Here’s the problem: Trump is very stupid so maybe he actually think’s Ronnie was MAGA. The people at Fox know better. Look how they’re framing the story:
“I can play dirtier than they can.”
President Trump is standing by his decision to end trade negotiations with Canada over an ad made by Ontario’s government that used “selective audio” of former President Ronald Reagan. pic.twitter.com/9XjV9dHm41
They aren’t coming right out and saying that it’s AI like Trump is but they are putting “selectively edited” as if they somehow changed the meaning of what Reagan said in that video which is absolutely untrue. Reagan said those words in the ad and he meant them exactly as they are portrayed.
Ok, so Fox is playing along with Trump. What else is new? I think I’m a little but surprised, however, that the Reagan Library is doing that. They are literally betraying their man by suggesting that the ad doesn’t accurately reflect Reagan’s beliefs. They don’t come right out and say it either, simply saying they used the speech without permission (it was publicly available with no restrictions) and that the words were “misrepresented.” So even the staunchest Reaganites are now re-writing history and throwing his legacy in the toilet in order to curry favor with Donald Trump.
That marks the final end of the old conservative movement.
It’s interesting that Mike Johnson has made himself the face of the shutdown while ceding all of his power:
Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to put the House on an indefinite hiatus that is now stretching into its second month while the government is shut down is the latest in a series of moves he has made that have diminished the role of Congress and shrunken the speakership at a critical moment.
It’s an approach born of political expedience that could have far-reaching consequences for an institution that has already ceded much of its power to President Trump. And Mr. Johnson, who without the president’s backing wields little influence over his own members, has chosen to make himself subservient to Mr. Trump, a break with many speakers of the past who sought in their own ways to act more as a governing partner with the president than as his underling.
“I’m the speaker and the president,” Mr. Trump has joked, according to two people who heard the remark and relayed it on the condition of anonymity because of concern about sharing private conversations with him.
Well, he’s actually the dictator so he’s right.
That didn’t have to happen. The Republicans just decided to let him politically castrate them and then thank him for the privilege of giving him what he wanted.
Johnson’s just doing press conferences instead of keeping the House in session to do what they normally do which is call difficult votes, like passing a stand alone bill to pay for air traffic control and the like. It’s his strategy. He’s got Newtie advising him:
The absenteeism, people around Mr. Johnson said, is a strategic calculation that the best way to keep his unruly rank and file in line is to place them on an extended leave.
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who often serves as a sounding board for Mr. Johnson, said in an interview that if the House were in session, “other issues will begin to clutter this up, and there is some small danger that some Republicans might begin to have a mixed message on the shutdown.”
In fact, such dissonance has already begun bubbling up even with everyone working remotely. The divide among Republicans over whether to extend expiring health insurance subsidies — Democrats’ central demand in the shutdown fight — has highlighted a political vulnerability for the party.
It has all created a strange dynamic on Capitol Hill: Mr. Johnson appears to be using the considerable power of the speakership to render the House irrelevant.
Oh why not? The only job of a GOP official in 2025 is to kiss Donald Trump’s ass. And he’s doing a find job of that, even adopting his crude, childish rhetoric and calling Democrats communists and saying that people who oppose Trump are all a bunch of paid Hamas supporters. It’s a much easier gig than being an actual politician with real power.
The’re all just submissives, yearning of a Daddy to tell them what to do.
What has changed is simple: people are scared of crossing Trump this time. In researching this piece, I interviewed dozens of figures, including lawmakers, private sector executives, retired senior military figures and intelligence chiefs, current and former Trump officials, Washington lawyers and foreign government officials. Such is the fear of jail, bankruptcy or professional reprisal, that most of these people insisted on anonymity. This was in spite of the fact that many of the same people also wanted to emphasise that Trump would only be restrained by powerful voices opposing him publicly. At times, it has felt like trying to report on politics in Turkey or Hungary.
I think that says it all about elites, don’t you agree?
That is from an article by Edward Luce in the Financial Times that’s gotten wide circulation. It’s basically an overview of where we are at this point in the second Trump term with interviews and analysis from people within Trump world and outside of it. Let’s just say that it’s not good.
I thought this was especially good. As you can tell by that excerpt above, the elites come in for a major drubbing in this piece and for good reason. They have turned out to be the lowest of cowards in most cases, refusing to speak out for fear of … well, everything. However:
In contrast to chief executives, America’s billionaires are not shy about speaking their mind. But their pronouncements are mostly in praise of the president. Days after Trump first took office in 2017, Google co-founder Sergey Brin joined a protest against his immigration policies, which threatened America’s “fundamental values”. This January, Brin was a guest at Trump’s inauguration, among several of the world’s richest men, including Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, LVMH’s Bernard Arnault and Reliance Industries’ Mukesh Ambani. Apple’s Tim Cook was also there. Their support has paid off.
The second term has also worked out nicely for the Trump family business. Though Trump once dismissed bitcoin as a “scam”, he had a road-to-Damascus conversion during the campaign. Days before his inauguration, he launched a memecoin called $TRUMP. The first lady, Melania, launched her own. Trump and his family’s participation in the crypto boom has netted more than $1bn in pre-tax profits over the past year, according to a Financial Times investigation.
Trump’s love affair with crypto is also at the heart of his foreign policy. Governments that want to seduce Trump have the perfect vehicle, World Liberty Financial, a token and stablecoin company set up by Trump’s sons Don Jr and Eric, and the sons of Trump’s chief foreign policy envoy, Stephen Witkoff. Earlier this year, the Abu Dhabi fund MGX bought $2bn of a WLF stablecoin, dubbed USD1, to invest in Binance. Pakistan’s military-backed government has gained an advantage over rival India after offering crypto investments to Trump’s family.
Trump sees no distinction between public and private. States governed by ruling families thus find it easiest to do business with him. This leaves America’s democratic allies stuck in a perpetual antechamber. “Even if we wanted to invest in Trump’s crypto schemes, we would legally be unable to do so,” said the foreign minister of a significant Nato ally.
A Baltic foreign minister admitted to visiting the US seven times this year. Ordinarily, there might have been two trips across the Atlantic, they said. Such concern is most acute at the Russian border on the fringes of the west’s fraying empire. “Would Trump honour Nato’s Article V pledge?” asked the Baltic foreign minister, referring to the commitment that an attack on one member is treated as an attack on all. “We don’t know.” Qatar, meanwhile, has donated a $400mn luxury jet to Trump. A Trump-branded luxury hotel and golf course is being built outside Doha. Earlier this month, Trump signed a Nato-style mutual defence treaty with the Gulf state.
What that shows is just how difficult it is for democrats (small d) to fight him, whether at home or abroad. We operate under a set of laws and rules that preclude thr sort of outright corruption that the autocrats embrace. Think about this one:
A little-known drone company backed by Donald Trump Jr has won its largest contract from the Pentagon, as the US government expands its procurement of the drones.
Florida-based Unusual Machines, in which Trump Jr has held a $4mn stake, said the US army had contracted it to manufacture 3,500 drone motors, alongside various other drone parts.
The company added the army indicated it planned to order an additional 20,000 components from Unusual Machines next year.
Allan Evans, the company’s chief executive, said he believed it was the largest order for Unusual Machines parts from the US government to date, but declined to disclose the value of the contract.
Chief Warrant Officer 4 John Brown of the 101st Airborne Division said of the acquisition: “The ability to train like we fight, using drones that are reliable . . . gives our soldiers the confidence they need for real-world scenarios.”
Shares in Unusual Machines jumped as much as 13 per cent on Friday.
Kicker:
Unusual Machines brought Trump Jr on as an adviser in November 2024. The Financial Times earlier this year found shares in the company almost tripled in price in the weeks leading up to its disclosure of the move.
Hunter Biden was persecuted for being on a board a decade ago that had zero business with the United States government and wasn’t allowed to sell his paintings because it represented the appearance of conflict of interest.
The corruption story goes part and parcel with the authoritarian story. And it isn’t getting the attention it deserves.
Timothy Snyder reinforces what Hullabaloo readers already know: “the goal of these people is the end of law, the end of democracy, and the end of a recognizable republic.”
Retired intelligence analysts confirm what the political scientists are telling us — and what the world outside is telling us — the goal of these people is the end of law, the end of democracy, and the end of a recognizable republic.https://t.co/RQW7qAIjj3
Snyder reacts to this Guardian story on a report released last week before the No Kings 2 protests:
The United States is “on a trajectory” toward authoritarian rule, according to a sobering new intelligence-style assessment by former US intelligence and national security officials, who warn that democratic backsliding is accelerating under the Trump administration – and may soon become entrenched without organized resistance.
The report, titled Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline, was released on Thursday by the Steady State, a network of more than 340 former officers of the CIA, the NSA, the state department and other national security agencies.
The intelligence experts employed the same tools from their former careers. They conclude “with moderate to high confidence” that the U.S. is “on a trajectory toward competitive authoritarianism: a system in which elections, courts, and other democratic institutions persist in form but are systematically manipulated to entrench executive control.”
“These are people who have seen these indicators develop in countries that shifted dramatically away from democracy towards authoritarianism,” Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior intelligence official who spent two decades at the NSA, told reporters on Thursday. “And we’re seeing those things happening in our country today.”
Among the key indicators of democratic decline identified in the report: the expansion of executive power through unilateral decrees and emergency authorities; the politicization of the civil service and federal law enforcement; attempts to erode judicial independence through strategic appointments and “noncompliance” with court rulings or investigations; a weakened and increasingly ineffective Congress; partisan manipulation of electoral systems and administration; and the deliberate undermining of civil society, the press and public trust.
“The speed with which we have devolved away from a fully functioning democracy is startling to me,” Gail Helt, a former CIA analyst and a member of the Steady State, said on a call with reporters after the assessment was published on Thursday. “In most cases, it takes longer than nine months to get where we are.”
Since returning to the White House, the president has pardoned January 6 rioters who assaulted police, fired independent watchdogs, purged career officials viewed as disloyal, publicly urged his attorney general to prosecute political opponents, deployed troops to US cities, attacked judges who ruled against him, threatened universities and restricted press freedom – all while testing the boundaries of executive power in ways federal courts have repeatedly deemed to be unlawful and unconstitutional.
Just last week, Trump’s justice department indicted Letitia James, the New York attorney general who successfully sued him for fraud, and separately charged the former FBI director James Comey, a longtime political adversary. He has also called for jailing the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, and the Chicago mayor, Brandon Johnson, both Democrats who opposed his deployment of federal troops there.
Just yesterday, Trump AG Pam Bondi threatened to investigate Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi of California. Anticipating Trump surging federal immigration forces into San Francisco, Pelosi suggested that federal officers could be arrested for violating California law.
“If you are telling people to arrest our ICE officers, our federal agents, you cannot do that, you are impeding an investigation, and we will charge them,” the Florida Republican told Fox News. Bondi added, “You’ve got Pelosi out there saying to obstruct their investigation. You can’t do it, and we’re going to investigate her now.”
Former Trump personal lawyer, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, chimed in with a letter posted to FKA Twitter:
“The Department of Justice will investigate and prosecute any state or local official who violates these federal statutes,” he wrote, “or directs or conspires with others to violate them.”
He concluded that “federal agents and officers will continue to enforce federal law and will not be deterred by the threat of arrest by California authorities.”
Not to be left out, Gruppenführer Stephen Miller went onto Fox News to assure ICE officers (no matter how unprofessional, capricious, brutal, or even murderous?) that they enjoy federal immunity for any of their actions.
Feels like we’re going down the rabbit hole pretty fast here, folks. https://t.co/gKI0b38ZY1
North Carolina Republicans this week passed yet another in along line of heavily gerrymandered congressional maps. Congressional (and state) representation is increasingly so skewed against Democrats in GOP-controlled states that they no longer look small-d democratic. The Republican Party has over the last decade-plus worked at denying the Constitution’s guarantee “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government” (that’s small-r) under Article IV, Section 4. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1849 ruled the Guarantee Clause nonjusticiable. The National Constitution Center adds, “Nearly one hundred years later, the Court sweepingly declared that the guarantee of a republican form of government cannot be challenged in court. Colegrove v. Green (1946). But is a guarantee a guarantee when Republican-controlled executive and legislative branches must enforce it?
Get busy defending it or get busy watching your republic die.
Not to be a bummer, but we talked about this topic a month ago. Then again, I’m just some rando blogger. Let Ronan Farrow lay it out with more gravitas. This from last night.
The White House just issued a sweeping federal directive transforming how dissent might be policed in the US—here’s why civil liberties groups are so alarmed. pic.twitter.com/jaBPotLjV3
“Working from a fever dream of conspiracies, President Trump has launched yet another effort to investigate and intimidate his critics,” is how the ACLU responded:
“After one of the most harrowing weeks for our First Amendment rights, the President is invoking political violence, which we all condemn, as an excuse to target non-profits and activists with the false and stigmatizing label of ‘domestic terrorism.’ This is a shameful and dangerous move. But the President cannot rewrite the Constitution by memo.”
Here’s the problem with that sincere ACLU statement. Donald Trump doesn’t care who he targets. He doesn’t care about what’s false. Or stigmatizing. He’s not shy about throwing around labels like “domestic terrorism.” Or about what’s shameful or dangerous.
He cannot rewrite the Constitution with a memo? Trump’s actions clearly demonstrate that his sense since being reelected is “Constitution? What constitution?”
In honor of the great Jane Goodall, here are new chimpanzee babies at the L.A. Zoo:
Vindi and Yoshi are showing off their new bundles of joy! 🍼
The two new moms have joined the rest of the troop in the large outdoor yard at the Chimpanzees of Mahale Mountains exhibit and are proudly giving the other chimps (and zoo guests) a good look at the newborns! pic.twitter.com/1rQY1dOp4b
Yoshi & Vindi continue to bond with their infants amongst the troop at Chimpanzees of Mahale Mountain! 🍼 Stop by their exhibit and see these new babies. #SavingWildlife#LAZoo#Zoopic.twitter.com/t2rY25VyqO
The first unnamed female infant was born to 35-year-old female Yoshi (YO-shee) and 26-year-old male Pu’iwa (P/ʊ/-ee-vuh) on Aug. 20, which also happens to be Pu’iwa’s birthday. This is Yoshi’s third offspring and Pu’iwa’s first. The second yet-to-be-named female infant was born on Sept. 9 to first-time mother eighteen-year-old female Vindi. Animal caregivers report that Yoshi and Vindi and their infants are all doing well and bonding.
“We’re thrilled to welcome the newest members of the troop!” said Candace Sclimenti, curator of mammals at the L.A. Zoo. “These are significant births for the Zoo and both are welcome additions to the dynamic, multi-male, mixed-age troop which closely mirrors the species’ natural social structure in the wild. Not only are these births vital for the well-being and social composition of the chimpanzees in our care, but they also play an important role in supporting the broader population in AZA accredited zoos both genetically and demographically.”
Chimpanzees are native to the forests and grasslands in east, central, and west Africa ranging from Senegal to Tanzania. Along with gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos, chimpanzees are great apes. They are one of the closest genetic relatives to humans. Chimps communicate using a wide variety of facial expressions, gestures, and vocalizations. Chimpanzee height ranges from 3.5 to 5 feet; weight ranges from 70 to 150 pounds. Males can be up to 20 percent larger than females. Their life expectancy is 50 to 60 years.
Chimps in the wild live and travel in troops of 30 to 80 individuals led by a dominant male. Challenges to the dominant male are common and the group leader typically changes every three to five years. Chimps live in a “fission-fusion” society, breaking into smaller temporary subgroups (fission) during the day. Smaller groups have a better opportunity to find sufficient food. In the evening, they reunite (fusion) to build nests and sleep. Larger groups offer better protection against predators. At the L.A. Zoo, chimps practice their own fission-fusion, breaking into subgroups during the day to either lounge in the penthouse or head out into the main habitat to enjoy the waterfall. They reunite at night in their sleeping quarters.
Chimpanzees are classified as Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Threats include human-wildlife conflict and other human activities including poaching, hunting, deforestation, and more. Although chimpanzees are protected in 34 national parks and reserves, those laws can be difficult to enforce in remote regions.
Also this… go Dodgers!
The LA Zoo cheers for the @Dodgers in the World Series! ⚾️ Here's a friendly wager: 💙 If they win, the Toronto Zoo swaps their Blue Jay logo for a condor! 💙 If Toronto wins, we’ll change our logo to a Blue Jay!
Trump: "I don't think we're necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war, I think we're just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We're going to kill them. They're going to be, like dead." pic.twitter.com/55NQXpZ0jf
Since he returned to office nine months ago, President Trump has sought to expand executive power across numerous fronts. But his claim that he can lawfully order the military to summarily kill people accused of smuggling drugs on boats off the coast of South America stands apart.
A broad range of specialists in laws governing the use of lethal force have called Mr. Trump’s orders to the military patently illegal. They say the premeditated extrajudicial killings have been murders — regardless of whether the 43 people blown apart, burned alive or drowned in 10 strikes so far were indeed running drugs.
The administration insists that the killings are lawful, invoking legal terms like “self-defense” and “armed conflict.” But it has offered no legal argument explaining how to bridge the conceptual gap between drug trafficking and associated crimes, as serious as they are, and the kind of armed attack to which those terms can legitimately apply.
The irreversible gravity of killing, coupled with the lack of a substantive legal justification, is bringing into sharper view a structural weakness of law as a check on the American presidency.
That’s certainly true. It’s very hard to stop an ignorant sociopath with immunity and pardon power from doing anything he wants. The presidency has a tremendous amount of power that most presidents have to use judiciously or risk losing the support of their party and the American people. Trump has no such restraint. He cares little for public opinion having found that he can just lie about it to soothe himself and his loyal followers and the Republican party establishment is his most eager enabler. He does what he wants and the law is basically irrelevant:
But administration officials have clammed up when asked for the legal analysis to support their assertion that there is a legal state of armed conflict that makes the killings lawful.
Even in closed-door congressional briefings, according to people familiar with them, officials have provided no detailed legal answers. They are said to have cited drug overdose deaths of Americans, and stated that Mr. Trump decided the country was in an armed conflict with drug cartels. They are also said to have pointed to the part of the Constitution that makes the president the commander in chief of the armed forces, without much further elaboration.
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former top Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, said Mr. Trump’s actions demonstrated an indifference to law that threatened to hollow it out.
“Nixon tried to keep his criminality secret, and the Bush administration tried to keep the torture secret, and that secrecy acknowledged the norm that these things were wrong,” Professor Goldsmith said. “Trump, as he often does when he is breaking law or norms, is acting publicly and without shame or unease. This is a very successful way to destroy the efficacy of law and norms.”
This is the systemic weakness Trump has exposed. If one is completely shameless and has the support of a cult-like following, there really are no barriers. Who is going to stop them?
In peacetime, targeting civilians — even suspected criminals — who pose no threat of imminent violence is considered murder. In an armed conflict, it is a war crime. International law accepted by the U.S. military says that, as do U.S.laws.
That seems pretty clear cut to me. He is murdering civilians and bragging about it. He nods to some kind of legal rationale by saying they’re drug dealers but it isn’t and he doesn’t care about that anyway. He is so drunk with power, as are his henchmen, that he believes he can kill anyone he chooses for whatever reason he sees fit.
In the case of the Venezuelans, he is trying to drive Nicolas Maduro from office because Marco Rubio and his Venezuelan exiles are promising him access to Venezuelan resources. The CIA is targeting Colombians in order to destabilize the Petro government and Trump doesn’t like him because he has a “fresh mouth.” And mostly, Trump just wants to demonstrate his willingness to kill anyone he chooses in the belief that that will make the world bow to his will. That what “peace through strength” means.
The law cannot restrain someone like him and now that he’s proved that it’s hard to imagine that he will be the last to use these powers for their own corrupt ends.
That’s just wrong. Trump is too ignorant to know the truth which is that free trade was always GOP doctrine until he came along. Reagan certainly did NOT believe in tariffs which is clear in the speech from which the ad in question was taken:
Here’s the original clip of Ronald Reagan from April 25, 1987, where he delivered a complete and total rebuke against tariffs. Trump is calling Reagan’s words in this video “FAKE” and “fraudulent.” They’re 100% real. And the original clip is actually far worse for Trump, as much… https://t.co/koi1Udz77Bpic.twitter.com/ZchQyPWPfU
If that’s an endorsement of tariffs then words have lost all meaning.
The beef from the Reagan Foundation, which started all this, was that the ad “misrepresents” Reagan’s address and Ontario’s government “did not seek nor receive permission to use and edit the remarks. I guess they were afraid Trump would get mad at them so, like every other Republican institution in America they abandoned every principle they, and Reagan, ever had in order to keep him happy. It’s enough to make you sick.
Here’s the ad in question which most certainly does NOT misrepresent Reagan’s speech.
The words that are directly taken from the speech are as follows and not not in any way change the meaning:
I’d love to know who told Trump that Reagan loved tariffs. It makes me laugh (mordantly) at the thought of it.
By the way, here’s another clip of Reagan condemning tariffs and praising Canada:
This exchange confounds me. Why would a popular Democratic politician fail to understand the obvious synecdoche/metaphor of Trump demolishing a historic wing of the White House to raise a huge, gaudy tribute to his monarchical pretensions while the government is shuttered and there is massive distress across the country?
I know for a fact that regular people know about this and they care about it. Seven million of them came out to express that last weekend. And yet we get this robotic response from the likes of Gretchen Whitmer:
I just wonder, from your vantage point as a governor of a state, what are you making of that split screen?” Psaki asked.
“Well, as I have talked to people, I’m telling you right now, no one is worried about building a ballroom in Washington, D.C.,” Whitmer replied. “What they want is to make sure that they can feed their kids next week. And the longer the shutdown goes, the more precarious it gets for people.”
The governor said most Americans are “never going to step foot in a ballroom over the course of their lifetime.”
“But what they do every single day is try to feed their kids, make sure that they get a job to show up to, make sure that they don’t hit a pothole on their drive to work and they have to take money out of their rent or their child care to pay to fix their damn car,” she continued. “That’s why we got to stay focused on the issues that matter to people.”
People are worried about the destruction of the White House which symbolizes the destruction of our country, including the economy. Doesn’t she understand that??
Brian Beutler addresses this phenomenon in his newsletter today and it’s really great. He talks about the art of persuasion. (I urge you to read the whole thing.)
How often over the past, say, five years have you found yourself confused to see something small, local, fringe, minor in the scheme of thing become a dominant issue in political discourse?
How do people in Georgia come to care about whether San Franciscans honor Founding Fathers with school names and statues? Why do voters who’ve never met or interacted with a transgender person decide they’ve learned everything they need to know about a politician based on whether they respect (or how they talk about) other peoples’ gender identities? By what process do people who watch Fox News or hang out on Twitter or consumer wellness content transform from normies into zealots?
Strident views can arise seemingly out of nowhere the same way trends do. People of influence drop them intentionally into the cultural slipstream then fan and fan and fan them until they’re ubiquitous enough to make us incorporate them, one way or another, into our identities.
This is something Republicans in particular understand about opinion formation, and, thus, persuasion. Democrats by and large do not.
Everyone I’ve asked, from all walks of life, had a visceral reaction to this week’s images of physical wreckage at the White House. Nearly all of them understood intuitively that if Joe Biden or Barack Obama had spent bribe money to bulldoze the East Wing, their presidencies would have ended. They knew enough about politics, in other words, to intuit this difference between how Republicans and Democrats react to shocking developments.
I suspect most elected Democrats had the same visceral reaction you and I did to those images. But they largely suppressed their indignation. They did not treat it as an emergency (i.e. a political opportunity) and reverted instead to their own, socially-constructed, default opinion that Regular People™️ would not care.
It is self evident to them that their feelings about what’s happening in the world, their instincts about what constitutes important news, are unreliable barometers of public sentiment. The fact that they’re upset about something doesn’t imply the voters they need to persuade will care. To the contrary, as out of touch elites, it’s likely that our fixations are of no interest to Joe Sixpack. They can not imagine that Joe Sixpack has few fixed views and is mostly just glancing around for cues about what’s important and what to think about it. They don’t reason that if people in Georgia can be made to care about school names in San Francisco, those same voters can be made to care about the White House reduced to rubble.
This gets to a phenomenon that seems confusing to those of us who know that democratic policies are far more likely to address the economic woes of the average Joe while the Republicans make everything worse. I think a lot of people are simply confused that Democrats often sound like they think Americans are selfish, myopic people who care about nothing but money. I know it annoys me anyway. People are more complicated than that and can hold several ideas in their heads at the same time, especially if leaders offer them different ways of thinking about things.
As Beutler writes:
I’m not saying Democrats should ignore laboratory findings about what matters to voters, or what voters want to hear. I want these stickers affixed to everything Donald Trump has made more unaffordable. I want people who lose their health insurance because of Trump on the news and in 30 second ads. I want people to think of him as Mary Antoinette or a modern-day robber baron. I want it to become socially awkward, a sign of supplication, to make excuses for the economic havoc he’s wreaked. It should be a sign of loserdom and weakness to blame Trump’s failures on Joe Biden or mysterious saboteurs or even the business cycle.
But none of this has to come at the expense of pouncing when he makes a mistake that has nothing to do with wallets and bank accounts—when he fantasizes openly about dumping shit on citizens exercising first amendment rights, or orders his defense attorneys, who now run the Justice Department, to pay him a quarter-billion dollars in taxpayer money.
Or when he demolishes a priceless historical artifact to build a gilded monument to himself.
It’s foolish to be dismissive of people who care about what Trump is doing to the country and that’s how Whitmer sounds to my ears. She could have incorporated all those thoughts Beutler names together because they are all of a piece. His destruction of the economy, our democracy, our history, our place in the world — all of it.
Take advantage of those things that have great symbolic value and put the Republicans on the defensive. They know Trump’s acting like a spoiled prince, doing what he wants without any sense of the optics or the timing anymore. Democrats should pounce on all of it — and repeat the charges over and over again. Make it a matter of conventional wisdom that he is a demented old tyrant and those people who are disengaged or just on the sidelines not knowing what to think will drift in the Democrats’ direction.
The first body washed ashore on Trinidad’s northeastern coast soon after the United States carried out its first strike in September on a boat in the Caribbean. Villagers said the corpse had burn marks on its face and was missing limbs, as if it had been mangled by an explosion.
The tides deposited another corpse on a nearby beach days later, drawing a wake of vultures. Its face was similarly unrecognizable, and its right leg appeared to have been blown off.
The bodies have fueled a mystery that is gripping parts of Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean nation that is within sight of Venezuela’s coast: Who were they? Did a U.S. strike kill them? Will more bodies appear on Trinidad’s beaches?
Good God.
Trump said yesterday that he’s not going to try to get a declaration of war, he’s just going to kill bad people. And that’s what he’s doing.
