Back in 2021 when Biden was elected, a lot of people were still working from home so they were able to watch the inauguration. But the same thing was true yesterday. It was a national holiday and most people were home and could have watched Trump’s restoration. They did not.
Nielsen found that ratings across ABC, CBS and NBC’s coverage of Trump’s swearing in as 47th president on Monday hovered around 26.05 million viewers on average from 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m (ET), reported The Hollywood Reporter.
According to Nielsen’s ratings, viewership for the two previous inaugurations, which includes Trump’s first term, faired much better by around 32 percent.
Around 39.87 million people tuned in to watch Biden take the oath of office in 2021. A hair behind Biden, Trump’s first inauguration in 2017 pulled in an average 38.35 million viewers. However, THR reported that viewership then was measured from 11:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m. (ET).
In terms of where audiences tuned in to watch the presidential fanfare, Fox News overwhelming held the most viewership. During the 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. window, Fox peaked at around 10.59 million viewers, just behind its coverage for Trump’s first swearing in.
President Donald Trump’s transition team and outside allies have been signaling for weeks that they were planning to “flood the zone” in the first 100 days of the new administration. Former senior adviser and activist Steve Bannon had pushed this idea during Trump’s first term, telling author and journalist Michael Lewis, “the Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” He called it “shock and awe” which was described by historian Douglas Brinkley as:
[B]izarre, rapid-fire presidential policy making …every day there’s a new, radical initiative, and it doesn’t give journalists or the public a chance to get a grip on what just happened.
Current senior adviser Stephen Miller has refined the idea for the second term. He recently told the NY Times that 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.”
Russell Vought, Project 2025 author of the first 180 days memorandum and Trump’s pick for the Office of Management and Budget has described the political opposition as “enemy fire that’s coming over the target,” while urging allies to be “fearless at the point of attack” and calling his policy proposals “battle plans.” Bannon has recently said that “shock and awe” is “so 2017.” Now he’s calling it “Rolling Thunder.”
I think you’re getting the picture from all these military terms. These guys are all cosplaying Clausewitz. It seems to make them feel very strong and manly.
Trump signed a huge pile of Executive Orders on Day One but they’re are as substandard as MAGA legal work always is. Slate legal expert Dahlia Lithwick said:
We saw some shoddy, shoddy lawyering in some of these new executive orders. And I want to note that the one promise, for at least the last six months, as I understand it, was that these Project 2025 jobs were going to be ready from Day 1. That the greatest minds in the conservative legal movement were beavering away for months to make sure that when all of this went into effect on Day 1, or Week 1, it would be bulletproof. And this is not bulletproof. Some of it looks like it was written by A.I. or by a first-grader using A.I. And I just want to flag that one of the reasons Donald Trump lost a whole lot in the first four years of Trumpism was because of crap lawyering by crap lawyers cutting corners and doing a bad job. It seems to me that would’ve been the one lesson they learned.
Maybe none of that really matters if the whole point of the exercise is to flood the zone with shit and rain down shock and awe on the American people but I have to wonder if maybe people are on to them this time.
Rather than confusing and overwhelming everyone with their flurry of sloppy Executive Orders there was one specific action Trump took yesterday that has everyone’s attention, almost to the exclusion of everything else — his shocking pardons of over 1500 January 6th convicts and the commutations of the handful who were convicted of sedition. On top of that he completely went back on his promise that he would not interfere with the workings of the Department of Justice by ordering it to drop all pending January 6th cases.
Everyone knew that Trump was planning to pardon some of the convicted prisoners but it’s clear that nobody expected this full sweep. Polling before and after the election has shown that of all of Trump’s proposals, from the ridiculous to the bizarre, this one is the most unpopular. A Scripps-Ipsos poll before the election found that 68% of Americans disapproved of Trump’s plan to pardon the J6 rioters. Likewise a recent AP-NORC poll from this month showed that 60% disapproved .
Just a couple of weeks ago, Vice President JD Vance was asked about it and he said “if you protested peacefully on January 6th… you should be pardoned, if you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.” Trump’s nominee for Attorney General Pam Bondi said just the other day in her confirmation hearing, that if she was asked to advice the president on the pardons (as is the usual process) she would take it on a case by case basis but added “let me be very clear in speaking to you, I condemn any violence on a law enforcement officer in this country.”
Trump pardoned people who were convicted of literally attempting to murder police officers that day. He was asked about it yesterday and his pathetic response was that he’d “take a look at it” as if that means anything and went on to say that murderers get away with it all the time in cities around the country:
BREAKING: In a stunning moment of incompetence, Donald Trump just completely failed to answer why he pardoned someone who used a stun gun to assault a police officer. This is insane. pic.twitter.com/VE2yZBZHOm
That officer had a heart attack from the stun and suffered a brain injury. More than 140 officers were injured that day the worst day for law enforcement since 9/11.
Trump had the chutzpah to then say:
Q: “Aren’t you sending the message that assaulting officers is okay with these pardons?”
Trump: “No, the opposite…I am the friend of police more than any president that has ever been in this office.” pic.twitter.com/XeYaxE34eF
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) January 21, 2025
As it happens ( in a proverbial leopards eating faces moment) the Fraternal Order of Police, which enthusiastically endorsed him last November, begged to differ, putting out this statement:
“Crimes against law enforcement are not just attacks on individuals or public safety —they are attacks on society and undermine the rule of law. Allowing those convicted of these crimes to be released early diminishes accountability and devalues the sacrifices made by courageous law enforcement officers and their families.
They went on to say that, contrary to Trump’s deplorable excuses, this sent a dangerous message, potentially “emboldening others to commit similar acts of violence.”
But then, that may just be a feature not a bug. At the same press conference, Trump virtually invited the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers to rejoin the MAGA cause, saying “they love our country” One of the leaders whose sentence Trump commuted, Enrique Tarrio, told Alex Jones yesterday that he wants the people who prosecuted him to “feel the heat” and be put in prison.
There is no mistaking the messages Trump sent with his sweeping pardons yesterday. He told his followers that if they commit crimes, violent or otherwise, on his behalf, that he has their backs. The immunity the Supreme Court gave him is therefore conferred on anyone who does his bidding. And he has told his political opponents, and any official protection they might have, that they are not safe from political violence.
He means it. Yesterday he revoked secret service protection from his nemesis John Bolton who was threatened by Iran:
News: BOLTON, in phone interview with me, says Secret Service called him at 11:30pm last night to say his protective detail ended today. It ended at noon. He said threat from Iran on his life and lives of other Americans continues nonetheless.
The new Trump administration may just have miscalculated what their “shock and awe” strategy might do. Pardoning even the violent criminals who attacked police officers has broken through the fog of war and people can see exactly what they’re up to. The “law and order” president is acting exactly like the convicted criminal that he is.
Donald Trump represents everything that for my entire lifetime this country flattered itself it was not. His reelection puts the lie to that national fantasy. The long arc of the moral universe took a nose dive on Nov. 5 like the stock market on Black Monday.
Trump’s “United States of Backlash,” Paul Waldman calls it:
What is the society Trump now seeks to create? It’s one in which virtually all the social progress of the last half-century is reversed. Not only will efforts to address racism in both public and private institutions be eliminated, even talking about racism will be either forbidden (as in schools) or banished through intimidation. Even the most milquetoast efforts to improve diversity will no longer be allowed. Millions of undocumented immigrants and their families — including both legal immigrants and U.S. citizens — will be deported, while legal immigration is drastically reduced, the result of which will be a re-whitened nation in line with a blood-and-soil conception of American identity.
Women will be removed from combat roles in the military and leadership in other organizations, where “masculine energy” will finally be valued again. Abortions will become unobtainable, at least for those who aren’t wealthy. Transgender people will be forced back in the closet, their very existence deemed unspeakable. Straight white men will no longer have to fear anyone saying to them “Hey, what you just said is kind of uncool, don’t be an asshole.” At long last, “wokism” will be destroyed. And with that, the liberals will no longer be on top; they will be hounded and frightened into silence, just as they ought to be.
Readers knew that. But it’s worse. The America Trump means to create for himself, and only for himself, snuffs out the American spirit the huckster claims to embody.
The Trump era that began in 2016 has made America a meaner, angrier, more quarrelsome place. Trump has convinced millions that their worst self is their truest self, that there is no greater happiness than seeing those you hate suffer, and that there is not only no shame but even a kind of nobility in being like Trump: rude, cruel, petty, greedy and small.
Where is the backlash against that, against the public savaging of the ideals behind our flawed founding and the last century of world leadership? Or has Trump convinced a critical mass of Americans that all those lofty words introducing the Declaration were Trumpish “truthful hyperbole“? Bullshit?
The Irish Labour Party’s Aodhán Ó Ríordáin gets it. Trump and Trumpism is as much an attack on American principles as it is on EU principles. He’s not having it even if his fellow legislators are prepared to go along to get along with America’s newly inaugurated monarch.
“Yesterday we witnessed the inauguration of a man whose ideology embodies everything the EU was founded to reject” “Standing up to Trump will come at a cost, but it is much less than letting this poison win” “Europe must resist because our history demands it” – My Speech on Trump’s inauguration
Will Stancil gives Democrats their marching orders. Bring the fight to the führer. Set a new narrative. Define the shit out of Trump. And not by trying to craft “the” message that will do it. Two can play flood the zone:
So, Democrats: your job is to argue that Trump is unfit, corrupt, decrepit, incompetent, and authoritarian. You want voters to form a mental image of him as unsafe, unreliable, untrustworthy, immoral, and inept. He can is selling out to the highest bidder; he is motivated entirely by greed, hate, and stupidity. His family is corrupt, and everyone who touches him is corrupt. He elevates violent men because they praise him, and dictators because they also praise him. He’s liable to get us all killed or destroy the federal government. When he’s president you can’t sleep easy at night, because there is no one competent leading the country who can respond to any crisis. It’s indecent and insane he’s president.
(This narrative has the added benefit of being entirely correct.)
Then, you just flood the zone with every horrible thing he’s done. React appropriately and angrily. It does not matter if every Democrat is reacting to the same thing, as long as the reaction is appropriately negative.
Indeed, it’s useful to have people mad about many different things at once, which maximizes the chance that some of it will land. Think about how information works in the modern media ecosystem: some stuff blows up, goes viral, and is seen by everyone, but you can’t predict in advance what it will be. Better to have lots of people saying lots of things to maximize your odds, than everyone saying a single thing, and hoping it’s right.
It certainly doesn’t matter if people capture every horrible detail. Some abuses will attract more attention than others. That’s fine. The goal is to ensure that everywhere people look, they see more evidence of the key narrative of Trump’s incredible unfitness and corruption. That’s how narratives work! The pieces promote the whole.
The right wing did that with Al Gore, with Hillary Clinton, and with Joe Biden. Make payback hell.
March. Meet offensive with counteroffensive. Trump has declared war.
For Trump’s second presidency, let’s do things differently. Let a thousand scandals bloom. Exploit the fact you have hundreds of elected officials and thousands of prominent voices and chase after every bit of wrongdoing. As long as Americans are hearing bad things about Trump, and not good things, you’re still promoting the core narrative of his unfitness. And that’s the essential fact that voters need to carry into the ballot booth.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a comedian and actor before Vladimir Putin’s Russian forces invaded his country. Zelenskyy adapted. He learned. It may even have been against his nature, as leading in this environment seems against that of most Democratic “leaders.” But he did it.
Conan : To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.
In his first unexpected term, JV Last explains, Trump discovered to his disappointment that, while his party superficially supported him, there were pockets of energy-sucking resistance that needed purging before he could fully work his will. Plus, there were “two other spheres in which structures prevented a president from acting as emperor”: the federal government and the broader culture of decency and honesty upon which he’d long preyed. Now with the Republican Party fully subjugated, “he’s going to war against America.”
Last outlines a strategy I’ve watched North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature pursue for over a decade. Take actions that starve blue cities of revenue to induce budget crises. Force cities to raise taxes, cut services, or both, generating popular discontent. By the time the crises bite, voters have forgotten whose actions precpitated them. Then Republicans run candidates (and perhaps finally win) against Democrats’ “failed policies.”
It’s a twofer. Trump can hurt businesses and make life more expensive for consumers in New York and Illinois—and then attack blue state mayors and governors for these problems and maybe even help Republican candidates win in those states. Meanwhile, Fox will run B-roll from the raids on a loop, satisfying Trump voters in Texas and Arizona—whose economies will continue to benefit from immigrant workers.
Trump understands that blue states are the last bastions of meaningful popular opposition to his rule, so he will use the federal government to subdue them. That’s what deportations—and tariffs—are for. These are executive powers which can be used in highly-targeted ways to hurt on local economies.
Everyone seems to be very upset with Biden for pardoning his family members ahead of Trump’s restoration. Considering that Trump made clear that he planned to pardon at least some of the people who tried to overturn the election by storming the capitol as it was counting the electoral votes, you’d think it wouldn’t ‘t really be necessary. He wouldn’t have the balls to go after Biden’s family after that, right?
And since he is flamboyantly swallowing a firehouse of corrupt money without even trying to hide it, no one would think it makes sense for him to try to continue the jihad against the Bidens. Well, he went even further and pardoned almost all of them, even the ones who tried to kill cops. And he granted clemency to those who plotted it. Does anything still think he has any limits?
Well, not everyone agrees with that. This is from Townhall:
Congress should immediately launch an investigation into this, both the House and Senate. Subpoena everyone. Joe can shield his documents in the decision-making process, he can’t claim executive privilege over people who had zero role in the Executive Branch or were not government employees.
While the pardons may hold, they will not protect anyone from a perjury charge should they lie under oath; or a contempt of Congress charge, should they refuse to answer questions. Veterans of the first Trump administration went to prison for this, and no one is above the law, right?
We need to know just how corrupt the Biden family was. Even if most of them are protected from prosecution by these pardons – and I think it’s an open question, depending upon if those pardons came to be as part of a criminal conspiracy – the country needs to know for posterity and to protect against future corruption.
If you thought that the Biden family was immune from this fun house mirror projection you would be wrong. Trump’s only raison d’etre now that he’s been restored is vengeance and money. Never doubt what he and his henchmen are capable of when it comes to those two things.
Puck’s Peter Hamby wonders whether the grotesquely ostentatious display of massive wealth dominating the inauguration pageant yesterday might penetrate the image of Trump as an avatar of the working man.
This was not a tableau that Steve Bannon and his America First crowd would have chosen. It is true that Trump became the Republican establishment when MAGA swallowed the G.O.P. many years ago, and all the while, Trump was never shy about giving powerful corporate interests a seat at the table, as long as the invite was hashed out in the lobby of a gilded Trump property. But whether in the White House or not, Trump has always possessed a magical ability to convince voters that he’s still a populist outsider, the anti-politician, fighting for Joe and Jane Six-Pack against the “elites”—even as he takes private Mar-a-Lago meetings with multibillionaires expecting favors in return for their campaign checks.
Hamby says that Trump’s populist rhetoric, in contrast to the old country club Republicans, has worked all this time because he sounds more like Rush Limbaugh (or Joe Rogan) than Mitt Romney. His trade policies are supposedly designed to appeal to the working man but I’m not sure that holds up. Trump never really extols the virtues of blue collar America in any specific sense. He says things like “America is being ripped off” and the blue collar workers simply assume he’s talking about them.
Trump’s signature talent is the ability to play to the cultural impulses of the working class while also fattening the portfolios of the wealthy. (Or, more recently, the Coinbase and Kraken accounts of crypto goons.)
Obviously, the working class cares more about their culture war issues than about economic issues which really should make people question whether economic determinism is the panacea everyone always thinks it is.
Anyway, Hamby explains that since Trump is a colossus who dominates everything you can’t really blame rich people for bribing the most corrupt politician in American history. (He didn’t say that exactly but I think that’s a fair interpretation.)
He says that Democrats have “lost their cachet” and their voters are tuning out the news as their leaders retreat waiting for Trump to overstep. (Is that even possible? He just pardoned over 1500 insurrectionists, many of whom beat the shit out of police officers on his behalf! What could possibly be an “overstep” now?)
He wonders how long Trump can maintain his outsider image:
Can Trump plausibly claim to be standing up to powerful tech overlords and moneyed interests when every photo and camera angle shows him surrounded by America’s private sector royalty? Thought about another way: Trump has always derived his power from running against enemies—hated elites and the establishment. But who do you run against when you win so bigly that your enemies just give up and join your team?
Nah. Trump’s true enemy is Blue America and it looks like his cyberbaron oligarchs are just fine with all that even though they have derived their fortunes from it. He’s got plenty of targets to thrill the rubes and the tech-bros alike —- us.
Yes, it’s true that Trump did not actually win the youth vote by 34 or 36 points. But his embrace of Tik Tok is still almost certainly because of his gains among young voters in 2024:
In NBC News’s exit poll, Trump won first-time voters by 55 to 44 percent. This was a massive reversal from 2020, when Biden won them by 32 points in the same survey. And a large part of Democrats’ woes with first-time voters seems attributable to the declining liberalism of young Americans. In 2020, Biden won voters under 25 by 34 points, according to NBC’s exit poll. Four years later, Harris won them by just 11.
Exit polls are highly flawed. But Democrats’ performance with young voters looks even worse in more reliable data sources. For example, AP VoteCast shows Harris winning voters under 30 by just 4 points in 2024 after Biden had won them by 25 — a development that suggests the youngest, newly registered voters were unusually rightwing last year.
Meanwhile, election returns show that Democrats lost more ground between 2020 and 2024 in younger parts of the country than in older ones.
Finally, the fact that the youngest zoomers are aberrantly conservative is also apparent in some states’ voter registration data. Voters 18 to 25 in North Carolina were more likely to register as Republicans than Democrats over the past four years, a break with that purple state’s historical pattern.
This is not good. Young voters, steeped in shallow social media infotainment, don’t really remember a time before Trump. He is perfectly normal to them.
This could be a big problem. People tend to maintain their partisan identities. My only hope here is that this is so Trump centric and so devoid of real ideology for most of these kids that it may not stick when someone without his celebrity power is on the ballot. We’ll see. But it’s awfully depressing to think of young people, whom we’ve all seen as more tolerant and open embrace this fascist leadership.
Trump is so shameless that he has no problem completely reversing himself on the Tik Tok issue. His main reasoning is undoubtedly the massive donations from Jeffrey Yass, one of Tik Tok’s major investors. And he clearly has dreams of Global social media domination with his pals Musk and Zuckerberg. But I don’t think there’s any doubt that he’s very impressed with Tik Tok’s ability to sway young people to join his cult.
There is a lot to say about Trump’s Executive Order zone-flooding yesterday and I’m sure most of them will be flying into the ether and soon forgotten. That’s the point.
Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional immigration order
The 14th Amendment of the US Constitution makes it achingly clear: Anyone who is born in the United States is a citizen.
Trump’s most troubling executive order attempts to overturn this constitutional right by executive fiat, ordering US officials to stop issuing citizenship documents to any future children born to undocumented migrants. It’s an order that will test just how willing the federal bureaucracy and the courts are to defend against unlawful Trumpian behavior.
If they get away with this one, it will be clear that the Constitution is dead. (I would suggest it’s on life support already with the immunity ruling but this would pull the plug.)
The article explains the fatuousness of the right wing’s legal theory around this if you want to read it. But it’s obvious that everyone but Native Americans trace their ancestry to parents who were not born here. If being born in this country isn’t enough to prove our citizenship what is?
Trump’s Schedule F ticking time bomb
At the tail end of Trump’s first time in office, he issued an executive order creating a new classification for federal civil servants called Schedule F — essentially, a tool for converting civil servant jobs protected from removal based on party into political appointments he could fire at will. The order got nowhere before former President Joe Biden took office and promptly repealed it.
Well, Schedule F is back. One of Trump’s Day 1 executive actions restored the 2020 order and added a few tweaks, including an inquiry as to whether “additional categories of positions” should be included in Schedule F beyond the ones considered in the first executive order.
In theory, this could be as damaging to democracy as the birthright citizenship order — if not more so. Schedule F in its original form applied, per some estimates, to somewhere around 50,000 civil servants (and potentially quite a lot more). Purging that many people and allowing Trump to replace them with cronies would be a powerful tool for turning the federal government into an extension of his will.
They will have to go through some hoops to get that done. But if they do, we will have a serious problem. Let’s just say that there are not 50,000 competent Trump cronies in this country. I doubt there are even 500.
Trump’s dangerous pardons for January 6 offenses
When it came to people convicted of crimes relating to January 6, a group Trump calls J6 hostages, there was a range of plausible predictions — including, for example, reserving pardons for only nonviolent offenders.
Trump chose maximalism.
It’s just shocking. As the article points out, this incentivizes political violence:
Any extreme right-wingers who want to attack Democrats now have at least some cause to believe that the president will shield them from legal consequences.
There is no doubt. This is not just about January 6th, which we all know Trump excused because the people had allegedly had the election stolen from them. He’s always been this way. Recall back in 2016 when Trump was first running and two men attacked a homeless man with a pipe saying “Donald Trump was right” and Trump’s instinctive response was:
“I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate,” Trump said. “They love this country, they want this country to be great again.”
It’s now clear that Trump will use his pardon power broadly to protect anyone who breaks the law on his behalf. It means not only that he has immunity from criminal behavior as president but practically speaking so do every one of his henchmen.
Trump’s potentially dangerous investigations
Two Trump executive orders, covering “weaponization” of government and “federal censorship” respectively, initiate formal inquiries into government conduct during the Biden administration.
What this means, in brief, is that the attorney general and the director of national intelligence are instructed to start looking into actions taken by the formal government in a series of areas ranging from January 6 prosecutions to FBI investigations of threats against teachers to cooperation with social media companies. Once the inquiries are complete, these officials are to recommend unspecified punishments for any wrongdoing uncovered.
I seem to recall Trump saying just the other day that he would leave any decisions about whether to investigate up to the Department of Justice. Of course he lies about everything so there’s no surprise that he lied about that.
This is very bad. Much depends upon the judiciary and I wish I had more faith that they would draw the line. But after overturning Roe v. Wade and creating a get out of jail free card for Trump I’m not sanguine.
I have to admit that yesterday hit me way harder than I anticipated. maybe even harder than the election itself. Watching that grotesque spectacle was almost too much to bear.
Unfortunately, reading this this morning took me right back there:
He literally became president yesterday, I know that. But according to John Harris, the founder of Politico, he became a great president yesterday.
Yes, he did say that once the Democrats gargle and spit they’ll feel liberated. That is not a joke although I’m sure Harris had a cigarette himself after he wrote that pithy line. Evoking it as non-consent is just … chef’s kiss.
That is because they can no longer place confidence in a strategy that once looked plausible but now has been exposed as illusion. They cannot push Trump to the margins, by treating him as a momentary anomaly or simply denouncing him as lawless and illegitimate.
Just lie back and think of Dear Leader:
That contest may be more effective if opponents embrace the reality that Trump has already demonstrated some familiar signatures of the most consequential presidents. Like influential predecessors, his arguments have shifted the terms of debate in ways that echo within both parties — in this case, on issues such as trade, China, and the role of big corporations.
Like other large presidents, Trump has been a communications innovator and exploited technological shifts more effectively than rivals. In that sense, Trump’s use of social media recalls Franklin D. Roosevelt’s mastery of radio, and John F. Kennedy’s and Ronald Reagan’s mastery of television — even as his banter and insults don’t aspire to anything like traditional presidential eloquence.
One more signature shown by the most consequential presidents: Uncommon psychological toughness. Have you ever known someone who was facing legal hurdles? In many cases, even if people ultimately win the case, they end up being consumed and shrunken by the searing nature of the experience. Imagine running for president amid huge civil suits, criminal prosecutions, and even felony convictions — then emerging from this morass as a larger figure than before. No one needs to admire the achievement to recognize that Trump is possessed by some rare traits of denial, combativeness and resilience.
About that combativeness: Could someone so zealously divisive ever join the roster of presidents who even schoolchildren can typically recite as the nation’s greatest?
You know who else was zealously divisive? I know that you do:
Anyway, Harris says that being divisive is a good thing because it leads to unifying the country. The implication being that once you gargle and spit you’ll be nice and docile and do whatever you’re told like a good submissive.
It reminds me of a famous line from Grover Norquist from 2004:
“Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don’t go around peeing on the furniture and such.”
I don’t recommend reading the whole thing. Harris is so aroused by all this that it feels downright intrusive.
