Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Depending on the breaks

A bit over six months ago, President Biden’s June 27 debate with Donald Trump went badly for him. Embarrassingly badly. He looked old, frail. He lost his train of thought. How long had his staff been covering for him? Everyone wanted to know. It was its own mini scandal and led to Biden dropping out of the race a few weeks later. The country elected Donald Trump instead in November.

Then Trump on Tuesday declared in a press conference that the United States would ethnically cleanse 1.8 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, take “a long-term ownership position” there, and develop the beachfront into a series of Trump-branded resorts. (Trump’s ownership stake was implied.)

“Everybody I’ve spoken to [inside his demented head] loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land” and developing it, Trump told a roomful of reporters. It would create thousands of new jobs and be “magnificent,” Trump continued. “The Riviera of the Middle East.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel praised Trump’s “willingness to think outside the box,” reports Peter Baker of the New York Times. 

Not one reporter jumped up and asked the obvious question. “Mr. President, are you out of your fucking mind?”

Al Jazeera has a flood of reaction from the people Trump means to relocate. “Ridiculous and absurd,” “a serious violation of international law,” “a dangerous escalation,” and a raft of carefully worded no-comments from allies and condemnation from adversaries. A UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory called Trump’s proposal “unlawful, immoral and completely irresponsible.”

A MAGA Republican would respond, “And your point is?”

Christian nationalists will start packing for the Rapture.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for Trump’s inner circle to give the 25th Amendment a test drive. They are as unbalanced as their boss. Trump put a reported alcoholic Christian nationalist in charge of the Pentagon, nominated a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist to run the FBI, a suspected Russian asset for national security director, and a worm-addled vaccine skeptic to run the Department of Health and Human Services.

Don’t expect anyone to hound Republicans to ask how long they’ve been covering for a madman.

And don’t expect Republican leaders in Congress to stroll down to the White House and insist Trump resign. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician, voted Tuesday to advance RFK Jr.’s nomination out of committee.

Oh, and Trump would send U.S. troops to backstop his beachfront development project. How many are willing to give their lives in a criminal effort to develop Trump’s next golf resort?

My mind this morning is swimming with scenes of comic fictional madmen. Esposito from Bananas insisting everyone change their underwear every half-hour; General Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove guaranteeing that winning a nuclear war wouldn’t kill more than ten to twenty million Americans, tops; General Garcia from The In-Laws talking to his hand puppet, Señor Pepe, and showing off his black velvet art collection; or Firesign Theater’s general claiming the fried eggs on his plate are flying saucers. At least in the last example, an aide has the presence to ask, “Ah, sir? Are you nuts?”

Not one reporter did yesterday.

Trump Gaza Resorts. They’ll be magnificent. Buy now. Get in on the subterranean floor.

That image invokes another Firesign bit. “This is a line of Indians leaving Rancho Malario. To make room for you! Here’s the beautiful Trail of Tears Golf Course…”

This is what happens when I’m offline for an hour.

Brian Beutler has some useful thoughts on how to focus as we confront this complicated crisis. He writes:

To my mind we have four main kinds of provocation raining down on us: headfakes, attacks on liberal pluralism, policy sabotage, and genuine constitutional crises.

In the headfakes category he has Greenland, The Panama Canal and other grandiose ideas that may or may not happen or could just as easily be like the 25% tariffs which make a big splash but end up just being PR moves for Trump to declare victory.

The attacks on liberal pluralism are all the heinous assaults on DEI, transgender kids, immigrants etc which makes us want to scream but which he says, and I think he’s right, still fit into the category of normal politics even though they are grotesque, cruel and disgusting which is not unprecedented. He says, and he’s right about this too, that a lot of this is bait to make us focus on that while they destroy the very firmament of our government and democracy. And these are all wedge issues designed to create division among Democrats.

The policy sabotage is something he thinks that elected Democrats are well-equipped to focus on and it’s what they’re good at (if they want to be.) I could see the House Democrats just calling a complete halt to any negotiations over the budget and debt ceiling. He writes:

• Policy sabotage refer to things Trump is doing, or intends to do, to upset the applecart domestically and internationally, in ways that are much stickier. Here in the U.S., that’s punishing blue states after natural disasters, angling to kick millions of people off Medicaid, pitting his supporters against the rest of America, further curtailing reproductive freedom etc. Internationally it’s threatening or imposing tariffs on certain allies, rattling his saber at others, undermining NATO. Much of this is improper, irregular, corrupt. But most of it is legal.
• To illustrate the point about overlap, culture-war provocations can veer into policy sabotage easily. When smearing immigrants becomes the Laken Riley Act, it transforms into a rooted policy booby trap; if the government really does build a concentration camp in Guantanamo, and begins to fill it with people, that’s no longer simply psychological warfare against liberals.
• Generally, though, this is where Democrats in Congress feel most comfortable. It’s where Trump’s antics show up in grocery prices and service outages and health care access. It’s where Republicans in Congress feel wedged themselves. It’s already the source of real misgivings among marginal Trump voters.

That’s the electoral side of this which is extremely important since we have to hope that the system holds up enough for Democrats to take back at least one house of Congress in 2026.

And then there’s the Constitutional crisis:

• To the extent Trump is trying to sap our attention with assaults on pluralism, it’s so that he can get away with dictatorial abuses of power. Trump, and his main benefactor Elon Musk have been on a constitutional crime spree. They have violated civil-service laws and laws governing the expenditure of congressionally appropriated funds. Trump has already effectively ended politically-independent federal law enforcement and has expressed a desire to do something similar with respect to the military officer corps. His apparent goal is to be able to sic federal cops on his elite enemies, and sic federal troops on larger populations of nameless immigrants and protesters.
• Ed Martin, the insurrectionist defense lawyer Trump appointed to be the acting U.S. Attorney in Washington, DC, has threatened to prosecute people for publicly identifying the young, far-right Musk acolytes (now government employees)currently rifling through government payments and sensitive records and rewriting the code base for critical government IT systems. A real assault on the first amendment, not the fake kind MAGA posters are always whining about.
• This is where Democrats are least surefooted, for reasons I explained here and in other articles, but where resistance is most urgent. It’s where we have to expect Democrats to set aside proximate concerns about the next election to honor their oaths to protect the Constitution. It’s why I’ve written that Democrats should withhold votes for all must-pass budget legislation until rule of law is restored, and ideally until the Justice Department appoints a real special counsel to investigate the crimes committed in this blizzard of corruption.

He says this is why it’s important to exhort Democrats to take this up. It’s worth calling, faxing, marching, rallying all of that.

He acknowledges that the Democrats are finally responding. Brian Schatz’s leadership on stopping the USAID atrocity and Hakeem Jeffries’ plan to obstruct the budget deal are steps in the right direction. Today elected Democrats held a big rally at the Treasury Department around the slogan “Who Elected Musk?!” which I think is very useful. It serves two purposes: reminding people that we didn’t elect this billionaire Bond villain and reminding Trump that he’s being upstaged by this freak.

Musk could be the future of MAGA if he wants it. He could be the successor to Trump. It would be a huge mistake to let him destroy the constitution and remake the country in his image.

I think we have to do everything. But Beutler is right that the one thing that may not be reversible is the assault on the Constitution. Keeping a special focus on that is job one.

Notus Asked GOP Senators about President Musk and his wrecking crew. They’re more than fine with it:

“He’s doing exactly what he should be doing,” Florida Sen. Rick Scott said Monday night. “He’s going through every agency and looking at how to make sure the money’s spent right.”

Wait, isn’t that explicitly the role of Congress?

“It doesn’t look like Congress is doing their job,” Scott answered simply.

And sure, there may be a little bit of Constitutional hanky-panky but it’s really no biggie:

North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, even acknowledged that what Musk is doing is unconstitutional — but “nobody should bellyache about that.”

“That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense,” Tillis said. But “it’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending.”

They all seem completely unworried about the fact that the un-elected billionaire drug-addled freak Elon Musk has sent in a bunch of little kids to mess around with the computer systems because they are “holding people accountable.” You can’t make this up:

“The actions that have been taken with USAID are long overdue,” Sen. Bill Hagerty said. “The agency is out of control.”

And Sen. John Hoeven said “they need to be accountable.”

“They’re somehow operating like they’re this independent agency doing their own thing,” he claimed.

Who’s operating like an independent agency? WTF???

Here’s Senator Cornpone Leghorn:

“Mr. Musk is acting under the authority of the president of the United States,” Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana told reporters. “It’s perfectly legal, perfectly constitutional. And the issue, anyway, is not process. The issue is substance. Did they find wasteful spending, or not?”

It is not legal. And Musk’s idea of “finding wasteful spending” is to say that USAIF must die. very thoughtful.

It’s all perfectly fi9ne:

“He’s working with the president, and they’re making recommendations in some cases on agencies,” South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds told NOTUS. “But the whole program here is that we’re spending way more money than what we’re bringing in.”

Nope, that’s not true. Musk is operating independently doing whatever he wants while the orange dementia patient in the White House is ordering the Corps of Engineers to waste 2 billion gallons of water in California because he can’t understand how anything works.

They are completely in the tank. And at the risk of repeating the most boring comment in the world — imagine what they would be saying if Joe Biden or Barack Obama did this?

As one reader said to me today, “this is the continuation of the January 6th attempted coup.” This is correct. And the Republicans in the Congress are all in.

Today Trump is meeting with Netanyahu and took some questions beforehand about Gaza during his daily Executive Order pageant. Once again he endorsed ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, saying that they will be happy to go in “large groups or many smaller groups” to some pieces of beautiful pieces of land where Saudi Arabia and others (not the US!) will build them some nice condos and everyone will live happily ever after.

Trump: The Gaza has not worked. It has never worked. I think they should get a good fresh piece of land. I don’t know how they could want to stay. It’s a demolition site. If we could find the right piece of land or numerous pieces of land and build them some nice places. They… pic.twitter.com/6vz44oaXbc

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 4, 2025

He has the mind of a child. Here is the full exchange:

Trump: I’d like to see Jordan or Egypt take them. Look, the Gaza thing has not worked, it’s never worked and I feel very differently about Gaza than a lot of people. I think they should get a good fresh beautiful piece of land and we get some people to put up the money to build it and make it nice and make it habitable and enjoyable and make it a home.

Palestinians say they don’t want to leave though.I don’t know how they could want to stay. It’s a demolition site. If we could find the right piece of land or numerous pieces of land and build them some really nice with plenty of money in the area that’s for sure. I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza, which had just decades and decades of death.

Reporter: Where would those pieces of land be?

Well that could be in Jordan and they could be in Egypt and they could be in other places. You could have more than two more than one but you could have more than two you’d have people living in a place that could be very beautiful and safe and nice. Gaza has been a disaster for decades.

Reporter: Would the US pay for that?

I don’t think we would pay. But there are plenty of people that would in the are .that have a lot of money. They certainly have a lot of money. Some of the countries over they’d like to see it. I know that Saudi Arabia wants to see peace, I can see and many of the countries there as far as I’m concerned, they all want peace.

Reporter: But the leaders of Egypt and Jordan have bluntly said they want no part of this

Well, they may have said that but a lot of people said things to me. They said they wouldn’t take anybody back in Venezuela, and right now they’re flying them right back to Venezuela nad a lot of people and they’re doing the right thing in Venezuela. The Panama canal is in active discussion right now. And they said things about that. And virtually everything that’s been said has been incorrectly stated based on the result.

Reporter: Wouldn’t that amount to forcibly displacing displacing those people from Gaza?

I don’t think so. I think if they had the opportunity they love if they had an alternative. They have no alternative right now. I mean, they’re there because they have no alternative. What do they have? It’s a big pile of rubble right now, I mean have you seen the pictures of it?Have you been there? It’s terrible to live. Who can live like that? And very dangerous as there’s shooting all over the place. There’s bombing all over the place on both sides, Now, I would think if they had an option of moving to an area either in a large group or various smaller groups and take care of the close to million people I would think that they would be thrilled to do it. They have no, you know, when you say about the Gaza strip they don’t have an option.

Reporter: To be clear, you’re saying they’d be thrilled to leave Gaza.

Oh I think they’d love to if they had an option, Right now they don’t have an option. What are they going to do? They have to go back to Gaza. But what is Gaza. There’s practically not a building standing and they’re very dangerous. You know, those buildings are shifting and they’re falling down all over. And there’s gunfire all over. It’s going to be that way for a while.

Gosh, why are there gunfire and demolished buildings all over the place? Nobody bothered to ask him. I actually would have been interested in hearing what he said about that.

I could go on and on about this but I don’t think it’s necessary. It’s clear that he’s just a moron who has no understanding of … well, anything … and he has come up with what he thinks is the brilliant idea of forcing millions of people to migrate to some other place . Apparently he has absolutely no knowledge of the history of the Palestinian people — or the Jewish people, for that matter. It’s just taken as a given that Gaza (and, apparently, the West bank) should be cleansed of Palestinians for the benefit of the Israelis.

But then, he is very, very stupid and even more addled than he used to be.

I thought they’d have to take some time to build the facilities but the Gitmo plan is already in process.

As tents went up in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold migrants, attorneys at the Department of Homeland Security and Pentagon were still trying to determine whether it was legal to take the unprecedented step of flying migrants from the US southern border to the facility, according to two US officials and a person familiar with the planning.

On Tuesday, a military flight carrying migrants was headed to Guantanamo Bay, according to one of the officials. It was carrying around 10 migrants with criminal records, according to a Homeland Security official.

[…]

The source familiar with the plan said questions like how long the migrants can legally be held there, and what their rights would be while detained, are still unanswered. It is also unclear whether the migrants will have any access to legal or social services while detained at the base.

Senior Trump officials have continued to tout the plan, casting it as a facility designed for criminals.

I don’t think laws really apply anymore, do they?

It could get even worse than Gitmo:

 U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio left El Salvador on Tuesday with an agreement from that country’s president to accept deportees from the U.S. of any nationality, including violent American criminals now imprisoned in the United States.

President Nayib Bukele “has agreed to the most unprecedented, extraordinary, extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world,” Rubio said after meeting with Bukele at his lakeside country house outside San Salvador for several hours late Monday.

“We can send them, and he will put them in his jails,” Rubio said of migrants of all nationalities detained in the United States. “And, he’s also offered to do the same for dangerous criminals currently in custody and serving their sentences in the United States even though they’re U.S. citizens or legal residents.”

They’ll take American citizens too? How generous! Now Trump can say that he’s emptying out our prisons just as he claims all the other countries are doing. I can’t see what would stop him.

CNN did a big story on the Salvadoran prisons pictured above. They are full of gang members after a crackdown by the new authoritarian regime that’s pretty much turned the country into a police state. They house about 80 prisoners to a cell and they get 30 minutes of group exercise a day.

You know that Trump will be thrilled to send people (including Americans) there and will want to watch videos of their punishing treatment late at night when he’s all alone.

The freeze is still on, at least in some places. Republicans have learned that the courts have no power to top anything, not even a blatantly criminal president who stole classified documents and refused to give them back. So issuing a “restraining order” is a nice symbolic act but I’m not sure anyone thinks it means much anymore. Once you take a wrecking ball to every norm and law in the country you end up standing on the courthouse steps saying “Yeah? You and what army?” and the whole thing falls apart.

One week after the Trump administration ordered a pause on federal grants and loans, many Head Start programs in Wisconsin are still unable to access needed funds and are facing uncertainty about whether they can stay open.

While the White House publicly rescinded the memo announcing the freeze, nonprofit organizations around the state are reporting they remain locked out of the payment systems that they use to pay staff and keep operations running.

“I’m hearing from people all across the country and here in Wisconsin that they’re still impacted by the freeze,” Shawn Phetteplace told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.” “There’s a lot of confusion about this right now, but if you talk to Head Starts, if you talk to child care providers … they’re still frozen out, and they can’t access the funds.”

There’s always the possibility that Musk and his little page boys have decided that a restraining order against the OMB freeze doesn’t apply to the payment system which they apparently now control?

Tim Nolan, who runs the program, told “Wisconsin Today” he received a notice from the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, last Monday, directing the center to shut down by the end of the day on Tuesday.

“When OMB asks, you do it,” he said. “So we did as we were told to do on Tuesday, which was shut down.”

Later, when he followed up about the status of the funding freeze, Nolan was told programs like Head Start and Meals on Wheels would not be affected. But since then, he said the payment management system of the U.S. Treasury, which he uses to request funds for things like rent and payroll, has not been working. 

While funding requests normally take only two to three days to process, Nolan said a request he made last Tuesday is still “pending review.” And unless the issues with the payment management system are resolved quickly, he won’t be able to pay his staff on time.

Feature, not bug I’m guessing although it’s always possible that they’ve just fucked something up.

It seems to me that it’s pretty important that the word goes forth that this stuff is happening because of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. To the extent people are talking about it is it penetrating or do most people just think this is all a bunch of white noise at best and as sign of Trump and Musk’s awesome power to destroy the status quo so we can all get rich at worst? I suspect there’s more of the latter than we like to think. If you look at the right wing media and the alternative media that people seem to rely on like Joe Rogan, they are very, very stoked about Musk taking over the government and making as many federal workers suffer as humanly possible.

This is because journalists have discovered the names of the young boys who are now running roughshod over the US government at Elon Musk’s behest.

Wired revealed the name of one last night who appears to have been given way beyond “read only” ability and he’s changing code. Josh Marshall has more on that today:

I’m told that Elez and possibly other DOGE operatives received full admin-level access on Friday, January 31st. The claim of “read only” access was either false from the start or later fell through. The DOGE team, which appears to be mainly or only Elez for the purposes of this project, has already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment system. They have not locked out the existing programmer/engineering staff but have rather leaned on them for assistance, which the staff appear to have painedly provided hoping to prevent as much damage as possible — “damage” in the sense not of preventing the intended changes but avoiding crashes or a system-wide breakdown caused by rapidly pushing new code into production with a limited knowledge of the system and its dependencies across the federal government.

Phrases like “freaking out” are, not surprisingly, used to describe the reaction of the engineers who were responsible for maintaining the code base until a week ago. The changes that have been made all seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked. I want to emphasize that the described changes are not being tested in a dev environment (i.e., a not-live environment) but have already been pushed into production. This is code that appears to be mainly the work of Elez, who was first introduced to the system probably roughly a week ago and certainly not before the second Trump inauguration. The most recent information I have is that no payments have as yet been blocked and that the incumbent engineering team was able to convince Elez to push the code live to impact only a subset of the universe of payments the system controls. I have also heard no specific information about this access being used to drill down into the private financial or proprietary information of payment recipients, though it appears that the incumbent staff has only limited visibility into what Elez is doing with the access. They have, however, looked extensively into the categories and identity of payees to see how certain payments can be blocked.

What could go wrong?

Meanwhile, it appears that the Treasury Secretary is either out of the loop or lying to Congress:

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent privately reassured Republican lawmakers Monday that Elon Musk and his team do not have control over a sensitive government system that manages the flow of trillions of dollars in payments, according to five lawmakers in the room for a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill.

Not that they care anyway. They want to be lied to. I’ve read dozens of articles in the last 48 hours about … all of this, and it’s clear that Republicans in Congress are absolutely fine with everything that’s happening. I honestly don’t think Musk’s little boys crashing the entire US government system and destroying the economy would move them. They know it’s lunacy. They are either just as crazy or so cowardly that they won’t say a word against it.

At this point I’ve lost the capacity to imagine what can stop what’s happening.

Update —

Rolling Stone reports that Elon and Trump are very upset about leaks but their plans to stop it are “ham-handed”

Among the ideas internally kicked around the Trump and Musk teams was the thought of planting younger informers or “spies” in different parts of the federal government to gain the trust of offices and teams suspected of anti-MAGA sentiments. (The Trump administration has already sought in other ways to erect a snitch network across the federal bureaucracy, encouraging staffers to anonymously tip off their superiors if they see any hint of hush-hush diversity programs operating in the shadows.)

Other ideas include potentially accessing, via virtual back-door access, some staffers’s government emails or communications to see if there’s any recent evidence of leaking to the media, though sources generally concede that it is unlikely career officials would be using their work accounts for these kinds of sensitive and unauthorized conversations. Other plans focus on Trump administration officials sending different staffers different internal messages or pieces of disinformation, to see what does or doesn’t leak — in the hopes of isolating where some of the leaking could be stemming from.

Trump and Musk allies have also discussed compiling dossiers of various federal staff and creating shortlists of suspected leakers by scouring their social media accounts to see who is friendly with certain reporters and who is “clearly a liberal,” in the words of a Trump administration official. One Musk ally says they have already asked trusted Trumpists installed in multiple agencies and departments for “brief rundowns” of names of their immediate coworkers or underlings who are the likeliest to be blabbing to the press over the past several days.

These are the people yammering about the Deep State…

Survival tips for Trump 2.0

“Hard not to feel like we’re all losing our minds when it’s just plain as day that what Musk is doing is obviously, flagrantly illegal,” writes Chris Hayes on Threads.

So, self care is going to be important especially for the near future. There’s a lot to take in. Others have already tuned out. But I have enough Irish on both sides that my attitude comes from the old joke, “Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?” Tuning out is not an option. That way lies helplessness, and I loathe feeling helpless. Action is the antidote.

Europeans accustomed to taking advice from the U.S. have some for their American friends facing an authoritarian regime. Watch for all those little changes that amount to big changes:

“I never liked the metaphor of the frog in a slowly boiling water, but it applies very well to our situation,” Srđan Cvijić at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy said. “One decision at a time, our regime has stripped Serbia of its democratic system. It didn’t come overnight. First they captured the media, then the judiciary, then other independent institutions, then they started rigging the elections, and finally they are trying to strip us of the right to freedom of assembly.

“So my advice to Americans is never relax, always be on guard, democracy is not given, not even in the land of the free,” Cvijić said. “Things can go backwards, you have to fight daily for your rights, otherwise someone will take them away from you.

“The most important thing to defend is solidarity and human decency,” Cvijić added. “Do not allow the enemies of democracy to lower your own standards of political behaviour.”

Márta Pardavi, the co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, has related advice:

Pardavi said it was important to dodge the trap of mirroring the political tactics of those in power.

“Avoid siege mentality that, even inadvertently, fuels polarisation. Polarisation undermines trust in public institutions such as the media and the courts,” she said.

“The lower the level of public trust in these institutions, the easier it becomes to capture them. Strive to strengthen institutions by strengthening public trust in them. In turn, ensure these democratic institutions are deserving of this public trust by performing their duties fairly and effectively. Hold them to account.”

My advice for those who have ears to hear is the Europeans’.

The common message from Europe’s pro-democracy activists was to keep fighting.

Pavel Slunkin, a former diplomat from Belarus, said: “The worst thing that Americans could do now is to stay out of politics.”

I know and hate it: Democrats have been really, really slow out of the blocks. But there is movement. Talk is cheap. Action is better. Even if it’s just leaving a voice message with your representatives, filling out an online response form or sending an efax. To Republicans and Democrats. Regularly. Not one and done.

Brian Stelter sums up advice from AOC’s livestream last night:

While the right delights in hearing about the chaos, the left is trying to organize resistance. “If you are watching the news right now, and feeling overwhelmed by the constant headlines and developments… first of all, know that you are not alone,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on an Instagram Live last night. And second, “this is exactly what this administration is trying to get you to feel.” She said “the paralysis and shock that you feel right now is the point. They are trying to induce a state of passivity among the general public.”

Her video lays out the master plan behind Musk-Trump’s individual actions. If you have the time, her suggestions are deep into her video. Trumpists want to divide and conquer? Two can play that.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@aoc)

If you live in a community with a lot of immigrants: Know your rights. (Chicago prepared residents for immigration raids, and when ICE showed up, people told them no.)

If Muskco offers you (federal worker) a “buyout,” don’t accept. Make them make you. Do not comply in advance.

Work with community organizing groups. “We need to be little grains of sand” in the authortarians’ gears. Slow them down and you’ll reduce the damage they can do.

Show up for special elections that impact you (like Elise Stefanik’s open NY seat). Even if Democrats lose, make Republicans lose by more.

Democrats are finally emerging from their stupor after a delayed response. Part of that, AOC explains, is because Trump waited to launch the “shit show” until Congress went out of session and members went home to their districts.

She recommends using every single procedural action to slow down action on Trump nominees in the Senate. “Block every damn thing that we can” while all this Muskish firestarting continues.

Tell your Democratic senator not to vote for Trump’s nominees. Do not assume they will because there is a D behind their names.

Adam Kinzinger offers simple advice for returning MOCs. Actions, not talk.

this is good idea. the issues here is certain things drive news. they're kinetic. stuff like this does that. press releases and statements don't. the goal for an opposition in a case like this has to be to raise salience. this among many other things does that. https://t.co/qMsLyKQ6Eo

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 3, 2025

“Lock in and make the choice,” advises AOC. “This will be a long battle but we will win.”

He’s a wholly owned subsidiary of Musk Industries

“Calling Musk the ‘shadow president’ may be underselling the severity of the situation,” writes Amanda Marcotte this morning at Salon. 

Indeed.

Elon Musk and his youthfoul band of arsonists are gleefully burning every agency in Washington they can force their way into. It’s a hostile takeover of the United States happening in full view of the world. It’s also happening in full view of Democrats down the street just now waking up and smelling the accelerants.

Donald is in the Oval Office sharpie-signing whatever executive orders underlings drafted for him to sign and show off for the cameras like a child’s finger-painting. Donald loves signing things. (Except checks to porn stars.) Does he know what’s in them or is he too far into deepening dementia to care?

But while Donald is busily sharpie-signing, Elon Musk, another overaged adolescent, is running about unsupervised. It seems the White House doesn’t really know what he’s doing with the government Trump was elected to run into the ground.

The New York Times has published an unusually blunt account of Musk’s blitz through executive agencies, including his “efforts to shut down U.S.A.I.D., a key source of foreign assistance.” That move has “reverberated around the globe” (unlocked article):

Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, is sweeping through the federal government as a singular force, creating major upheaval as he looks to put an ideological stamp on the bureaucracy and rid the system of those who he and the president deride as “the deep state.”

The rapid moves by Mr. Musk, who has a multitude of financial interests before the government, have represented an extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual.

The speed and scale have shocked civil servants, who have been frantically exchanging information on encrypted chats, trying to discern what is unfolding.

Senior White House staff members have at times also found themselves in the dark, according to two officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. One Trump official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Mr. Musk was widely seen as operating with a level of autonomy that almost no one can control.

Trump was once the Frankenstein monster running amuck through D.C. But now that he’s loosed Musk on the city, the South African immigrant is stealing his thunder. A fidgety Trump is unable to deploy his signature power moves to reel him back. He’s reduced to explaining him away.

“He’s a big cost-cutter,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday. “Sometimes we won’t agree with it and we’ll not go where he wants to go. But I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy.”

[…]

Mr. Trump himself sounded a notably cautionary note on Monday, telling reporters: “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we’ll give him the approval where appropriate, where not appropriate, we won’t.”

What Trump cannot bring himself to concede (like 2020) is that his presidency is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Musk Industries. Musk has far more money, impossibly more than Trump, a man who measures his manhood by it. James Taylor sang that back when Trump was snowing Times reporters into believing his daddy’s buildings were his own. It’s not often Trump gets up-staged. In spite of holding the presidency, Trump has failed to dominate a man whose stack is so much bigger. And for the richest man in the world, the world is not enough.

President Felonious is not the only one with a mouth agape at the American carnage Musk is wreaking in the nation’s capitol:

There is no precedent for a government official to have Mr. Musk’s scale of conflicts of interest, which include domestic holdings and foreign connections such as business relationships in China. And there is no precedent for someone who is not a full-time employee to have such ability to reshape the federal work force.

The historian Douglas Brinkley described Mr. Musk as a “lone ranger” with limitless running room. He noted that the billionaire was operating “beyond scrutiny,” saying: “There is not one single entity holding Musk accountable. It’s a harbinger of the destruction of our basic institutions.”

Several former and current senior government officials — even those who like what he is doing — expressed a sense of helplessness about how to handle Mr. Musk’s level of unaccountability. At one point after another, Trump officials have generally relented rather than try to slow him down. Some hoped Congress would choose to reassert itself.

While officials and electeds wait for someone else to stop him, “Musk is crowdsourcing ideas of what he should unilaterally cut from the absolute worst people on the internet,” Marcotte writes:

The first target of Musk’s illegal campaign to cut programs that Congress has authorized money for is USAID, a program started by President John F. Kennedy that administers foreign aid and development assistance. The program has long been embraced by both parties, with Democrats supporting its charitable aims and Republicans more interested in how it buys goodwill that keeps the U.S. as the top international power. Shutting it down would also undermine Trump’s efforts to reduce immigration from places like Central America, by increasing the poverty and desperation that drives migration. But Musk doesn’t care about the law or the disastrous effects. He’s too busy trying to please his minions on X, especially the ones with nice things to say about Adolph Hitler. 

[…]

Musk’s baby-faced boy army is just an especially galling example of how the billionaire believes random know-nothing right-wingers should usurp the authority of elected representatives. Their youth is alarming not because they lack experience — which will thankfully make it harder for them to figure out how to execute Musk’s supervillain-style plans — but because of what it suggests about Musk’s strategy. Young people tend to be more naive and are probably starstruck by their celebrity boss. Such people are easier to lure into committing direct crimes, so they incur legal liability instead of Musk. It’s easy to see how young men, drunk on memeified far-right politics and the cloak-and-dagger excitement of hacking into government offices, might not see how they’re taking serious risks with their futures by playing illegal games. 

They won’t. The Musk-Trump administration has eliminated the FBI’s leadership and means to install fangirl Pam Bondi to head what Trump derides as the Department of Injustice. Bondi will redefine “selective enforcement.” Meaning illegal is what Trump says it is now that the Roberts court has effectively indemnified him.

For his part, Musk is living his supervillain dream. All that’s missing is him smugly laying out his evil plan before its denouement. But those Bond set-pieces only occur in the presence of heroes prepared to stop them. So far, heroes are in short supply.

He said he would do it but they didn’t believe him

I wonder how many people feel this way:

EL PASO — On a recent windy, cold afternoon in this border city, dozens of people gathered at a park for an immigrant rights demonstration to denounce the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Some held signs reading: “Immigrants Make America Great.”

Alan, a local police officer, and his wife came and held a Mexican flag. He said he joined the demonstration because he worries about his father, an undocumented immigrant who works at a farm in southern New Mexico.

Alan said he voted for Donald Trump because of worries about the economy and because he believes Trump is pro-police and would combat the public’s negative perception of law enforcement. He said he believed Trump’s promises to make everyday items affordable for middle-class families.

But after two weeks of Trump in the White House, Alan — who declined to give his last name because he fears retaliation against his father — said he now regrets his vote. Partly because he was angered when Trump granted clemency to people involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

I am trying to dredge up some empathy for these folks and hopefully I’ll be able to eventually. These folks do seem like sad sacks who are more to be pitied than censured. But considering the carnage we are currently experiencing, with the worst yet to come, I’m not there yet. Trump didn’t try to hide it. His voters just didn’t believe anything he said.

All they knew was that he wasn’t Biden or Harris, who they irrationally hated, and that Trump promised to make America 2019 again (as if that was some kind of utopia.) They didn’t think he meant any of the bad stuff. But that’s the only stuff he actually meant.