Author: Tom Sullivan

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.”

The “disaster” is the NC GOP losing

As the nation braces for another game of “What Are the Chances?” with Donald J. Trump the returning contestant, the 2024 election is still in overtime in North Carolina.

Via Democracy Docket:

While the dust settles on the outcome of the presidential race, North Carolinians are still waiting to see who’ll sit on the state’s highest court.

Justice Allison Riggs, one of two liberals on the seven-member court, is locked into a tight race with appeals court Judge Jefferson Griffin (R). Griffin was leading on Election Day but was surpassed by Riggs, who’s ahead by a few hundred votes.

The race isn’t North Carolina’s first judicial match to span several weeks. In the 2020 general election, now-Chief Justice Paul Newby (R) beat then-incumbent Justice Cheri Beasley (D) by just 401 votes. That race also involved a recount and didn’t conclude until December of 2020, when Beasley conceded.

The Riggs lead this morning stands at 625 votes. Tell us again that your vote doesn’t count.

A recount in the Riggs race starts today across most of North Carolina. (It started in my county on Tuesday and will take days; I was there Tuesday as an observer.)

Riggs is on track to defeat her Republican challenger by a couple of hundred votes more than Republican Paul Newby turned out Chief Justice Cheri Beasley in 2020.

I don’t have hard numbers on absentee ballot cures Democrat volunteers secured between Nov. 5 and Nov. 14 (the deadline), but Katherine Jeanes, Deputy Digital Director for NCDP, posted this estimate on Monday: over 800.

🚨 After two weeks of counting, Justice @AllisonJRiggs will return to the bench as a champion for justice and reproductive freedom. 🥲⚖️

We won by ✨ 6️⃣2️⃣3️⃣ ✨ votes after North Carolina Democrats helped a little over 800 voters cure their ballots! pic.twitter.com/pEKsV6cqsZ

— Katherine Jeanes (@KatherineJeanes) November 19, 2024

The Republican response to losing judicial races here is, as The Dude might say, “This aggression will not stand, man.”

So like clockwork, Republicans running the North Carolina legislature are scrambling to change ballot curing rules before the next election and, with Democrat Josh Stein the incoming governor, before they lose their veto-proof majority in January.

In a bill NC's GOP-controlled legislature is expected to vote on today, lawmakers are proposing moving the State Board of Elections under the purview of the auditor. A Republican will hold the office come Jan., after a Democrat has held the office for more than a decade. #ncpol pic.twitter.com/ubvmyI1tPJ

— Lucille Sherman (@_lucillesherman) November 19, 2024

It’s a thing they do when they lose races: change the rules for the next one. After Judge Michael Morgan (hint: he’s Black) in 2016 won a North Carolina Supreme Court in what were nonpartisan judicial races (tipping the court majority in Democrats’ favor), the Republican-controlled legislature responded by switching the contest to a partisan one over the veto of newly elected Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.

After it was clear Cooper had turned out incumbent governor Republican Pat McCrory in 2016, Republicans set about stripping the governor of powers (as Wisconsin Republicans tried with Democrat Tony Evers). Jamelle Bouie, then at Slate, called it “a new nullification crisis.”

Republicans are at it again now. Their vehicle this time? An amendment to a disaster relief bill:

The North Carolina House passed a bill Tuesday stripping incoming Democratic Gov. Josh Stein of all appointments to the State Board of Elections and giving them to a newly elected Republican official.

Currently, the board’s members are appointed by the governor, who is allowed to appoint a 3-2 majority of their own party. That means Democrats have controlled the board since 2017, when Gov. Roy Cooper took office, and would continue to do so throughout Stein’s term.

However, a provision tucked into a 132-page disaster relief bill would transfer all appointments to the state auditor, a position that was just won by Republican Dave Boliek after 16 years of control by Democrats.

The bill passed the House 63-46 Tuesday evening, just hours after it was made available to the public.

Democrats slammed Republicans for moving the complex bill so quickly and for tying it to hurricane relief efforts.

“This is a transparent power grab pushed through by a supermajority that’s not happy with the recent election results,” Rep. Lindsey Prather, a Buncombe County Democrat, said. “And you’re calling it a disaster relief bill. This is shameful and Western North Carolina isn’t going to stand for it

But jerking around with State Board of Elections appointments is only part of it. A State Board summary provided to me bulleted a few of the vote-counting rules SB 382 would change. Many involve ballot curing and provisional ballot counting. Go figure:

Election Administration Changes
3A.4(a) — Requires corrections to VR forms from voters (cures) to come in 3 days after election instead of by the day before canvass. Eliminates 6 days to cure.
3A.4(b) – Requires the use of the State Board’s template voter assistance log at the polling place.
3A.4(c) – Eliminates 6 days to cure HAVA ID required after election day; now noon on the third day after election.
3A.4(d) — Eliminates 6 days the opportunity to return with ID to cure lack of ID at the polls; now noon on the third day after election.
3A.4(e) — Requires counting of all provisional ballots by 5 pm on the third day after Election Day.
3A.4(f) – Request deadline for absentee ballot moved up one week to two weeks before Election Day.
— Absentee cures cut down 6 days, must be done by noon on Friday after election day.
3A.4(g) — Requires all election day absentees to be counted on election day night in an ongoing meeting starting at 5 pm
— Supplemental absentee meeting is only permitted for UOCAVA ballots
— Absentee ballot tallies must be announced at 5pm three days after Election Day (meaning all civilian absentees must be tallied included those that could have cured by noon that same day)
3A.4(h) – the above changes become effective Jan. 1, 2025.

This is in the weeds, but bear with me.

If a county party in North Carolina has a building fund for purchase, payoff or operating of a party headquarters, it may accept corporate contributions. The proposed change would turn that building fund into a corporate-funded slush fund for challenging election results:

Campaign Finance Changes
3A.5(a) — As of Jan. 1, 2025, political parties may use their party headquarters building funds to fund a legal action as defined in G.S. 163-278.300(4) or to make donations to candidate legal expense funds organized under Article 22M of Chapter 163. Building funds may accept unlimited corporate contributions. Candidate legal expense funds may already accept limited corporate contributions.

So. Here we go again.

Late Update: Told ya.

Republicans in North Carolina rushed a bill through the legislature this week to boost their power before they lose their supermajority, approving a measureto give their party more control over elections, eliminate the jobs of judges who have ruled against them and limit the authority of the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general.

[…]

Republicans’ last-minute move to hamper the power of Democrats echo their efforts in 2016 to limit the authority of Cooper in the weeks between his election as governor and his inauguration. Two years later, Republicans in Wisconsin’s legislature took the same step before Democrats were sworn in as governor and attorney general.

You asked for it, America

President-elect Donald Trump signaled in a Truth Social post on Monday that he means to declare a national emergency as a component of his plans for mass deportations (CNN):

CNN reported over the weekend that Trump’s team is evaluating a national emergency declaration to unlock Pentagon resources and tailoring that declaration to pave the way for expanding detention space.

In his first term, Trump declared a national emergency on the border with Mexico to circumvent Congress and use Pentagon funds for his border wall—a move that was faced with numerous lawsuits.

The incoming administration’s sweeping immigration plans are beginning to come into focus, sources previously told CNN, including implementing strict border measures, striking down Biden-era policies and kicking off the detention and deportation of migrants at large scale.

People close to the president-elect and his aides are laying the groundwork for expanding detention facilities to fulfill his mass deportation campaign promise, including reviewing metropolitan areas where capabilities exist.

But they are also preparing executive actions that are a call back to his first term in office and could be rolled out as soon as Trump takes office, the sources said.

I remember when the right-wing panic of the day was mythical Obama FEMA camps. Digby reminded readers last February that the huge conspiracy theory died off as soon as Trump took office (like the stolen-election conspiracy this year). Also, detaining vast numbers of “undocumented Central American residents and 4000 American citizens whom the US Attorney General had designated as ‘national security threats’” was originally a Reagan-administration idea:

It’s a Republican thing.

Trump’s top henchman Steven Miller has been floating the idea of “deportation camps” and one of Trump’s big plans is to do sweeps in American cities and put the homeless into camps as well.

Camps are on the GOP agenda.

The camps idea gets Discount Goebbels hot and bothered. But that’s not all, reports The New York Times:

[Trump’s] team plans to stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents in a bid to end birthright citizenship.

David Badash, founder and editor of The New Civil Rights Movement, writes:

Constitutional law professor and political scientist Anthony Michael Kreis last week said, “Birthright citizenship is a foundational concept in American constitutional law. It is a betrayal of the 14th Amendment to suggest otherwise or that it can be discarded with ease. We settled any doubt about this in Wong Kim Ark in 1898. We should not budge one solitary inch.”

But Trump himself has declared, “going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.”

That would, as Professor Kreis notes, directly contradicts the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which also bans Americans who “have engaged in insurrection” from holding office.

If Trump is allowed to revoke the citizenship of some people born in the United States, what’s to stop him from expanding dispossession to anyone he deems insufficiently servile, including Black Americans for whom the post-Civil War amendment was principally written? What other amendments or clauses might Trump dismiss with a wave of his stubby fingers?

Defiance of the 14th Amendment regarding U.S.-born citizens sets up a showdown (or not) between the U.S. Supreme Court and Dear Leader. We’ve already established that if a Republican Senate confirms Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK Jr. to Cabinet positions, an utterly cowed GOP caucus will do anything their liege lord asks. (Trump made new health czar RFK Jr. eat McDonald’s, observes late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. “That’s what he does, these are subservience tests.”) Trump’s open defiance of the Constitution would leave the Court with an unsolvable problem once His Lordship’s actions are challenged in court.

JV Last writes:

They have immunized a man whose administration is openly toying with the idea of defying their authority.

Let’s think through this dynamic together.

If Trump were to pursue a case all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Court were to rule against him, and Trump were to decide not to abide by that ruling . . .

What happens next?

Sorry, wait: What happens next if the attorney general, the head of the FBI, the secretary of defense, and the Joint Chiefs and their general staffs are all personally loyal to Trump and Trump has both (a) blanket criminal liability for himself and (b) the power to pardon anyone who commits a crime he orders?

There’s your worst-case scenario.

So here’s the logic chain:

1. SCOTUS must understand that it has put itself in this box.
2. It also must understand that if it ruled against Trump on a matter of sufficient importance, then Trump might be inclined to defy its ruling.
3. And if the president exhibited such defiance, then the high court’s position in American politics would be utterly, irrevocably exposed.
4. Ergo, the chief justice would not—under any circumstances—allow the Court to rule against Trump if he believed that Trump might attempt to defy the ruling.

And that, my friends, is the sum of all fears. A system of government so fully perverted that it is not possible to chart a path back to liberalism and the rule of law.

Is this scenario likely? No.

Is it possible? Let’s call it 1-in-100 odds.

Then again, what were the odds you’d see a losing presidential candidate attempt to overthrow the election? What were the odds you’d witness a violent mob storm and sack the U.S. Capitol after battling police for hours while said loser watched on TV and did nothing? For that matter, what were the odds that a sitting president would threaten this little blog?

“If we assumed—just for the sake of argument—that Trump was trying to bring about this worst-case scenario . . . what would he be doing differently?” asks Last. “Nothing.”

Which is to say: Trump’s actions to date are entirely consistent with a man looking to remake our system of government. If he was intent on the worst-case scenario, there is nothing he’d be doing differently.

Should Trump attempt to revoke birthright citizenship, he will set up the nine SCOTUS justices to somehow accede his demand or else become legal eunuchs.

I’ve watched too many unimaginable scenarios play out in my life not to worry.

Capitalism’s race to the bottom

There is an interesting story about how the chicken of the 1930s (on the left) became the chicken of the 21st century (on the right). It’s not just a tale about how antibiotics created bigger chickens (presumably even your organic, no-antibiotics, free-rangers are a product of that selective breeding), but about how monopsony makes prices higher by eliminating competition, not among manufacturers but among buyers upstream of consumers (the Tysons and Perdues, and the ADMs and Walmarts, etc.)

Bloomberg’s three-part “Beak Capitalism” podcast explains how chicken farmers became Uber-style independent contractors before there was an Uber, and how Big Chicken learned to outsource its risk. Uber was late to that party.

Consolidation among chicken processors meant farmers had fewer places to sell their birds (um, the processors’ birds, actually) and had to become all-but employees of Big Chicken. Chicken farmers these days raise the birds as contractors.

Once chicken became a staple rather than a luxury (and under cover of the Covid pandemic), Big Chicken found it could raise prices and make more money selling to fewer customers. Without competitors in the market, they could simply set their own prices while blaming inflation, the inflation helped sink Kamala Harris.

That economic model is now everywhere. Like chickens, under a Project 2025 administration it’s likely to get even bigger.

Beak Capitalism, Part 2: The Chickenization of Everything

Beak Capitalism, Part 3: Un-Clucking the System

(h/t/ DJ)

Advice from Carole Cadwalladr

Friends have already secured permanent residency in Canada. Others are headed there in January. But then they have the means. Following post-election racist texts targeting Black people come a spread of similar intimidating texts targeting Hispanic and LGBTQ people. They warn recipients they have been “selected for deportation or to report to a re-education camp.” The FBI still does not know their origin. “The FBI did not say whether it believes the offensive messages to LGBTQ and Hispanic recipients are from the same source as the previously reported messages,” NBC News reports.

Some of my LGBTQ friends were concerned even before this report.

In this threat environment, Carole Cadwalladr offers “How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world.”

The Guardian investigative journalist acknowledges that her list is an homage to Timothy Snyder and his 2017 “On Tyranny.” His first rule for surviving a tyranny is the now-famous: “Do not obey in advance.” Serendipitously, Snyder called her as she was crafting her own list on how to survive what comes next (for however long it lasts). Snyder’s updated piece of advice: “Know what you stand for and what you think is good.”

Many of Cadwalladr’s rules are familiar. Others, more practical than one might see elsewhere, since she was been the target of a SLAPP suit over her 2019 TED talk. A couple in particular caught my attention:

8 Protect your private life. The broligarchy doesn’t want you to have one. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: they need to know exactly who you are to sell you more shit. We’re now beyond that. Surveillance Authoritarianism is next. Watch The Lives of Others, the beautifully told film about surveillance in 80s east Berlin. Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is.

And this:

11 Think of your personal data as nude selfies. A veteran technology journalist told me this in 2017 and it’s never left me. My experience of “discovery” – handing over 40,000 emails, messages, documents to the legal team of the Brexit donor I’d investigated – left me paralysed and terrified. Think what a hostile legal team would make of your message history. This can and will happen.

Cadwalladr has been there.

You’re next

But the message that stood out to me most in Cadwalladr’s list, and may to those of us not (immediately) planning on leaving the country, is this:

10 Listen to women of colour. Everything bad that happened on the internet happened to them first. The history of technology is that it is only when it affects white men that it’s considered a problem. Look at how technology is already being used to profile and target immigrants. Know that you’re next.

I wrote The Niemöller Countdown a week ago and urged readers not to wait to speak out until they get to the Jews.

Listen. Digby and I treated the threat letter I received from a Trump lawyer in August 2019 largely as a joke. Standard Trump operating procedure. Threaten a lawsuit against someone without pockets deep enough to resist to get them to back down. We simply got caught in the fallout of a Trump tantrum against NBC-Universal.

That was then. Now Trump is drawing up enemies lists that we are not likely high-profile enough to be on. Then again, I would have thought we were too small to notice in 2019. As Cadwalladr warns, “Know that you’re next.”

Cokie’s Law über alles

Longtime readers recall Cokie’s Law. Digby coined the term in 2008 for how skillfully the right wing tosses smears into the air to be carried by the media like the wind. Smears, lies, and disinformation become a “legitimate” subject of mainstream reporting not because they are true or meaningful but because they are “out there.” The law is named for the late NPR/ABC reporter Cokie Roberts:

“At this point,” said Roberts, “it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”

Thus right-wing smears, lies, and disinformation become, in campaign parlance, “earned media.”

James Fallows on Saturday did not reference Digby’s law, but essentially conceded that “the death-cloud of misinformation, ignorance, lies, myths, fears, stereotypes” has come to represent, like the shadows in Plato’s cave, an “artificial reality playing out in the minds of citizens.”

Fallows:

—It’s not a new problem in American democracy. Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, published when Warren Harding was in the White House, was about people’s inevitable reliance on “pictures in our head,” often stereotypes or half-truths, to judge events they had not witnessed themselves. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, about the convergence of information and entertainment (with entertainment coming out on top), was published nearly 40 years ago but grows ever more prophetic-seeming.

—It’s not even a new insight into this election. In the past week, while traveling, I’ve seen excellent essays by Nathan Heller, Julie Hotard, Brian Beutler (and Beutler again), Michael Tomasky, and a growing number of others on the “news” problem that extends far beyond the official “news media.”

Facts no longer define reality in a post-truth world. “All anyone was talking about” does. The right is more skilled than the left at ensuring its version of reality is in circulation at the beauty parlor and part of the culture. Watch any The Good Liars or Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse videos shot at Trump rallies. The MAGA faithful absorb extremist disinformation like sponges and, like sodden sponges, refuse to accept anything more, like objective fact.

There is a sad irony to the phenomenon. I’m so old that I remember rednecks beating up hippies for having long hair. Until country music discovered the mullet. Lefty New Agers later inhabited their own alternate reality of unseen energies and aliens (and QAnon-esque conspiracies):

As Larry Massett observed in “A Night on Mt. Shasta” (recorded during the Harmonic Convergence), “I met a lot of people I liked and almost no one I believed.” People following their spiritual journeys seemed alienated by modernity, and suckers for whatever snake oil came peddled by people who seemed genuine enough.

Today it’s the right’s turn to be alienated by modernity. For their tastes, a bigoted, 34-time felon/reality star and showman seems more genuine than a world of uncomfortable facts and neighbors who seem alien. Nothing feels right anymore. They’ve given themselves over to a cargo cult of truthiness supported by Trump rallies and right-wing influencers. News is curated disinformation. It’s the right’s version of the New Age only, considering Jan. 6 and Project 2025, far less benign.

Fallows again:

In essence, “news” is everything you don’t see or experience yourself. And with each passing year, a growing share of the “news” on which people base their sense of reality has come neither from personal experience2; nor from “regular” news organizations, flawed as they may be; but instead from the surrounding climate of social media and other sources that have been skewed in a nihilistic, suspicious-and-hostile direction. A large part of that skewing is intentional—a supercharged version of Fox News, as those I’ve linked to above all argue. Part of it just comes with the technology. And evidence suggests that in 2024 this mattered more than anything the official news media did.3 People had “heard” that the economy was terrible and no one could find a job and illegal immigrants were everywhere and Kamala Harris was an affirmative-action cipher. And they could see that eggs were expensive—and that Donald Trump had come up, fist-first, after the bullet whizzed by. No contest.

The result explains a lot about these past week in public affairs. If nothing matters, if everything is terrible, if elections are just about swapping one liar for another, why not just shake it all up? Or burn it all down? At least it will be entertaining along the way.

In 2016, actress Susan Sarandon, an advocate for Sen. Bernie Sanders, suggested to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that a Trump presidency would, in Marxist terms, hasten the revolution:

“If you think that it’s pragmatic to shore up the status quo right now, then you’re not in touch with the status quo,” Sarandon said. “The status quo is not working … I think it’s dangerous to think that we can continue the way we are.”

LET’S FUCKING GO!!!! pic.twitter.com/LOkm4HKYlQ

— Maureen Bannon (@maureen_bannon) October 29, 2024

Right on cue (roughly a decade later), the Trumpist right is ready for its revolution. It’s Mullet Time. In his War Room, Steve Bannon is humming Springtime For Hitler.

“The thing you’ve gotta know is everything is show-biz!”

“The more capitalism creates wealth, the more it sows the seeds of its own destruction,” writes David Prychitko on Karl Marx’s theories. “Ultimately, the proletariat will realize that it has the collective power to overthrow the few remaining capitalists and, with them, the whole system.” Think of it as a rosily optimistic Marxian corollary to Charles Darwin. Consider the centuries of properity for the peasantry after the sacking of Rome by Alaric I and the Visigoths in 410 CE.

Modern Visigoths under Trump I, plan to lay waste to Washington, D.C. starting January 20 (and even before). One of his chosen lieutenants, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., suffered cognitive damage after a suspected pork tapeworm larva ate part of his brain during a tour in South Asia. There are medications the World Health Organization recommends for treating neurocysticercosis, and preventative measures. But despite his own experience, Mr. Kennedy eschews many such interventions, including medications and vaccines.

If confirmed as the head of Trump I’s Department of Health and Human Services, Kennedy would involuntarily enlist the entire population of the United States in a clinical trial to see what happens if the most advanced country in the world rolls back its medical technology to the 1950s.

As it happens, we have data on what that world looked like. The Wall Street Journal provided a series of heat maps illustrating that in 2015 (the original is interactive):

Perhaps there’s a Darwin Award in it for Mr. Kennedy. If so, many of his neighbors won’t be around to see him receive it.

Do Americans get the leaders they deserve?

“One of the most maddening aspects of the 2024 election is the extent to which so many voters viewed Trump as a mostly normal political candidate,” writes David French in The New York Times. This is the same Times, a paper not celebrated for its headlines, which boasts several online examples this morning of the new Trump normal.

I’m resisting the urge here to substitute another D-word in that famous line from The Sixth Sense (1999):

Most Americans are not political geeks. They don’t have the time. They have other interests. They have other hobbies for when they are not tied up in jobs and bills. They ferry kids to soccer practice and dance classes. A shrinking number attend church, another demand on their time. They are not low-information voters. They are busy, some with multiple jobs. They are not interested in mastering the details of policy proposals. When they go to the polls, they contract out that work to politicians who, for whatever evanescent reasons, seem to reflect themselves back to them. Or else reflect back an image of themselves they’d rather see.

It’s what they see in Donald Trump that should scare you.

Trump’s most-aired ad from October, French writes, was

all about inflation, Medicare and Social Security — arguing that” Kamala Harris “will make seniors already struggling with high prices ‘pay more Social Security taxes,’ while unauthorized’ immigrants receive benefits.”

Trump was marketing more vodka he doesn’t drink and sneakers he doesn’t wear. But still standard political stuff, French observes. Except the headlines on the Times landing page are anything but. Americans will suffer another two or four years of Trumpism before contemplating (if ever they do) “whether politicians have taken care of prices, crime and peace, and then ruthlessly punishes failure.” In between, they disengage.

Because the majority votes and then checks back out, politicians hear almost exclusively from the most engaged minority. My colleague Ezra Klein, has written, for example, about the power that “the groups” — progressive activist organizations — exercise over Democratic policy. They demand that politicians focus on issues that might be important, but that are often not matters of majority concern. Or, even worse, they demand political fealty to positions that majorities reject.

In many administrations, this dynamic results in a kind of tug of war between the activists who demand attention to their pet causes and the political realists who grab the candidate’s arm and tap the sign that reads, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

In his first presidency, Trump hired aides that would restrain his impulse to pursue an agenda of all grievance, all the time. He fired most of them and won’t make that mistake again. Kitchen table issues are not what get him out of bed.

Throughout the campaign, Trump ran with two messages. On the airwaves, he convinced millions of Americans that they were electing the Trump of January 2019, when inflation was low, and the border was under reasonable control. At his rallies, he told MAGA that it was electing the Trump of January 2021, the man unleashed from establishment control and hellbent on burning it all down.

But here is his fundamental problem: The desires of his heart and the grievances of his base are ultimately incompatible with the demands of the majority, and the more he pursues his own priorities, the more he’ll revive his opposition. He’ll end his political career as an unpopular politician who ushered in a Democratic majority yet again.

French assumes here that Trump will survive another four years, that before dying in office he won’t succeed in centralizing power in an Executive branch he bequeaths to J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, already a shadow president.

French concludes:

Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas defended the Gaetz pick, saying, “Trump was elected to turn this place upside down.” That’s what Trump thinks. That’s what MAGA thinks. But MAGA should beware. If Trump’s cabinet picks help him usher in the chaos that is the water in which he swims, then the question won’t be whether voters rebuke MAGA again, but rather how much damage it does before it fails once more.

Perhaps the real question is not who next faces the voters’ wrath but whether voters will retain another chance to express theirs once Trump weaponizes his. Maybe voters usher in another Democratic majority. Or maybe the republic falls like the House of Usher with Roderick. That is, if world doesn’t face another Red Death worse than COVID-19 first.

Many Americans not of the MAGA persuasion focus on sustainability. What may matter to that more than clean energy is the sustainability of the American experiment run by an electorate that has no time for it.

Who’s next for DNC chair?

Now that Democrats face four year of an administration bent on destroying the greatness their Lord Trump claims he wants to restore, they can don sackcloth and ashes or elect a someone to lead the DNC who knows how to lead, how to raise money, and how to organize at the grassroots.

Politico this week reported the fight for the future has begun:

When rumors began swirling that Wisconsin Democratic Party leader Ben Wikler might run for chair of the national party, Jeff Weaver, a prominent progressive strategist, texted him with a warning.

“I am letting you know that in advance I will be publicly and actively opposing any effort to elevate you to DNC chair,” he wrote.

Only one week after losing the White House, the battle for the next chair of the Democratic National Committee is underway — with members of the party’s political class boosting their favorite potential candidates for the job on social media and knifing their opponents behind the scenes.

Isn’t that nice?

It’s a fight with significant consequences for Democrats. What is sometimes a little-noticed contest over who is best connected to DNC insiders has become an urgent battle for the direction of the party in the aftermath of last week’s election. The next DNC chair will also be tasked with helping determine the next presidential primary calendar, debate schedule and who makes the 2028 debate stage in what could be the biggest and most unwieldy Democratic primary in history.

[…]

Democrats are floating numerous names as potential candidates: Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chair Ken Martin, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, California Sen. Laphonza Butler, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, ex-White House infrastructure czar Mitch Landrieu, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel and Wikler, to name a few. (Jaime Harrison, who is currently DNC chair, is expected to not seek reelection.)

You read that right, progressives: Rahm &%*$# Emanuel. I’d consider two or three of the others.

The Hill is already promoting Emanuel:

Democratic strategist David Axelrod is pushing for U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel to become the new chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

“If they said, ‘Well, what should we do? Who should lead the party?’ I would take Ambassador Rahm Emanuel, and I would bring him back from Japan and I would appoint him chairman of the Democratic National Committee,” Axelrod said Tuesday on his podcast “Hacks on Tap.”

Wisconsin Public Radio profiles local hero, WisDems Chair Ben Wikler:

He’s made his name in national circles by helping to transform the Wisconsin Democratic party into a campaign powerhouse, helping to solidify President Joe Biden’s win in 2020 and Gov. Tony Evers’ 2022 reelection, and to flip the state Supreme Court in 2023 to a liberal majority with the election of Judge Janet Protasiewicz. Her win was supported, in part, by a $10 million from the state Democratic Party.

[…]

After last week’s electoral rout, Wikler pointed to Wisconsin’s narrower margin of loss compared to other swing states as a sign of relative organizational strength.

And throughout this election cycle, he received acclaim from national Democratic leaders. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, a series of guests at Wisconsin’s delegation breakfasts heaped praise on Wikler.

“You know that ‘Big Ben’ is recognized nationally as a preeminent state party chair,” said former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California. “His reputation is a great one.”

“This guy is one of the best chairs of a state party — not just today, but ever,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.  

Emanuel’s become proficient with chopsticks, I hear.

The game clock stopped on Nov. 5. Now we’re in overtime.

Don’t know about your states, but we’ve got a recount scheduled to start on Tuesday.

As counties tabulated remaining absentee and provisional ballots, Democrat Allison Riggs took the lead late Friday by 106 votes in the NC Supreme Court race. At the end of election day, she was down by over 7,000. As of this writing, there are still several counties yet to upload their final tallies that don’t plan to complete their work until Monday. So more to come.

Upside? Blue counties left to report voted 455k of their citizens. Red counties voted only 172k. The vast majority are already counted. What’s left are the handful that need approving by the county boards.

Remember the fierce 2023 battle in Wisconsin for the state supreme court seat won by Janet Protasiewicz? These local and state races matter. But like Rodney Dangerfield, they largely get no repsect. It’s why we station poll greeters outside polling stations urging voters to vote their ballots all the way to the bottom. Many don’t. Downlballot races suffer. We are still reeling from N.C. Chief Justice Cheri Beasley’s 2022 loss by 401 votes. Holding Riggs’s seat (she was appointed by Goc. Roy Cooper in September 2023) means maintaining the current 5-2 (R-to-D) balance from which Democrats hope to build. People’s rights hang on it.

Then there are the voting changes year after year (WRAL):

Some ballot officials won’t count this year, in a change from years past, are any mail-in ballots that arrived after polls closed.

For years the state allowed mail-in ballots to be counted as long as they were postmarked on or before Election Day and arrived within three days of the election, a grace period that acknowledged the slow and sometimes irregular pace of mail delivery. But Republican state lawmakers eliminated that grace period ahead of the 2024 elections, saying it was necessary to improve voters’ confidence in election results. It was also likely politically helpful to the GOP; recent shifts in voting habits have led to Democrats being more likely to vote by mail than Republicans.

Around the state, it’s possible that thousands of voters had their ballots invalidated due to the new rules.

Wake County officials, for instance, say they received 616 mail-in ballots that would’ve been counted in the past but couldn’t be counted this year.

Yes, I’m an elections geek.