On her first day as attorney general, Pam Bondi launched an investigation of the Biden-era investigators of President Donald Trump that will report its progress directly to the White House. It’s a crossing the Rubicon moment for DOJ independence that is compounded by the fact that Trump has made Stephen Miller the point person on the administration-wide effort to exact retribution for the criminal investigations of the president.
[…]
Trump’s executive order also instructed his director of national intelligence to launch a similar investigation of the investigators and report back to his deputy chief of staff for policy, which again is Miller. Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination as DNC is still pending in the Senate, but she is expected to be confirmed after narrowly winning the Senate Intelligence Committee approval this week.
“The fact that the DOJ is reporting to someone in the White House itself crosses a rubicon,” noted Gillers, who did not have independent knowledge of Miller’s apparent role. “That’s a major shift. The fact that the person who’s getting the reports is Miller is, in my view, dangerous because of his ideological beliefs.”
There will be no “guardrails.” There will be no limits. Miller is a true fascist and he enjoys making people suffer. This is bad.
Trump: We’re making our country larger, we’re making our country stronger. And in the case of Canada—if this should happen—I don’t know how they can do it without us. Because without the U.S., Canada really doesn’t have a country.
Trump: We’re making our country larger, we’re making our country stronger. And in the case of Canada—if this should happen—I don’t know how they can do it without us. Because without the U.S., Canada really doesn’t have a country. They do almost all of their business with us, and if we say we want our cars to be made in Detroit, with a stroke of a pen, I can make that happen. And other things, in addition to that, would not allow Canada to be a viable country.
With a stroke of a pen he can make all our cars in Detroit? He can make Canada cease to be a viable country? Is he now consciously aping Putin?
I’m a little bit concerned that I’m not seeing more commentary about this change in his personality. He’s always been a narcissistic dick but this is different. The repeated, casual assertion of omnipotence should be of interest to some people in the press.
Update — it’s catching:
NEC Director Kevin Hassett on Trump seriously wanting to annex Canada: "When the US was founded, how many states did we have? And how many do we have now? And so, is it outlandish?"
Come on Dems, get this done. When you think about what the Republicans are doing down in North Carolina and, really, all over the country there is no excuse not to do it. They would do it to you in a heartbeat:
New York Democrats are poised to delay until November the special election to fill Rep. Elise Stefanik’s House seat — a move that would deny House Republicans a crucial vote in the closely divided chamber.
State lawmakers on Friday introduced a bill that would allow Gov. Kathy Hochul to schedule special elections under some circumstances until the November general election. The Democratic-led Legislature is expected to approve the bill Monday, touching off a bitter feud with New York Republicans in a hyper partisan era. President Donald Trump tapped Stefanik to become the United Nations ambassador.
Top Albany Democrats are framing the proposal — which follows consultations between state lawmakers and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ office — as a way to save money for local governments. Republicans decried the measure as an attempt to deny a rural, deep red House district representation in Washington and called for a RICO investigation of Democratic lawmakers.
Lol. A RICO investigation. As long as they don’t “weaponize” the legal system I guess that’s just fine.
Just do it. No more fainthearted adherence to “norms.” Look where that got us.
Reporter: You are going to meet with first responders today, but you pardoned hundreds of people who assaulted first responders.
Trump: No, I pardoned people who were assaulted themselves… by our government. I didn’t assault. They didn’t assault. They were assaulted. What I did… pic.twitter.com/LbzrbFM6rb
Reporter: You are going to meet with first responders today, but you pardoned hundreds of people who assaulted first responders.
Trump: No, I pardoned people who were assaulted themselves… by our government. I didn’t assault. They didn’t assault. They were assaulted. What I did was a great thing for humanity.
He apparently now believes that the people who broke into the Capitol should have been allowed to march in interrupt the joint session, stop the count, hang Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi.
He condemned the violence the next day under some duress. And he’s defended them as political prisoners treated unfairly by the legal system. But I’ve never heard him say that the rioters were assaulted by the government (meaning the police.)
I get that he’s doubling down on his pardons which are unpopular with a majority of the public. But the way he’s doing it shows a descent into mental illness. He now says his pardons were a “great thing for humanity.” Virtually everything he says now smacks of delusions of grandeur. He’s losing it.
The DOGE has found something really great for Donald Trump
Hard at work this weekend Donald Trump was on Air force One en route from Mar-a-Lago to the Super Bowl Trump dropped another wild, radical idea. He told reporters that DOGE had found “irregularities” in US Treasuries which means there may be do obligation to pay them. He said, “maybe we have less debt than we thought.”
Are the Wall St boys ok with Trump saying that the teenage DOGEboys have found some “irregularities” in US treasuries and the US may not have to pay them. Maybe we have less debt than we thought,” he said. That’s completely daft but it’s predictable that Trump’s desperately looking for a shortcut to cutting the deficit. Unfortunately for him, just as with the birthright citizenship question, that pesky 14th Amendment is standing in the way with yet another crystal clear direction:
“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
“Shall not be questioned.” In short, by the time they get to the payment center at the US Treasury the ship has sailed. They are debts that have to be paid. The place to question a charge of fraud, waste or abuse is much earlier in the process and, by the way, with legitimate constitutional, legal methods not some ketamine addled teenage getting a vibe.
Marshall assumes that this is just another blast of hot air from the gasbag in chief. But even so, he’s playing with fire. As he noted:
One other point worth noting is that Trump seems to be basing this on some analysis from the DOGE boys. This appears to have been one of the DOGE boys main goals at Treasury, getting access to details about what kinds of payments Treasury makes, the answer being close to everything the US government does outside of the Pentagon and some of the Pentagon stuff too. The Treasury also services the US debt, which is what we’re talking about here. I’m less clear on what access in what part of Treasury Department these guys could have gotten more information about how the Treasury Department sells and service Treasury notes.
But all that detail aside, imagine thinking that by downloading a ton of data and having a few days to analyze it you could make the determination that a significant amount of the US national debt wasn’t real and didn’t have to be paid.
Will this happen? Who knows? I wouldn’t have thought that adolescent incels would be running the government by the middle of February and yet here we are.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was caught on a hot mic the other day giving his assessment of Trump’s threat to turn Canada into the 51st state. I don’t think Trudeau is given to wild conspiracy theories. This is what he said:
“I suggest that not only does the Trump administration know how many critical minerals we have but that may be even why they keep talking about absorbing us and making us the 51st state,” he said. “They’re very aware of our resources, of what we have, and they very much want to be able to benefit from those. But Mr. Trump has it in mind that one of the easiest ways of doing that is absorbing our country. And it is a real thing.”
Trump was asked about it by Fox news’ Bret Baier in his Super Bowl interview and he assured him that he is serious about the 51st state thing but that it’s because of Canada’s trade deficit which he’s inanely convinced himself is a “subsidy” (once more demonstrating that he has no idea how trade actually works.) That’s just his excuse — which he may believe as well — but there’s more to it.
Everyone always says that Trump is just trolling Canada but it’s not true. Trudeau’s assessment is correct. It is a real thing. We know this because Trump has always said that he believes “to the victor belongs the spoils” and by that he apparently also means that his victory as US president last November makes him a victor over the whole world.
Now, it’s important to distinguish his belief in “to the victor belongs the spoils” in the imperialist context from a “spoils system” in the domestic context, which he also believes in. The encyclopedia Britannica explains the meaning of “spoils system” which springs from the same source:
[I]twas made famous in a speech made in 1832 by Senator William Marcy of New York. In defending one of President Andrew Jackson’s appointments, Marcy said, “To the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.” In Marcy’s time, the term spoils referred to the political appointments, such as cabinet offices or ambassadorships, controlled by an elected official.
Trump is taking that concept even further by appointing uniquely unqualified, slavish devotees and trying to fire civil servants (something that didn’t exist in Jackson’s time) and demanding personal loyalty oaths. But essentially he’s emulating Jackson, the president Steve Bannon taught him was supposed to be his inspiration. Not that he is likely aware of that. But he has certainly created a spoils system in the US federal government for the first time in many a moon.
Trump claims that he won a landslide victory (a lie: his popular-vote win was narrow 1.4% and his electoral victory was modest by historical standards) which seems to have led him to believe that as the undisputed leader of the world’s most powerful nation he also has the power to buy or take whatever he wants. To the victor goes the spoils and traditionally, those spoils are natural resources.
Consider the fact that Trump has been waxing on about William McKinley who he’s been convinced was a great president because of his tariffs. Trump is no scholar and knows nothing about that historical period but the fact is that that era, known as The Gilded Age, was also called the the New Imperialism era, when the British Empire, Germany, Italy, Japan Russia, The United States and Japan all raced to colonize everything that was left uncolonized on the planet. The period lasted from roughly 1873 –1914, the outbreak of WWI. There were a lot of reasons for this but one of the main ones was competition for the natural resources that were required to fuel the second Industrial Revolution.
The belief that “to the victor belongs the spoils” is built into imperialism and so it is with Trump. Right after he took office in 2017, he went to CIA headquarters and said:
The old expression, “to the victor belong the spoils” — you remember. I always used to say, keep the oil. I wasn’t a fan of Iraq. I didn’t want to go into Iraq. But I will tell you, when we were in, we got out wrong. And I always said, in addition to that, keep the oil.
As we know he’s been inexplicably demanding that Denmark sell Greenland to him and threatening to just take it if they refuse and that too turns out to be about resources: minerals. Lately Ukraine’s been on the menu for, once again, rare earth minerals:
Trump: "One of the things we're looking at with President Zelenskyy is having the security of their assets. They have assets underground. Rare early and other things. But primarily rare earth. Really, we want security, because as you know, Europe is putting up much less money… pic.twitter.com/ABG3nkucZd
Trump: “One of the things we’re looking at with President Zelenskyy is having the security of their assets. They have assets underground. Rare early and other things. But primarily rare earth. Really, we want security, because as you know, Europe is putting up much less money than us.”
REPORTER: What you said about Ukraine earlier — the rare earth. Do you want them to give the rare earth to the United States?
REPORTER: What you said about Ukraine earlier — the rare earth. Do you want them to give the rare earth to the United States?
TRUMP: Yeah
And then there’s his Gaza “imperialist acid flashback” as Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir calls it, which, as far as I know, doesn’t have any oil or minerals to offer but does feature some very nice beachfront property which he apparently wants to develop into an international resort.
Let’s not pretend that any of this is about the national interest. It’s all about money for him and his cronies.
This talk of minerals is coming from somewhere and I would guess it has something to do with the fact that rare earth minerals are necessary for all modern electronics (among other things). Trump has a very rich BFF who has a great interest in such things and it’s easy to guess that he’s whispering in Trump’s ear about all the “spoils” to be had by acquiring/seizing the land where they exist.
Trump’s imperial ambitions go beyond just taking natural resources. He is also finally articulating what he has always meant by “America First” since he entered politics. It isn’t about isolationism it’s about dominance. America First means “We’re number one!”
Back in 2017 when he made that speech at the CIA headquarters and said that the US should have kept the oil, this was how he prefaced that comment:
When I was young — and I think we’re all sort of young. When I was young, we were always winning things in this country. We’d win with trade. We’d win with wars. At a certain age, I remember hearing from one of my instructors, “The United States has never lost a war.” And then, after that, it’s like we haven’t won anything. We don’t win anymore.
Having eluded all accountability for anything he did in his first term and beyond Trump sees himself as omnipotent now. He was restored to the White House with a bigger margin than 2016 and he is being aided in his revenge by the richest man on the planet. He stands to make massive amounts of money during what is already shaping up to be the most corrupt presidency in US history. His win means that the US is winning again. Il est l’État. To the victor belongs the spoils.
When Elon Musk’s unelected Agents of DOGE kids march in and physically take over government agencies and their computer systems, it’s not exactly a pyrotechnics-fueled professional wrestling extravaganza. But that doesn’t mean it’s not right-wing spectacle. The spectacle simply isn’t for traditional media or a general audience.
Mehdi Hasan and British columnist Owen Jones this morning discuss the rolling authoritarian coup happening in Washington, D.C.
The disconnect between American reality and our peception of a democracy dying is that the latter comes from Latin America, Jones offers. “It’s tanks on the street, the presidential palace getting bombed a bit,” etc. It’s visual in a way that taking over the U.S. Treasury’s payment system is not.
Hasan notes that the real spectacle is happening on Musk’s social media platform.
“He’s just sitting on Twitter, just unilaterally chatting to his right-wing fans, going, ‘What should I cancel next?’ “
That suggests there is a Roman Coliseum quality to DOGE that doesn’t translate to cable TV but plays well on social media. Throwing Christians to the lions. That sort of thing. The emperor surveying the crowd and asking, thumbs up or thumbs down on who dies and who lives.
For a mob conditioned for decades to view the “gummint” as the enemy, the tool of some rich, unreal-American like George Soros, it’s spectacle like Kid Rock machine-gunning cases of Bud Light or Marjorie Taylor Greene blowing up a Prius.
AWESOME! What shall we blow up next?
Marge Greene says in 2022 she is going to “blow away the Democrats’ socialist agenda,” then blows up a car with “socialism” on it with a 50-caliber rifle she is auctioning off for contributions. pic.twitter.com/b10wGwVVW2
Call it yee-haw-ism or hell-yeah-ism, that thrill people get in seeing things get violently destroyed (like Trump’s Atlantic City casino). If Musk really wanted to put on a WWE-worthy show, he’d arrange a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the headquarters building of whatever agency is tops on the right’s shit list this week. But given how much one of Musk’s rocket failures costs him, it’s probably not an image he wants reinforced when his program depends on government outlays. He’s enjoying playing emperor nonetheless.
It turns out, tweets Jane Coaston of the Times, “that many of the people who claimed to hate Imaginary George Soros Who Runs Everything simply wanted their own.”
It appears that many of the people who claimed to hate Imaginary George Soros Who Runs Everything simply wanted their own.
Republicans are at war with America. Do Democrats know?
Democrats are reactive, not proactive. They don’t think outside the box. They built the box.
That’s what provoked an exasperated Anand Giridharadas to tell Ruth Ben-Ghiat in a livestream last Monday, “I just feel so profoundly undefended right now by the well-meaning people [meaning the Democratic Party and people with small D democratic values in “the big powerful press”]. And even more pointedly, “I feel so fucking undefended by these people. Like what are they doing, any of them?”
I watched most of the DNC’s 12-1/2 hour winter meeting days earlier. Most of the speeches were dispiriting. They could have been written 30 years ago. Members said what they what they were expected to say as good lefties, what they learned to say years earlier then stopped learning. However idealistic they started out, by the time many Democrats go from being enthusiastic interns or staffers to institutionalized players, they have imperceptibly “become the kind of politicians people love to hate. And once they achieve power, they’re not leaving. You see that in the faces of those still there after decades.”
Part of that enculturation makes them not only reactive but boring. That’s especially awful in a period in which attention is the coin of the realm. Michael Tomasky hears it from others: “They’re weak. They’re divided. They’re letting themselves get steamrolled.” It’s the wrong headspace for the times:
The truth is simple: Far too many Democrats don’t want to think of themselves as fighters. This is a self-conception that has some deep historical roots; but far more importantly, it’s a potentially self-fulfilling prophecy of passivity that will have grave consequences for tens of millions of Americans, and for the Constitution and the republic, if they don’t get over this fast and come to terms with the reality they are in.
[…]
Movement conservatives had a vanguardist mentality—they were insurrectionists assaulting the liberal establishment’s castle. Newt Gingrich embodied and advanced this outlook more than anyone. The outlook set in train a dynamic that still holds true today: Conservatives are disruptors who constantly question the status quo; liberals are defenders of the existing order.
Boring.
So I ask you: Who’s more interesting to your average person? Disruptors, of course. And who likes the existing order? Practically no one, at any time, ever. Trump and Elon Musk are the biggest disruptors arguably in the entire history of the country. Biden was about as conspicuous an order-defender as exists—and Kamala Harris became such by extension, since vice presidents can’t walk too far outside the footprints left by their presidents. That’s another one of those “established order” rules, by the way.
None of this is about policy, Tomasky writes. Democratic ballot initiatives pass regularly. Democrats themselves are less popular.
Most speeches at the DNC meeting were predictable and stale. There are Democrats in Congress who are exceptions, naturally. The AOCs and Jasmine Crocketts and Max Frosts. They tend to be Millennials or younger and more comfortable on a podcast than behind a lectern. They possess skills necessary to fight a war for attention. For all their experience, the Democrats’ gerontocracy is bringing 20th-century knives to a 21st-century gun fight. Too many learned politics in the 1980s. Even if they could learn new tricks, they’re not the ones to bring it now. People on social media last week asked Chuck Schumer to please not lead chants anymore. It’s a public embarrassment, and he doesn’t know it.
I just don’t even know what to say anymore when I see this kind of stuff. Is it Saturday Night Live or real life? Does anyone really think this is the future of the country? This is the only alternative to Trump’s America? It’s just so depressing. https://t.co/5qJihgREAt
But even Tomasky’s prescription for Democrats reflects his age (64). Remarking on the predations of Project 2025, Tomasky suggests, “How about a weekly press conference, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, bringing the public up to speed on this?” <yawn>
In Idiocracy (2006), an America 500 years into the future has fallen into cultural decline. The president is a former professional wrestler. We’re not there just yet. Ours is a former professional wrestling “owner.” He knows how to capture and hold attention. Democrats hold press conferences.
Musk-Trump and the Project 2025 wrecking crew are waging war on the republic. Some are bent on creating a Christian theocracy. Others mean to extract wealth the way private equity wrings the life out of companies acquired through leveraged buyouts. Others like Musk and Trump are drunk on power and out for revenge.
On this, Tomasky and I agree:
[Democrats] need to think of themselves as going to war, because it’s sure clear that their opponents think this is war. And not for the sake of scoring political points—they need to do it for the sake of the tens of millions of Americans upon whom Trump and MAGA actively want to impose suffering. They are counting on Democrats as never before to fight for their rights and defend our laws. If that can’t rouse them, they’ve forgotten what their job is.
And those Americans feel pretty fucking undefended right now.
Gabe Sherman at Vanity Fair has many contacts in Trump world. He reports on Elon Musk’s crazed rampage in detail and asks whether Trump’s on board:
“Trump is the king on the chessboard and Elon is a bishop. Sometimes the bishop takes the lead,” the Republican said. Plus, it’s useful for Trump if Musk takes political heat. “Trump can let the public hate Elon and Elon doesn’t care. So then Trump can come in and save a few programs and look like the restrained one. He can be ‘Trump the Merciful King.’”
But other Republicans I spoke to said Trump can’t––or won’t––challenge Musk because Trump understands Musk’s unprecedented power. Musk is reportedly worth nearly $400 billion and has more than 216 million followers on X. (Trump has less than half that follower count on X, plus an audience of 8.8 million on Truth Social.)
“How can he say no to Elon?” a former Trump campaign staffer said. “You think he wants to go to war with him?”
It’s ironic that Trump finds himself unable to control Musk, as Musk is doing to Trump what Trump did to the Republican Party. Trump gained control of the GOP by pushing the outer limits of what behavior the GOP would tolerate. Trump’s grip on the MAGA base eventually made it impossible for the establishment to rein him in. Musk has a similar psychic hold over his massive fan base, which gives him significant leverage over Trump. Trump also knows that Musk is willing to out-crazy him.
“Elon is autistic and that scares people. He’s unpredictable and prone to tantrums,” another Trump ally said. (In 2021, while hosting Saturday Night Live, Musk disclosed publicly that he had a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder.)
That said, the longer the “President Musk” memes continue, the more Trump might be motivated to act. It’s been a truism since Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015 that there can only be one star in the Trump show. “Trump has a limit to others getting credit,” a prominent Republican strategist told me. Musk’s falling popularity could also hasten Musk’s defenestration. An Economist/YouGov poll recently found that Musk’s Republican support has dropped 21 points since shortly after Election Day. “Elon is going to blow himself up,” the Trump ally said.
I think we all expected Trump to tire of him before now and he hasn’t so who knows? I do think it gives Trump way too much credit to say that he’s strategically allowing Musk to take the heat so he can be the good guy. There’s no evidence that Trump thinks like that at all. I think it’s far more likely that Trump just doesn’t care much about what Musk is doing and until it causes him a problem he’s happy to let him do it.
Remember, Trump didn’t run on slashing and burning the entire government. He ran on destroying the Deep State which he sees as anyone in the government who isn’t 100% loyal to him personally. He wants vengeance. He wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He wants to make money.
Musk is destroying the government to reorder the way the world is structured for his own benefit. Those aren’t the same things.
I think we can see where this is leading: “let them enforce it”
Ever since Justice it was understood that the ultimate interpreter of the executive’s “legitimate power” under the Constitution (specifically Article II) was the Supreme Court. I think we’re about to see that concept contested, which has kept our system more or less stable short of civil war, in a way we’ve never seen. It could be the whole ballgame.
