The most chilling moment of the election night carnage came a little before 1 a.m. ET. It wasn’t yet confirmed that Donald Trump would win, but the writing was on the wall. Assessing the newly transformed MAGA-friendly political landscape, the pro-Trump lobbyist and political commentator David Urban said on CNN: “Democracy is a luxury when you can’t pay your bills.”
Democracy as a luxury. Democracy in good times only. Democracy when it suits you.
This mindset – a precursor to fascist regimes in other countries – is why it feels like a white-wash to ascribe Trump’s victory to economic issues. It feels like a safe, socially acceptable reason to cite for rejecting Kamala Harris and the Biden baggage she carried.
It’s easy for political reporters and TV commentators to slip into gentle analysis of the election results by focusing on the economic factors (to the exclusion of misogyny, racism, and host of other drives of the electorate). But it doesn’t necessarily follow that Biden-era inflation and post-pandemic backlash means jettisoning democracy. That’s a choice.
When we talk about democracy as a luxury that means everything that comes with democracy: free and fair elections, majority rule, and the rule of law.
And so America’s experiment in autocracy begins …
When the price of eggs and bacon are higher than they were five years ago, who cares about rights and the constitution, amirite?
That seems to be the calculation. Luckily we have a narcissistic, game show host, heir to a fortune who lost money at everything he’s every touched to fix that bacon and egg problem.
There may be much for liberals to learn walking in the shoes of working class or rural midwesterners, but few Democratic officials would find the experience shocking. They know, at least on an intellectual level, all the ways working class life can be a slog. The talking points they write don’t misdescribe the struggle. The policies they enact aren’t unrelated to the challenges Americans face: Insulin and hearing-aid costs, insurance premiums, wages, roads, worker leverage, etc.
What I think would make a lot of these elites go bug-eyed would be to spend a day shadowing working-class or rural midwesterners purely to understand the kind of information they absorb, intentionally and passively, from their earliest moments to when they shut off their televisions, phones, or computers at night. I believe they’d be disturbed. I believe they’d be so alarmed that they’d convene the most powerful people in the party and declare an emergency.
I hope they try an experiment like that. And then I hope they act. Because my experience over the past eight years tells me they won’t believe it when someone like me pleads with them.
Being a successful party requires more than just competent governance and legislative success. It requires understanding all the country’s major challenges—including homegrown ones—and addressing them directly. Democrats needed to create a cure for the fascist mind virus circulating in America. Instead they created a sedative, hoping that, with sufficient bedrest, Americans would neutralize the virus themselves. If they don’t revisit that decision, the sickness will keep getting worse, and may lead us to ruin.
There is a ton of commentary out there about how the Democrats need to create a new and more modern media infrastructure which is not uncommon in the wake of a losing election. I recall many a blogpost written on this subject during the Bush years. It seems we’re always playing catch-up. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true and with the rapidly changing media environment of thelast few years it seems clear that we have fallen more behind than ever.
I live on the internet and I don’t think I was aware of this. It’s so easy to retreat into your comfortable silo among your friends. And I am probably too old, too west coast and too female to truly appreciate the media landscape Beutler describes. But I hope that some of the people with the means and and the focus do so and then make a move to figure out how to deal with it. It’s clear to me that it’s vital if we ever expect to make this system work properly again.
President-elect Donald Trump told NBC News on Thursday that one of his first priorities upon taking office in January would be to make the border “strong and powerful.” When questioned about his campaign promise of mass deportations, Trump said his administration would have “no choice” but to carry them out.
“We obviously have to make the border strong and powerful and, and we have to — at the same time, we want people to come into our country,” he said. “And you know, I’m not somebody that says, ‘No, you can’t come in.’ We want people to come in.”
As a candidate, Trump had repeatedly vowed to carry out the “largest deportation effort in American history.” Asked about the cost of his plan, he said, “It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not — really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”
Heather Cox Rixchardon wrote on her substack:
GEO chief executive officer Brian Evans told investors that filling currently empty beds could bring in $400 million a year and that the company can scale up its current surveillance, monitoring, and transportation programs to handle millions of immigrants. “This is to us an unprecedented opportunity,” he said.
A blank check for the DHS round-up. Sounds great. Big government spending on personnel, private camps, transportation. It’s going to be a candy store. I guess Elon’s going to have to take his 2 trillion in cuts out of somebody else’s hide. Heath care sounds like a ripe target. Education for sure. Maybe Social security.
This almost made me throw the phone against the wall when I read it:
Trump also spoke about his phone calls with Harris and President Joe Biden since the election.
“Very nice calls, very respectful both ways,” Trump said, describing the conversations, adding that Harris “talked about transition, and she said she’d like it to be smooth as can be, which I agree with, of course.”
How fucking dare he say one word about a smooth transition. He is, dare I say it, garbage.
I guess everything he did last time is just going to memory holed now. After his outrageous temper tantrum and Big Lie when he didn’t win, now he’s a statesman expecting to be treated respectfully? You can almost hear his henchmen snickering behind his back about the pathetic Democrats. It’s infuriating.
Now that we’ve had a chance to catch our breath a little bit and get through the grieving process over last Tuesday’s election, the inevitable recriminations have begun in earnest. Social media is awash with accusations against the Biden administration, the Harris campaign, the left, the right and everything in between. The Democrats are out of touch with Real America, they don’t know how to talk to Latinos, men, young voters, anyone really except college educated women. Was it an expression of deep desire for fascism, misogyny and racism or a simple admiration for the reality show ringmaster who tells them what they want to hear? I suspect we will spend many years dissecting what happened that put Donald Trump back inthe White House this year.
There is no doubt a kernal of truth in much of what people are saying. Any losing team has to look at their game plan and question where they went wrong. This campaign was especially fraught with President Joe Biden belatedly realizing that he wasn’t capable of campaigning, and the party taking the risk of running a woman and person of color against one of the most racist, misogynist demagogues ever to run on a major party ticket. It was never going to be easy. It’s astonishing that we ever thought it would be. As Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir observed yesterday, liberals will have to do some deep soul searching to determine what the party really is and how to adjust itself to what is clearly a new political landscape.
I think many of us just assumed that the nation would never elect Trump again because he had not only been repudiated once, he had subsequently attempted a coup, incited an insurrection and had been foun guilty of fraud and defamation and was currently under indictment at both the federal and state levels. He is a convicted felon. How could it even be possible that such a person would be returned to the White House?
The clues were there. The opinion polls had Kamala Harris and Donald Trump essentially tied for months with the margin of error showing that either side could have had a blowout. Joe Biden had been extremely unpopular for the past two years and the wrong track numbers are very high. People have lost faith in virtually all institutions, particularly the press which they believe is corrupt. There has just been an overwhelming feeling of discontent and unhappiness in the cultural zeitgeist for the past four years.
People are angry about immigration even though most of them aren’t affected by it at all.They are upset about culture war issues like diversity training and transgender kids even though they aren’t personally affected by that either. But mostly they are distressed about the economy, specifically inflation. Everyone bitches about higher grocery prices and restaurant tabs to the point where it’s become a sort of national bonding exercise. If there’s one thing everyone can agree on in this politically polarized country it’s that prices are just too damned high.
All of this is in spite of the American economy being literally “the envy of the world” with a robust job market that hasn’t been seen since the 1960s, roaring markets, high consumer spending on durable goodsand travel and what would normally be considered a very reasonable inflation rate. But as the NY Times’s Paul Krugman has discussed at length while most people feel they’re doing ok they believe the rest of the country is in terrible shape. Nonetheless, inflation is cited by most voters as their most important concern. (Those numbers are highly driven by partisanship, so I think we can be sure they’ll turn around pretty quickly once Trump is in office and Republicans attribute the already good economy to his magical genius.)
People have been very unhappy for the past four years in this country and I think inflation has simply become the symbol of that unhappiness. It represents that feeling of things being out of control, that nothing is working right anymore. It is a daily reminder of how things went bad in 2020 and never fully recovered. And, as it turns out, this is true all over the world.
There’s been quite a bit of discussion over the past couple of days about the startling fact that the Democrats are just the latest in an unprecedented string of elections over the past few years in which the incumbent party has lost vote share and leadership been ousted. It is a global phenomenon.
Just to clarify: this isn’t just the first time since WW2 that all incumbent parties in developed countries lost vote share.
It’s the first time since this data was first recorded in 1905. Essentially the first time in the history of democracy (universal suffrage began in 1894). pic.twitter.com/04hdpN8aq0
A better, more comprehensive way to explain the outcome is to conceptualize 2024 as the second pandemic election. Trump’s victory is a reverberation of trends set in motion in 2020. In politics, as in nature, the largest tsunami generated by an earthquake is often not the first wave but the next one.
The pandemic was a health emergency, followed by an economic emergency. Both trends were global. But only the former was widely seen as international and directly caused by the pandemic…
Many voters didn’t directly blame their leaders for a biological nemesis that seemed like an act of god, but they did blame their leaders for an economic nemesis that seemed all too human in its origin. And the global rise in prices has created a nightmare for incumbent parties around the world. The ruling parties of several major countries, including the U.K., Germany, and South Africa, suffered historic defeats this year. Even strongmen, such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, lost ground in an election that many experts assumed would be a rousing coronation.
Trump was one of the earliest casualties of this anti-incumbent movement, Unfortunately for us, we were unable to vanquish him sufficiently to prevent his return and the consequences of that are going to be particularly bad. The maintream press managed to normalize him over the past four years, first by refusing to remind Americans how bad he was while he was in exile openly plotting his revenge and then “sanewashing” his absurd lies and mental deterioration. As a result, him being the alternative made sense to a lot of people we didn’t expect to vote for him. They thought by doing so that maybe we could just erase the last five years and pick up where we left off.
This election was an emotional tidal wave, one that’s engulfed the whole world in the wake of the pandemic, the trauma of which we clearly have yet to fully process. We will eventually pull out of this. The problem is that when tidal waves recede they leave a tremendous amount of damage in their wake and I’m afraid it’s going to be especially devastating in America.
“There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them,” closed out each episode of a police procedural from the mid-twentieth century. It also approximates the hot takes this week and in coming months on why Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election to a fascism-curious, [your list of Donald Trump’s crimes and character flaws here], in obvious mental decline, etc. The world now faces a period of disruption to rival post-September 11 wars, the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a fresh land war in Europe. And maybe worse.
The twenty-first century has been nothing if not disruption. Trump fosters it. He keeps rivals off balance with it and blames Others for it. MAGA finds its scapegoats primarily among immigrants but doesn’t limit itself to them. Where pundits find theirs for what happened on Tuesday confounds me.
As after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016, the usual suspects will fall back on their usual simplistic answers. Remember “economic anxiety“? A week ahead of that election, Libby Nelson wrote at Vox of Trump supporters who’d been “studied and caricatured and psychoanalyzed“:
But there’s another important factor that these analyses have largely left out: sexism. Three political scientists who studied the connection between sexism, emotions, and support for Trump found that the more hostile voters were toward women, the more likely they were to support Trump.
Even while abortion rights measures passed in seven states on Tuesday, deep misogyny of the Nick Fuentes (430k Twitter followers) variety was there all along. Within less than 48 hours of Trump’s victory, reportsThe New Republic, women “have found themselves the subjects of hate campaigns designed to belittle and marginalize them.”
A text campaign—and obvious hate crime—issued a threat to students of color across the nation, claiming the recipients had been “selected” as “house slaves” and were due to appear at plantations.
Yet when the country elects a fascist demagogue, misogynists and racists are not the go-to fall guys for the press and pundit class. Nor economic or status anxiety. It’s Democrats.
Is it just me, or is it nuts that pundits are analyzing why Democrats lost the 2024 election without examining what’s happened to American society? That patriarchy will not go quietly? Or that 73 million of us chose an autocratic, misogynist felon, xenophobe, and national security risk because, as Brian Beutler put it, “the price of bacon increased“? As if millions face violent deportation, Ukrainians face learning Russian, Gazans face unfettered slaughter, and the world witnesses the collapse of NATO and the advent of fascism American-style because the Democratic Party has a marketing problem?
Black public school students are reportedly getting texts that they've been chosen for a cotton-picking plantation and even "assigned fields." But don't worry, folks, Trump's election was simply a rebuke of Bidenomics! pic.twitter.com/5IUqShGWMg
Is the decades-long, oligarch-funded, right-wing campaign to define deviancy down now invisible to the press because the deviancy it cultivated and Trump exploited is now the norm?
“Sure, we had previously lost an election to a talented demagogue. Maybe that was partly our fault. But we could still consider our values to be mainstream and the other side’s to be aberrant,” Jonathan Rauch laments at The UnPopulist. What now? We may never know exactly why Harris lost, but the people have spoken. Or primal screamed:
We on the liberal-democracy side need to recognize the implications. We lost more than the election. We also lost the standing to claim that our values represent the moral mainstream. We now must function in a world where MAGA not only controls the country’s government but defines its norms—more, at least, than we do.
This will make it harder to hold ground from which to criticize Trump and MAGA, no matter what they do or say. When we protest the latest Trump outrage (and there will be many), we will be accused of elitism and irrelevance. “If you’re the moral arbiters,” MAGA’s allies will say, “why can’t you persuade anybody? Why is it that no one cares about your indignation? Might it be because the public is tired of your moral grandstanding? Might it be because you’re wrong?” We’ll have to fight for moral oxygen these next few years, and it’s a fight we might not win.
Complicating matters further: In the teeth of the election’s permissioning of grotesque political behavior, those who have stood firm against MAGA’s depredations will feel even more pressure to give way or stand down. Some will lack the energy to keep insisting that MAGA is not morally normal; others will conclude that criticizing MAGA is futile or counterproductive, and also potentially dangerous; yet others will, as Tocqueville warned, internalize the electorate’s verdict, concluding that the majority of American voters can’t be wrong. However it happens, we must expect a struggle to maintain our own moral confidence—again, a fight we might not win.
Americans did this to themselves, argues George Conway, a staunch Republican until 2018:
We knew, and have known, for years. Every American knew, or should have known. The man elected president last night is a depraved and brazen pathological liar, a shameless con man, a sociopathic criminal, a man who has no moral or social conscience, empathy, or remorse. He has no respect for the Constitution and laws he will swear to uphold, and on top of all that, he exhibits emotional and cognitive deficiencies that seem to be intensifying, and that will only make his turpitude worse. He represents everything we should aspire not to be, and everything we should teach our children not to emulate. The only hope is that he’s utterly incompetent, and even that is a double-edged sword, because his incompetence often can do as much harm as his malevolence. His government will be filled with corrupt grifters, spiteful maniacs, and morally bankrupt sycophants, who will follow in his example and carry his directives out, because that’s who they are and want to be.
And what Americans chose for themselves.
“The system was never perfect,” Conway observes, “but it inched toward its own betterment, albeit in fits and starts. But in the end, the system the Framers set up—and indeed, all constitutional regimes, however well designed—cannot protect a free people from themselves.”
Sunrise seen over the Atlantic Ocean through cirrus clouds on the Jersey Shore at Spring Lake, New Jersey, U.S. Photo by Nick Harris, (CC BY 2.5)
As we lick our wounds and brace for what’s coming, two threads are worth your time.
New Jersey Senator-elect Andy Kim (D) read transcripts of listening sessions. Voters, he says, have a deep disgust with politics. I’d argue that that disgust has deliberately been cultivated. Whatever.
“There were other issues that they raised but the main point I wanted to convey is that the hinge was on what it means to be ‘different.’ Not about being just different from Trump, but different from the same old same old entrenched politics that people are wholly angry at.”
In 2020 I was one of 7 dems that won a district that Trump won, so I held a series of listening sessions with people who voted for Trump and voted for me to understand their actions. I reread the transcripts yesterday and much of it felt like it could have been said today. THREAD pic.twitter.com/dkvi5gOaZx
Norm Ornstein tweets, “Plenty more understood who Trump is, and what he represents, but still voted for him, in a much broader willingness to blow up the status quo &roll the dice. I have little doubt that most of them will deeply regret this. They will have blown up their own well-being along the way.”
There will be a lot of soul-searching among Democrats, as there should be. Those who criticize Joe Biden for not dropping out earlier, or Kamala Harris for her campaign, are looking in the wrong place. This was a broader rejection ofe ruling elites. 1
Ornstein agrees there is a “broader rejection of ruling elites.” It’s not that it’s not deserved, I’d add, but that too has deliberately been cultivated to serve the purposes of ruling elites. They don’twant to govern. They want to rule.
Jason Statler takes up that theme and offers observations:
I had three epiphanies that may offer some keys to understanding of how we fight back.
The bias against women is built into American culture, and we can only ever hope to overcome it once we free women from being our social safety net. My mind has been irreparably “pilled,” for lack of a more current word, by the work of Jessica Calaraco. Her book HOLDING IT TOGETHER explains how you cannot separate misogyny from America’s broken approach to caring for those in need. And if you want to understand how Trump won, listening to Jessica will clarify a lot.
The media prefers fascism. Marcy Wheeler sensed early in this race that the media was failing or succeeding, depending on your POV, by refusing to clarify what Trump and his candidacy meant. Blame consolidation, the billionaires, and the collapse of local media. It’s all the same thing. We can only do our best to replace journalism in the short term. That’s why we made Ball of Thread. Not because we thought it could replace a broken media but just because we had to do something. I believe Marcy has offered a history of 2016-2020 that DOES NOT EXIST anywhere else, and it provides the most straightforward explanation of what’s coming next as Trump obsessively seeks revenge. I promise you that’s what’s next.
Propaganda works. Strategic racism works. And we’ve tried everything we can to defeat it, except directly confronting it. Ian Haney López should be the most famous academic in America. His work explains the rise of the right and the appeal of fascism better than anyone. And my conversation with him in October clarified how as good as the Harris/Walz campaign was—and it was so good in so many ways—they were not confronting Trump’s most effective weapon. And I point that out not because I want to look back or re-lose this election forever but because he has dire warnings about how the rise of AI will only make the situation worse.
Jason Stanley offered this explanation for what’s happening to us and it’s been around for a couple of millenia:
For 2,300 years, at least since Plato’s Republic, philosophers have known how demagogues and aspiring tyrants win democratic elections. The process is straightforward, and we have now just watched it play out.
In a democracy, anyone is free to run for office, including people who are thoroughly unsuitable to lead or preside over the institutions of government. One telltale sign of unsuitability is a willingness to lie with abandon, specifically by representing oneself as a defender against the people’s perceived enemies, both external and internal. Plato regarded ordinary people as being easily controlled by their emotions, and thus susceptible to such messaging – an argument that forms the true foundation of democratic political philosophy (as I have argued in previous work).
[…]
In my own work, I have tried to describe, in minute detail, why and how people who feel slighted (materially or socially) come to accept pathologies – racism, homophobia, misogyny, ethnic nationalism, and religious bigotry – which, under conditions of greater equality, they would reject.
And it is precisely those material conditions for a healthy, stable democracy that the United States lacks today. If anything, America has come to be singularly defined by its massive wealth inequality, a phenomenon that cannot but undermine social cohesion and breed resentment. With 2,300 years of democratic political philosophy suggesting that democracy is not sustainable under such conditions, no one should be surprised by the outcome of the 2024 election.
But why, one might ask, has this not already happened in the US? The main reason is that there had been an unspoken agreement among politicians not to engage in such an extraordinarily divisive and violent form of politics. Recall the 2008 election. John McCain, the Republican, could have appealed to racist stereotypes or conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birth, but he refused to take this path, famously correcting one of his own supporters when she suggested that the Democratic candidate was a foreign-born “Arab.” McCain lost, but he is remembered as an American statesperson of unimpeachable integrity.
Of course, American politicians regularly appeal more subtly to racism and homophobia to win elections; it is, after all, a successful strategy. But the tacit agreement not to conduct such a politics explicitly – what the political theorist Tali Mendelberg calls the norm of equality – ruled out appealing too openly to racism. Instead, it had to be done through hidden messages, dog whistles, and stereotypes (such as by talking about “laziness and crime in the inner city”).
But under conditions of deep inequality, this coded brand of politics eventually becomes less effective than the explicit kind. What Trump has done since 2016 is throw out the old tacit agreement, labeling immigrants as vermin and his political opponents as “the enemies within.” Such an explicit “us versus them” politics, as philosophers have always known, can be highly effective.
Democratic political philosophy, then, has been correct in its analysis of the Trump phenomenon. Tragically, it also offers a clear prediction of what will come next. According to Plato, the kind of person who campaigns this way will rule as a tyrant.
He concludes that our run as a democracy is over and there will no longer be free and fair elections.
That is certainly possible. But the one thing we have going for us (and against us) is that Trump is a monumental moron and many of the people around him atre nothing more than petty grifters and star fuckers. Even his pet oligarchs are weird and drug addled. Maybe that’s typical of tyrannnies but this is a big complicated country. It may just be beyond their ability to pull this off.
The biggest gainer was Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and one of Trump’s most outspoken and dedicated supporters, whose wealth jumped $26.5 billion to $290 billion Wednesday, according to Bloomberg. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ wealth grew $7.1 billion a week after defending his decision to withhold the Washington Post’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, another Trump supporter, saw his net worth rose $5.5 billion Wednesday.
Other gainers include former Microsoft executives Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, former Google executives Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. Although none of those billionaires endorsed a candidate this year, they have spoken in favor of Democratic candidates and causes in the past.
Collectively, the top 10 richest people gained $64 billion.
Bloomberg notes it’s the “biggest daily increase” of wealth it’s seen since the index began in 2012,. The market rallied Wednesday as the election concluded swiftly and with expectations that Trump will usher in a new era of deregulation and other pro-business laws and policies investors believe could benefit the stock market overall — especially billionaires who hold much of the world’s wealth.
The Billionaire Boys Club is very happy indeed. They simply cannot ever have enough money.
Jimmy Kimmel: “It was a terrible night for women for children…For our allies in Ukraine for NATO…a terrible night for everyone who voted against him, and guess what? It was a bad night for everyone who voted for him too. You just don't realize it yet”pic.twitter.com/OE8IoG0kWK
Donald Trump’s allies and some in the private sector have been quietly preparing to detain and deport migrants residing in the United States on a large scale, according to four sources familiar with the discussions.
Immigration was a cornerstone of Trump’s 2024 campaign, and while he repeatedly touted promises of mass deportation on the trail – putting increased emphasis on interior enforcement compared to his 2016 fixation on the border wall – members of his orbit and some in the private sector discussed what that plan would look like, according to the sources.
Trump’s day one priority is to reinstate his former administration’s border policies and reverse those of President Joe Biden, senior Trump adviser Jason Miller told CNN.
Early discussions among Trump’s team have focused on removing undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, a source familiar with the team’s preliminary plans told CNN. A key issue under consideration is how, when and if to deport immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, commonly known as Dreamers.
Targeting Dreamers would be a departure from the historically bipartisan support they’ve enjoyed. Some are temporarily protected by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that allows recipients to live and work in the US.
Tom Homan, who previously served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, could potentially serve as one of the leads on immigration in the administration, sources said.
“It’s not gonna be – a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not gonna be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous,” Homan told CBS News in an interview that aired last month.
“They’ll be targeted arrests. We’ll know who we’re going to arrest, where we’re most likely to find ‘em based on numerous, you know, investigative processes,” he added.
It won’t take much “investigation” to deport the DREAMers. We told them that if they registered with the government they would have a path to citizenship. The same with asylum seekers and others on temporary visas. Just go in with gins and betray them. Easy peasy.
You can expect this to get back on track right away too:
They won’t be able to round up 12 million (or 30 million as Trump says) at least not in the beginning. But they can make an example of many people and they can do it dramatically in ritual fashion to thrill the cult. It’s primitive stuff.
If you have a basement or an attic you might want to clean it up and get it ready just in case your neighbor, nanny, gardener, local school kid needs a place to hide.
What will you do if men in uniforms arrive in your neighborhood, and an immigrant neighbor gets a knock on the door and is led away in handcuffs?
Or if the uniforms are not police uniforms, and there is not even a knock?
What if the knock is for your daughter, and they’re coming for her because of a pill that she took? Will you open the door?
Or if your teenage granddaughter, alone and afraid, calls you and begs you to drive her to a state where abortion is legal? Your governor has signed a bill making such “abortion trafficking” illegal, stipulating a penalty of 15 years.
What will you do if you’re called to serve on the jury hearing the grandmother’s case? She is guilty beyond a hint of a reasonable doubt; no way around that. Do you vote to convict her, or do you hold out against 11 of your peers?
LET’S SAY YOU ARE AN ATTORNEY in North Carolina, working out of your home. You sometimes serve as a court-appointed lawyer. Mysterious figures from something called “Gov Ops” appear at your door and claim power to rifle through your files without a warrant or any deference to attorney-client privilege.
They do not say what they are looking for. It could be public records proving government malfeasance, or private medical records of a client seeking an abortion, or communications involving legislative redistricting, or anything else they want to take. This is all because of a provision snuck into the state budget by the Republican legislative leadership that authorizes this new secret police force to seize “any document or system of record” from anyone who does work for the state. You are also advised that if you say anything about this raid to anyone, you will be breaking the law.
Please click over and read that whole piece. There are dozens of examples of situations like these we are likely to be confronted with in Trump Redux. Get ready.
In the months leading up to the election, Donald Trump and his Republican allies warned relentlessly of widespread voter fraud. Trump accused Democrats of trying to steal the election by cheating, and he repeatedly refused to commit to accepting the election results unless he won.
On Election Day, Trump further amplified those claims and suggested that there was voter fraud in Philadelphia and Detroit, two major cities in battleground states. Elon Musk’s “Election Integrity Community” discussion page on X was also rife with conspiracy theories about Democrats cheating.
Yet on election night, as the results looked to be in Trump’s favor, the claims tapered off. Instead of dark warnings about election fraud, posts on X’s “election integrity” page grew self-congratulatory and “the urgency to investigate wrongdoing subsided,” The Washington Post reported. Far-right channels on the Telegram platform, where voter fraud claims were widespread in recent days, suddenly grew quiet as well, according to The New York Times.
And, most significantly, there was no more talk of voter fraud from Trump, who spent months sowing doubt about the integrity of the 2024 presidential election — and who, to this day, refuses to concede the 2020 election.
Trump said he won in a landslide in 2020 and the Democrats allegedly managed to steal it from him. Why didn’t they do it this time? Just lazy?
