That’s the White House Press Secretary. Trump called us vermin before so I guess this is actually a step up.
Are all of our Republican friends and neighbors ok with this?
Yeah, I guess they must be. They actually believe that you and I are terrorists because we don’t agree with her and Donald Trump.
Meanwhile:
By the way, every one of those people were over 30.
It’s hard to know exactly what kind of historical moment your in when you’re at the center of the maelstrom. I feel strongly that this is a crucible in America like very few in our history and I struggle daily to tamp down the rising panic. But not everyone sees it that way to, which I find very weird. Whether because of propaganda or self-preservation or just plain different worldviews, we are not all on the same page.
This piece by Jedediah Britton-Purdy and David Pozen in the Boston Review does an excellent job of analyzing three distinct views of our current situation:
One view, dominant at this point among mainstream liberals and centrists, is that the United States has entered a dangerous new era of authoritarian crisis. Following a playbook used in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, and other illiberal regimes, the Trump administration is attacking independent institutions such as the media and universities, turning the Justice Department and other government agencies into instruments of extortion and retaliation, manipulating official data, pardoning violent allies, dehumanizing marginalized communities, declaring endless emergencies, and preparing the military to suppress “the enemy from within.” The emerging authoritarian crisis is also a constitutional crisis, as an ever more emboldened and presidentialized executive branch sidelines Congress and the civil service, deploys troops domestically over the objections of state and local officials, and flirts with ignoring judicial rulings. Variously framing the threat as one of autocracy, kleptocracy, fascism, patrimonialism, gangsterism, or another cousin of authoritarianism, this view insists that things have ceased to be “normal.” American democracy is beginning to fall apart.
A second view, espoused by prominent voices on the left as well as some libertarians, asserts that Trump has not ushered in a new order so much as highlighted and exacerbated preexisting pathologies. It’s mainly more of the same. Following a standard Republican playbook, his administration has embraced sweeping tax cuts, a selective gutting of economic and environmental regulations, and hostility to abortion and affirmative action. With some coarsening of the discourse and hardening of anti-immigrant policies, we could be in Ronald Reagan’s America. This through line is no cause for comfort. Whether styled as homegrown fascism, racial fascism, or simply the unreconstructed core of American political ideology, more of the same means more harsh immigration enforcement (as in Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback” or Obama’s record-setting deportation program), more vilification of dissidents (as in the Red Scares or Nixon’s “Enemies List”), more expansion of the national security state, and more runaway deficits that fail to address runaway inequality. The real constitutional scandal is not the sudden arrival of “executive lawlessness”—the War on Terror had that in spades—but a long-festering rot that has eaten away at our system’s ability to produce responsive governance and thereby created the conditions for Trump 2.0.
According to a third view, embraced by many of Trump’s advisors and supporters, U.S. politics are indeed undergoing transformation but in a familiar or at least not unprecedented way, as part of a process of constitutional regime change. Trump’s decisive Electoral College victory in 2024, after a campaign with more sharply defined stakes than in 2016, put a popular (if not quite majoritarian) imprimatur on such change. Following a playbook developed during the New Deal and refined in the civil rights era, Trump’s team is employing all the tools at its disposal to reshape the balance of power across state and society in line with campaign pledges to curb illegal immigration, shrink the federal workforce, restore religion in the public sphere, and advance a “colorblind” conception of racial equality. To be sure, some of these shifts may be alarming to those socialized in the prior regime. But that’s what happens in a constitutional democracy when voters choose the other side. And if there has been some overreach or misadventure, well, the same could be said of any regime change. This revolution in law and governance, moreover, is at heart a “counterrevolution”—not so much a turn toward any foreign model as a return to principles that prevailed before the assaults of wokeism and Warren Court liberalism, the rise of the administrative state, and the proliferation of identitarian rights.
Yeah, I’ll pick door number one for $10 billion, Alex. As they say:
The stakes of this disagreement are high, the shape of it disorienting. From within each script, people in the others tend to look either dangerously complacent or risibly hysterical. Americans are deeply divided not just over partisan preferences or “alternative facts” but over the basic direction and meaning of our politics.
The piece goes on to flesh all this out in some very interesting ways. There are not a lot of solutions to offer except for one big one. Door number one and door number two can, and must, find common ground because together they constitute the majority. So far, it’s an uphill task.
I saw “One Battle After Another” the other day and was struck by the message which was both clarifying and daunting: saving our country is going to be, as the title suggests, one battle after another. I think we just have to gird ourselves for the fight.
I will admit that this has succeeded in freaking me out a little bit:
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on Charlie Kirk’s show and said the quiet part way too loud: calling Kirk’s assassination a “domestic 9/11” and promising to “compile lists” of left-wing groups to investigate. Tim Miller breaks down how this rhetoric crosses every line and why this “war on terror 2.0” mentality is straight-up un-American.
Bob Bauer, former White House Counsel, breaks it down:
Donald Trump has demonstrated his administration’s programmatic commitment to weaponizing the government to settle scores with political adversaries or weaken their opposition to him and his policies. Much of the fiercest public controversy has involved the Department of Justice and, so far, the president’s direction of the criminal prosecutions of old foes such as former FBI Director James Comey and New York State Attorney Letitia James. Now, according to Wall Street Journal reporting, his administration is turning its attention to an overhaul of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that would enable the agency to “pursue criminal inquiries of left-leaning groups” and “major Democratic donors.”
As reported, this is a full-on assault on a long-standing policy, expressed in law and norm, that the IRS should be kept clear of political misuse. President Nixon was impeached for attempting to abuse the IRS’s power for political gain. Following that incident, and with overwhelming bipartisan support, the tax code was amended to prohibit “the President, the Vice President, any employee of the executive office of the President, and any employee of the executive office of the Vice President” from “conduct[ing] or terminat[ing] an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer with respect to the tax liability of such taxpayer.” The law imposes fines and imprisonment as penalties for violations, and it requires that any employee who receives any request or directive to violate the statute report it to the Inspector General for Tax Administration.
It is also a striking development because it comes some years after Republicans in Congress investigated alleged political abuse of the Service’s authority to grant or deny exemptions to nonprofits engaged in various forms of issue advocacy. To simplify a complicated story, the IRS Inspector General found that the IRS had discriminated against conservative organizations in the application of its power over exemptions. Democrats joined Republicans in decrying any such political misuse of tax regulatory authority but argued that the record pointed to “equal opportunity mismanagement and equal opportunity bedlam” that also affected progressive organizations. Congress subsequently enacted a freeze on all further rulemaking activity in this area.
Now the Trump administration appears to be breaking with the bipartisan consensus that the IRS should be insulated from politics. And it is notable that reports of this weaponization policy have surfaced within days of a federal court decision, in Freedom Path v. Internal Revenue Service, that highlighted the dangers of the IRS’s power to grant or deny exemptions from tax for organizations active in the political process. The case brought by Freedom Path, a nonprofit social-welfare organization that supports conservative fiscal policies and has financed ads calling for repeal of the Affordable Care Act, illustrates how this intersection of tax regulation and politics is a problem at all times—and, now, one that could become far worse under the reported plans for IRS weaponization.
Bessent is nuts, as Tim Miller amply demonstrated in that rant above. And I guess he wants a big piece of the police state action.
I would just add that the the Wall St. Journal reports that the guy they’ve put in charge of this is a hard core MAGA fellow by the name of Gary Shapely who was a big “whistleblower” in the Hunter Biden case and was ousted as head of the IRS under Trump after only three days. Let’s just say I wouldn’t be too sanguine that this is a person of good judgement.
CNN offers a wrap-up on the Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s CNN town hall on the government shutdown. I assembled clips below, but wanted to grab this quote from CNN:
[AOC] said Democrats won’t accept a short-term extension of those subsidies, including for one year, a proposal she described as an effort to delay the political blow of skyrocketing health insurance premiums until after next year’s midterm elections.
“I think we know what we will not accept, and what we will not accept is for the ACA premiums to skyrocket on the American people. What we will not accept is the doubling of these premiums. And what we will not accept is allowing the teetering of this system to collapse right before everyone’s eyes,” she said.
A friend on Tuesday reported that her health care premiums are slated to jump from under $200/month to over $900 if the GOP kills off the subsidies. That’s far more than double. More than double is the national average.
No “measly one year extension of the ACA” just so Republicans can get past the 2026 midterms.
No IOUs or “pinky promises” accepted from Republicans on extending ACA subsidies, insists AOC. “That’s not the business that I’m in.” She wants “ink on paper.”
“No Kings” include billionaires who would be.
AOC: You’re damn right that it’s a Democratic priority to keep people from getting poisoned, from dangerous chemicals that are being dumped and causing cancer in people without their knowledge.
You’re damn right that it’s a Democratic priority to bring down the cost of housing and mortgages and rent, and you’re damn right that it’s a democratic priority to raise the minimum wage in this country, to allow people to get a fair shot at the American dream.
If they want to say that that’s a Democratic priority, they’re right
“And until there is accountability for people who refuse to work, to work, then we’re going to continue to be in this cycle.”
Thank you:
AOC: The VP has been trafficking this other misconception, saying that the emergency medicaid program is doing is providing health care to undocumented people…
The truth of the matter is that we have a federal law, as it should be, that any person who walks into a hospital in desperate need of medical attention receives that medical attention, regardless of their insurance status and regardless of who they are.
And I don’t know about you, but me as a human being, I don’t want to live in a world where if a human being is struck by a car or is getting rushed into a hospital, that the people in the E.R. Surgical room are asking for your insurance information or asking for documents before they save your life
AOC has really come into her own this year. If this country ever evolves to the point of electing a woman president, she’d make a good one.
* * * * *
No King’s One Million Rising movement – Next national day of protest Oct. 18
50501
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
The man angrily shouting out of his car window on Wednesday was barely decipherable above the traffic noice and music from my Bluetooth speaker behind me. He said something about the number of words on my sign: NO SECRET POLICE. (The others side promoted the local No Kings rally this Saturday.)
I figured it out later. The sign was a radical leftist lie, Angry Driver thought, and the real message was NO POLICE. Like “Defund the Police” after George Floyd’s murder.
Fine, I thought. What part of losing your Bill of Rights protections to a totalitarian dictator backed by masked secret police makes your heart sing, I’m proud to be an American | Where at least I know I’m free ?
It is remarkable how many neighbors have lost the plot on the whole 1776 and “We the People” thing. It may be that Angry Driver is not paying attention to the lawless behavior of ICEmen in Chicago and Portland. But likely the idea of busting heads on people he thinks are not like him gives Angry Driver a visceral thrill. He’ll have a rude awakening when it’s someone he knows or he himself is thrown to the ground and dragged off my masked thugs in violation of multiple once-constitutional rights.
“Sorry, the only king is Jesus,” spat a woman passenger in another passing car. That non sequitur was her reply to the No Kings ad.
It is remarkable, too, how many neighbors have lost the plot on the whole Jesus thing.
Former youth pastor John Pavlovitz experienced that at and after Wake Forest Pride Fest last weekend. It was all rainbows and music and dance, “a glorious thing to behold.” Until the “Christians” showed up, “a sullen, stone-faced cadre of almost exclusively young white men from local (and out of state) Evangelical churches.”
Pavlovitz writes:
One of the disrupters later posted that he and his partners were celebrating that “the Gospel was preached.” What he doesn’t understand is that their “Gospel” provided no good news, brought no love for neighbor, exuded no joy, and was bereft of Jesus.
All that stuff came from those they were targeting.
One of the protesters on Wednesday accosted Pavlovitz in the grocery store:
The first thing out of his mouth was, “Do you want to make enemies or do you want to have a conversation?”
I said, “You come screaming through bullhorns, waving signs about eternal damnation, and invading people’s personal space, and you’re gonna try and gaslight me into believing you were interested in conversation?”
He wasn’t pleased.
The takeaway was that his accuser’s anger wasn’t about the LGBTQ community, Pavlovitz concluded. “They’re out to get rid of everyone who isn’t like them.”
Like the Donald Trump administration’s lawless law-enforcement. Or like Jesus-less Christians. Americans for Un-Freedom mean to wring America out of America in America’s name. Founders be praised.
* * * * *
No King’s One Million Rising movement – Next national day of protest Oct. 18
50501
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
“Everyone’s on my side now,” Trump told advisers this summer. “They were fighting me last time.”
He was talking a bout the business community but he might as well have been talking about the Republican party:
Inside the White House, top advisers joke that they are ruling Congress with an “iron fist,” according to people who have heard the comments. Steve Bannon, the influential Trump ally, likened Congress to the Duma, the Russian assembly that is largely ceremonial.
I think that’s right. In fact, I think we should call the GOP Congress The Duma from now on. That’s what it is and the members are totally fine with it.
Increasing prices of goods…. increased the prices of goods? THAT cant be right.
How about this?
As Americans continue to struggle with high costs and looming tariffs, 5.1% of those with auto loans are delinquent on at least one account as of the first quarter of 2025. By state, that figure ranges from 3.2% to 9.8%.
And:
Egg prices are down from last year (when we had a bird fly emergency), however, and that’s all that matters.
I still can’t believe that I’m positively quoting Bill Kristol but when he’s right, he’s right. And he’s more right about Trump and the threat he poses than some of my erstwhile allies on the other side who are more interested in pursuing their personal political vendettas than facing down fascism. (I’m not interested in that right now. I’ll join the circular firing squad when the AR-15s pointed at my head have been disarmed.)
Any and all critics of the administration are now at risk of legal assault. Following up on their earlier executive order and national security memorandum, the administration and its allies routinely claim that peaceful protests are controlled by “antifa”—which they in turn claim is a criminal and terrorist conspiracy. And they assert that such speech is a cover for and an incitement to violence. The administration is thus laying the groundwork for subjecting speech critical of it to suppression and prosecution. There are indications that new crackdowns on dissent, on dissenters, and on the institutions that employ them and their funders, are imminent.
It’s of course comical when President Trump says, as he did yesterday, that
You see people holding this gorgeous sign with beautiful wood, beautiful cardboard, wood, everything, everything’s perfect, paint job, and they’re all the same. There are thousands of them, you know, that they weren’t made in the basement out of love. They were made by anarchists.
Beware of the well-organized anarchists at work!
It really is too funny.
He goes on to urge people to join the No Kings protest this weekend, ruefully admitting that some of his old friends find it hilarious that someone such as him would be endorsing protests against the government. But he does it, saying rightly:
… what’s not comical, what is in fact sinister, is the assumption here that there would be something wrong if protest signs weren’t being made in basements but in print shops; and that it would be wrong to attempt to organize others who agree with their message. This is all protected speech. But the president and his administration barely conceal any longer that they want to suppress both free speech and free political activity.
There is no doubt about it. In fact, they seem to be preparing to provoke violence at the DC protest at least and I wouldn’t be surprised if they do it elsewhere. Look at this:
Kristol writes:
The Founders tried to construct a government that featured all kinds of guardrails to protect liberty: separation of powers, federalism, and checks and balances. They didn’t want to count too much on uncommon courage or wisdom from the people. As Federalist #51 puts it,
A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs…These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State.
But the “auxiliary precautions” that were to supply “the defect of better motives” haven’t proved, in this crisis, up to the task. We do ultimately depend on the common sense and common courage of the people. “No Kings” is an expression of protest. But it is also an affirmation of responsibility. We the people ordained and established our free government. It’s up to us to keep it.
I seriously hope that many millions show up this weekend. If people become too frightened to make their voices heard we may already be lost.
As the new Rose Garden patio was coming together, Trump interrupted an Oval Office meeting with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to show off the new outdoor Bang & Olufsen sound system being installed (same brand as at Mar-a-Lago).
- “We have a great speaker system,” Trump, microphone in hand, boasted on Sept. 5 when he inaugurated the new “Rose Garden Club.” The guest list consisted of trusted Cabinet secretaries and advisers, and lawmakers who are reliable votes for his plans.
- “You are the ones that I never had to call at 4 o’clock in the morning,” he said.
“He’s stamping his legacy on the presidency and on the White House forever,” one senior adviser said. “No one can get rid of the ballroom. It will be difficult to take all of the gold away. Who would even do that?”
- “President [George W.] Bush liked to paint. Trump likes to build and design. This is his artistic outlet,” a White House aide said, describing the “perfectionist” tendencies of the Luxury Resort Owner-in-Chief.
Bush didn’t spend his time painting while he was still in the White House.
Trump is semi-retired. Miller and Vought are calling the shots domestically and, God help us, I think Hegseth and Rubio are doing it internationally. Trump steps in if it’s a pet project, maybe to knock some heads or lobby for the Peace Prize, but other than that he’s only half there at best.
I mean:
He’s devoting more and more time to this stuff. I wrote about his dream of a 250 anniversary celebratory Arc de Trump the other day. And then there’s the ballroom:
- Trump also 3D printed models of the ballroom on a diorama of the White House grounds that he fidgets with in the dining room during meals.
- “The tenser things are, the more he moves the [diorama] pieces around in his spare time, or he takes a break and thinks about the marble he wants or the columns, whether they’re going to be Corinthian or not,” a White House official said.
Another aide said Trump “worked every single detail you can think of … from where the bathrooms and plumbing are, to how many people will be able to sit in the ballroom, what material to use for the floor and the walls. How big the windows will be. He is literally the project manager.”
There’s more:
- Trees on the South Lawn: He hated the look of some of the newer oaks, birch and maples and began replacing them with trees that have broader canopies and that, to him, are more aesthetically pleasing.
- The Palm Room: Late last month, Trump redid the hall connecting the front of the White House to the Rose Garden and West Colonnade by ripping up the tiles and replacing them with statuary marble. He insisted on “bookmatching” the new tiles so that the marble veins line up and make the floor appear as if it’s one giant slab. He replaced the overhead lights with two Schonbeck chandeliers.
“This is all the president’s baby,” one of the advisers said. “It’s the Trump White House.”
He’s apparently also giving hour long White House tours to his MAGA visitors and getting their opinions on the tile.
This is not a president who is engaged in the presidency. He’s a part-time, semi-retired set decorator who dabbles in politics in his spare time.
Also, he’s got severe encroaching dementia.
Update —
He is also losing his hearing.
You may have heard that the Democrat running for Virginia Attorney General wrote some texts wishing violence on his political enemies a few years back. He’s been roundly condemned by the Democratic Party and there’s every likelihood that will lose his race. He’s an idiot. Anyone in politics should certainly know better.
And there’s there are the racist, Hitler-loving Nazi Young Republicans who were revealed yesterday to be such disgusting human beings that it’s genuinely shocking, even today, to read what they said.
JD Vance has thoughts:
I guess firing some school teacher or soldier for merely repeating Charlie Kirk’s own words is speaking truth to power. Interesting. Recall:
The First Amendment protects a lot of very ugly speech but if you celebrate … Charlie Kirk’s death, you should not be protected from being fired for being a disgusting person,” Vance told Fox News. “If you are a university professor who benefits from American tax dollars, you should not be celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death and if you are, maybe you should lose your job or your university should, should face a loss of funding.”
Vance added, “If you are the kind of person who thinks that Charlie Kirk was justifiably murdered, sometimes the government can’t do anything about that. But you know what can — is, is civil society and I’ve actually been gratified to see all these people standing up and saying, ‘Yes, we have free speech and yes, we have free debate, but if you’re, if you’re celebrating the death of a young father, you ought to pay some consequences for it.’”
Young Republican activists celebrating Hitler and chattering about ovens and gassing their political rivals is just college hijinx. No need to “clutch your pearls” over any of that.
I know that even mentioning hypocrisy or double standards is a waste of breath with today’s Republican Party but it’s become so common and is so blatant that I feel as if I have to make note of it once in a while so we don’t become so inured that we don’t notice it anymore.
Get a load of this one:
You can’t make this shit up.
Vance meanwhile, is defending his people. As Brian Beutler notes about the future leaders of the GOP whom Vance defended:
This is, in essence, a private virtual gathering of the right-wing hordes senior administration officials like Vance mingle with online. The extremists they seek to please with gutter rhetoric and real-life violence…
The administration is a content factory for people like that. It explains the state-sanctioned violence and attendant propaganda, but also the Trump campaign’s slandering of Haitian immigrants as people who eat household pets. It’s why the White House finds the racist Hakeem Jeffries In A Sombrero deepfake so useful.
And if they are not reined in by checks and balances and protest movements and journalism, it will soon explain much graver atrocities.
He’s right. Just look at what the next generation of Republican leaders were “chatting” about.