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Stop Helping Him

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 26, 2025

Pick a fight

For all their sky-is-falling rhetoric about Project 2025 last year, Democrats (with exceptions) have settled into business as usual in D.C. They just chose old and busted over new hotness for a top Oversight Committee post. It’s what they know. It’s their comfort zone, well-worn groove, rut [your preferred metaphor here]. Well, the rest of us will be feeling discomfort beyond serving in the congressional minority for the forseeable future. If Democrats have another gear, they’d damned well better find it now.

From December 2016 during the first Trump transition:

The biggest challenge Democrats face is not Donald Trump, but constitution. Not the one in the National Archives, but their inner constitution.

The Democratic Party as an “establishment” organization is conservative by disposition. When shaken or defeated, or when facing the unknown, like now, such organizations by reflex seek safety in the comfortable and familiar. They shy from risk. Democrats fret about what Republicans might say about them at election time. Inner circles across the country worry about fundraising: regular donors might not support untested, young leaders. Democrats fret about how a new direction might induce “division in the party.” (Translation: chieftains might have less influence going forward).

[…]

After confiding my concerns about Democrats playing it safe in the age of Trump, my friend summed up the situation in a single, powerful metaphor: “The Ring has to go to Mordor. It won’t help to carry it back to The Shire.”

Thank you. Now if only Democrats will reach inside and find some heroes.

It’s clear that Trump’s allies and enablers are spineless. Democrats need to find theirs. Pick a fight. Take risks. Stop living in the past. The norms you grew up with are gone.

Politics Girl (Leigh McGowan) gets what I’ve been writing (but is much better on camera.) *

Democrats are bringing 20th-century knives to a 21st-century gun fight. The Trump-oligarch alliance is not your grandfather’s country-club Republican Party. That’s gone.

Stop trying to play ball with autocrats, hoping for crumbs. Former RNC chair Michael Steele knows better. He knows who gave him fleas.

Next Saturday, Democrats as a party have a chance to set a new direction when they elect new leaders in National Harbor, Md. Will it be new hotness or business as usual? Whom they choose to lead for the Trump 2.0 years will define them or perhaps sink the greater Us.

Choose your fighters and pray they do. We have to work with what we elected in November for at least two years.

* FYI, Bluesky vids still won’t play inside WordPress. Otherwise, I try to avoid X posts.

Surviving The Flood Of Sh*t

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 26, 2025

Not burning out is key to pushing back

An AI-generated image of President Trump applying a sharpie to the Constitution (via Civic Texts).

This next period of American history is going to be more of slog than the first Trump administration. Pray it isn’t as deadly.

We’re all trying to summon an effective response to Trump 2.0, but the angst gets in the way, doesn’t it? Greg Sargent points to recommendations at Civic Texts, the blog website of technology journalist Alexander B. Howard.

In the wake of Trump pardoning violent Jan. 6 seditionists and portraying them as victims, Howard offers some suggestions for self-care and safety online. “If you want to hit the trifecta of intolerance, ignorance, and bigotry, however, post online about religion, immigration, and the First Amendment at the same time. (It’s like grabbing a third rail, but less fun.)”

Trump and his enablers in the states, in Congress, and in the Supreme Court represent “the worst crisis for the rule of law in my lifetime, paired with a muted response from American society,” Howard writes. “The flood of actions is intentionally designed to overwhelm, intimidate, and flood the zone with cruelty expressly designed to instill hopelessness and fear. The authoritarian playbook is being deployed against Americans at scale.” So far, reaction in Congress is “relatively muted.”

I don’t know where and when the line will be crossed that force Republican senators to check the presidency so clearly unbound by the constitution or rule of law. There is nothing practically to be done about President Trump or former President Biden’s pardons, as that power is near-absolute under our Constitution, checked only by the impeachment and removal from office that is currently unimaginable in this Congress.

For now, senators (including a few Democrats) have submitted to Trumpish humiliation. Not an auspicious sign for any nascent resistance.

Almost as unimaginable is how in an “I’ve got mine culture” where freedom is a worship-word, few seem alarmed that Trump and his Project 2025 allies mean to take theirs from them in a “concerted assault on truth, the rule of law, & the Constitution.”

Howard directs readers to Ben Raderstorf’s “If You Can Keep It” where the policy advocate for Protect Democracy offers advice on how to triage your responses to Trumpish actions and statements. Modulate your expenditure of intellectual and emotional responses to the flood of Trump 2.0 outrages “based on the likelihood and irreparability of the damage.”

It’s best not to burn yourselves out. “Numbing down” (pun intended) opponents is a deliberate component of the authoritarian plan for turning the United States into Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Or worse.

Authoritarianism thrives on despair. Trump aims to grind down critics by throwing so much at the media, civil society, and his political opponents that they can’t keep up. Every moment we collectively spend chasing outrages that don’t really matter makes it more likely that we lose heart or focus, and then some threat that truly matters slips through.

They mean to “flood the zone with shit,” as Steve Bannon put it. So prioritize.

A few key bullet points:

  • Is the action tangible, actionable, and detailed? Or intangible, abstract, and vague?
  • Does this thing cause irreparable harm to real people?
  • Does this action target the opposition in a way that may cause anticipatory obedience?
  • Does this entrench the authoritarian faction in power and make it more difficult to dislodge?

Raderstorf fleshes out those points in “How to pay attention.”

“We refuse to allow any of what we have created to be lost, says Kimberlé Crenshaw of the African American Policy Forum. We are here because the forces behind the Confederacy never gave up after Reconstruction, or after Brown v. Board. Not in 150 years. “What are we gonna do to make sure that we don’t give up?”

First, don’t burn yourselves out chasing every shiny object Trump (and Musk) toss out to elicit an angry response. Be strategic.

Their Heart Belongs To Daddy

Published by digby on January 25, 2025

Just don’t call it a cult

Mel Gibson: I’m glad Trump is here. It’s like daddy arrived and he’s taking his belt off

— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2025-01-25T03:00:30.524Z

We’re hearing this an awful lot these days. But I do appreciate old Mel making it clear that the Daddy cult is an explicitly violent, abusive one.

“It Was Horrendous”

Published by digby on January 25, 2025

He’s talking about taking over Greenland, a Danish autonomous territory and Denmark is our long time ally. He doesn’t give a damn. He will do it whether they like it or not just to prove his shriveled manhood is still working.

He is drunk with power and out of his mind.

Donald Trump had a fiery phone call with Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen over his demands to buy Greenland, according to senior European officials.

Speaking to the Financial Times, officials said that Trump, then still president-elect, spoke with Frederiksen for 45 minutes last week, during which he was described to be aggressive and confrontational about Frederiksen’s refusal to sell Greenland to the US.

The Financial Times reports that according to five current and former senior European officials who were briefed on the call, the conversation “was horrendous”. One person said: “He was very firm. It was a cold shower. Before, it was hard to take it seriously. But I do think it is serious and potentially very dangerous.”

Another person who was briefed on the call told the outlet: “The intent was very clear. They want it. The Danes are now in crisis mode.” Someone else said: “The Danes are utterly freaked out by this.”

According to one former Danish official, the call was a “very tough conversation” in which Trump “threatened specific measures against Denmark such as targeted tariffs”.

Sounds great. Tariffs first, invasion second? Sure, why not?

I know that Europe is freaked out about possible Russian expansion into their territory. Maybe they ought to be looking west instead of east. The US has a madman in charge who thinks he’s invented manifest destiny.

Update —

Oh my:

On Air Force One from Las Vegas to Miami, President Trump says Palestinians in Gaza should be relocated. “I’d like Egypt to take people. I’d like Jordan to take people,” he tells reporters.”We just clean out that whole thing.”

— Steve Herman 📡 (@newsguy.bsky.social) 2025-01-26T01:42:51.552Z

On Greenland: “I think we’re going to have it. I think the people want to be with us,” President Trump tells reporters on AF1. “I don’t really know what claim Denmark has to it, but it’d be a very unfriendly act if they didn’t allow that to happen because it’s for the protection of the free world.”

— Steve Herman 📡 (@newsguy.bsky.social) 2025-01-26T01:46:15.801Z

Canada is a “country that should be a (US) state,” reiterates President Trump. “They’ll get much better treatment, much better care and much lower taxes, and they’ll be much more secure.”

— Steve Herman 📡 (@newsguy.bsky.social) 2025-01-26T01:48:03.276Z

Trump Has Handed The Democrats A Huge Gift

Published by digby on January 25, 2025

If they are smart enough to run with it

I wish I knew why the Democrats are acting like they just lost in a huge landslide so they must find ways to appeal to the huge majority of MAGA acolytes or stay out in the cold for a generation. It just ain’t true.

However, one of the real lessons of the election, indeed the last several elections probably going back to Occupy Wall Street, is that the country is in a populist phase and it’s up for grabs which party will be able to meet the moment. The Democrats passed big pieces of legislation aimed at working people while Trump and the Republicans have used typical right wing xenophobic and “anti-elite” populist sentiments neither of which has brought either party a real majority.

However, if you want real populism, the GOP has given the Democrats an opening they couldn’t have dreamed of. Josh Marshall wrote about it today:

I’ve mentioned a few times that Donald Trump is giving Democrats a big, big opening by so conspicuously surrounding himself and seeking the counsel of almost all of the country’s super-billionaires. If you’re a bruised party looking to get a footing in a populist moment, having the billionaire (at least branded as such) head of the opposite party surround himself with the country’s top billionaires and basically say, “We’re Team Billinoaire” is a pretty good opening. And the American people seem to agree.

AP has a new poll out which asked whether people think it’s a good or bad thing that the President “relies on billionaires for advice about government policy.” When I first saw the results of this poll as “good” coming in at “+12” I thought they meant “net” 12% and I thought, “eeeesh, the honeymoon phase is more intense than I thought!” But no, 12%: as in, 12% of the public think it’s a good thing. 60% think it’s not. That’s U.S. adults. The only outliers are Republicans, 20% of whom think this is a good thing. But even that is pretty feeble. To put it simply, these are terrible numbers.

The most important thing to remember about polls is that the opinions captured in them are often less important than the salience of those numbers. Maybe Donald Trump likes linguini and 90% of Americans are against it. But who cares? No one’s going to make their vote on that basis. Salience is critical. On its own I’m not sure surrounding yourself with billionaire friends is a major voting issue. But it’s unlikely to stay on its own since we’re about to see huge shifts in fiscal policy which favor billionaires at the expense of everyone else. The biggest point is that Democrats need to make it salient. But these numbers show there’s very fertile ground for doing so.

He goes on to point out that this means the Democrats don’t have to get into the argument about whether or not a New York City family making $500,000 a year is “really rich.” Yes, they are by the standards of the rest of the country. But in relation to these insanely wealthy billionaires, they’re as poor as the rest of us, which is important politically since that is a group that the Democrats need to win elections.

And the vast majority of these billionaires are now slavering over the opportunity to serve Donald Trump and the Republicans.

By the way, DOGE is extremely unpopular while the core Democratic policy agenda is not:

A few other data points. 29% support “DOGE”; 39% oppose it. A fairly large 20% don’t know and 12% don’t have a clear opinion. Rather strikingly, when asked which things the government isn’t spending enough money on social security (67%) and education (65%) ranked highest, with assistance to the poor (62%) and Medicare (61%) just slightly behind. Notably, just slightly further behind are Medicaid (55%) and Border Security at (51%)

They have handed the Democrats a perfect opening but they need to go through it and they need to do it quickly. They can tie everything Trump is doing to it — every single decision he’s making is really in service of his rich pals. He’s actually saying it. Here he is in the last couple of weeks lamenting the hell people in Beverly Hills are supposedly enduring at multiple appearances:

By the way, he sold his house in Beverly Hills in 2019 while he was president — to an Indonesian billionaire business partner.

He sounds a lot more out of touch than he used to with this embrace of the Billionaire Boys Club. The Dems have to stop being afraid of them and take it to the people. Remember, most of these guys are just delayed adolescent nerds. It shouldn’t be that hard to get them to go back to what they’re good at and stay out of partisan politics. It really isn’t their thing.

The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far

Published by digby on January 25, 2025
Don’t tell anyone but Elon’s grandparents were actual Nazis.

Germany should be proud of its past history, I guess. Well, there was that little blip in the last century but who’s counting?

There is no doubt in my mind that Elon was doing a Nazi salute. I will accept that he was probably high and lost control what with the excitement and all. But that’s what he was doing.

Sort of like this:

Update: By the way, Elon’s speaking at the Afd rally today. In Germany. After the Nazi salute thing.

Surprise

Published by digby on January 25, 2025

President Donald Trump made clear during his campaign that he wanted little to do with Project 2025, the sweeping and controversial conservative policy blueprint created by the Heritage Foundation. But just days into his second term, many of Trump’s early actions align with the Project 2025 agenda.

An analysis by TIME found that nearly two-thirds of the executive actions Trump has issued so far mirror or partially mirror proposals from the 900-page document, ranging from sweeping deregulation measures to aggressive immigration reform. 

Democrats had seized on Trump’s connection to Project 2025 during the campaign, pointing out that many of the playbook’s contributors previously worked for Trump or had connections to his orbit. Trump repeatedly said he had “no idea who is behind” the conservative blueprint and that some of its ideas were “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” He appeared to soften his stance after winning the election, telling TIME in November, “I don’t disagree with everything in Project 2025, but I disagree with some things.”

Despite Trump’s past disavowals, many of the individuals involved in drafting Project 2025, such as Russell Vought and Brendan Carr, have been tapped to serve in prominent positions in his Administration. Vought was nominated to run the Office of Management and Budget, while Carr was tapped to lead the Federal Communications Commission. The Heritage Foundation declined to comment for this story. 

Imagine that.

Bring Out The Gimps

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 25, 2025

Shamelessness was their superpower

For a man with a decades-long obsession with the world laughing at us (him) and a visceral fear of looking weak, Donald Trump sure is determined to give the world plenty to laugh about. Especially for our sworn enemies.

Vice President J.D. Vance cast a tie-breaking vote Friday night in the U.S. Senate to confirm Pete Hegseth, the scandal-spangled, alleged hard-drinking, former Fox News weekend talk show co-host, as Trump’s next secretary of defense. What won’t Hegseth do at Trump’s whim? Shooting Americans in the legs could be the least of it.

Stuart Stevens, former chief Republican strategist and Lincoln Project adviser, posted to social media Friday night that “Trump could have appointed serious Conservatives to his Cabinet. Instead, he picked nuts and freaks. Why? To prove he could make Republican Senators do whatever he told them to.”

“Humiliation through submission,” Stevens concluded.

Republican senators are not the only ones Donald Trump means to humiliate through submission. He just wants to “do them” first to show the world who’s boss and who’s the gimp.

Screenshot from Pulp Fiction (1994).

Shamelessness was once the conservative superpower. Now it’s spinelessness. Trump is the Shameless One.

Every Democrat voted against Hegseth. In the end, only three Republicans voted against Trump’s nominee for defense secretary. No one else had the guts to be the final vote to defeat Trump’s pick (CNN):

Vice President JD Vance cast the 51-50 tie-breaking vote after former GOP Leader Mitch McConnell and GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine joined Democrats to oppose Hegseth’s nomination. It was just the second time in history that a vice president has broken a tie for a Cabinet nominee – the other being then-Vice President Mike Pence for Betsy DeVos’ 2017 confirmation to lead the Education Department.

Politico describes McConnell as some kind of principled maverick for taking a stand against Hegseth.

McConnell’s chance to take a stand was during the Senate impeachment vote after Trump was charged with incitement of insurrection. McConnell’s shrinking from his responsibility in February 2021 led directly to Trump’s reelection and the complete debasement of Lincoln’s former Republican Party:

McConnell, in a lengthy statement, warned that whoever leads the Pentagon faces a “daily test with staggering consequences for the security of the American people and our global interests.”

“Mr. Hegseth has failed, as yet, to demonstrate that he will pass this test. But as he assumes office, the consequences of failure are as high as they have ever been,” he said.

McConnell has failed repeatedly. The world is living with the consequences of his spinelessness before Trump, even if the childhood polio survivor votes against Trump HHS secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or Russophile Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence nomination, or Kash Patel for FBI director.

North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis was rumored to be a Republican swing vote in the Hegseth confirmation. Tillis in the end swung Trump.

Coward.

— Rep. Wiley Nickel (@wileynickel.com) 2025-01-25T13:51:02.603Z

I make a lot of movie references in these pages. The images, characters and narratives are cultural shorthand. Too often, moderate Democrats and progressives would rather satisfy their egos and show off how smart they are by laying out detailed philosophical arguments against political adversaries. This is a mistake. Invoking sounds, images and stories already in people’s heads is more straightforward, as well as quicker than trying to plant and water them until they sprout. That’s not to say that there are not ideas that need cultivating, like renewing a sense of common purpose and civic duty. Those will take time and movies that might never be made.

For now, it is plain that Trump is trying to turn his own supporters into his gimps. I don’t need to paint that picture. Quentin Tarantino has already done that.

A Widespread Massacre

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 25, 2025

Oversight, His ass!

Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush): It’s so easy to get the best of people when they care about each other. Which is why evil will always have the edge. You good guys are always so bound by the rules (throws switch & electrocutes the Frat Boys). You see, I kill my own men. And lucky me…I get the girl. (Mystery Men, 1999.)

Donald Trump, twice-impeached convicted felon and career huckster, spent the first week of his second term exacting revenge against current and former officials who as much as contradicted his frequent misstatements. He cancelled the federal security details for Dr. Anthony Fauci, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Brian Hook (The Hill):

Fauci led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for almost 40 years, including at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Bolton was Trump’s national security adviser, and Pompeo was Trump’s secretary of State. Hook was a key Pompeo aide.

All four men have fallen out of favor with Trump, with Bolton in particular now a strident critic of the president.

Fauci has long been the target of threats from anti-vaccine extremists. Iran has targeted Bolton for his role 2020 drone killing of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani.

Friday night, Trump fired 17 federal inspectors general, internal watchdogs for multiple government agencies, including the Departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, and Energy, reports The Washington Post. Trump’s action is an apparent violation of a federal law requiring that the president give Congress 30 days’ notice of firing a Senate-confirmed inspector general:

Most of those dismissed were Trump appointees from his first term, which stunned the watchdog community. One prominent inspector general survived the purge — Michael Horowitz at the Justice Department, an appointee of President Barack Obama who has issued reports critical of both the Biden administration and Trump’s first administration.

“It’s a widespread massacre,” said one of the fired inspectors general. “Whoever Trump puts in now will be viewed as loyalists, and that undermines the entire system.”

You see, Trump fires his own men. In his first term, Trump hired “the best people” and subsequently fired dozens of them, and did again Friday night (New York Times):

The firings threatened to upend the traditional independence of the internal watchdogs, and critics of Mr. Trump reacted with alarm.

“Inspectors general are charged with rooting out government waste, fraud, abuse and preventing misconduct,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “President Trump is dismantling checks on his power and paving the way for widespread corruption.”

Trump is in the process of sweeping away the last remnants of the Old Republic, to borrow from a cultural touchstone.

Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977).

In firing his own men, Trump sends a clear signal that he will tolerate no insubordination. There will be no oversight, no rules unbroken, no limits in his second term. Trump always wanted to be emperor and, as far as he’s concerned, he is one now. He has all but subjugated his entire political party and reduced its “leaders” to fawning courtiers. (But that’s another post.)

Meantime, Democrats in the minority struggle to find any way to restrain Trump’s worst instincts, unwilling or unable as many senior Democrats in Congress are, to face the fact that they are bringing 20th-century knives to a 21st-century gun fight. The Washington they knew was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on January 24, 2025

I find that I need animal soothers much more often than I used to. These are tough times. One of the sites that I look at every morning before I look at anything else is We Rate Dogs. I read it on Bluesky but you can find it on the other sites as well. The videos are fun and inspiring and heart warming. I think we all need a little bit more of that. Every day. Maybe twice a day…

There are hundreds more and each one makes me feel just a little bit better.

They also sell very cute merch which goes to helping dogs in medical need. Check them out if you need a quick soother.