AOC: The House is governed by a Republican majority. The Senate is governed by a Republican majority, and The White House has a Republican president. And if they want to pass their agenda, Republicans need to conjure up the votes to pass their own bills. pic.twitter.com/U4ME5dYP4K
As usual, AOC says it plainly and clearly. But the party does appear to be coalescing into something of a plan even if the leadership is using language more suited to 2015 than 2025:
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) in a letter to colleagues Monday warned of the possibility of a “Trump shutdown” and reminded fellow senators that Democrats have the power to make or break any bill to fund the government past March 14.
Democrats in the Senate and House are looking more seriously at the looming funding deadline as an important point of leverage to slow or stop President Trump’s and Elon Musk’s freezing of federal payments, lockout of federal workers and plans to slash government spending by trillions of dollars.
Schumer wrote that Democrats want to avoid a shutdown and argued that if Congress fails to reach a government funding deal by the March 14 deadline, the fault would lie with Trump.
“Legislation in the Senate requires 60 votes and Senate Democrats will use our votes to help steady the ship for the American people in these turbulent times. It is incumbent on responsible Republicans to get serious and work in a bipartisan fashion to avoid a Trump Shutdown,” Schumer wrote.
Schumer released the letter a day after rank-and-file Democrats threatened to use a government shutdown as a last resort to stop Trump’s and Musk’s aggressive review of federal programs, which has resulted in layoffs, furloughs and a pause on broad swaths of federal funding.
We’ll see. This tactic is one of the only points of leverage the Democrats have and they need to deploy it. I wish I thought it was some kind of slam dunk but the truth is that it’s a long shot. On the other hand, how could a government shutdown be more disruptive and chaotic than what we’re living through right now? They’re already blowing the place up.
JV Last answers a question I’ve wondered about recently. A year ago my neighborhood was inundated with Teslas. California is the biggest US market for EVs and they were everywhere on the westside of LA. It was downright weird. Suddenly, there aren’t so many. There are other EVs but not so many Teslas. Apparently, Tesla’s popularity is in the toilet all over the world.
Why? Elon Musk has alienated the very market that was in love with his cars:
Elon Musk has made himself very popular with men who drive gas-powered pickup trucks and have no intention of ever buying an EV. Meanwhile, he has made himself toxic to the kinds of people most likely to buy EVs in the coming years.
Let’s start with the trade pub Inside EVs, reporting on post-election Tesla sales:
[F]ull-year and January sales results from various markets around the world indicate a bleak picture for the Elon Musk-led electric vehicle company. Even as it added the Cybertruck to its lineup in large volumes last year—which should have unlocked more buyers in America’s expansive pickup truck field—Tesla is seeing serious declines in places where it once had a near-lock on electric sales.
Some numbers:
California leads the United States in EV sales. In 2024 EV sales of all non-Tesla brands increased by 1.4 percent in the state while Tesla sales declined by 11.6 percent. That’s a steep drop in America’s most important EV market.
Germany is Europe’s biggest car market and Tesla has been the German EV sales champ for some time. Last month Tesla sales in Germany dropped by 60 percent compared to a year ago. Not a typo.
In France, year-over-year Tesla sales dropped by 63 percent in January.
In the U.K. overall EV sales were up 7 percent in January compared to January 2024, but Tesla sales were down 8 percent.
In China, January’s Tesla sales were down by 11.5 percent year-over-year.
This isn’t rocket science: In late 2024 Elon Musk inserted himself into global politics. He was gleefully antagonistic. He played footsie with Nazis. He made it known that he positively hates the woke, educated, “elites.”
I have no idea what it will take to seriously put a dent in his fortune. I suppose he’ll try to choke off his competition through some kind of government taxation or something and old addle-brained Trump will go right along with him. And those government contracts are almost certainly going to continue to be extremely lucrative. But Tesla represents the bulk of his fortune and he’s destroying the brand among the very people who will want to buy it. The average MAGA voter in Bumfuck USA ,whose idea of a luxury car is a Ford Raptor, is not among them.
As Last says, driving a Tesla is becoming a scarlet letter and the rest of us should help make that happen. He compares it to driving a car with a big confederate flag bumper sticker. It makes a statement. And you can’t just peel it off.
My very liberal neighbor loves his Tesla and I asked him if he was having any qualms about owning one considering everything that’s happening. He said he loves it but that his next car will be a Lucid Air. He buys a new car every two or three years.
“We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources,” Google said.
But Google made deletions to its Calendar application as well. Among others, Black History Month is gone:
“Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world,” the spokesperson said in an email. “We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing — and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable,” the spokesperson added.
“Maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable”? In the age of AI? Really?
Here’s the really part:
Google has made numerous changes lately that align with an altered political environment in the U.S. The company recently began scrapping its diversity hiring goals, becoming the latest tech giant to change its approach to hiring and promotions following the election of President Donald Trump. One of Trump’s first acts as president after taking office in January was to sign an executive order ending the government’s DEI programs and putting federal officials overseeing those initiatives on leave.
Arshad Hasan from Democracy for America’s Campaign Academy (back in the day) told us straight away: You are not normal. Normal people do not spend their weekends learning to run political campaigns. Let me extend that: If you read this blog, you are not normal either. Since these are abnormal times, you are in the right place.
The lesson Arshad meant to convey was not to talk to normal people like you do to other political geeks. They don’t get worked up by things like, say, a constitutional crisis. Too removed from work, kids and shopping. Not even the collapse of the republic breaks through until tanks are blocking the streets or social security checks stop coming.
But for us, the crisis is here. In the course of moving fast and breaking things, Musk-Trump is headed to court(s) over its actions since January 20. At issue is whether the U.S. Supreme Court will sign off on executive overreach (so John Roberts can avoid being ignored) or defy King Donald and actually be ignored.
“We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis right now,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at UC Berkeley tells The New York Times. “There have been so many unconstitutional and illegal actions in the first 18 days of the Trump presidency. We never have seen anything like this.” He offered a partial list:
It will take some time, though perhaps only weeks, for a challenge to one of Mr. Trump’s actions to reach the Supreme Court. On Monday, a federal judge said the White House had defied his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants, marking the first time a judge has expressly declared that the Trump administration is disobeying a judicial mandate.
It remains to be seen whether Mr. Trump would defy a ruling against him by the justices.
The vice president, at least, is eager to tell the court to take a long walk on a short pier.
If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal.
If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal.
Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.
Pamela Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, added that a crisis need not arise from clashes between the branches of the federal government.
“It’s a constitutional crisis when the president of the United States doesn’t care what the Constitution says regardless whether Congress or the courts resist a particular unconstitutional action,” she said. “Up until now, while presidents might engage in particular acts that were unconstitutional, I never had the sense that there was a president for whom the Constitution was essentially meaningless.”
Or solemn oaths to preserve, protect and defend it.
So long as there are not tanks in the streets or midnight arrests down the block, normal people will pretend everything is normal.
But it will be difficult to paint over Trump’s usurpation of power from the the legislative and judicial branches of government (many Americans cannot name) if Trump defies SCOTUS. Republicans in Congress are already supine in the face of blatant Musk-Trump lawlessness.
Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, tells the Times, “the Supreme Court may find it hard to defend the laws Congress enacted against executive usurpation when the Republican-controlled Congress refuses to do the same.”
Even the normies may soon hear an apocryphal saying likely spoken already in the West Wing.
Not all presidents gave the court’s rulings the same respect. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce a Supreme Court decision arising from a clash between Georgia and the Cherokee Nation. A probably apocryphal but nonetheless potent comment is often attributed to Jackson about Chief Justice John Marshall: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”
Even before this weekend, Mr. Vance has said that Mr. Trump should ignore the Supreme Court. In a 2021 interview, he said Mr. Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state” and “replace them with our people.”
It seems unlikely that Republicans suddenly snap out of their cult-trances and demand their power back from Musk-Trump. Democrats in the minority have limited ability to push back legislatively and little stomach for anything more dramatic. Even if Democrats pulled off some kind of attention-getting protest, the king and his henchmen would ignore them, as would normal people.
If things spiral even more out of control, the only force capable of stopping the collapse of republican government is mass public protest. But that will require large numbers of normal people to stop acting like normal people. Close to 90 million normal people stayed home last November. A tad over half of the ones engaged enough to cast ballots voted for monarchy.
On her first day as attorney general, Pam Bondi launched an investigation of the Biden-era investigators of President Donald Trump that will report its progress directly to the White House. It’s a crossing the Rubicon moment for DOJ independence that is compounded by the fact that Trump has made Stephen Miller the point person on the administration-wide effort to exact retribution for the criminal investigations of the president.
[…]
Trump’s executive order also instructed his director of national intelligence to launch a similar investigation of the investigators and report back to his deputy chief of staff for policy, which again is Miller. Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination as DNC is still pending in the Senate, but she is expected to be confirmed after narrowly winning the Senate Intelligence Committee approval this week.
“The fact that the DOJ is reporting to someone in the White House itself crosses a rubicon,” noted Gillers, who did not have independent knowledge of Miller’s apparent role. “That’s a major shift. The fact that the person who’s getting the reports is Miller is, in my view, dangerous because of his ideological beliefs.”
There will be no “guardrails.” There will be no limits. Miller is a true fascist and he enjoys making people suffer. This is bad.
Trump: We’re making our country larger, we’re making our country stronger. And in the case of Canada—if this should happen—I don’t know how they can do it without us. Because without the U.S., Canada really doesn’t have a country.
Trump: We’re making our country larger, we’re making our country stronger. And in the case of Canada—if this should happen—I don’t know how they can do it without us. Because without the U.S., Canada really doesn’t have a country. They do almost all of their business with us, and if we say we want our cars to be made in Detroit, with a stroke of a pen, I can make that happen. And other things, in addition to that, would not allow Canada to be a viable country.
With a stroke of a pen he can make all our cars in Detroit? He can make Canada cease to be a viable country? Is he now consciously aping Putin?
I’m a little bit concerned that I’m not seeing more commentary about this change in his personality. He’s always been a narcissistic dick but this is different. The repeated, casual assertion of omnipotence should be of interest to some people in the press.
Update — it’s catching:
NEC Director Kevin Hassett on Trump seriously wanting to annex Canada: "When the US was founded, how many states did we have? And how many do we have now? And so, is it outlandish?"
Come on Dems, get this done. When you think about what the Republicans are doing down in North Carolina and, really, all over the country there is no excuse not to do it. They would do it to you in a heartbeat:
New York Democrats are poised to delay until November the special election to fill Rep. Elise Stefanik’s House seat — a move that would deny House Republicans a crucial vote in the closely divided chamber.
State lawmakers on Friday introduced a bill that would allow Gov. Kathy Hochul to schedule special elections under some circumstances until the November general election. The Democratic-led Legislature is expected to approve the bill Monday, touching off a bitter feud with New York Republicans in a hyper partisan era. President Donald Trump tapped Stefanik to become the United Nations ambassador.
Top Albany Democrats are framing the proposal — which follows consultations between state lawmakers and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ office — as a way to save money for local governments. Republicans decried the measure as an attempt to deny a rural, deep red House district representation in Washington and called for a RICO investigation of Democratic lawmakers.
Lol. A RICO investigation. As long as they don’t “weaponize” the legal system I guess that’s just fine.
Just do it. No more fainthearted adherence to “norms.” Look where that got us.
Reporter: You are going to meet with first responders today, but you pardoned hundreds of people who assaulted first responders.
Trump: No, I pardoned people who were assaulted themselves… by our government. I didn’t assault. They didn’t assault. They were assaulted. What I did… pic.twitter.com/LbzrbFM6rb
Reporter: You are going to meet with first responders today, but you pardoned hundreds of people who assaulted first responders.
Trump: No, I pardoned people who were assaulted themselves… by our government. I didn’t assault. They didn’t assault. They were assaulted. What I did was a great thing for humanity.
He apparently now believes that the people who broke into the Capitol should have been allowed to march in interrupt the joint session, stop the count, hang Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi.
He condemned the violence the next day under some duress. And he’s defended them as political prisoners treated unfairly by the legal system. But I’ve never heard him say that the rioters were assaulted by the government (meaning the police.)
I get that he’s doubling down on his pardons which are unpopular with a majority of the public. But the way he’s doing it shows a descent into mental illness. He now says his pardons were a “great thing for humanity.” Virtually everything he says now smacks of delusions of grandeur. He’s losing it.
The DOGE has found something really great for Donald Trump
Hard at work this weekend Donald Trump was on Air force One en route from Mar-a-Lago to the Super Bowl Trump dropped another wild, radical idea. He told reporters that DOGE had found “irregularities” in US Treasuries which means there may be do obligation to pay them. He said, “maybe we have less debt than we thought.”
Are the Wall St boys ok with Trump saying that the teenage DOGEboys have found some “irregularities” in US treasuries and the US may not have to pay them. Maybe we have less debt than we thought,” he said. That’s completely daft but it’s predictable that Trump’s desperately looking for a shortcut to cutting the deficit. Unfortunately for him, just as with the birthright citizenship question, that pesky 14th Amendment is standing in the way with yet another crystal clear direction:
“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
“Shall not be questioned.” In short, by the time they get to the payment center at the US Treasury the ship has sailed. They are debts that have to be paid. The place to question a charge of fraud, waste or abuse is much earlier in the process and, by the way, with legitimate constitutional, legal methods not some ketamine addled teenage getting a vibe.
Marshall assumes that this is just another blast of hot air from the gasbag in chief. But even so, he’s playing with fire. As he noted:
One other point worth noting is that Trump seems to be basing this on some analysis from the DOGE boys. This appears to have been one of the DOGE boys main goals at Treasury, getting access to details about what kinds of payments Treasury makes, the answer being close to everything the US government does outside of the Pentagon and some of the Pentagon stuff too. The Treasury also services the US debt, which is what we’re talking about here. I’m less clear on what access in what part of Treasury Department these guys could have gotten more information about how the Treasury Department sells and service Treasury notes.
But all that detail aside, imagine thinking that by downloading a ton of data and having a few days to analyze it you could make the determination that a significant amount of the US national debt wasn’t real and didn’t have to be paid.
Will this happen? Who knows? I wouldn’t have thought that adolescent incels would be running the government by the middle of February and yet here we are.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was caught on a hot mic the other day giving his assessment of Trump’s threat to turn Canada into the 51st state. I don’t think Trudeau is given to wild conspiracy theories. This is what he said:
“I suggest that not only does the Trump administration know how many critical minerals we have but that may be even why they keep talking about absorbing us and making us the 51st state,” he said. “They’re very aware of our resources, of what we have, and they very much want to be able to benefit from those. But Mr. Trump has it in mind that one of the easiest ways of doing that is absorbing our country. And it is a real thing.”
Trump was asked about it by Fox news’ Bret Baier in his Super Bowl interview and he assured him that he is serious about the 51st state thing but that it’s because of Canada’s trade deficit which he’s inanely convinced himself is a “subsidy” (once more demonstrating that he has no idea how trade actually works.) That’s just his excuse — which he may believe as well — but there’s more to it.
Everyone always says that Trump is just trolling Canada but it’s not true. Trudeau’s assessment is correct. It is a real thing. We know this because Trump has always said that he believes “to the victor belongs the spoils” and by that he apparently also means that his victory as US president last November makes him a victor over the whole world.
Now, it’s important to distinguish his belief in “to the victor belongs the spoils” in the imperialist context from a “spoils system” in the domestic context, which he also believes in. The encyclopedia Britannica explains the meaning of “spoils system” which springs from the same source:
[I]twas made famous in a speech made in 1832 by Senator William Marcy of New York. In defending one of President Andrew Jackson’s appointments, Marcy said, “To the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.” In Marcy’s time, the term spoils referred to the political appointments, such as cabinet offices or ambassadorships, controlled by an elected official.
Trump is taking that concept even further by appointing uniquely unqualified, slavish devotees and trying to fire civil servants (something that didn’t exist in Jackson’s time) and demanding personal loyalty oaths. But essentially he’s emulating Jackson, the president Steve Bannon taught him was supposed to be his inspiration. Not that he is likely aware of that. But he has certainly created a spoils system in the US federal government for the first time in many a moon.
Trump claims that he won a landslide victory (a lie: his popular-vote win was narrow 1.4% and his electoral victory was modest by historical standards) which seems to have led him to believe that as the undisputed leader of the world’s most powerful nation he also has the power to buy or take whatever he wants. To the victor goes the spoils and traditionally, those spoils are natural resources.
Consider the fact that Trump has been waxing on about William McKinley who he’s been convinced was a great president because of his tariffs. Trump is no scholar and knows nothing about that historical period but the fact is that that era, known as The Gilded Age, was also called the the New Imperialism era, when the British Empire, Germany, Italy, Japan Russia, The United States and Japan all raced to colonize everything that was left uncolonized on the planet. The period lasted from roughly 1873 –1914, the outbreak of WWI. There were a lot of reasons for this but one of the main ones was competition for the natural resources that were required to fuel the second Industrial Revolution.
The belief that “to the victor belongs the spoils” is built into imperialism and so it is with Trump. Right after he took office in 2017, he went to CIA headquarters and said:
The old expression, “to the victor belong the spoils” — you remember. I always used to say, keep the oil. I wasn’t a fan of Iraq. I didn’t want to go into Iraq. But I will tell you, when we were in, we got out wrong. And I always said, in addition to that, keep the oil.
As we know he’s been inexplicably demanding that Denmark sell Greenland to him and threatening to just take it if they refuse and that too turns out to be about resources: minerals. Lately Ukraine’s been on the menu for, once again, rare earth minerals:
Trump: "One of the things we're looking at with President Zelenskyy is having the security of their assets. They have assets underground. Rare early and other things. But primarily rare earth. Really, we want security, because as you know, Europe is putting up much less money… pic.twitter.com/ABG3nkucZd
Trump: “One of the things we’re looking at with President Zelenskyy is having the security of their assets. They have assets underground. Rare early and other things. But primarily rare earth. Really, we want security, because as you know, Europe is putting up much less money than us.”
REPORTER: What you said about Ukraine earlier — the rare earth. Do you want them to give the rare earth to the United States?
REPORTER: What you said about Ukraine earlier — the rare earth. Do you want them to give the rare earth to the United States?
TRUMP: Yeah
And then there’s his Gaza “imperialist acid flashback” as Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir calls it, which, as far as I know, doesn’t have any oil or minerals to offer but does feature some very nice beachfront property which he apparently wants to develop into an international resort.
Let’s not pretend that any of this is about the national interest. It’s all about money for him and his cronies.
This talk of minerals is coming from somewhere and I would guess it has something to do with the fact that rare earth minerals are necessary for all modern electronics (among other things). Trump has a very rich BFF who has a great interest in such things and it’s easy to guess that he’s whispering in Trump’s ear about all the “spoils” to be had by acquiring/seizing the land where they exist.
Trump’s imperial ambitions go beyond just taking natural resources. He is also finally articulating what he has always meant by “America First” since he entered politics. It isn’t about isolationism it’s about dominance. America First means “We’re number one!”
Back in 2017 when he made that speech at the CIA headquarters and said that the US should have kept the oil, this was how he prefaced that comment:
When I was young — and I think we’re all sort of young. When I was young, we were always winning things in this country. We’d win with trade. We’d win with wars. At a certain age, I remember hearing from one of my instructors, “The United States has never lost a war.” And then, after that, it’s like we haven’t won anything. We don’t win anymore.
Having eluded all accountability for anything he did in his first term and beyond Trump sees himself as omnipotent now. He was restored to the White House with a bigger margin than 2016 and he is being aided in his revenge by the richest man on the planet. He stands to make massive amounts of money during what is already shaping up to be the most corrupt presidency in US history. His win means that the US is winning again. Il est l’État. To the victor belongs the spoils.
