Once again, thanks to everyone who has contributed so far to our annual Happy Hollandaise fundraiser. It’s reassuring to know that people value what we do here and want us to continue as we face the next year of difficult challenges. I am so appreciative of your continued encouragement and support.
As I contemplate the next year of covering politics, I can’t help but think about our probable new FBI Director Kash Patel’s famous declaration:
“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.” — Kash Patel, future FBI Director.
Trump just showed one of those tactics is already working with that ABC settlement of 15 million and a forced apology from Trump nemesis George Stephanopoulos. It’s ugly.
This morning he held a press conference and indicated that he expect to do more of this and it appears he thinks it will work:
Trump says he plans to sue Ann Selzer and the newspaper in Iowa that published her poll showing Trump losing just days before the election pic.twitter.com/ujSmW3GTTM
He has sued for defamation before and lost. But he seems to think, perhaps correctly, that he has the media on the run. This ABC capitulation sends a strong message that it’s best to play ball and you can imagine that plenty of corporate media leaders want their people to go easy right now. The zeitgeist seems to be that Trump is a colossus who must be appeased.
I suspect that independent media is going to be more important than ever. We’re looking at a period of tremendous stress on the information ecosystem with massive disinformation and propaganda programs, the right wing media encroaching on all public spheres, big money manufacturing Trump friendly press for its own purposes and the degradation of the kind of traditional media that might have operated outside all of this. The ability to find out the truth and make rational decisions for ourselves and our country as a democracy is very tenuous right now.
We’ll keep fighting the good fight here, spending our time seeking out the truth as we see it. There’s an awful lot to sort through these days but it is possible to do it if you have the time and the experience to cut through the bullshit. Here at Hullabaloo we’ve been at this a while and although we’re hardly perfect, we have pretty well honed BS detectors.
If you think it’s valuable to have independent analysis and a view of our politics from beyond the beltway, I hope you’ll throw a few coins into the Hullabaloo stocking if you can. But even if you don’t, please stop by from time to time. We are here seven days a week trying to make sense of this crazy world.
How many Democrats does it take to change a light bulb?
Lefties’ fondness for novelty goes only so far. Democrats are policy liberals (sort of) and campaign conservatives. Party culture is built around seniority and whose “turn” it is to move up the organizational ladder. There is ageism in that, but also resistance to generational change. (I wrote about our local changing of the guard a few years back.) That’s visible in real time in the contest for ranking member of the House Oversight Committee between Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.).
House Democrats have solidified the generational shake-up at the top of their committees, after significant behind-the-scenes influence from both current and former leaders of the caucus.
The caucus faced tough races for the Agriculture, Oversight and Natural Resources Committees. Rep. Angie Craig (Minn.) won the nod for the top party spot on Agriculture, beating incumbent Rep. David Scott (Ga.), who’d faced long-standing questions about his health, and Rep. Jim Costa (Calif.). Rep. Gerry Connolly (Va.) won the Oversight recommendation over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.). And Rep. Jared Huffman (Calif.) earned the nod for the Natural Resources Committee against Rep. Melanie Stansbury (N.M.) after Rep. Raúl Grijalva (Ariz.) stepped down.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.) is also poised to take the top Democratic spot on the Judiciary Committee, though Steering will now take votes on uncontested panel spots on Tuesday.
AOC did not win the recommendation during a Monday meeting of the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee (Axios):
What we’re hearing: Connolly defeated Ocasio-Cortez 34 to 27 on Monday, according to multiple lawmakers present.
Ocasio-Cortez said after the vote that she will continue to contest the role when it goes to a vote of the full caucus.
Democrats’ interest in change goes only so far.
A friend observed pithily, post-election, “Any Dem leader or consultant who blames the party for turning a deaf ear to the working class, of being too elite, is not to be trusted. Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester lost their well-earned, populist seats to carpetbaggers, monied grifters.”
Yet Democrats who have spent long careers on Capitol Hill still insist the key to winning elections is more focus on kitchen table issues in a political era fueled by right-wing billionaires and the disinformation ecosystems they (not the RNC) constructed over decades. Nonetheless, “kitchen table issues” might as well be Democratic catechism in an age in which politics isn’t really politics anymore.
Democratic power-players in Raleigh two years ago lined up to reelect the incumbent state chair (a former state legislator). Under her tenure, Democrats left 40 percent of legislative seats uncontested. Democrats also lost two state supreme court seats. The new Republican majority swiftly overturned the previous court’s ruling establishing representative congressional districts and allowed the GOP-controlled legislature to draw three more congressional seats for Republicans. Yup, leading state Democrats wanted to reelect that chair over feisty 25-year-old Anderson Clayton, the eventual winner and soon media darling.
Organizers believe change has to come from the gound up. We changed the guard in our county almost 20 years ago. The guard changed in Raleigh two years ago. It’s only now changing on Capitol Hill. And at that, slowly.
Thank you sharing this Sanctuary of Sanity with us each day. Happy Hollandaise!
How many times have “Twilight Zone” references popped into your head lately? These times are as surreal as they are threatening. Except there’s no Rod Serling to offer a pithy observation on the human condition or to offer a moral coda to each day’s news. For those among the uninfected, there is only a collective shaking of heads, a silent prayer, at the behavior of MAGA millions, titans of industry, and newsies genuflecting before the Great Orange Oz.
Witnessing this “Great Capitulation,” Michelle Goldberg writes:
Different people have different reasons for falling in line. Some may simply lack the stomach for a fight or feel, not unreasonably, that it’s futile. Our tech overlords, however liberal they once appeared, seem to welcome the new order. Many hated wokeness, resented the demands of newly uppity employees and chafed at attempts by Joe Biden’s administration to regulate crypto and A.I., two industries with the potential to cause deep and lasting social harm. There are C.E.O.s who got where they are by riding the zeitgeist; they can pivot easily from mouthing platitudes about racial equity to slapping on a red MAGA hat.
Are they really falling at his feet driven by calculated, economic self-interest? Or are they entranced by power, like the Eloi by the Morlocks’ sirens? Since the launch of this republic there have been among us those who wish to rule and freedom-and-liberty types who in their hearts yearn to be subjects. In Trumpism, both are having a moment. The situation is, at minimum, a dark signal of what lies ahead until (and if) American good sense resurfaces.
Goldberg sees it too:
Collectively, all these elite decisions to bow to Trump make it feel like the air is going out of the old liberal order. In its place will be something more ruthless and Nietzschean.
Gary Legum of Wonkette watched a Trump press conference on Monday and marvels at the reporters filing into Trump’s gilded lair (like the Eloi or ABC News) to be eaten:
Which brings us back to our original thought as we watched the media let Trump steamroll over it as he has for a decade. And that is how absurd it is that reporters still, still, after all this time, troop into these rooms with Trump like a bunch of lemmings, knowing they will be lied to, knowing they will be berated and threatened and insulted, and dutifully write it all down without standing up for themselves and their profession.
[…]
We watched four years of such scenes during Trump’s first term, and we find it unreal that we will be watching the same sorts of spectacles for another four. We can’t believe we get another four years of White House reporters scribbling down Trump’s rambling horseshit without noting that Trump has always rambled through every press conference and interview, and that 95 percent of the stuff he promises never happens.
Imagine if you will — and you won’t strain doing it — little Donny standing before the class, bullshitting his way through another oral report on a book he hasn’t read. He boldly utters vague generalities disconnected from the novel in his stubby fingers and, with the long experience of moneyed privilege, expects everyone listening to buy it like Trump Bibles or Eau de Trump.
Thank you sharing this Sanctuary of Sanity with us each day. Happy Hollandaise!
Trump only cares about his agenda of deportation, revenge, tariffs and personal profits. He’s fine with Elon doing whatever as long as it doesn’t interfere with his own agenda. The Daily Beast reported in his last term that when pressed about the rising deficit, he would say:
“Yeah, but I won’t be here,” the president bluntly said, according to a source who was in the room when Trump made this comment during discussions on the debt.
The episode illustrates the extent of the president’s ambivalence toward tackling an issue that has previously animated the Republican Party from the days of Ronald Reagan to the presidency of Barack Obama.
But for those who have worked with Trump, it was par for the course. Several people close to the president, both within and outside his administration, confirmed that the national debt has never bothered him in a truly meaningful way, despite his public lip service. “I never once heard him talk about the debt,” one former senior White House official attested.
He never talked about it when he ran for reelection both times either. I have to believe that he’s appeasing his new best friend, the richest man in the world, but he really does not care about the debt because he knows that he’ll be out of office, possibly dead, if all these worst case scenarios come to pass (which they probably won’t.)
The Muskswamy commission is looking to recommend massive, unprecedented cuts to the entire government including the so-called entitlements. Many GOP members of Congress are excited at the prospect of finally getting that done. Whether that happens with that very tight margin in the House is another story. And there are people in his orbit absolutely determined to fire federal government workers (or force them out some other ways) and they may make some headway but it isn’t quite as easy as they think.
The one thing that gives me hope is Trump’s narcissism preventing him from caring enough to put any of his clout behind this stuff. It’s all about him and these are not his issues.
He wants his tax cuts to be extended and expanded because that puts money in his own pockets. He wants to put on a big deportation show although how extensive that will be is up in the air. He wants to use tariffs to bully and intimidate other countries but he’s too stupid to understand that they have power to do the same thing and it’s going to blow up in his face. If he succeeds in doing all these things the economic consequences will be extreme but I have a sneaking suspicion that his undeniable ability to lie and have people believe him will allow him to not go to the extremes on those issues and just say that he did. (“See, promises made promises kept and everything worked out fine!”) Our completely fragmented and ineffectual information ecosystem will allow him to get away with it.
As for his desire to get revenge on his enemies and profit from the presidency, I think he might just get that done, at least to some extent. Nobody cares about the corruption so he can just write himself checks from the US Treasury or steal the White House silver and get away with it. As for the vengeance agenda, I imagine his administration will do many things to make his enemies pay, from IRS audits to lawsuits to criminal investigations, costing his targets dearly. I don’t know if we will ever reach that “at long last sir, have you no decency” moment because I’m not sure our society is really concerned with decency at the moment.
But in the end, I do believe that his own ignorance, laziness and narcissism may be the tool that saves us. He’ll get his pet issues and steal massive sums of money. But I don’t think there is quite enough bandwidth in this rogues gallery of neo fascists, D-list pols and egomaniacs to get their agenda passed as well. I may very well be wrong, though. It wouldn’t be the first time.
A former FBI informant pleaded guilty on Monday to lying about a phony bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden and his son Hunter that became central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress.
[…]
Smirnov will get credit for the time he has served since his February arrest on charges that he told his FBI handler that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had paid President Biden and Hunter Biden $5 million each around 2015.
Smirnov had been an informant for more than a decade when he made the explosive allegations about the Bidens in June 2020, after “expressing bias” about Joe Biden as a presidential candidate, prosecutors said.
[…]
No evidence has emerged that Joe Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes as president or in his previous office as vice president.
While Smirnov’s identity wasn’t publicly known before the indictment, his claims played a major part in the Republican effort in Congress to investigate the president and his family, and helped spark a House impeachment inquiry into Biden. Before Smirnov’s arrest, Republicans had demanded the FBI release the unredacted form documenting the unverified allegations, though they acknowledged they couldn’t confirm if they were true.
During a September 2023 conversation with investigators, Smirnov also claimed the Russians probably had recordings of Hunter Biden because a hotel in Ukraine’s capital where he had stayed was “wired” and under their control — information he said was passed along to him by four high-level Russian officials.
But Hunter Biden had never traveled to Ukraine, according to Smirnov’s indictment.
Smirnov claimed to have contacts with Russian intelligence-affiliated officials, and told authorities after his arrest this year that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about Hunter Biden.
Nobody seems to care that James Comer and the House Oversight Committee spent years pursuing this nonsense. They’ve moved on to haranguing Biden for pardoning Hunter so it’s all water under the bridge.
If you want to know where they get their information,here’s the breakdown: YouTube 90% TikTok 63% Instagram 61% Snapchat 55% Facebook 32% (down from 71%) WhatsApp 23% X 17% (down from 33%) Reddit 14% Threads 6%
I have to wonder about the Youtube use. It could just be music or some other very specific interest there but if they ever get caught up in something and go down the Youtube rabbit hole it’s very dangerous. That site is full of disinformation and it’s very compellingly presented.
I don’t know what to do about it exactly. YouTube is extremely valuable. I use it constantly myself. But if you don’t know what you’re looking at it can be disorienting and destructive. I use Tik Tok much less, but I go there enough to see how much fun it is and understand why the kids like it so much. And from what I gather it’s full of disinformation too.
If we weren’t working overtime to destroy the education system we might try something like this:
Being able to identify hoaxes, avoid scams and debunk propaganda is a civic skill required in today's information society. That's why the curriculum of students in Finland includes media literacy lessons, aimed at safeguarding a precious resource: the truth.
Democrats, especially when they’re feeling on the ropes as they surely are now, often get into these games of 20-dimensional chess with themselves about which issues are most important, which people care about, which can be used to gain political traction in a now uncertain and often bewildering political and electoral environment. What we too often forget is that certainty and consistency of belief are messages in themselves. Especially in a cacophonous and cluttered media environment. It’s worth considering the message it sends when a party loses a close and hard-fought election and then spends time debating what it should be for the next time.
Josh puts into words something that’s been rattling around in my head ever since the election. This very public self-autopsy in which Democrats have been flagellating themselves over their failure is another failure. It’s always worth considering what you could have done better. But the idea that the message about democracy and freedom and autonomy was a mistake because nobody cares when the price of eggs is so high is just wrong.
Sure they could have talked more about “kitchen table issues” and pretended that their economic program was an abject failure but publicly rejecting your sincerely held values is an act of self-immolation. No one can respect that. In fact, it makes you appear to have no values and all you’re left with is the price of eggs. Sorry, that’s not a winning issue either.
Don’t look for another cover like this one any time soon
In May of 2023, the world watched as Charles III was crowned King of England after his mother Queen Elizabeth II passed away at the age of 96. Very few people alive could have remembered her coronation almost 71 years before and most Americans’ only familiarity with that medieval ritual comes from viewing “The Crown.”
The UK Parliament prepared a detailed briefing on the history and protocol of coronations and it’s quite fascinating. Much of the ceremony is symbolic these days, but the intent is clear. It is designed to make it clear that the new king is the legitimate monarch, ordained by God. Back in the day this required that all the peers would pledge their fealty to the king one by one and it was apparently a long and tedious process. But since they abolished most of the hereditary peerage back in 1999, they shortened the process this time, with the Archbishop of Canterbury pledging to be “faithful and true” and Prince William kneeling before his father and saying, “I pledge my loyalty to you and faith and truth I will bear unto you, as your liege man of life and limb. So help me God.”
Then they called upon the people to pay homage and everyone in the Abbey said together:
God save King Charles. Long live King Charles. May The King live forever
Back in medieval times this would all be followed by a huge banquet and it was a given that to remain in the King’s favor nobles and vassals would need to offer the king a monetary tribute.
I couldn’t but think of all this as I read about all the billionaires and foreign leaders making the pilgrimage to Donald Trump’s golden palace down in Mar-a-Lago. The coronation (or what we used to call the inauguration) hasn’t happened yet, but he’s already being feted like a medieval king. And unlike the British monarchy, which has eliminated the paying of tribute to the king, here in America, where we supposedly cast off such practices in our revolution, our new president is busily collecting payments and demanding fealty from his liege lords and foreign allies. And he’s making it very clear that he will not be happy if they don’t come across with plenty of lucre to fill his royal coffers.
We have, of course, observed every Republican who can get his or her hands on some formal wear rushing down to pledge their undying loyalty. And we saw the unpleasant spectacle of the Canadian Prime Minister being treated like a vassal by Trump who declared that if Canada doesn’t like his tariffs they can become a state and he could be a Governor, as if that would be a much greater privilege. He also met with his fellow far right autocrats Argentine President Javier Milei and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and has reportedly invited several foreign leaders to the inaugural, including Chinese premiere Xi Jinping (who has declined the invitation.) No head of state has ever attended the inauguration according to State Department historical records because the United States used to pride itself on its peaceful transfer of power not being like a coronation in which foreign leaders paid tribute to the president. That’s a very quaint idea today.
But nothing compares to the media moguls and corporations who are racing to outdo each other to get into Trump’s good favor or spare themselves from becoming the object of his anger. We all know that the man who never leaves his side these days is Elon Musk, who spent over a quarter of a billion dollars to help Trump get elected. He has a great deal of business with the US Government and an apparent burning desire to turn the country into the same grotesque shadow of its former self as he’s done to his social media company, X. Trump is clearly thrilled to have the richest man in the world acting as his major domo.
It’s possible that Musk’s closeness to Trump has inspired other billionaires to try to get in on the action. The Wall St Journal reported on this embarrassing phenomenon last week under the apt headline: “The Week CEOs Bent the Knee to Trump.” It describes the scene as Trump went to Wall St to celebrate his Person of the Year Time Magazine cover:
Gathered behind red velvet ropes were senior executives at Visa, Meta Platforms, Goldman Sachs, Charles Schwab and Citadel, according to people who were present. Real-estate and aerospace magnate Robert Bigelow was spotted in the crowd, as was investor Bill Ackman…
Titans of the business world are rushing to make inroads with the president-elect, gambling that personal relationships with the next occupant of the Oval Office will help their bottom lines and spare them from Trump’s wrath.
As the Journal reports, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, both billionaires who own media companies made ostentatious trips to pay tribute to the new president after having been on his enemies list in the first term. They each pledged a million dollars to Trump inaugural (which is basically a personal slush fund with virtually no ethics requirements) as has OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
In fact, media owners and corporations are making many grand gestures to curry favor with the new president. The owner of the LA Times effectively took over its editorial board insisting that it be more Trump friendly. And in one of the most egregious examples to date, over the weekend, ABC settled a defamation lawsuit with Trump in which he had sued them and anchor George Stephanopoulos. Legal observers say there was no chance in hell that Trump would have prevailed on the merits and, in fact, has failed spectacularly in similar lawsuits. They agreed to pay 15 million dollars to his (as yet non-existent) library fund and forced Stephanopoulos to apologize.
Day after day, Trump holds banquets at his Florida palace where wealthy, powerful people come from all over to pledge themselves to him. They clearly believe that it is not in their interest to oppose him in any way, instead they are giving him huge gifts and throwing themselves at his feet in what is surely a vain hope that he will return their loyalty. But they don’t really understand the dynamic. They are there to serve the king not the other way around. If it pleases him to dispense his favor then he may do it. But it’s all about him, not them.
The real question is why these vastly wealthy people are so eager to be subjects? You would think with all their money they could afford to have some pride and integrity. But maybe that’s really the one thing that money can’t buy.
From his first cabinet picks, Donald Trump demonstrated a bully’s intent both to stick a stubby finger in the world’s eye and a need to surround himself with a thick posse of wingmen to do his fighting for him. It’s working. He’s already succeeded in getting ABC News to capitulate to him for daring to use the R-word.
The most litigious president in U.S. history is just getting warmed up (New York Times):
The legal threats have arrived in various forms. One aired on CNN. Another came over the phone. More arrived in letters or emails.
All of them appeared aimed at intimidating news outlets and others who have criticized or questioned President-elect Donald J. Trump and his nominees to run the Pentagon and F.B.I.
The small flurry of threatened defamation lawsuits is the latest sign that the incoming Trump administration appears poised to do what it can to crack down on unfavorable media coverage. Before and after the election, Mr. Trump and his allies have discussed subpoenaing news organizations, prosecuting journalists and their sources, revoking networks’ broadcast licenses and eliminating funding for public radio and television.
Or maybe he’ll just order troops to shoot news executives in the legs. At the very least, Trump transition copiers must be eating up reams of paper printing NDAs with non-disparagement clauses. And that’s just for Trump’s “friends.”
A bad precedent
Litigation, or the threat of it, is among Trump’s weapons of choice. The $15 million ABC settlement sets a bad precedent and whets Trump’s appetite for more. The grifter will see it as another profit center. If he can’t void the First Amendment by royal fiat, he’ll threaten enough legal action that the fourth estate self-censors. Or else make money suing them.
Media lawyer Elizabeth McNamara expects more of the same in the current political environment:
“There’s been a pattern and practice for the past couple of years of using defamation litigation as a tactic to harass or test the boundary of case law,” said Ms. McNamara, who represented ABC News and Mr. Stephanopoulos but was speaking in general. (Her law firm, Davis Wright Tremaine, has also represented The New York Times.)
Over the past several weeks, lawyers for Mr. Trump and two of his most high-profile nominees — Pete Hegseth, the potential defense secretary, and Kash Patel, whom Mr. Trump has picked to run the F.B.I. — warned journalists and others of defamation lawsuits for what they had said or written.
Freedom was a theme (and a theme song) for the Harris campaign. But freedom of speech, like loyalty, only works one way in authoritarian cults.
And if lawsuits don’t work to “cancel” the libs, there are always flying MAGAs.
It’s almost impossible to believe he exists. It’s as if we took everything that was bad about America, scraped it up off the floor, wrapped it all up in an old hot dog skin, and then taught it to make noises with its face.
I mean in its own way it’s a miracle. Sure, it’s the most tragic kind of miracle and it may very well cause the death of the American experiment. But still, if you step back and behold it with cosmic indifference you cannot help but be almost awestruck.
It’s like the inverse feeling of standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon. In both cases you’re struck numb. “How can this thing be‽ It is incalculable.” But rather than a soaring sense of awe, you feel an equally powerful well of dark gravity, your soul being eaten by despair.
We survived the four years since the thread above first hit the Net. We’re only a few days from the longest, darkest day of the year. Don’t despair. Things get brighter from there.
