While grocery shopping the other day, a friend asked how we were doing (in Trump 2.0). A lot of stress-eating, I said. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is hearing the same sort of thing as he travels the country.
There are a couple of reasons for my stress just this week, but even people who don’t immerse themselves in politics (and blog politics every day) are feeling it. People on Donald Trump’s target list are feeling it.
Sanders asks his audiences how living in this America makes them feel. He asks about their stress level, and it connects more than a discussion about policy. It is a big change from the Sanders who campaigned for president in 2016 on income and wealth inequality in a rigged economy. In 2020, he ran on people’s pain. Anand Giridharadas writes at The Ink:
It was something of a departure for a man who is not necessarily the most touchy-feely guy you’ve ever met. I tried to dig in to what Sanders was doing, and why. I spoke to many of his advisers and his wife and him. What I learned is excerpted below.
It was, in short, that he was trying to help citizens better connect their individual pain to the larger forces misgoverning the country.
And it appears now that he is doing it again. While many are banging the drum about fascism and a coup and all the rest, Sanders is reminding us that connecting those issues to the emotional life of voters is vital.
Oligarchy and autocracy and the like are not textbook concepts. They make life suck.
Democrats need to learn from Sanders, Giridharadas explained this week on “Morning Joe.” Because the key decision point for politically less-engaged people (unlike blog writers and readers) may not be left/right, Democrat/Republican, but “fighter for me or not fighter for me?”
Voters want leaders — even phony ones — willing to fight for them and to risk themselves in the effort. Wimps need not apply. Stern words to not count.
It’s said that Donald Trump has no friends. Not real ones. Sycophants, yes. Transaction partners, sure. Plus dictators who leverage his ignorance and pliability to use him. But making friends is not his strong suit. Quite the opposite.
He’s rubbed off on Secretary of State Marco Rubio who, in a rare move, is expelling South Africa’s ambassador over comments taken as hostile to Trump and his proclivities:
“South Africa’s ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome in our great country,” Rubio posted on X on Friday.
Rubio accused ambassador Ebrahim Rasool of being “a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS”, referring to Trump by his White House X account handle. “We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered persona non grata.”
The up-is-downism in that statement is obvious.
Neither Rubio nor the state department gave an immediate explanation for the decision. However, Rubio linked to a Breitbart story about a talk Rasool gave earlier on Friday as part of a South African thinktank’s webinar in which he spoke about actions taken by the Trump administration in the context of a US where white people would soon no longer be a majority.
Rasool pointed to Elon Musk’s outreach to far-right figures in Europe, calling it a “dog whistle” in a global movement trying to rally people who see themselves as part of an “embattled white community”.
Rubio this week dropped a peace demand that Russia return the children it abducted in its Ukraine invasion. It was, as Digby pointed out, a concession to Vladimir Putin, but also another jab at our friends in Ukraine. But then, Trump and friends….
“It’s a campaign by the same scum you’ve been dealing with for years,” Trump said of the lawyers and officials who have targeted him. “We will expel the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government. … We will restore the scales of justice in our country.”
Then he defended Judge Aileen Cannon, the Florida federal judge who ran interference for him in cases brought by the DOJ. Criticism of judges should be “illegal,” Trump insisted.
What’s yet to be seen is the extent of the career con man’s and his SecState’s fluid definition of “rogue actors and corrupt forces.” It could be, like the South African ambassador, whoever rubs Donald Trump the wrong way. Like Mahmoud Khalil. Or the Rhode Island doctor who traveled to Lebanon recently to visit family:
Alawieh was returning to the U.S. on an H-1B visa she had recently acquired at the American consulate in Lebanon, said lawyer Thomas S. Brown, who handles immigration and visa issues for doctors affiliated with Brown Medicine.
She is being detained at Boston’s Logan Airport and awaits deportation over some “wrinkle” in her visa application approved and issued by Rubio’s department. Unless they already deported her Friday night as officials indicated.
Lebanon is not even among the 43 undesirable countries on Trump’s new travel ban proposal.
Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) ignores advice not to meet voters
Veteran escorted out after standing and hurling epithets.
Credit NC-11 Rep. Chuck Edwards for actually holding a town hall meeting Thursday evening in Asheville. And for staying 90 minutes.
Beyond that, few of the 400 people who got into the tech school auditorium came away with much more than the satisfaction of heckling him. Local news reports that 2,000 outside Ferguson Auditorium [that number feels inflated] had to content themselves with holding an ad hoc rally.
In a preview earlier in the day in Canton, N.C., the former paper mill town flooded twice in recent years, Edwards dodged a shouted question about cuts to Medicaid harming local schoolchildren.
“I agree with a lot of what’s going on in Washington,” Edwards said early in his Asheville presentation. The comment elicited loud boos, as did criticisms of FEMA and mentions of Donald Trump, bureaucracy, etc.
Edwards was reading a prepared speech including a checklist of facts on what’s been accomplished with Helene relief efforts. The impatient crowd didn’t want to hear it, some shouting, “We know all that. We lived it. Listen to us now!”
After each outburst, Edwards returned to his speech. but at mention of Trump seeking American economic dominance and Edwards’ vote for the the Republican budget resolution, the crowd exploded. A veteran stood up and started cursing that Edwards didn’t “give a f@ck about me.” Edwards waved at sheriff’s deputies to have him escorted out.
Edwards hadn’t gotten to the Q&A part yet.
As the Associated Press reported it, the town hall got “rowdy”:
For about an hour and half, Edwards endured a constant barrage of jeers, expletives and searing questions on Trump administration policies. About 300 people crammed inside a college auditorium for the town hall, while the boos from more than a thousand people outside the building rumbled throughout the event.
Edwards attempted to answer submitted questions drawn randomly from a bin and for the most part gave answers expected from a Republican congressman.
What about plans to eliminate the Department of Education? The answer is block grants. And again later, block grants.
What about plans to cut Social Security benefits? Edwards won’t vote to abolish the system, which didn’t exactly answer the question.
“Are you willing to cut 25% of your staff like DOGE is doing with other agencies? Edwards praised his staff, then read off a familiar list of small contracts DOGE characterized as frivolous and waste, some from Trump’s speech to Congress. The audience jeered, calling them debunked.
A woman stood and shouted, all those things are great, but what do they have to do with people losing their jobs? Edwards replied with something about DOGE looking for efficiencies.
At some point it seemed Edwards was simply trolling the crowd by mentioning Trump and “the art of the deal,” knowing it would elicit an angry response.
In one answer that stood out as nonsensical, Edwards said (emphasis mine), “What my job is is to listen to the information that I hear coming out of the administration and then to look at how that might be affecting our district. And then go back to that administration and make a case for why some of those changes might not be in the best interest of NC-11.”
Seriously? Edwards is a legislator in the arm of Congress that sets the budget, but speaks as if he must go to Trump on his knees to beg for crumbs.
Asked how Trump can legally impound funds appropriated by Congress, cancel contracts, and fire workers, Edwards replies that there’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president has to spend every single dollar Congress appropriates. [Because that’s in statute, IIRC.]
The crowd outside is shouting and can be head through the exit door.
And so it went. Full video here for those interested.
Bitecofer’s post concerns the 2024 book by Tina Nguyen, now with The Verge. Formerly with Puck/Politico/Vanity Fair, Nguyen was also formerly and briefly “employed” by The Daily Caller (more on that in a moment). Her memoir, “The MAGA Diaries,” details her upbringing as a young libertarian and Claremonster (a student at Claremont McKenna College where John Eastman is or was on the faculty) and her eventual escape from conservative politics. Subtitle: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right Wing & How I Got Out.
Bitecofer recounts from the book how Nguyen, an aspirng journalist, realized she’d been groomed instead as a propagandist:
Then she got what felt like a the break of a lifetime for an aspiring conservative “journalist”: a job at The Daily Caller working with a pre-Fox News Tucker Carlson.
A few months into that job, where she was hired to cover the tech beat, it began to dawn on her that things at The Daily Caller were not what they appeared to be. The moment of realization hit when a co-worker asked her to lunch and she responded she was waiting for edits from her editor, John Henke: a man her co-worker had never heard of.
That got Nguyen asking herself, if the Daily Caller isn’t paying me, who is?
Turns out her real boss was a Republican communications firm and what they wanted from her wasn’t reporting, they wanted her to write hit pieces on their political and corporate enemies.
Before she could resign, Nguyen got fired as “not a good fit.”
Those who have read closely know that the left and Democrats are in an asymmetrical political battle with a network of right-wing think tanks and media outlets supported by conservative billionaires who, unlike moneymen on the left, think like longterm investors. The biggest lefty funders get behind the latest shiny object that promises a quick win.
The left doesn’t build the kind of infrastructure the right has spent the last half century building. The right mentors promising conservative college kids like Nguyen, sends them to training camps, connect them to conservative networks, and gets them placement at media outlets until they appear, as if fully formed, on your TV screens or in your news feeds.
It wasn’t until she left that world and joined Vanity Fair that Nguyen realized that “there is no such thing as the professional left.” Bitecofer summarizes:
She was pitched a story about a program Dems launched in 2005 to supposedly build the bench (a problem, by the way, we still have today despite at least 5 groups I can think of working on it for two decades) which was pitched to her as “revolutionary, unique, and new.”
The Republicans had The Heritage Leadership Institute so the idea of an organization to build the bench did not sound “revolutionary, unique, or new” to Nguyen. Her first thought was, “I thought the Democrats had the same resources my old team did?”
SPOILER ALERT: We don’t.
The Heritage Leadership Institute’s Young Leaders program has graduates like Josh Hawley, who they basically grew in a lab.
I finished Nguyen’s audiobook in the car yesterday. Nguyen’s bigger shock was finding out years later that the Claremont mentor who helped her get The Daily Caller gig belonged to a secret network screening for young white nationalists, grooming them in mentoring networks, and working to place them at outlets where they could sublty advance white nationalist ideology. Nguyen told the Columbia Journalism Review that “in no universe” would the Caller “have ever explicitly courted white nationalists when I was there.” Yet her WTF moment was realizing that she herself had been nurtured by that system.
Bitecofer concludes that the right out-invests the left and it shows:
So, if you want to understand why Democrats seem inept right now its because we have no brain trust. We have no small room of very smart people with a shit ton of money and authority strategizing on to how fund, build, and run the infrastructure we need to compete with the propaganda machine Republicans have spent decades financing and perfecting.
Instead we have a series of barely connected party organizations, tons of 501c3s, and SuperPACs like Future Forward, who managed to waste nearly a billion dollars on positive ads on Harris that allowed 60% of swing voters to have positive memories of Trump’s first term.
And many of them duplicate each others’ work while struggling to find funding.
These are things most of us already know. But reading Nguyen’s first-hand account as a product of the conservative farm system carries more punch.
Hundreds filled Raleigh,NC’s Bicentennial Plaza Wednesday to protest Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts to popular government programs.
Donald Trump brought two of his friends (at least in puppet form) to an anti-DOGE rally organized by the North Carolina Democratic Party across from the North Carolina State Legislative Building on Wednesday. Perhaps 400-500 people filled Bicentennial Plaza to protest Elon Musk’s and Donald Trump’s chainsaw approach to (ostensibly) making government more “efficient.”
“Stop the GOP Coup.” “America Has No King.” “DOGE Musk Go.”
Hundreds wielded signs with messages like these in Raleigh’s Bicentennial Plaza on Wednesday, protesting the Trump administration’s Elon Musk-led cost-cutting initiative known as the Department of Government Efficiency.
Hosted by North Carolina Democrats, the protest kicked off around noon with a speech from NC Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton. She spoke in support of federal workers and defended programs like Medicaid and Social Security.
Former federal watchdog, Hampton Dellinger, addressed the rally on Wednesday.
“We need to let Republicans know how much the cuts are actually hurting North Carolina. That’s the point of what we’re doing today. And yes, it’s specifically targeted at Republicans because my legislative colleagues need to be talking to Senator Tillis, Senator Budd, their Republican colleagues in Congress and saying, Congress, do your job, take care of our people, take care of our state,” said Sen. Graig Meyer, a Democrat who represents Orange, Caswell, and Person counties.
Debbie from Greenville told WRAL she worries about children not being fed, “I’m concerned about children not being covered under Medicaid if that gets canceled.” Other programs targeted by DOGE impact her life:
“Today it’s the Department of Education,” Debbie said. “Next week, it might be Social Security. It might be Medicare. I’m on Medicare … I’m concerned.”
On Tuesday, Department of Education leaders announced plans to lay off more than 1,300 of its employees as part of an effort to halve the organization’s staff — a prelude to President Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle the agency.
Our friend Lauren Windsor of The Undercurrent brought the puppets.
As a practical matter, I-40 begins in Wilmington, runs the length of North Carolina, and extends west to Barstow, California, joining the legendary Route 66 in Oklahoma City. I’ve driven most of its 2,556.61 miles and drove 500 round-trip in North Carolina on Wednesday. One wonders how long it will be before DOGE will decide that federal highway funds that support placing rest areas about every 50 miles represent waste, fraud and abuse.
If the poors can eat cake, they can pee into empty bottles.
Delta Air Lines (DAL.N), opens new tab on Monday slashed its first-quarter profit estimates by half, sending its shares down 14%, and its CEO said the environment had weakened due to U.S. economic uncertainty.
The Atlanta-based airline is the first major U.S. carrier to report that mounting economic worries among consumers and businesses are hurting domestic travel.
“We saw companies start to pull back. Corporate spending started to stall,” CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC. “Consumers in a discretionary business do not like uncertainty.”
Define uncertainty.
“The National Transportation Safety Board today recommended that helicopter traffic be banned from a four-mile stretch over the Potomac River when flights are landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport,” reports CNN:
Warning signs were missed: The warning signs leading up to the disaster over the Potomac River were there, NTSB investigators said, citing data detailing thousands of near collisions at the airport over a number of years. Investigators uncovered 15,214 “near miss events” between 2021 and 2024 where aircraft were within one nautical mile of colliding, with a vertical separation of less than 400 feet. Additionally, there were also 85 cases where two aircraft were separated by less than 1,500 feet, with a vertical separation of less than 200 feet, according to the NTSB.
On the east bank of the Potomac, Elon Musk’s unofficial junior G-men are slashing the nation’s air traffic controller workforce. But that’s not all (The Atlantic):
As hundreds of career officials depart, the FAA has a fresh face in its midst: Ted Malaska, a SpaceX engineer who arrived at the agency last month with instructions from SpaceX’s owner, Elon Musk, to deploy equipment from the SpaceX subsidiary Starlink across the FAA’s communications network. The directive promises to make the nation’s air-traffic-control system dependent on the billionaire Trump ally, using equipment that experts say has not gone through strict U.S.-government security and risk-management review.
Starlink is an internet service that works by installing terminals, or dishes, that communicate with the company’s overhead satellites. Already, terminals are being tested at two sites, in Alaska and New Jersey, the FAA has confirmed. Musk, meanwhile, took to X, the social-media platform he owns, to warn last month that the FAA’s existing communications system “is breaking down very rapidly” and “putting air traveler safety at serious risk.”
Between his rapid unscheduled disassembly of government agencies, his cosmik debris endangering air traffic, and consolidation of communications infrastructure under one man who can turn it off at the flick of a switch, Musk is a Bond-villain-level threat to national and world security as well as to air traveler safety.
The Atlantic article continues, “A poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released last month shows that 64 percent of American adults say air travel is ‘very safe’ or ‘somewhat safe,’ down from 71 percent last year.”
Emphasis mine:
Inside the FAA, morale is at an all-time low, two agency officials told me. A former senior executive told me that recent events—beginning with the crash and the pressure to take early retirement—have sunk the agency into “complete chaos.” The consequences, the former executive said, could be far-reaching. The FAA oversees an industry that supports$1.8 trillion in economic activity and about 4 percent of American GDP. It keeps millions of people safe.
“This isn’t Twitter, where the worst that happens is people losing access to their accounts,” the former senior executive said. “People die when FAA workers are distracted and processes are broken.”
Delta is not the only airline that will be reporting slashed profit projections this year.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 3.6% since Trump’s second inauguration, with the S&P 500 index off 6.4% and the Nasdaq composite tumbling 11%. The small-cap Russell 2000 has slumped 11.3%.
Thank you for flying Trusk Airways. Enjoy your flight.
He fantasized about shooting people in the middle of Fifth Avenue and getting away with it. He grew up learning tax dodges from his father. He learned tough-guy bluster from mob consigliere, Roy Cohn: attack attack attack; admit nothing, deny everything; always claim victory. He bought concrete from firms run by mafiosos Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano for building Trump Plaza and Trump Tower.
He ran for president not to be president but to build his profile, enjoy the public attention, and enhance his family brand. Then on November 8, 2016, to his surprise, he won. His mafia stylings that worked in New York brought legal scrutiny in D.C.
Now with Elon Musk’s help he actually gets to kill people in bulk from the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue and get away with it. But the man who doesn’t use email and discourages note-taking knows how to hurt people without getting his hands dirty. He learned that in New York City. Handed a Get Out of Jail card from the Roberts court, Fifth Avenue now seems like small potatoes.
The Trump administration has terminated $800 million in grants to Johns Hopkins University, spurring the nation’s top spender on research and development to plan layoffs and cancel health projects, from breast-feeding support efforts in Baltimore to mosquito-net programs in Mozambique.
Trump has stopped weapons shipments to Ukraine and cut intelligence support. More people will die, says a Ukrainian MP (The London Times):
Ukraine’s key weapon systems were dramatically weakened on Wednesday after the US severed its intelligence sharing with Kyiv, leading to warnings that the move will result in more civilians dying.
Weapons systems stopped receiving data they rely upon to hit Russian targets, hampering Ukraine’s ability to effectively defend itself against incoming attacks. There were also fears that those personnel operating UK-supplied equipment, such as Storm Shadow cruise missiles, could struggle to identify military positions without intelligence from the US.
Kira Rudik, a Ukrainian MP, told Times Radio that the “brutal” decision to pull American intelligence sharing after denying the country military aid meant “so many people will be doomed”. While insisting that the move would not change Ukraine’s resolve to fight on, she said: “It is obviously brutal and I cannot imagine how many people will pay the ultimate price for the decision.”
Trump’s choice for Health and Human Services secretary, vaccine skeptic RFK Jr., recommends eating better and ingesting castor oil for avoiding the measles outbreak that’s spreading on his watch (ABC News):
The measles outbreak in western Texas is continuing to grow with 25 cases confirmed over the last five days, bringing the total to 223 cases, according to new data published Tuesday.
Almost all of the cases are in unvaccinated individuals or in individuals whose vaccination status is unknown, with 80 unvaccinated and 138 of unknown status, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. At least 29 people have been hospitalized so far.
Two deaths are reported so far, one child in West Texas and an adult in New Mexico. Both were unvaccinated. More are coming.
Trump’s team of DOGE assassins led by Musk is busily performing “hits” on tens of thousands of civil servants more loyal to their country and their missions than to Mafia Don. They’re losing their jobs. They may lose their homes soon enough.
Proposed cuts to Medicare could leave tens of millions of low-income Americans without health care, force rural hopitals to close, and likely cause more unnecessary deaths.
In true Mafia Don fashion, Trump hopes to bribe citizens into keeping their mouths shut about it by issuing a “DOGE Dividend” (USA Today):
“We’re considering giving 20% of the DOGE savings to American citizens and 20% to paying down the debt,” Trump said in a during the Saudi-sponsored FII PRIORITY Summit in Miami Beach last month.
If it happens, people will get “a piece of the action” taken out of the hide of neighbors who’ve lost government jobs or private-sector jobs that cease to exist because Musk has cancelled contracts that paid their mortgages, fed their families, and supported local businesses.
As far back as he can remember, Donald Trump always wanted to be a gangster. But getting rich as a mobster is nowhere near as sweet as being able to destroy the lives of tens of thousands of people you’ll never know. And get away with it. That’s power. Mobsters just whack individuals. Donny and Elon have an entire republic in their sights.
Meanwhile, where I live boxes of breakfast cereal now go for $5.
“So we’re disappearing people now? Nice to know,” Charlie Pierce writes at Esquire. He’s responding to the Department of Homeland Security over the weekend arresting Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and green card holder, over his participation in protests against Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Donald Trump’s DHS is now creating Desaparecidos.
According to the advocates, at around 8:30 PM, Khalil and his wife – who is eight months pregnant – had just unlocked the door to their building when two plainclothes DHS agents pushed inside behind them. The agents allegedly did not identify themselves at first, instead asking for Khalil’s identity before detaining him.
The agents proceeded to tell Khalil’s wife that if she did not leave her husband and go to their apartment, they would arrest her too. The agents claimed that the State Department had revoked Khalil’s student visa, with one agent presenting what he claimed was a warrant on his cell phone. But Khalil, according to advocates, has a green card. Khalil’s wife went to their apartment to get the green card.
“He has a green card,” an agent apparently said on the phone, confused by the matter. But then after a moment, the agent claimed that the State Department had “revoked that too.”
DHS had already sent him to a detention facility in Louisiana before a federal judge issued an order blocking Khalil’s deportation.
Are we now allowing the rendition of legal residents to black sites in the United States? Where would he be in Louisiana? Angola? That would be fun. There are six federal prison facilities in that state. One of those facilities in Oakdale was the subject of a Department of Justice report in 2020 for refusing to follow the Covid protocols mandated by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons during the pandemic. Eight prisoners died there.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement on Sunday night that Mr. Khalil had been arrested “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.”
“Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” she said. “ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump’s executive orders and to protecting U.S. national security.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared a link on X to a news article about Mr. Khalil’s arrest and issued a broad promise: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
“Aligned”? So, Khalil was arrested for wrongthink. One hopes Khalil wasn’t flown to Louisiana by helicopter.
Whether or not one agrees with the Gaza protests, the action of Trump 2.0 against Khalil appears to be part of a systemic attack on the First Amendment that is now S.O.P. for the Trump administration.
Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin last week sent a letter to Georgetown University — a private university — threatening that “that his office will not consider hiring anyone affiliated with a university that utilizes DEI,” the Washington Post reported:
Martin added two questions: “First, have you eliminated all DEI from your school and its curriculum? Second, if DEI is found in your courses or teaching in any way, will you move swiftly to remove it?”
William M. Treanor, the dean and executive vice president of Georgetown Law, responded:
The First Amendment, Treanor wrote, “guarantees that the government cannot direct what Georgetown and its faculty teach and how to teach it,” noting that the Supreme Court “has continually affirmed that among the freedoms central to a university’s First Amendment rights are its abilities to determine, on academic grounds, who may teach, what to teach, and how to teach it.”
Martin, Treanor wrote, was threatening to deny students and graduates of Georgetown opportunities until Martin approved its curriculum, and he said the school looked forward to confirming that applicants for employment would receive “full and fair consideration” in the future, adding that the Constitution was clearly on Georgetown’s side.
“Given the First Amendment’s protection of a university’s freedom to determine its own curriculum and how to deliver it, the constitutional violation behind this threat is clear, as is the attack on the University’s mission as a Jesuit and Catholic institution,” Treanor wrote.
All of which has landed the United States of America under Donald Trump on a watch list of countries with “faltering civic freedoms” (The Independent):
CIVICUS, a nonprofit organization that serves as an advocate for democracy, added the U.S. to the list on Monday. It’s the first watchlist of the year.
Claiming the U.S. was “once a global champion for democracy and human rights,” CIVICUS said Trump’s attempts to remake the federal government in his vision and remove the U.S. from global participation have raised concerns that it is infringing on democratic freedoms.
The U.S. joins the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Chile, Slovakia and 37 other countries on the list of countries with “narrowed” civic freedoms.
How’s the water in that pot, froggies? Warm enough yet?
