surprise. But it does make it important that Mrs. Clinton, in defending the family’s efforts on behalf of the world’s needy, reassure the public that the foundation will not become a vehicle for insiders’ favoritism, should she run for and win the White House.
After Clinton declared her candidacy in April 2015, the Clinton Foundation reimposed restrictions on foreign donations, increased the frequency of its voluntary disclosures, and announced it would stop holding events overseas. The New York Times noted that “questions about the donations have created weeks of negative headlines for Mrs. Clinton leading up to her campaign rollout.”
About this time the Times made a deal with Steve Bannon associate Peter Schweizer to coollaborate on this story, much of which was based upon Schweizer’s bogus “expose” called “Clinton Cash.” The stories and editorials were endless, month after month. It was the lowest point in NY Times history since Judith Miller’s WMD stories in the run-up to the Iraq war.
“The foundation’s ties to foreign governments and financiers have long been fodder for Mrs. Clinton’s critics — chief among them Donald J. Trump — who contend that foreigners used donations to the foundation to curry favor with the Clintons while Mrs. Clinton was the country’s top diplomat,” the New York Times reported on October 15, 2016. That story was about a hacked email revealing that the Qatari government, who donated to the Clinton Foundation, requested to meet with Clinton. The email was treated as a potential scandal even though there was no evidence such a meeting ever occurred.
The New York Times’ approach to foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation was not unique. A review of Washington Post coverage over the same time period reveals dozens of similar articles. The Washington Post, for example, highlighted the pledge to stop accepting foreign donations if Clinton won the election meant “donors could race to give money before the deadline — but in time to curry favor with a Democratic nominee who is leading in the polls.”
The Washington Post finally filed a story about the crypto gift yesterday. Nobody else has bothered to note that Trump is putting those millions of dollars directly into his personal coffers from a foreign player since the election.
Oh, and by the way, the top officers in “World Liberty Financial” happen to be Don Jr and Eric. Good thing they aren’t members of the Biden Crime Family or there would be hell to pay.
It looks like Pete Hegseth is in serious trouble. The sleaze just keeps pouring out from every direction. I doubt Trump or any Republicans really care about the womanizing and misogyny. That’s the brand. But the drunkeness may be a dealbreaker for Trump.
DONALD TRUMP AND RON DESANTIS have personally discussed the possibility of the Florida governor becoming the next secretary of defense amid concerns that sexual assault allegations could engulf the president-elect’s current nominee for the post, Pete Hegseth.
The talks, relayed by four sources briefed on them, are in their advanced stages. They underscore the fears within Trump world about Hegseth’s ability to survive a Senate confirmation process—despite public posturing from Hegseth and allies that he remains committed to ending up at DoD.
“These discussions are real. It’s serious. I can’t say it’s definitely going to happen, but the governor is receptive and Trump is serious, too,” a top Republican source familiar with the conversations told The Bulwark on condition of anonymity.
The discussions around DeSantis involvele persona untangling several different political threads. The governor is currently handling the fallout of a separate Trump cabinet pick: Marco Rubio’s nomination to be secretary of state. DeSantis is weighing whether to appoint Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, to fill Rubio’s Senate seat. The possibility that the governor himself could end up at the Pentagon may factor into that decision.
How convenient.
DeSantis is qualified. He’s a Navy vet and has run the state of Florida. I can’t imagine he would balk at Trump’s desire to declare martial law and shoot protesters or send troops to invade Mexico, since he endorsed all those things during his campaign. It’s possible that he might be less likely than a drunken Hegseth to back an order to drop a nuclear bomb on Canada or something but maybe not. He’s as MAGA as MAGA can be, a true blue neo-fascist. If Trump wasn’t such a fool for a good lookin’ man he would have picked him in thefirst place.
Caputo’s source seemed to think that Hegseth is dead in the water: “Trump talking to DeSantis while this is all going on is a sure sign that Trump doesn’t think Pete is gonna make it.”
Loyalty only goes one way. It’s clear that Trump could really not care less if his first choice makes it or not. He’s ready to toss them aside if they get into trouble. He is impervious to criticism, embarrassment or shame. He just does what he wants. If I were Kash, Tulsi and Bobby I wouldn’t waste too much time preparing for these new jobs. There’s every reason to believe they’ll get tossed too, only to be replaced by another MAGA henchman. They all serve at the pleasure of the king.
There are a thousand election hot takes and post mortems floating around these days and I’m sure in due time we’ll come to some consensus about what drove the Trump victory, (now down to a whopping 1.48% margin and shrinking.) But if there’s one thing we do know it’s that he won both of his elections at least in part by shedding some Republican Party orthodoxy that had been bringing them down for ages. He knows a third rail when he sees one.
If there’s one issue that differentiated Trump from other Republicans from the minute he came down that golden escalator it was his promise to preserve the so-called entitlement programs. He made it clear: “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” and it may have been the key to his success in that first campaign. By so boldly declaring those programs off limits he created an aura of post-ideological Republicanism, something that allowed people to buy into his fake persona as a self-made businessman who played by different rules to get things done.
Over the next 10 years, Trump’s 2020 budget proposal aims to spend $1.5 trillion less on Medicaid — instead allocating $1.2 trillion in a block-grant program to states — $25 billion less on Social Security, and $845 billion less on Medicare (some of that is reclassified to a different department). Their intentions are to cut benefits under Medicaid and Social Security.
Medicare was supposed to be cut as well, through a complicated mechanism that reallocated some of its funds. Obviously, the congress didn’t approve those cuts so it didn’t happen but it wasn’t for lack of trying.
That last budget was put together by the man Trump is bringing back as his Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and one of the principal authors of Project 2025, Russell Vought. It’s highly questionable whether Vought will be as circumspect about the plans to cut the programs this time or whether Trump will care because all of that was predicated on Trump’s need to run for office again. Without that hanging over their heads they have no need to hold back. Republicans have wanted to do away with those programs since they were first passed. This may be their chance to finally get it done.
As we know, Trump has pledged to create a sexy new government commission led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy called the “Department of Government Efficiency” or DOGE (the acronym cutely chosen to evoke the crypto scheme by the same name in which Musk is heavily invested.) Vought has said that he plans to work closely with the commission to use executive action to accomplish the slashing and burning of government programs they’re promising.
Vought hasn’t openly called for cutting Social Security retiree benefits but has promoted cutting disability payments and Medicaid and fully privatising Medicare. His history suggests, however, that given the go-ahead he will gleefully take a meat ax to the program. Musk however, has been clear that he believes the government has to be cut to the bone immediately which he admits will cause “hardship” that we will just have to bear. After all, he did that with Tesla and Twitter, how is that different from the United States federal government? Well, except for the massive scale and complexity…
This week, the far right Senator from Utah, Mike Lee posted a thread on twitter/X in which he claims that Social Security is a scam that the government mismanages and must be reformed so that people can “invest” their money and avoid “dependence.” (Back when America was Great — the 1890s or the 1790s or whenever — that’s how it worked. Sure many elderly people lived in abject poverty because they forgot to become rich but at least they had their independence.)
Elon Musk found Lee’s fantasy history and disinformation “interesting” and amplified it on his X platform.
It’s the same old story. In fact, the last time they tried this after President George W. Bush declared he had a mandate from his re-election victory, it ushered in a massive Democratic congressional takeover in the midterms and a two term Democratic presidency. The financial crisis hit and everyone in America saw the wisdom of having at least a portion of their old age or disability safety net guaranteed by the government instead of Wall Street. I suppose it’s possible that it’s ancient history to a lot of people but I kind of doubt it is for anyone over 50.
But it’s possible they won’t even try to sell it that way. Musk expects people to suffer in order to save the country from bankruptcy which he has decided is imminent and Vought and his right wing Christian nationalist allies want to completely decimate the “administrative state” so they may just declare that the program is insolvent and cut the benefits across the board.
There are at least some members of congress ready for action. Rep. Richard McCormick of Georgia on Fox said they have to “have the stomach” to make some “hard decisions.”
Rep. Richard McCormick: "We're gonna have to have some hard decisions. We're gonna have to bring in the Democrats to talk about Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare. There's hundreds of billions of dollars to be saved, we just have to have the stomach to take those challenges on."
With what will be a tiny majority in the House it’s very hard to see anything like that passing. Unlike Trump they have to face the voters again. But we do know that Vought is a big fan of “impoundment” which basically says that the president can spend money however he wants regardless of what the congress has intended. (He actually used this concept to justify the withholding of funds to Ukraine which led to Trump’s first impeachment.)
This practice was actually outlawed in the 1970s after the previous criminal president, Richard Nixon, refused to allow funds to be spent the way the Democratic congress allocated it but it hasn’t been fully tested in court. It is highly likely that the DOGE group and Vought at OMB are going to try to use this concept to sidestep the congress completely. Whether they have the nerve to attempt it with something as massive as Social Security or Medicare remains to be seen. But those programs are the right’s great white whale and I wouldn’t be surprised if they make another attempt to finally kill them.
Donald Trump certainly won’t care. He never has to face another voter and that is the only reason he ever promised to keep his hands off of the programs in the first place. He can do somersaults on the third rail now and it can’t hurt him at all. His party is another story but then, he doesn’t care about them either.
Gen Zers have grown up amidst endless economic and political crises — fallout from September 11, the financial collapse of 2008, the Great Recession, the Covid-9 pandemic, January 6, etc. — that led to a grimmer view of their futures. Axios reports that their struggles have pushed them right while setting impossibly high expectations for financial security:
Catch up quick: Financial services company Empower surveyed more than 2,200 Americans in September and the Gen Z respondents — born between 1997 and 2012 — said they would need to make more than $587,000 a year to be “financially successful.”
That’s three to six times the amount reported by other age groups surveyed, and almost nine times the average U.S. salary tracked by the Social Security Administration.
So what’s going on here?
Angst: “Many people feel they’re coming up short — with half believing they’re less financially successful compared to others around them,” Rebecca Rickert, head of communications at Empower, tells Axios. “The majority think prosperity is harder to achieve for their generation, which factors into the magic number people attach to success.”
Persistently high costs: “Sure, groceries, student loan payments, the cost of going out to restaurants and bars all matter — but ‘feeling successful’ when you have to have a roommate to afford rent undermines all capacity for consumption,” David Bahnsen, whose California-based Bahnsen Group manages $6.5 billion in assets, tells Axios.
The influence of influencers: “These macro trends are exacerbated by social trends. Influencers portray false versions of reality that suggest wealth building being easy and hard work being outdated,” says David Laut, CIO of Abound Financial in California. “It is widely known that comparison is the thief of joy, and this leads the next generation to feel discouraged, setting higher and higher bars as a prerequisite for happiness.”
Mismatched expectations: “They’re concerned about increased costs of living, hyper-aware that their money isn’t going as far as it used to even few years ago. Our hypothesis is this is having a major impact on what they think it takes to be ‘financially successful’ in our current climate,” Julia Peterson, director of consumer marketing at youth marketing agency Archrival, tells Axios.
Costs are certainly up, especially housing costs. People living with their parents into their late 20s or needing rommates just to get by certainly influences one’s sense of economic stability.
But the statement above about “influencers” stands out. Is their presence on social media leaving the impression that fame and fortune are just one TikTok away? Or is that just generational prejudice by us oldsters? Or is it another edition of that familiar, old American fantasy that everyone is just one lottery tickey or NBA contract from being fabulously wealthy and a life of leisure? I don’t know. Nor do I know how representative is the Gen Z cohort in Empower’s survey of 2,200 Americans.
Cara Michelle Smith writes at Salon citing Eric Arzubi, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Yale Child Study Center:
More than 90% of Gen Zers regularly use social media. And as anybody with even one social media account knows, apps like TikTok and Instagram offer glimpses into the (often meticulously curated) lives of individuals who, frankly, seem like they’re living our fantasy. A perfectly innocent, five-minute scroll sesh can bombard you with irrefutable evidence that there are people living in nicer apartments than you rent, buying pricier skincare products than you can afford and wearing clothes you couldn’t dream of splurging on — making you, by comparison, feel a little less satisfied with your weekend road trip now that you’re comparing it to another couple’s two-week retreat in the Maldives. This can redefine what success looks like.
“That’s what people naturally do, right? You index yourself against other people. That’s just kind of human nature,” Arzubi said. “We all know that the level of happiness doesn’t necessarily correlate with what people are seeing online, but that doesn’t matter.”
There’s a name for this phenomenon: upward comparison. It’s the flipside of downward comparison, in which individuals compare themselves to those with fewer resources. Downward comparisons can translate to feelings of gratitude, while upward comparisons can leave individuals feeling dissatisfied with their lives, though research also suggests upward comparison can motivate individuals to create positive changes.
My Gen Z friends are doing better, I suspect. But their cohort’s right lean won’t help any of us in the end.
It is no secret by now that patriarchy will not go quietly, as Digby noted on Tuesday, calling it “the oldest organizing principle in human history.”
There are some very deep forces at work in our changing world, many of which refuse to change. Vigorously. People I’ve called rump royalists never bought into the Declaration’s flowery prose about people being “created equal.” It’s surprising that more don’t do spit-takes at its very mention. They would just as soon see the return of feudalism if they could craft a more consumer-friendly version consistent with global consumer capitalism. (They’re working on it.) Misogyny, promimently on display in Trump 2.0 cabinet picks, is one facet of that patriarchal organizing principle.
Consistent with both is the elevation to the cabinet of what Greg Sargent dubs “a Murderer’s Row of Billionaires.” By one count, there are eight among Trump’s picks so far. Sargent discusses the takeover of the White House by the ultra-wealthy with Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
It’s not as if some wealthy leaders have not been good stewards worthy of the public’s trust, Bookbinder begins, “But the idea that you would have a government where such a high proportion of the top ranks are filled by the wealthiest people in American society is not something we’ve seen in modern times.”
Not since the Gilded Age have we seen the level of corruption and kleptocracy in government that Trumpism brings to Washington. Ethical standards that Trump pushed aside in his first administration Trump is torching heading into his second:
Bookbinder: One thing that we saw again and again in the first Trump administration were people coming into cabinet positions or deputy positions, and immediately making decisions that benefited former clients, former companies, companies to which they had ties. Now, you see a little bit of that in every administration—as you said, the revolving door is a really unfortunate D.C. tradition. But it was taken up a notch in Donald Trump’s administration to what seems to be happening here, which is you increase the number of billionaires and investors and people who potentially stand to profit.
Trump in his first term found areas of govenance controlled more by tradition than by law and exploited them for profit, Bookbinder notes. He at least attempted the pretense of adhering to ethical rules. (At least financial ones, I’d interject.)
Bookbinder: It now looks like he’s got no particular interest in doing that. I’m hopeful that he’ll see the light in the next month or two and divest from his companies and commit to ethics, but we certainly haven’t seen anything to date that gives us a lot of confidence. When you have a president who has chipped away at ethical safeguards coming in without any stated regard for those safeguards and surrounding himself by very, very wealthy people who stand to benefit from their government posts unless they adhere to the strictest ethical standards, there’s a lot of cause for concern here.
Coming after the Jeffrey Epstein conviction for child prostitution and a civil judgment against Trump for sexual assault, many Trump 2.0 picks come with their own history of misogyny and sexual misconduct. Just a coincidence, no doubt.
“Donald Trump is most likely not trying to intentionally assemble a Cabinet chock-full of people accused either of sexual assault or of enabling it, but if he were, he’d be killing it,” writes Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. Sewer provides a rundown of Trump picks you can read there or just catch on the evening news.
What’s notable is how prominently sex crimes feature in the imaginations of Republican politicians. Sex crimes committed by “whichever group they want to demonize,” that is. When it’s a Republican, well, “I don’t care,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham in dismissing sexual misconduct allegations against Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nomineee for secretary of defense, and Matt Gaetz, Trump’s first nominee for attorney general.
Sophie Gilbert adds (also in The Atlantic) that she harbored little hope about seeing attitudes change among emotionally stunted men:
I simply wished for voters to reject the idea, pushed so fervently by those on Trump’s side, that women should be subservient incubators, passively raising the next generation of men who disdain them. This wish did not pan out. “Your body, my choice. Forever,” the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes, who has dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, posted on X on Election Night. “Women threatening sex strikes like LMAO as if you have a say,” the right-wing troll Jon Miller wrote on the same site.
The misogynist backlash is here:
The old analytical terms we use to describe sexism in politics aren’t sufficient to deal with this onslaught of repugnant hatred. Michelle Obama was right, in her closing argument of the 2024 campaign, to note that Harris had faced an astonishing double standard: Both the media and Americans more broadly had picked apart her arguments, bearing, and policy details while skating over Trump’s “erratic behavior; his obvious mental decline; his history as a convicted felon, a known slumlord, a predator found liable for sexual abuse.” She also captured the stakes of the election when she said that voters were fundamentally making a choice in 2024 about “our value as women in this world.” On that front, the people have spoken. But women don’t have to play along.
All his life, Trump has ruined people who get close to him. He won’t ruin women, but he will absolutely destroy a generation of men who take his vile messaging to heart. And, to some extent, the damage has already been done.
This old union will not be perfected anytime soon. Don’t let the bastards walk away with an easy win.
[T]here are at least eight other Trump choices for senior government posts who have made clear their desire to get rid of, target and even prosecute the undesirables, from attorney general to secretary of state to staffers set to work in the White House.
[…]
Gaetz’s replacement as the pick for attorney general, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi (R), made similar if less-pitched comments last year on Fox News.
She said that when Trump reclaimed office, “you know what’s going to happen: The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated. Because the deep state, last — first term for President Trump, they were hiding in the shadows.
“But now, they have a spotlight on them, and they can all be investigated, and the House needs to be cleaned out. Because now we know who most of them are; there’s a record of it, and we can clean house next turn. And that’s what has to happen.”
After Trump’s criminal conviction this summer, Miller called for Republican lawmakers and prosecutors to mobilize en masse to hit back with subpoenas and investigations.
“Every facet of Republican Party politics and power has to be used right now to go toe to toe with Marxism and beat these communists,” Miller said.
Trump’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, has spoken about making civil servants want to quit their jobs and to “put them in trauma,” as well as making the attorney general and White House counsel’s office more loyal to the president.
Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has pushed for an overhaul of that department that includes firing “woke” generals.
“Oh yeah, and fire any general who has carried water for Obama and Biden’s extraconstitutional and agenda-driven transformation of our military,” he wrote in his book this year. “Clean house and start over.”
Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, in her own book last year decried the fact that Hillary Clinton wasn’t prosecuted for using a private email server and that former intelligence officials like James R. Clapper Jr. and John Brennan weren’t prosecuted for perjury. She also complained about the lack of “accountability” for intelligence officials who signed a letter linking Hunter Biden’s laptop to possible Russian disinformation. (Contrary to how some have portrayed the letter, it didn’t directly say the laptop was disinformation.)
Even the “establishment ” pick Li’l Marco:
Our current President is a demented man propped up by wicked & deranged people willing to destroy our country to remain in power
