Ben Wikler, Democratic Party of Wisconsin chair, appeared Monday night on “The Daily Show” and made an impression on host Jon Stewart. That’s not easy to do for a political operative. Wikler, 43, a founding producer for Al Franken’s Air America radio show and former national adviser to MoveOn, is running for Democratic National Committee chair.
“The passion that you’re bringing, that feels like what it needs in this moment,” Stewart said, remarking that DNC chairs he’s interviewed before felt much more corporate.
“You are approaching [politics] from a much more populist, bottom-up standpoint than I’ve heard in the past. Other than Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy.” At that Dean reference, the audience applauded.
I’ve mentioned Wikler in the context of the DNC chair’s race twicealready. The two front runners for the position are Wikler and Minnesota’s DFL chair Ken Martin. I met Martin in passing this year at a North Carolina party meeting. He’s known, experienced, impressive, and connected. But indulge me. How I met Wikler says worlds about the man.
Netroots Nation held its 2019 conference in Philadelphia. A few weeks earlier, I’d sent Wikler a link to For The Win via IM. At an after-hours party in a hotel suite packed elbow-to-elbow, I’d slipped into an adjacent bedroom for a conversation where the din was somewhat less. While attendees in the main room sipped beers, ate cheesesteaks, and traded political gossip, a guy sat in the corner of the bedcoom in a cushioned chair with his nose in a laptop: working. Seriously, working. I caught a glimpse of his name badge: Ben Wikler.
When he came up for air, I walked over and introduced myself. He recognized my name.
“Didn’t you send me a message recently?” Wikler asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Did I respond to it?” Wikler asked, recalling what I’d messaged about.
No, he hadn’t.
“I’m putting you in touch with my training director,” Wikler said, pulling up an email form and e-introducing us on the spot. I had a 45-minute call with her the next week.
That’s the kind of chair Democrats need running their national party. A guy who understands and appreciates field work and is passionate about boots on the ground work. It’s what Stewart saw across the table last night.
Update: Let me say again, There is no The Democratic Party. A lot of the negatives Stewart reacts to as “the Democratic Party” are more a feature of the Beltway caucus fundraising arms — the DCCC and DSCC — than activists farther down the food chain. But the DNC chair gets more media face time than the heads of those groups and can set a new tone and agenda, as Howard Dean did and caught grief for inside the Beltway:
“We’re going to be in places where the Democratic Party hasn’t been in 25 years,” Dean likes to say. “If you don’t show up in 60 percent of the country, you don’t win, and that’s not going to happen anymore.”
The anger of the crowd and the pettiness of plutocrats
Princeton economist Paul Krugman just published his final New York Times column in a body of work begun in January 2000. He considers how the world has changed over 25 years. It’s a grimmer place:
What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.
Krugman doesn’t mention Trump again, but he’s the most prominent of those resentful billionaires.
In early 2000, Krugman writes, “Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards.” One could point to many reasons for the public mood, but the collapse of public faith in elites features prominently. “The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.”
Krugman touches on the financial crisis of 2008 as one reason, eliding the crisis of confidence in American invulnerability that was the fallout from the September 11 attacks. Still, the Great Recession hit more Americans where they live, and their resentments swelled.
Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe were uncontrite and escaped well-earned criminal prosecutions, adding to public cynicism. They kept their bonuses but lost stature in the public eye. They responded with “Obama rage” to the 44th president’s suggestion that they were, you know, in some small part to blame.
These days there has been a lot of discussion of the hard right turn of some tech billionaires, from Elon Musk on down. I’d argue that we shouldn’t overthink it, and we especially shouldn’t try to say that this is somehow the fault of politically correct liberals. Basically it comes down to the pettiness of plutocrats who used to bask in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy you love.
There is not enough money on the planet to fill an empty soul. So not to overthink things, then, it is clear that the incoming 47th president has been trying to buy love his entire career. As have many of the billionaires with which he plans to populate the White House next year. Trump chief among them demands worship. Wealth equals worth in the billionaire universe, and in the country club of the gods.
Venture capitalist Nick Hanauer famously deconstructed billionaire’s mythmaking in a 2012 TED talk. He told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell:
“When a capitalist like me claims to be a ‘job creator,’ it sounds like we’re describing how the economy works, but what we’re doing is something far more interesting. What we’re doing is making a claim on status and privilege. Look, there’s a small leap from ‘job creator’ to ‘The Creator’ — someone at the center of the economic universe…
But elites in general have taken it on the chin over the last 25 years, not just the One Percent. The public mood has curdled, in Krugman’s view, towards elites in particular, and of any kind.
The Washington Post reports this morning, “University leaders are bracing for an onslaught of aggressive legislation and regulations amid growing hostility from an ascendant Republican Party that depends less and less on college-educated voters.”
This is not a new trend. Attacks on elite academies by state legislatures have taken place in the last decade in North Carolina and Wisconsin. Only now they may come from Washington, D.C.:
For years, conservatives have seen colleges and universities as unwelcoming and disdainful of their values. Tensions between Republicans and higher education have been rising over questions of free speech, the cost of college, diversity, race and more.
Now that rift has become a rupture.
In a “Morning Joe” interview aired Monday, President Bill Clinton commented on how “deeply and yet closely divided” the U.S. is as a country.
That divide, distrust of learning and expertise is both organic and cultivated, seeded and nurtured by the very petty plutocrats whose wealth can’t buy love.
Commenting on the Clinton interview, a Bluesky commenter notes, “Since Reagan, the GOP has worked to increase citizens’ cynicism about government, and then campaigned against government. Now, under Trump, the GOP is working to increase citizens’ cynicism about democracy, and then campaigning against democracy.”
Is there a way out? Krugman offers:
We may never recover the kind of faith in our leaders — belief that people in power generally tell the truth and know what they’re doing — that we used to have. Nor should we. But if we stand up to the kakistocracy — rule by the worst — that’s emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world.
May you all live to see it.
For now, the satire of Idiocracy (2006) bites deeper than ever and we seem a long way from the corner Joe Bowers turned in his inaugural speech:
And there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn’t just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!
Thank goodness Syria’s autocratic regime collapsed before Bashar al-Assad “suck-up,” Tulsi Gabbard, had a chance to prop him up as Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, quips Michael Tomasky. Our unstable world is about to become more so.
Here at home, Democrats still smart at losing the presidency to a criminal imbecile and walking advertisement for the Dunning-Kruger effect. How they pull the country and the world back from the brink of Idiocracy will occupy them until the next general election, if that long.
Perhaps Democrats’ biggest obstacle to freshening up their brand, aside from institutional lethargy, is a media ecosystem owned and operated by reactionary billionaires. Democrats’ post-mortem spitballs over how to regain market share with the American electorate are so many trees falling in the forest if no one hears the sound. Perhaps more star power could break through?
Vanity Fair‘s Chris Smith suggested last week that perhaps “Democrats need their own demagogue,” to break through the right-wing noise. The good kind, of course. He admits to twisting the definition for didactic purposes:
Trump, twice now, has demonstrated the importance of choosing a compelling character as your party’s nominee. Yes, the substance of what that nominee is selling matters. But being able to generate attention in an ever-more-fragmented media world and reaching the crucial, growing population of low-information voters matters more all the time. That’s something Trump, a 78-year-old creature of old media, graspedin 2024.
But Democrats typically are more interested in governing and making the world a better place for people. They’re less focused on the show. Trump’s emphasis on showmanship represents a kind of “genius,” says Ashley Etienne, a sometime a top communications aide top-tier Democrats. Savants often do one thing spectacularly well.
Smith proposes New York’s Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a Democrat who fits the bill:
Inside-the-Beltway types tend to dismiss her as having peaked in 2020. But Ocasio-Cortez, more than any other young Democrat right now, is a brand. She has a gift for social media, with more than 8 million followers on Instagram and 1 million on TikTok, and a talent for generating polarizing reactions. The second quality is highly useful in the current and foreseeable information age. David Hogg, the anti-gun-violence activist, recently posted a smart take on the importance of Democrats having a facility for direct-to-camera online video. Hogg’s prime example, 26-year-old Brooklyn city council member Chi Ossé, won’t be old enough to run for the White House in 2028, but Ossé has clearly learned from AOC. Sure, Republicans would vilify Ocasio-Cortez as a radical lefty, but they do that to all Democratic presidential candidates anyway, including Harris, who was solidly centrist. And maybe it’s time for the Democrats to lean into the party’s liberal base; eagerly embracing Liz Cheney in pursuit of moderate Republicans sure didn’t work.
A friend who’s written for Hollywood has for years rent his garments over Democrats relying on chummy, inside-the-Beltway consultants for messaging rather than people who tell compelling stories for a living. Smith consults Billy Ray, the talent behind the Hunger Games script. His Captain Phillips screenplay earned an Oscar nomination:
“Stop any American on the street and say, ‘What does the Democratic Party stand for?’ The only answer you can come up with is, ‘They are the party that hates Trump,’” Ray says. “That is a failure of storytelling.”
But Democrats need more than a left version of Trump or better storytelling to build brand identity. There’s that nagging trees-and-forests problem.
Mike Lux believes the next Democratic National Committee chair needs a way to win back the two-thirds of the electorate with blue collars. Lux recommends several excellent structural reforms that might help with that, but leads with addressing the party’s “Jupiter-sized” media problem:
But the biggest reason by far that voters didn’t know about our accomplishments is the utterly ravaged media landscape outside of the biggest cities. Newspapers are gone or are shells of their former selves. Local radio stations are gone or part of big media conglomerates that don’t cover the news much. Half of local TV stations are owned by far right media companies like Sinclair.
Meanwhile, more and more people are getting most of their news through social media, which is awash in rightwing disinformation.
This Jupiter-sized problem will not be solved overnight, and can’t be solved by the DNC alone. Democratic investors should be buying up media properties so that rightwingers don’t own such a high percentage of them …
But there is plenty the DNC can and should be doing in the media space beyond buying ads two months before Election Day. The new DNC Chair should appoint a task force and give it some serious money to build a media strategy that reflects the modern media era. The Chair should be pulling key Democrats together to get them to invest in some of these other efforts.
That’s a fine idea, if not an original one. Progressives have advocated for left-leaning billionaires to jump headfirst into the media pool for decades. But the deepest pocketed won’t commit to that long-term investment the way a Rupert Murdoch will, nor the way right-wing ideologues of the Koch variety fund think tanks that manufacture talking points like widgets for their media allies to traffick.
If there are among the wannabe DNC chairs a candidate with the gravitas to persuade left-leaning billionaires to do that, please! But the rotating DNC chair has no more ability to finagle left-wing billionaires into undertaking the purchase of major media outlets for a decades-long branding project than RNC chairs did. The most party heads can do is ask pretty please.
Plus, lefties’ fondness for novelty means getting them to get on and stay on the same page, message-wise is their Achilles heel. The left first must craft a message the party faithful will repeat and persuade them to sing it together long enough for it to lodge in voters’ brains. But without a delivery system for that, it’s another tree falling in the forest. President Biden accomplished more for working-class Americans in his four years than perhaps any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson. Voters heard little about it.
WisDems chair Ben Wikler. Photo by Angela Major/WPR.
Robert Kuttner profiles the two DNC chair front-runners, “Ken Martin, 51, Minnesota party chair, and his neighbor, Ben Wikler, 43, who chairs the Wisconsin state party.” Kuttner writes, “If ever there were a moment for both a strong Democratic Party and a compelling face of the party, it’s now.”
Which takes us back to screenwriter Ray’s free advice for what Democrats’ storytelling ought to be:
“Whoever is going to be our next presidential candidate needs to look to the American people and say, ‘You matter. Not me, not Trump. You matter. You matter to your family, you matter to your community, you matter to your country,’” he adds. “‘You matter to our collective future, and you matter to me. And what I’m going to do for the next four years is just work for working families. I’m going to do the things that made the Democratic Party your party for so long.’”
That’s a terrific start on a message. Finding a riveting messenger—someone who can stir passion in millions of voters as Trump has, only for good instead of evil—will be a little trickier.
Internet sleuths believe they have found the jacket worn by the gunman who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson … and now it is morbidly flying off the shelves.
On Reddit, a user speculated the suspect’s jacket was a Sherpa Lined Two Picket Hooded Trucker Jacket by Levi’s … sold at Macy’s for the retail price of $225.
The jacket’s popularity has since spread like wildfire on the company’s website … where more than 6,000 people were viewing the jacket at the same time — and nearly 700 were sold in the past 48 hours, according to an item popularity tool on Macy’s site.
UnitedHealthcare CEO Shooter's Possible Jacket Flying Off Shelves After Sleuth Speculation | Click to read more 👇 https://t.co/8k5KQpeZbz
A grainy image of his face drew comparisons to Hollywood heartthrobs. A jacket similar to the one he’s wearing on wanted posters is reportedly flying off the shelves. And the words written on the bullets he used to kill a man in cold blood on a sidewalk on Wednesday have become, for some people, a rallying cry.
Three days after a gunman assassinated a top health insurance executive in Midtown Manhattan and vanished, the unidentified suspect has, in some quarters, been venerated as something approaching a folk hero.
The authorities have pleaded for help from the public to find the person who killed the UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, who was a husband and father of two children. But in a macabre turn, some people seem to be more interested in rooting for the gunman and thwarting the police’s efforts.
Look, we’re all traumatized by what the Second Coming of Trump represents. Yes, wealth inequality that was bad got worse over the Reaganomics decades. Venture capitalist and early Amazon investor Nick Hanauer is famous for his almost-banned TED talk and his caution a decade ago to “Fellow Zillionaires” that pitchforks are coming for them. His message then:
Wake up, people. It won’t last.
If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.
Hanauer has been preaching that message ever since, including in his Pitchfork Economics podcasts. But until this week the pitchforks always seemed metaphorical. Vivid imagery harkening back to 1931’s pre-Code Frankenstein, but metaphorical.
The celebration of a health insurance company CEO’s murder, even if a fringe phenomenon, lifts the lid on a submerged mood in the country that Hanauer saw ten years ago. It’s not unrelated to the racial and xenophobic animus that peeked out from under the sheets with the T-party after the election of Barack Obama. Donald Trump identified that mood and exploited it to get himself elected in 2016. Then after losing reelection in 2020 he threw accelerant onto it and loosed a MAGA mob against the seat of government in Washington, D.C. I’m still traumatized by that.
I’m as big a critic of the moderncorporation as anyone. We make Douglas Adams-inspired jokes about corporate bozos being “the first against the wall when the revolution comes.” But calling forth a real revolution with guns or guillotines and targeted murder against elites is a path this country should try to avoid.
It is as chilling as pitifully ironic to see blood lust for corporate moguls bubbling up on the website of Macy’s.
Syria’s armed opposition says its fighters have captured the capital, Damascus, and that President Bashar al-Assad has fled. His whereabouts remain unknown.
The commander of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Abu Mohammed al-Julani, says all state institutions will remain under the supervision of al-Assad’s prime minister until they are handed over officially.
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Turkiye and Russia issued a joint statement earlier in the night, describing the crisis as a “dangerous development” and calling for a political solution.
Seems the Islamist rebels already have their solution. The autocrat is gone. What comes next is the question. ISIS? A Taliban? Al-Qaeda?
We are here, by the N-5 Highway. Cars are moving on the highway with people returning to their homes in Syria for the first time in 14 years.
The joy of the people is insurmountable. We’ve talked to the civilians here as they transport their belongings back into the country. Their joy is shared across the Syrian geography – from Idlib to Hama, Homs, Damascus, and Deraa.
This is the most significant moment in the history of the Syrian revolution.
Two senior Syrian officers told Reuters that Assad had fled Damascus, his destination unknown. The report could not be independently verified.
The senior Emirati diplomat Anwar Gargash declined to say whether Assad was fleeing to the United Arab Emirates.
“When people ask where is Bashar al-Assad going to, I say, you know, when you really look at this, this is really at the end of the day a footnote in history,” he told reporters at a conference in Bahrain.
When opposition forces threatened Assad a decade ago, other government worried that an Islamist government might replace him (Washington Post):
What if Assad fell, analysts asked, only to be replaced by groups that Washington regarded as terrorists? The scenario was given a name: the “catastrophic success.”
The same question is being asked with urgency as intelligence agencies around the world contemplate the sweeping gains over the past week by the Syrian rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS — an Arabic name that translates to the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant.
The group’s pedigree is well known, with historic links to both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. From Jerusalem and Amman to Washington and Paris, governments are bracing for the real possibility that Damascus could come under the sway of a militant faction that the United States has officially labeled a terrorist organization.
Updates are rolling in every few minutes. It’s too early to know much more. Not that the Sunday talkies won’t spend the morning asking “experts” to speculate. So if speculation your jam, have at it. The dust won’t clear for days.
That Star-Bulletin box headline above points to the “other” Pearl Harbor day attack in the Philippines. Not sure I even knew about that one. Have another cup of coffee:
In the early morning hours of December 8, 1941 (still December 7 in Hawaii), Japanese land-based naval bombers and Zero fighters from Formosa were detected by radar heading over Lingayan Gulf in the direction of Manila. American planes were alerted and took off from Clark Field and Iba Field but, after hours of searching, they failed to make contact. The Japanese, on the other hand, had no problem finding their American targets.
The most serious aspect of the raid was the destruction of and damage to the 18 Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses that were on the ground at Clark in the midst of refueling and rearming when the attack came. Most of the Curtis P-40 Kittyhawk fighters of the 20th Pursuit Squadron were lost when 10 of the warplanes were caught in the Japanese bomb pattern as they were preparing to take off, while several of the 3rd Pursuit’s fighters ran out of fuel and had to crash-land. The radar facility at the remote airfield at Iba was destroyed.
But half of the 35-plane force of B-17s had been deployed to Del Monte Field at Mindanao, and more than half of the P-40s in the islands had not been involved in the attacks at all. Although its strength had been greatly reduced, the U.S. Army Air Force in the Pacific was still very much in the war.
On Dec. 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched an air raid on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing more than 2,300 Americans. The United States declared war against Japan the following day.Read more about what happened on this date: t.ly/sJ7Un
I’m neither rich enough nor libertarian enough to have invested my time in deciphering how cryptocurrency works, much less invested any of my money. But uber-rich crypto investors, Chris Hayes reports, now have a president-elect ready to backstop their funny money with public money. Even after watching his Friday night report, I still don’t understand how crypto works. But he confirms how oligarchy does.
Like much libertarian dogma, protestations by these shrugging Atlases that government stay out of the way of their Randian penis-enhancement schemes is so much Trumpian puffery. Government is not their enemy. It’s a tool of the moneyed class for making more money.
Matt Taibbi in his heyday understood this. He wrote in Griftopia (2011), “There are really two Americas.” For the grifter class, government is “a tool for making money,” while “in everybody-else land, the government is something to be avoided.”
Elon Musk invested — what other word is there for it? — over a quarter billion dollars in getting Donald Trump reelected. Now it’s time for Trump to pay dividends. Not from his own stash, of course. From America’s. “They’re just backing the truck up to the government,” Hayes warns.
In July, Cynthia Lummis, a US senator from Wyoming, introduced a bill to establish what she called a “strategic bitcoin reserve”, a programme instructing the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to buy a million bitcoins over the next five years to then hold them for at least 20 more years.
Greeley roughs out the basic details but, more importantly, explains what this reserve would mean to the hodlers (I had to look it up):
The bill lays out a mechanism for paying for the reserve. Any surplus the Federal Reserve returns to the Treasury would be spent instead on bitcoin. The Fed doesn’t currently return any money to the Treasury. No matter. The bill also proposes that Fed banks mark all their gold certificates to the current market price of gold, then remit the difference to the Treasury to buy bitcoin. This is all plausible, but the bill doesn’t answer the most important question facing any piece of legislation: how will this change anything at all, for anyone?
A reserve would present both a consummation and an irony for bitcoin’s hardcore supporters — the hodlers. The state would recognise what hodlers call freedom money, but also prop that up with a state programme. The preamble to Lummis’s bill argues that in return, a million bitcoin would diversify America’s assets, improving financial and monetary resilience. Unlike a traditional banking reserve, however, they would be held by the Treasury and couldn’t start to be sold until 2045. An asset you cannot sell does not give you resilience. It gives you storage costs.
Greeley considers the financial ins and outs of this effort by the oligarchs, but there is another more insidious aspect of this scam.
What do men with more money than God, like Elon Musk, do with themselves when adding to their dragon hoards is as pointless as making the rubble bounce after a nuclear exchange?
Money is a kind of power. Controlling billions of dollars is even more power. But it’s like bitcoin that way. Money power is not altogether tangible. If an oligarch wants realpower, life-and-death power, he wants political power. Naturally, without the bother of rich narcissists having to serve humanity, perfect the union, defend the proposition that all persons are created equal, or any of that nonsense.
Oligarchs have discovered there are indeed more worlds to conquer: yours.
We’ve warned plenty here about Christian nationalism, the New Apostolic Reformation, and the Seven Mountains mandate. Considering the Second Coming of Trump already features cabinet nominees associated with efforts to turn our democracy into a theocracy (what’s the big deal about swapping out two letters?), it’s time for another look. Amanda Marcotte this morning offers a hair-raising glimpse at Salon.
“You think you ‘know’ what’s in it,” Marcotte introduces it on Bluesky, “but I promise it’s much crazier. I went deep in the research on this. Lots of quotes from Christian nationalists Trump has appointed, and experts.”
Plenty of those, but some key points before you click over to read the whole thing:
“the Christian nationalist movement … believes the purpose of the U.S. government should be to enforce far-right Christianity on not just Americans, but the whole world“
“the plan was always to reduce Congress to a ceremonial body and concentrate all the power in the hands of the president [committed to enforcing] a “biblical worldview” by fiat”
Russell Vought, Trump’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), “argues that the law or separation of powers should not constrain him and the president, because this is a ‘post-constitutional moment'”
Vought aims to make the lives of civil servants so miserable “that they are ‘traumatically affected’ and forced to quit…. He plans to refill those jobs with Christian nationalists.”
Trump’s Christian nationalist enablers plan “to replace respectable civil servants with bug-eyed fascist ideologues who oppose the most basic values of our country, such as religious freedom, equal justice, and democracy.”
Just because we’ve heard this all before does not mean they are any less of a threat this time around. Believe them the first time. They don’t want to govern; they want to rule. The oligarchs behind Trump are in it for more money and power and because they are Randian adolescents. The Christian nationalists are after dominance with a capital “D.”
It's pretty telling that the thing most upsetting to Christian nationalist MAGA cultist Lance Wallnau about the controversy over Pete Hegseth is that the allegations against him are being reported in the media. pic.twitter.com/r2b5sMfpDA
Mexican workers pick romaine lettuce in a field near Yuma, AZ on November 23, 2012. Photo by Peter Haden. via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
Donald Trump has had it out for non-European, non-whites on these shores since the Muslim ban of his first weeks in office in 2017. And before that, really, with his post-escalator ride tirade about Mexicans in 2015. Now with a second shot at cleaning house starting in January, Trump and his henchmen-xenophobes are poised to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants and anyone who looks like one. And they’ll erase the four years of the Biden presidency while they’re at it out of spite, if they can.
But out where reality intersects with rhetoric, that tough talk is raising eyebrows, Greg Sargent explains. “Republicans or GOP-adjacent industries … suggest gingerly that a slight rethink might be in order.”
Rolling back President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act could decimate nascent green technology manufacturing in Georgia, for example, “from electric vehicles to batteries to solar power.” State representative Beth Camp worries that repealing Biden’s climate measures could leave factories in Georgia “sitting empty.”
Despite Trump’s claims that growth in green technologies would kill jobs, writes Sargent, “the IRA is spurring an outpouring of private investment that’s creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, many in advanced manufacturing and well suited for people without college degrees.” You know, in places the MAGA faithful believe “were abandoned by liberal and Democratic elites.”
Whoops. Trump rolling back Biden initiatives could be the real job-killing move.
Something similar is also already happening with Trump’s threat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Reuters reports that agriculture interests, which are heavily concentrated in GOP areas, are urging the incoming Trump administration to refrain from removing untold numbers of migrants working throughout the food supply chain, including in farming, dairy, and meatpacking.
Notably, GOP Representative John Duarte, who just lost his seat in the elections, explicitly tells Reuters that farming interests in his California district depend on undocumented immigrants—and that Trump should exempt many from removal. Duarte and industry representatives want more avenues created for migrants to work here legally—the precise opposite of what Trump promised.
Now over to Texas. NPR reports that various industries there fear that mass deportations could cripple them, particularly in construction, where nearly 300,000 undocumented immigrants toiled as of 2022. Those workers enable the state to keep growing despite a native population that isn’t supplying a large enough workforce. Local analysts and executives want Trump to refrain from removing all these people or create new ways for them to work here legally. Even the Republican mayor of McKinney, Texas, is loudly sounding the alarm.
But surely Americans who believe migrants stole their jobs will flock to fill those low-skilled meatpacking, construction, and long-hour farm jobs once the deportations bite.
Paul Krugman thinks not. Immigrants, he told Sargent last month, “take very, very different jobs. They just bring a different set of skills, a different set of preferences. There’s very little head-to-head competition. In fact, immigrants are really complements to American workers, even American workers without college degrees.”
So what does that mean for Trump’s plans for ethnically cleansing America? It means, as with his plans for slapping tariffs on anything not made in America, that he’ll find ways to exempt companied and industries that kiss his ass and fill his pockets, all while claiming he’s smacked down the downtrodden just as he promised at his rallies. And use selective enforcement to punish blue cities and towns, those cesspools of migrant crime where, according to MAGA myth, little boys go to school with penises and come home girls.
It’s significant that this emotionally stunted septuagenarian is stunted in other ways. His world view seems stuck in the 1980s. He never learned much, but what he thinks he knows about the world is by now decades old. He’s wedded to fossil fuels, for example, and hates “green.” He complained about the Navy wanting electromagnetic catapults for its aircraft carriers. He prefers steam. Why? Because there’s steam heating and steam boilers in his properties. He knows this much (thumb and forefinger an inch apart) about steam, so that’s what he thinks is preferable.
As we know, he’s always the smartest person in the room.
