Author: Tom Sullivan

Are they out to get you? Who they?

During the runup to Nov. 5, there was a lot of talk about “vibes.” This was a vibes election more about what people felt than about what they think (or think they know). Jonathan V. Last has a Bulwark post about how out of synch people perceptions are with reality. It’s rather instructive. First, the results of a YouGov poll on how people perceive what percentage of the population various groups constitute:

The results were hilarious. Here are some of the percentages that Americans (on average) think their fellow citizens are:

• Transgender: 21 percent
• Muslim: 27 percent
• Jewish: 30 percent
• Black: 41 percent
• Live in New York City: 30 percent
• Gay or lesbian: 30 percent

We’ll get to the actual, in vivo percentages in a moment. First I want to point out the absurdity: 1-in-3 are gay/lesbian? Muslims and Jews make up 57 percent of the country? Blacks are 40 percent of the population?

Now, the actual numbers:

• Transgender: 1 percent
• Muslim: 1 percent
• Jewish: 2 percent
• Black: 12 percent
• Live in New York City: 2 percent1
• Gay or lesbian: 3 percent

We are talking about errors of perception measured by orders of magnitude. On the trans population, the average American’s estimation is off by 2,000 percent.

People make a consistent mistake in the same direction, Last observes. They wildly overestimate the number of people from recognized minority/interest groups of every kind and underestimate how numerically common their own group is. He dubs it “a particularly American cognitive bias.”

I wonder how much it has to do with the evangelical perception that there’s a secret war going on just below the surface of observable reality that Christians wage daily against spiritual principalities and powers, “against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” They learn that the Devil and his demons lurk around every corner waitin’ to git ya.

These perceptions are conclusions drawn from little or no actual encounters in real life with trans people, gay people, Muslims, etc. Yet people assume these Others are everywhere.

Like imaginary Satanic pedophile cults that way. It’s this learned paranoia that perhaps says something fundamental about Americans’ psyche, long haunted by paranoid fantasies, whether it’s savages in the woods or commies in woodpiles.

This distorted perception leads people in majorities to a combative, oppositional politics. They worry about being displaced by minorities they rarely encounter but fear are lurking somewhere, out there, in great masses.

Richard Hofstadter wrote about the paranoid style in American politics in 1964 and he was looking at both the contemporary and the historical. Developments since then have mostly confirmed his thesis. I think we can take it as read that paranoia is an important component of American social and political life.

And if this is the case, then I would say that our bizarre perception bias is both symptom and cause. People are paranoid about The Other, which is why they believe that hordes of The Other must exist. And the belief that their own majority group is small while The Other is large feeds the underlying paranoia.

“I’m not sure how democracy is supposed to work with a population that is this paranoid, confused, and oblivious to reality,” Last concludes.

I’m not sure either. But this misperception of threats that the poll reveals is nothing new. I noticed that decades ago after the Three Mile Island accident when nuclear power was more on people’s threat radar:

I have a 1982 Scientific American article here (Xeroxed. Remember kids?) in which study subjects were asked to rank a sampling of 30 sources of risk. Nuclear power topped the list for the League of Women Voters and college students, although it ranked 20 in terms of attributable deaths. Business professionals ranked nuclear power No. 8. Pesticides also made the top ten for the League and college students. It showed up at 28 on the researchers’ list. At the bottom of list of risks for all three groups? Vaccinations. Where would they rank today? We’re not very good at this.

The dangers from vaccinations may leapfrog ionizing radiation as a perceived risk after Jan. 20. Getting them or not getting them.

Update: shortened for brevity, fair use.

Uh-huh

Can we stop parroting that we can’t normalize Donald Trump? Or autocracy, kleptocracy, oligarchy, etc.? Look around.

Anyone who says, “Well, that’s never going to happen,” to warnings that some batshit insane event might happen under the coming Trump administration has not been paying attention over the last decade. “Well, that’s never going to happen” keeps happening.

A brief review (in no particular order):

• Americans elected Donald Trump, a reality TV star with no political experience, a man with a reputation in his hometown as a con man, a repeat adulterer and sexual predator, to be president of the United States. Backed by Bible-believing, evangelical Christians.
• After Trump’s dark, “American carnage” inauguration speech, former president George W. Bush remarked, “That was some weird shit.”
• The world watched Trump reject the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community and take Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s word that Russia had not interfered with the 2016 election. In front of the world’s press. After meeting the former KGB officer in private with no advisers or note-takers.
• An American president ordered immigrations officials to separate migrant parents and children, losing track of the children and/or locking them in cages.
• The same president attempted to withhold appropriated weapons from an American ally fighting off a Russian invasion unless Ukraine launched (or at least announced) an investigation into a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter. He was impeached (but not convicted) for it.
• The world watched the United Nations General Assembly laugh at the president of the United States.
• At a NATO summit, Trump was caught on camera “shoving aside Montenegro’s Prime Minister Dusko Markovic in what appeared to be an attempt to get to the front of the photo line.”
• Trump dismissed the COVID-19 plague that had already killed hundreds of Americans as going away on its own by Easter 2020, then promoted quack remedies as tens of thousands more died.
• The America president told so many blatant lies that a major newspaper kept count, discontinuing its tally at somewhere over 30,000.
• Trump wanted to buy Greenland and talked about nuking hurricanes.
• Trump and Republican allies around the country attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election after Trump lost to Joe Biden.
• On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump “summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack” on the U.S. Capitol. The mob battled the police for hours, breached and sacked the building, threatening to lynch lawmakers, as Trump sat for hours watching on TV, doing nothing. Several people died. Trump told rioters he loved them. He was impeached but not convicted a second time.
• Trump left the White House after stealing hundreds of classified documents. It was just one of the many acts for which he’s been federally indicted, including the Jan. 6 insurrection.
• New York juries convicted Trump on 34 felony counts for business fraud and found him guilty of rape in a civil lawsuit.
• Trump held a xenophobic, misogynistic rally in Madison Square Garden that echoed the German American Bund rally held there in 1939.

After all of the above and much, much more — and yet still more — Americans elected Donald John Trump as president for a second time on Nov. 5, 2024.

Let’s contemplate some of what may come next.

• Trump means to staff his administration with anti-democracy, extremist cranks and weirdos.
• He will direct the Department of Justice to prosecute and jail his political enemies, and demand military tribunals for generals who crossed him.
• He will ethnically cleanse the country of millions of (face it) nonwhite, undocumented residents using perhaps active-duty troops.
• Trump hopes to denaturalize others and strip birthright citizenship from U.S.-born children of the undocumented, and the Roberts Supreme Court will let him.
• He plans to abandon Ukraine to Russian annexation and precipitate the collapse of NATO.
• He plans to wholesale fire dedicated, career civil servants, and staff what’s left of the government with inexperienced, fawning sycophants led by anti-democracy, extremist cranks and weirdos.
• Women’s rights will be under more threat than in the past half-century.
• Trump’s administration will, in effect, declare open season on the LGBTQ+ community and allow Christian nationalists to impose their beliefs on the nation, including on Christians who find their beliefs abhorrent.

Look, fighting back against what’s coming is not just righteous, but patriotic. I’m tired. You’re tired. We’re all tired. But for all its flaws, the ideal of America that MAGA Republicans want to unmake with extreme prejudice is worth fighting for. I’m sorry I’m not more upbeat about it like James Fallows or Rebecca Solnit. That doesn’t lessen the imperative, especially since there is no guarantee how low the foes of freedom won’t stoop once they get rolling.

Tell me again, “Well, that’s never going to happen.”

S-O-P for M-A-G-A

Now that campaign season is almost over (our N.C. state Supreme Court recounts, lawsuits, etc., could drag into December), I’ve scheduled my Covid booster and flu shots for later this morning. With quacks and cranks poised to take over the health system on January 20, hoarding your necessary meds is a good idea. As is getting your shots, advises Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse. She got hers on Friday:

Increasingly, I’m contemplating the issues we are going to face at the intersection of public health and the rule of law. Dr. Vin Gupta posted on BlueSky today, “We need as many healthcare professionals to be courageous and speak to truth, for our patient’s sake and for the sanctity and credibility of our profession. That starts now. We cannot allow the highly abnormal to be normalized.” He said it in the context of the qualifications, or lack thereof, of Trump’s nominees for key positions in the health sector, including Marty Makary as FDA commissioner, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat for surgeon general, and Dr. Dave Weldon for CDC director, all of whom would work for Kennedy. Each of them is controversial. And, of course, there’s Mehmet Oz for CMS, which oversees agencies including Medicare and Medicaid.

Gupta is naive. Normalizing the abnormal was pretty much complete after the vote count on Nov. 5. Horse, barn, etc. Not to mention that if you don’t get those immunizations at federal expense now, you may be paying for them out of pocket (if still available) once Dr. Brainworm & Co. move into their new offices.

That is, if they can find their new offices (Raw Story):

According to an expert on public policy, members of Donald Trump’s incoming administration may already find themselves behind on their jobs the moment that they take over for the outgoing President Joe Biden administration.

Appearing on CNN early Saturday morning, Professor Heath Brown of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice raised alarms that the Trump transition team has yet to submit much-needed documentation to the General Services Administration (GSA) which would allow senior members of the president-elect’s team to have access to information they will need on day one.

Speaking with host Victor Blackwell, Brown was asked, “So this agreement with the General Services Administration allows them to get some office space, get some money but also there are documents related to ethics agreements and anti-conflict of interest commitments. Is this abnormal, disruptive or is it more than that?”

“I think it’s very worrisome for two primary reasons,” Brown replied. “If the agreements aren’t signed that means the key information that the incoming administration needs about the major threats, challenges facing our country are not going to be shared in the same way as if the agreements were signed.”

I-O-K-I-Y-A-R will be S-O-P for M-A-G-A more then ever this time around, starting even before Dictator on Day 1 takes and violates his oath of office in the same breath. Rules established to ensure government transparency and accounatbility are out the window. Not quite half the country voted for abnormal.

Without those signed agreements, Brown worries, we won’t know who is funding this transition.

“Those agreements establish caps on the amount of money that can be donated to the transition team as well as requiring public disclosure of who those donors are,” Brown continued. “If we don’t see those agreements signed, we’ll never know that information and I think many people would worry about that.”

But that’s the point. Donations to the transition become another lucrative grift for Trump. Again, not quite half of “many people” couldn’t care less about that.

Will they when the next Covid variant or the flu strikes down a family member? Doubtful.

Out of the news but not out of the woods

A friend last night asked how recovery was coming along here in Asheville. The truth is we are out of the news but a long way from out of the woods. 

Some friends were in the Oval Office on Thursday to ask President Joe Biden to add a zero to the end of federal recovery aid already approved for Western North Carolina. Or at least for another $25.5 billion. The group also met with congressional budget staff on Capitol Hill to promote a larger aid package.

Locals are hoping the supplemental aid passes quickly because the next occupant won’t be as friendly to ye olde Cesspool of Sin™. The GOP-dominated legislature in Raleigh is already cutting us off. More on that in a moment.

This week, I sat down with @NC_Governor and elected officials from western North Carolina to thank them in person for their partnership as we continue our focus on hurricane recovery.

We're doing everything we can to get your communities what they need in these difficult times. pic.twitter.com/ad8Ti8s2h8

— President Biden (@POTUS) November 21, 2024

Recovery will take years. Downtown Asheville normally would be bustling with shoppers this time of year. For a local economy overdependent on tourism (don’t get me started), empty hotels and shops are dead weight on the city’s economy and on out-of-workers’ lives. Some storefronts are empty and for rent. Residents who left the area during the seven-week water outage may have found work where they relocated already, and may not return.

Recovery depots are still in operation for people (fewer now) from more remote areas of the county still without power or with contaminated wells needing testing, or with homes too damaged to be habitable.

It’s not in the news but it is still the reality on the ground. The town may look normal but normal will not return soon.

Disaster victims still need showers, laundry facilities, supplies, etc. A Board of Elections members told me on Friday relations are still camping out in her house eight weeks after Tropical Storm Helene dropped off a disaster.

A FEMA map I obtained on Friday (dated 11/19) displays the numbers of privately owned and rental residences impacted across Western North Carolina. The largest concentrations are in Buncombe County (Asheville metro). 

• 542 homes destroyed
• 1,600 homes with major damage
• 18,102 homes requiring habitability repairs

There are another 6,000+ rental residences destroyed, damaged, or requiring habitability repairs, meaning structural repairs and/or replacement of appliances and heating/cooling/plumbing/electrical systems.

Thanks to the New York Times for covering what I said on the floor: this is not a recovery bill — this is a purely partisan bill that takes aim at some of the foundational pillars of our democracy.https://t.co/2NzlFfXUJf

— Sen. Julie Mayfield (@MayfieldforNC) November 22, 2024

We mentioned this week North Carolina Republicans’ scramble in the lame-duck session to snatch power from Democrats who defeated their candidates under the guise of a disaster recovery measure. The GOP-dominated body remains “dead-set on refusing to provide meaningful relief for mountain communities hit hard by Hurricane Helene,” reports Smoky Mountain News.

“I’m deeply concerned that instead of help for Western North Carolina, that they used this storm as a front to engage in yet another power grab that I think hurts North Carolina,” Cooper told The Smoky Mountain News Nov. 22.

Three WNC Republicans voted against the bill but are likely to vote to sustain an expected Cooper veto. Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers, whose town flooded just three years ago, had stern words for Raleigh:

Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers praised the three western reps for sticking up for a region that consistently feels overlooked by Raleigh — perhaps for good reason.

“What you saw was fundamental, principled leadership and doing right by the people of Western North Carolina. That was not a hurricane relief bill; it was a bill that was trying to be marketed as one. Even when talking about the money, it just shifts money. It doesn’t allocate where it goes,” said Smathers. “It was a bill that was done behind closed doors, very quickly and not involving even the Republicans, even our own legislators. This is a bill that should not have been passed and should not exist and should be vetoed. And if it was Democrats doing it, I would say the same thing.”

Plenty of videos and podcasts (some of them sensationalized) show destroyed homes, crushed cars and piles of debris and downed trees along roadsides in residential neighborhoods and in more outlying areas. The destruction is not just along the rivers but on hillsides hit by slides and flattened by tornadoes or microbursts. Sometimes only a few yards and a few feet of elevation separate devastation and “normal.” No one really knows how long the cleanup will take.

Officials report 103 deaths across WNC, with 43 in my county, Buncombe. Our house painter reports he lost one of his best crew members to the storm.

A friend just returned from Hawaii reports that a year later the burned city of Lahaina is still a wasteland. They feel us, he said. We feel them.

“Who will be the targets tomorrow?”

This speech by then-Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in November 1994 was prophetic.

30 years ago today, I warned that America was becoming a two-tiered society composed of a few winners and a larger group left behind, whose anger and disillusionment could be easily manipulated.

I took a lot of heat for this speech at the time. Watch and tell me if I was wrong. pic.twitter.com/KcU7SVCiNT

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) November 22, 2024

Did anyone listen?

Also, our numbers matter

Heading into Season 2 of “The Apprentice Goes To Washington,” we are already seeing Donald Trump’s flacks insisting he won a mandate bigger even than his first inauguration crowd. Even without Sean Spicer around to parrot it, you know know the line by heart: “Like nobody’s ever seen.” There will be big strong men with tears in their eyes agog at Dear Leader’s yuge mandate, etc.

Not so. The New York Times subhead reads: “The latest vote count shows that Donald J. Trump won the popular vote by one of the smallest margins since the 19th century.” But if Trump is still breathing, he’s still selling the rubes crap like Trump steaks and Trump sneakers and Trump NFTs and Trump Bibles:

The disconnect goes beyond predictable Trumpian braggadocio. The incoming president and his team are trying to cement the impression of a “resounding margin,” as one aide called it, to make Mr. Trump seem more popular than he is and strengthen his hand in forcing through his agenda in the months to come.

[…]

With some votes still being counted, the tally used by The New York Times showed Mr. Trump winning the popular vote with 49.997 percent as of Thursday night, and he appears likely to fall below that once the final results are in, meaning he would not capture a majority. Another count used by CNN and other outlets shows him winning 49.9 percent. By either reckoning, his margin over Vice President Kamala Harris was about 1.6 percentage points, the third smallest since 1888, and could ultimately end up around 1.5 points.

Johnson beating Goldwater in 1964 with 61% was a lansdlide. Nixon wiping the floor with McGovern with 61% was a landslide. Reagan besting Mondale in 1984 with 59% was a landslide. I grew up with Lyndon Johnson. I voted in the 1984 election. Donald, you’re no Ronald Reagan.

Peter Baker adds:

Mr. Trump would not be the first newly elected or re-elected president to assume his victory gave him more political latitude than it really did. Bill Clinton tried to turn his 5.6-point win in 1992 into a mandate to completely overhaul the nation’s health care system, a project that blew up in his face and cost his party both houses of Congress in the next midterm elections.

George W. Bush likewise thought his 2.4-point win in 2004 would empower him to revise the Social Security system, only to fail and lose Congress two years later. And President Biden interpreted his 4.5-point win over Mr. Trump in 2020 as a mission to push through some of the most expansive social programs since the Great Society, then saw Republicans take control of the House in 2022 and the White House and Senate two years after that.

One can hope Trumpty Dumpty has an even greater a fall.

I don’t expect one as dramatic as Nicolae Ceaușescu’s (nor do I wish it), but the improbable has been happening with unnerving regularity over the last decade, almost as if “Q” had changed the gravitational constant of the universe without us knowing.

James Aames reminds TikTok how quickly things can go sour for dictators who send troops after their own people, as Trump is crazy enough to try. “Our numbers matter.”

As the Trump regime takes shape for the impending implementation of the fascist manifesto Project 2025, I am reminded of another fascist authoritarian who misjudged the true extent of his power. The date is December 21, 1989. The dictator's name was Nicolae Ceaușescu. 😳👇 pic.twitter.com/csxJTGBUqF

— Bill Madden (@maddenifico) November 21, 2024

How many Trump supporters share his agenda?

Adam Serwer considers how easily voters he spoke to across the South dismissed Donald Trump’s worst traits as media propaganda:

During the last weeks of the campaign, when I was traveling in the South speaking with Trump voters, I encountered a tendency to deny easily verifiable negative facts about Trump. For example, one Trump voter I spoke with asked me why Democrats were “calling Trump Hitler.” The reason was that one of Trump’s former chiefs of staff, the retired Marine general John Kelly, had relayed the story about Trump wanting “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” and saying that “Hitler did some good things.”

“Look back on the history of Donald Trump, whom they’re trying to call racist,” one Georgia voter named Steve, who declined to give his last name, told me. “If you ask somebody, ‘Well, what has he said that’s actually racist?,’ usually they can’t come up with one thing. They’ll say all kinds of things, and it’s like, ‘No, what?’ Just because the media says he’s racist doesn’t mean he’s racist.”

We on the left criticize voters on the right as existing in a disinformation bubble. But is that right? Perhaps we political junkies exist in one of our own? Sewer considers how blithely Trump voters tune out information that corrodes confidence in their tribal leader.

This is consistent with Trump voters simply ignoring or disregarding facts about Trump that they don’t like. Democratic pollsters told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent that “voters didn’t hold Trump responsible for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, something Trump openly boasted about during the campaign.” Sargent added, “Undecided voters didn’t believe that some of the highest profile things that happened during Trump’s presidency—even if they saw these things negatively—were his fault.” One North Carolina Trump voter named Charlie, who also did not give me his last name, told me that he was frustrated by gas prices—comparing them with how low they’d been when he took a road trip in the final year of Trump’s first term. That year, energy prices were unexpectedly depressed by the pandemic.

Many Trump voters seemed to simply rationalize negative stories about him as manufactured by an untrustworthy press that was out to get him. This points to the effectiveness of right-wing media not only in presenting a positive image of Trump, but in suppressing negative stories that might otherwise change perceptions of him. And because they helped prevent several worst-case scenarios during Trump’s first term, Democrats may also be the victims of their own success. Many people may be inclined to see warnings of what could come to pass as exaggerations rather than real possibilities that could still occur.

A 2024 candidate told me this week he was stunned by how many people across the region were disengaged from politics and knew little about current events. We’re not just talking conservatives, he said, but left-leaners as well. What’s happening in Washington that impacts their lives is as remote as the state capital four-to-six hours away.

As I keep saying, “normal” people are busy with their lives. Too busy to devote the kind of time and focus people like me do to current events. The job, the kids, the mortgage, the car repair, the storm damage … those are the only current events for which they’ve reserved mental bandwidth. What they think they know about everything else reaches them in snippets, factoids, like what “anyone is talking about” at the beauty parlor. What reaches them is the MEG economy (the price of milk, eggs, and gas). On those atmospherics and on tribal fidelity they cast their ballots. If they cast their ballots. Close to 90 million eligible voters stayed home in 2024.

So those who voted for Trump (and those who stayed home) may be shocked to find that what they don’t know can hurt them, Serwer suggests. They may be shocked when Trump actually pursues “the most extreme right-wing policies” he campaigned on and they dismissed as Trumpish bluster. What do average voters actually know about the cranks and crooks Trump wants to appoint to positions where they can do families harm?

This speaks to an understated dynamic in Trump’s victory: Many people who voted for him believe he will do only the things they think are good (such as improve the economy) and none of the things they think are bad (such as act as a dictator)—or, if he does those bad things, the burden will be borne by other people, not them. This is the problem with a political movement rooted in deception and denial; your own supporters may not like it when you end up doing the things you actually want to do.

All of this may be moot if Trump successfully implements an authoritarian regime that is unaccountable to voters—in many illiberal governments, elections continue but remain uncompetitive by design. If his voters are allowed to, some may change their minds once they realize Trump’s true intentions. Still, the election results suggest that if the economy stays strong, for the majority of the electorate, democracy could be a mere afterthought.

The car needs new tires. The price of bacon increased. Are they living in a bubble or are we?

Catch-2025

This I learned from 35 years working in the corporate world: Employees who start hearing “shareholder value” had best update their resumes. Layoffs are coming. The same could be said for “efficiency.“

Season 2 of “The Apprentice Goes To Washington” will feature not only the firing of cabinet officers and West Wing advisers from “central casting,” but the wholesale purging of federal employees who have dedicated their lives to serving the American public no matter which president’s photo hangs on the office wall.

Except the Project 2025 team isn’t using euphemisms to signal the coming purge. They submitted a bill under the pretext of dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The House Oversight Committee held a hearing on the Dismantle DEI Act on Wednesday. Sen. J.D. Vance’s June announcement alleges his bill means to “restore merit” to government hiring practices, and to ensure only “the most qualified candidates” get hired.

“We’ve got now a World Wide Wrestling Executive who’s gonna run education,” said recently reelected Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D) of New Mexico. “We’ve got a Fox News commentator who’s gonna run the military for us!” she said in exasperation:

Call it the Catch-2025.

President-elect Donald Trump’s Republican loyalists were called out Wednesday by a frustrated Democrat over a paradox concealed within their promised purge of federal government professionals.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) told the Oversight Committee she was confused by Vice President-elect J.D. Vance’s bill to dismantle Diversity, Equity and Inclusion protections on the grounds it burdened the federal government with unqualified workers.

Her problem? Trump’s chosen appointees.

“If this is really about making sure that we have qualified individuals inside the federal government,” she asked, “Why is the president-elect choosing absolutely unqualified Cabinet secretaries to be at the head of every single agency?”

Stansbury, a former federal employee with the Office of Management and Budget, issued a damning rebuttal to Vance’s Dismantle DEI Act of 2024 which was brought to a mark-up without a hearing, as is usual.

The New Mexico Democrat noted the bill would amend the Civil Rights Act and the federal code as well as require a list be drawn up of federal workers and contractors no longer eligible for such employment.

She called the requirement “blacklisting” and likened the bill to policies pushed by the notorious Sen. Joe McCarthy, the notorious perpetrator of America’s 1950s “Red Scare.”

“Welcome to the new House Committee on Un-American Affairs and the new McCarthyism,” she said. “We have arrived here today with this bill.”

How many of you actually watch Congressional Hearings? Y’all should be paying attention. Take 5 minutes and listen to @Rep_Stansbury in there fighting the good fight ✊🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/0N3hvKxrUf

— Anarchy princess (@SatireAP) November 20, 2024

Stansbury wasn’t done.

First responders and emergency managers at @fema put their lives on the line to support our communities during disasters.

This hearing is not about oversight, it’s a pretext for the purge @realDonaldTrump and Project 2025 have promised.@RepMTG said, “Let the purge begin!” pic.twitter.com/XfaraGAibM

— Rep. Melanie Stansbury (@Rep_Stansbury) November 20, 2024

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R) of Georgia said, “Let the purge begin!”

Trumpism, yes. Competence, no. The “spoils” system is back.”

It’s all part of the show

Season 2 of “The Apprentice Goes To Washington” will be filled with characters whose major qualification is television experience. In Season 1, Donald Trump hired only “the best and most serious people” for his administration. And them he fired them one by one. See, it’s not good TV to fire them all at once. You have to build the suspense, keep the audience coming back week after week to see who goes next. That’s how you keep your ratings up.

For Season 2: “Trump Unbound,” the aging actor elected to play a president on TV hopes to bring higher production values to the show by casting more television veterans (The New York Times):

President-elect Donald J. Trump, whose rise was fueled by reality TV stardom, is once again turning to television to recruit the key cast members of his new administration.

The latest was Dr. Mehmet Oz, the former syndicated TV host, who was picked by Mr. Trump on Tuesday to oversee Medicare and Medicaid.

Dr. Oz follows Pete Hegseth, who could move straight from co-hosting the weekend edition of “Fox & Friends” to overseeing 1.3 million active-duty troops as defense secretary, and Sean Duffy, a Fox Business host and former star of MTV’s “The Real World,” who is now poised to run the Transportation Department. (His wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, is Mr. Hegseth’s erstwhile “Fox & Friends” co-host.)

Mike Huckabee, Mr. Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel, hosted a live Fox News show for seven years. Tulsi Gabbard, whom Mr. Trump has said he plans to nominate for national intelligence director, was a paid Fox News contributor until August. His choice for border czar, Tom Homan, was a contributor at the network until last week.

At this rate, the second season of the Trump administration may end up with more television stars than the first one.

Stars in quotes. The reality-show president is obsessed with surrounding himself with characters straight out of central casting, with his ratings, and with “crowd sizes,” but he has not cast particularly popular actors to fill roles in Season 2. Perhaps that is by design. We’ll start an online poll to predict who is first to hear “You’re Fired.”

The Associated Press provides this callback to Season 1:

Choosing TV personalities isn’t that unusual for the once-and-future president: A number of his first-term choices — John Bolton, Larry Kudlow, Heather Nauert and Mercedes Schlapp, were all on TV — mostly also on Fox. Omarosa Manigault Newman, a confrontational first-season member of Trump’s NBC show “The Apprentice,” was briefly at the White House before she was fired.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican who ran Trump’s 2016 transition team until he was fired, said that eight years ago, Trump held “Apprentice-like interviews at Bedminster,” summoning potential hires to his club in New Jersey.

On a call on Tuesday organized by the Council on Foreign Relations, Christie said this year’s Cabinet choices are different than 2016’s but it’s still “Donald Trump casting a TV show.”

“He’s casting,” Christie said.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder (“On Tyranny“) explains that Trump’s cheesy reboot of the fictional “The West Wing” represents the only reality Trump knows. It’s all fiction, even his concocted image as a successful businessman.

Timothy Snyder is spot-on about the fictional reality the serial lying psychopath inhabits. 😳👇 pic.twitter.com/PulaxsUyUc

— Bill Madden (@maddenifico) November 21, 2024

Trump turned daily COVID-19 briefings into more airtime for his vacuous ramblings. Trump needs the spotlight like plants need sunlight, and he withers without it. Sadly, the media — Fox News and beyond — is more than happy to coddle him. And his fans are more than happy to tune in. God help us.

Billionaire hedge fund managers

As X swirls around the Musk sewer, social media users not of the MAGA persuasion are fleeing to Bluesky. What was a sleepy outpost with little traffic (at least for me) is now surging as an alternative. My follows have over tripled since the election.

That means it’s time for a culling by billionaires with more money than sense.

Case in point: Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and big Democratic donor. He proposes buying and shutting down Bluesky to “prevent further fracturing of the town square.”

Every day is a like a new fork to the brain by people with lunatic money and absolutely no f***ing sense

— Molly McKew (@mollymckew.bsky.social) 2024-11-20T14:48:01.958Z

On October 19, Axios considered America’s gullibility crisis and found Ackman there:

Bill Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire with 1.4 million followers on X, obsessively promoted allegations from an ABC News “whistleblower” that the network had given Harris questions in advance of her debate with Trump. On Wednesday, more than a month later, Ackman admitted it was “fake.”

Zachary Basu wrote:

The big picture: The misinformation crisis may be playing out online, but the real-world implications are vast.

• The deadly hurricanes that swept across the Southeast in recent weeks exposed the staggering extent to which people have become prone to conspiracy theories, spurring threats against emergency responders.
• “The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality,” The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote in an article about hurricane conspiracies headlined: “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is.”
• 54% of respondents in an Axios Vibes survey published last month agreed with the statement, “I’ve disengaged from politics because I can’t tell what’s true.”

The bottom line: Never before have so many people been so exposed to so much misinformation. Given the increasing ubiquity of AI-generated content, this may be only the beginning.

Thank you, Dear Readers, for sustaining this humble little island of sanity.

Update: Melissa Ryan shares her take on why “people are rediscovering that social media can only be social if there are consequences for antisocial behavior.”