Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock’s SNL bit when Donald Trump won in 2016 holds up still.
— Joe Randazzo 📚📕📖 (@LibrarianJoe_) November 6, 2024
I’m shocked this many people are shocked. pic.twitter.com/1PEcPQzdJi
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
In case you were wondering who he plans to go after first, here is a partial list.
President Joe Biden
Trump has frequently called Biden corrupt and, in June, reposted a Truth Social message that said he should be “arrested for treason.” In a speech last year, Trump vowed: “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.”
Vice President Kamala Harris
Trump has described Harris’ failure to control migration as so severe that people have been “murdered because of her action at the border.” He told a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in September that Harris “should be impeached and prosecuted” for her role in permitting what he termed an “invasion” of the U.S. by undocumented immigrants.
Former President Barack Obama
In 2020, Trump accused Obama of “treason” for what Trump describes as the FBI’s surveillance of his 2016 presidential campaign over its ties to Russia. In fact, the email snooping was aimed at a former foreign policy adviser to that campaign.
In August of this year, Trump reposted a message on Truth Social calling for “public military tribunals” for Obama.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
“Lock her up!” was a memorable refrain of Trump’s 2016 campaign rallies, alluding vaguely to Clinton’s use of a private email account while secretary of state and the ensuing FBI investigation, which did not lead to any charges.
In an interview in June of this year, Trump suggested Clinton should face the same sort of criminal prosecutions brought against him. “Wouldn’t it be terrible to throw the president’s wife and the former secretary of state … into jail?” Trump told Newsmax. “It’s a terrible, terrible, path that they’re leading us to and it’s very possible that it’s going to have to happen to them.”
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi
In September, Trump said Pelosi should face criminal charges in connection with her husband’s sale of Visa stock a few months before the Justice Department sued the company for alleged antitrust violations. “Nancy Pelosi should be prosecuted for that,” Trump said.
He also said Pelosi should be prosecuted for failing to ensure adequate security at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the building as Congress was preparing to certify Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential race.
In a speech Monday, Trump said Pelosi “could’ve gone to jail for” theatrically ripping up a copy of Trump’s State of the Union address while sitting behind him on the House rostrum in 2020.
New York Attorney General Letitia James
James earned Trump’s ire as a result of the lawsuit she brought alleging widespread fraud in Trump’s business empire. The case resulted in a judgment of more than $450 million against Trump, who has appealed.
Last November, Trump said on Truth Social that James “should be prosecuted” for her role in the suit. In January, he said at a campaign rally in Iowa that James “should be arrested and punished accordingly.”
Trump has also reportedly expressed enthusiasm about plans some of his legal supporters have discussed to prosecute James for election interference.
Manhattan Justice Arthur Engoron
Engoron, a New York trial judge, faced a torrent of attacks from Trump while presiding over James’ civil fraud case. At a campaign event early this year, Trump said Engoron “should be arrested and punished accordingly.”
Former Rep. Liz Cheney
Cheney (R-Wyo.) angered Trump while serving as vice chair of the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. She is also one of the most prominent Republican figures to publicly endorse Harris over Trump. In March, Trump declared on Truth Social that Cheney “should go to jail.” In June, he reposted a message calling Cheney “guilty of treason.” And in the final days of the 2024 campaign, Trump mused: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her.” He said he was accusing her of hypocrisy for supporting the war in Iraq.
Special counsel Jack Smith
Smith, who brought both of the federal criminal cases against Trump, is a frequent punching bag for the former president. Last year, Trump reposted a social media message from conservative talk show host Mark Levin saying Smith “must go to prison.” In August, Trump reposted a message calling “Jackal Smith … a career criminal” and saying he “should be prosecuted for election interference and prosecutorial misconduct.” Last month, appearing on a radio show, Trump called Smith “mentally deranged” and said he “should be thrown out of the country.”
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg
Another one of Trump’s courtroom adversaries is Bragg, who brought the case that led to the former president’s conviction on 34 felony charges stemming from a scheme to secretly pay $130,000 to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet during the 2016 election about her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump.
“There is a case to be made … that the prosecutor should be prosecuted — the district attorney should be prosecuted,” Trump told reporters during the trial in May.
Former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley
For more than three years, Trump has railed against Milley, claiming that the general’s contact with a Chinese official during the tense transition period four years ago amounted to treason. “This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!” Trump declared in a social media post last year. The feud was reignited in recent days after Milley called Trump “fascist to his core.”
There are more:
Former FBI Director James Comey
Hunter Biden and the rest of the Biden family
Former FBI special agent Peter Strzok
Former FBI attorney Lisa Page
Rep. Adam Schiff
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg
Former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Mark Pomerantz
Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen
U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Michael ByrdTrump has joined with his supporters — some of whom took part in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot — to call for prosecution of Byrd, the U.S. Capitol Police officer who shot and killed rioter Ashli Babbitt as she attempted to breach the entrance to the Speaker’s Lobby while House members were being evacuated. The Justice Department announced in April 2021 that it closed the investigation into Babbitt’s death and no charges would be filed against Byrd. Last year, Trump called Byrd a “thug” and “coward,” adding: “Ashli Babbitt was murdered!”
Rep. Jamaal Bowman
51 intelligence professionals who signed letter about Hunter Biden laptop
Members of the Jan. 6 select committee
Unspecified people engaged in election fraudDespite few examples of verified election fraud, Trump has threatened severe criminal consequences for anyone who engages in such behavior, and he’s muddied the waters by suggesting such tampering went on during the 2020 race — and was bound to occur in 2024, too.
“WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” Trump said on Truth Social in September. “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
POLITICO reporters, editors and publisher
He will definitely do this to at least a few of the enemies on his list. I would not be surprised at all to seehim go after Cohen. He believes that you have to make an example of people who have wronged you or you won’t be respected.
I suspect that if someone comes crawling to him and shows proper obeisance, he’ll extend them a reprieve. Much of this exercise is to demand that these people refrain from any more criticism and either retire from public life or become his minions. You’ll note that this happened with most of his former GOP critics. A case in point:
If you follow the Marco and Lindsey examples you’ll probably be ok. If you continue to criticize him and oppose him anything can happen.
Look at what this worm is already doing:
Trump will never be held accountable for anything. He never has been. His followers see that as a superpower. But he will find it intensely satisfying to punish his enemies fro trying to do it. I fully expect to see some of these people facing legal peril.
What the hell happened to make that big of a shift among this particular demographic and not the others? I’m honestly stymied and I have to wonder if it might be an error in the exit poll.
I can certainly see why Latino men would be attracted to Trump. Many of them are working class which means they share many of the same attitudes as other blue collar types. And there’s plenty of misogyny in Hispanic culture, just as there is among their Black and white brethren. But are they laboring under the illusion that the”mass deportation” signs they held up at the RNC were simply about “illegal immigration”? If so, I’m afraid they’re very much mistaken. Sure that’s the excuse these people use. But the reality is that they just don’t like Latinos and they think they are polluting the culture. It’s xenophobia, not immigration.
And that means you too, guys. Unless they’re willing to surrender their ethnic identity completely, maybe even change their names, Trump’s ICE will not ask who they voted for before they racially profile them and possible even gather them up in the mass deportation scheme. They’re playing for the wrong team.
It was late but it arrived with a vengeance
This wasn’t about anything the Democrats did or didn’t do. This was comprehensive and across the board. The country decided it wanted Donald Trump, period. The majority approves of him and his plans and they want more of it, even in the big blue states like California and New York.
Some people say it’s a realignment. I don’t think we can know that until Donald Trump leaves the stage. His form of demagoguery is apparantly very seductive to tens of millions of people and they believe his lies or at least find them tolerable. But I don’t know if it goes beyond him. We will see in four years … assuming he doesn’t blow up the world before then.
The only succor we have is that this is happening all over the globe. It isn’t just us. The turn to fascism, particulaly in the wake of the pandemic, is a phenomenon we see in all the western democracies to one degree or another. Some countries have been able to beat it back, but barely. We were among them, until yesterday.
Update:
This from political scientist John Sides at Good Authority, which does excellent electoral analysis, breaks the election down to its essence:
…Donald Trump did better in all kinds of places – red states and blue states, rural places, cities, and so on. So the initial explanations we should seek have to be broader than just one place or one group.
The simplest story is one that Michael Tesler and I wrote about back in March. A spike in inflation dragged down Joe Biden’s approval rating, which never improved very much even as inflation receded. Public views of the economy remained less positive than other indicators – economic growth, employment – would predict.
Replacing Biden with Kamala Harris opened up the possibility that she could outperform his approval rating. Some research suggests that the incumbent president’s record matters less when the incumbent is not running. Of course, Harris was also part of the incumbent administration herself.
As of March, Biden’s approval rating was consistent with a 3-point Democratic loss in the national popular vote. At the latest tally, early on Nov. 6, Trump has a 3.5-point lead. That may change as the remaining voters are counted, but it’s likely to be consistent with what Biden’s approval rating alone predicted.
As we get more and better data – a process that will take months, to be sure – we can add important details. But the central plot lines of the story are already clear, and not that dissimilar from four years ago.
In 2020, an unpopular incumbent lost reelection.
In 2024, an unpopular incumbent’s party lost reelection.
The circumstances and the reasons for their unpopularity differed. Nevertheless, their struggles provided the tailwind for the challenger. That has put Donald Trump back in the White House.
I would find that explanation more satisfactory if the challenger wasn’t the same guy the country had ousted four years before — who also now happened to be a convicted felon, con man, adjudicated rapist and certified freakshow. But maybe when people don’t like the incumbent it doesn’t matter who the other side vomits up. They’re going to vote for him anyway.
If this is true, for me the bigger question is why so many people are so sour and hold Biden and Harris responsible for it. None of the external factors, not even inflation or immigration can account for it. Maybe, just maybe it has something to do with the media environment and Trump’s uncanny ability to bullshit people into believing what he wants them to believe? I dunno.
To me it just seems as if too many people in this country are in love with hate. You see it at sporting events and public gatherings and yes, at Trump rallies. Violence and tribalism energizes them. Misogyny and racism are openly celebrated sothey feel free to act out, believing that their negativity and hostility are shared by most people. Now we know that they’re right.
Kara Swisher is one of the most astute observers and chroniclers of the tech revolution and politics. Her experience makes her particularly valuable at this moment because she knows all the tech bros who are now going to be in the inner circle of the highest office in the land.
She wrote this today on threads:
I got some kind of 24 hour bug and fell asleep early last night with a headache & slight fever and woke feeling better but to these truly heinous results. Obviously, a shock, given the blatantly misogyny, homophobia/anti trans, racist & anti-immigrant messaging. But unhappiness with the economy & an ennui with the general US direction prevailed. @profgalloway & I were wrong to believe in the kinder nature of Americans. Some short observations:
1. We still don’t have to like it at all.
2. The other side will not be magnanimous in victory at all. Too many of them are the people you think they are, so no need to try to reach across the aisle & hope for the best unless you want to. (I hear their caterwauling, but not me!)
3. This is the red wave we were all dreading, just a few years later. It’s not clear yet what the mandate is — my guess is that it is economic and immigration issues rather than the truly bent ideas — but it is a mandate nonetheless, given how widespread it is.
4. You may be tired & heartbroken, but that does not mean we can rest for long. The world spins forward in the end has always been my mantra, proven time and again, even if it goes backward at times in its long history (this is def backwards).
5. Thank you to all the anti-Trumpers who warned us all whom we have let down and who are now adrift for a very long time. We are all in danger in some way, but they will bear the first ugly blows that are doubtlessly coming. Continue to support them.
6. Do not engage in conspiracy tactics and disinformation as attractive as they are. They won across the country clearly because their messages resonated and were able to tap into an existing dark vein of the American psyche that has always been there. Hope works. So does fear. As I say about tech: Enragement equals engagement.
7. This still remains a divided county & that means something. Most of these splits are close to 50-50. You are not alone even if it feels like it. Don’t cooperate.
8. Tech companies, especially social media, along with gerrymandering & Rupert Murdoch’s angry, cynical news outlets, have combined to bring us here. Tech leaders abrogated their responsibilities to ensure safety on their platforms & regulators did too. This is media unfettered in a way that will be studied decades from now. They were handmaidens to sedition on 1/6 and are now just willing bystanders more interested in profits than anything, as I have long asserted. It was capitalism after all.
10. Musk will merge X with Truth Social & take it public to benefit him and Trump. It is still a shitty business but a powerful propaganda organ. He bought it for this reason & will continue to use it in that way since the $44 billion he spent will yield trillions.
11. Musk is vindictive & loud, but he and Trump will inevitably war. Two malignant narcissists cannot occupy the same space for long. The person I would zero in on is the quieter (but not quiet) Peter Thiel, the true mastermind.
12. Thiel was the one who first saw the awful vehicle that is Trump and now Vance, who is also the one to watch (and Trump now needs to watch his back too as his usefullness will diminish). Thiel has bought himself a government for very little and will use it to further his many troubled theories. All the second bananas around the erratic Musk are via disciplined Thiel. Go read his books to understand as he has spelled it out clearly.
13. They will try to bring everyone to heel via their now massive power. Again, we don’t have to like it or cooperate. They won through tapping into rancor and selfishness. Fine. So be difficult. Say no. Resist. Don’t feel the need to be nice. In fact, be disrespectful. Lose people who tell you to accept this. It’s okay to be angry and fed up and disappointed. In fact, it’s required.
14. We can and will win again in what is a dark moment for progressives. The lives of our children depend on it.
15. Kamala Harris conducted a really impressive campaign, so don’t pillory her. She got us to close to even and we owe her our respect and gratitude.
16. Lastly, the Swishkatz family has your back. We are not going away and we will not be quiet. In fact, we like our odds and now we know the stakes. Today was a major Thanos loss, for sure, but you need to get up again and fight. I know we can do this all day. And we will.
I’m too tired from lack of sleep to feel inspired to go out and do anything right now. But I’ll gather myself up as I’ve done before and carry on as best I can. It’s not in my nature to just back off or back down.
I think her observations about Musk, Thiel and Vance are important. These are people with massive influence both because of their huge fortunes and their new proximity to power. I think she’s probably right about Musk and Trump inevitably locking horns. They’re both unstable narcissists who will not be able to work together for long.
Thiel and his creature JD Vance are more interesting. I have not done a full study of Thiel but I will take it up as soon as I have the energy. These people want to fundamentally re-order society and not in a good way.
In another bow to Peter Thiel and the weird Network State tech cult, Donald Trump’s campaign platform has a plan to create new charter cities (so-called “Freedom Cities“) on federal land. It’s a clear indicator of his willingness to sell out the country to his far right Silicon Valley benefactors. In fact, Thiel and Marc Andreessen are funding an entire company – Pronomos Capital – dedicated to building such futuristic tech cities around the world.
“Kamala has nothing like this on her website,” declared Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini on Twitter yesterday. His post included text from Trump’s campaign website that promises to build “Freedom Cities“:
President Trump will work to open up the American Frontier, holding a contest to charter new cities where families and individuals can have a new shot of the American Dream.
The Network State cult, a frequent subject of this newsletter, calls for the creation of private cities ruled by non-democratic tech governments. “Freedom Cities” seems like a slight Republican rebranding of the concept. The adoption of the idea suggests that Trump’s team – which announced the plan last year – has been searching for ways to align with Weird Tech for quite some time.
If you’re interested, click that link. It spells it all out. It sounds looney but these guys have more money than god and have now seized political power.
“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.” – Joseph Heller, Catch-22
I’m sorry to be sharing so many pertinent quotes today but it’s about all I’ve got the energy for. If the shoe fits…
James Fallows has a good piece today which I don’t think he’ll mind my sharing in full:
This time, it was not a fluke.
When Donald Trump came to power eight years ago, there were countless what-ifs. What if James Comey had held his tongue? What if Clinton campaign emails, hacked by Russian operatives, had not been published on WikiLeaks just minutes after the Access Hollywood video came out? (And distract attention from “Grab ‘em by…”) What if Clinton emails had not been such a media obsession? What if cable outlets had not found Trump rallies such useful audience draws? What if the US had joined every other democracy on Earth in choosing leaders without the bizarre Electoral College? What if everyone including Donald Trump himself had not taken it for granted that Hillary Clinton would win, and given her tougher scrutiny accordingly?
What if, what if.
This time we don’t have that distraction, or that consolation. The electorate of our country has had a good, clear, years-long look at Donald Trump. His braggadocio and his decline. His corruption and his vulgarity. His resentments and his threats. The warnings about what he would do from the most senior people who had ever worked with him, starting with his own vice president.
And, with eyes wide open, with the evidence before them, most of our fellow-citizen voters decided: Bring him back.
Yes, sure, there are what-ifs? this time. What if Mitch McConnell, after condemning Trump for the January 6 assault, had mustered courage to match even that of Mitt Romney and the other GOP Senators who voted to convict Trump on his second, Jan 6-related impeachment? McConnell could have assembled his caucus to do so, which would have permanently barred Trump from seeking office ever again. (Counting Romney, seven Republicans voted to convict; it would have taken 17.) What if in this past month George W. Bush had matched the courage of hundreds of his appointees, one of his daughters, and his vice president (and that vice-president’s daughter)?
What if Joe Biden had stepped aside earlier? What if Kamala Harris had chosen a crucial swing-state governor as her running mate?
Among these, only the impeachment-conviction vote would have stopped Trump for sure. Based on what we’ve seen now, I have doubts whether any of the rest would have. The stakes were clear. And the voters chose.
By the standards of any presidential race in modern times, Kamala Harris ran a very “good” campaign. Minimum of gaffes; maximum of concentration on “strategic” states. The broadest alliance in modern political history—Beyonce to Dick Cheney. The smallest number of backstage, backbiting leaks or second-guessing. This on the heels of what was at least statistically the strongest re-election year economy of any incumbent party in many decades.
By those same standards, Trump ran a very bad campaign. Mounting insults to known voting blocs—starting with the biggest bloc of all, women. Increasing darkness, rambling, and resentment in Trump’s public appearances. Visibly diminishing crowds. Leaks from disgruntled staffers blaming others for a likely defeat.
And none of it mattered.
The Republican presidential candidate had won the popular vote only once in the past 32 years. Eight years ago, Trump lost to Hillary Clinton by three million votes. Four years ago, he lost to Joe Biden by seven million. Yesterday, our fellow Americans appear to have given him an absolute majority—as I type, over 51% of the total vote, and a margin of several million.
“Absolute” is the relevant term here. The results last night appear to be so sweeping and absolute, on so many fronts, with so few caveats or complications, as to give us an unsparing view of our country in our time.
Two weeks ago, I quoted two celebrated and veteran campaign strategists—the Democrat James Carville, and the Republican Stuart Stevens—on why they were confident that Kamala Harris would win. Each of them rested that outlook on the character of the country.
Stevens said, to members of the broad Harris coalition:
There are more of us than there are of them… This is yours. Walk out and take it. You will look back at this moment with quiet pride and satisfaction for the rest of your life, knowing that when America called, you answered.
And Carville:
A vast majority of Americans are rational, reasonable people of good will. I refuse to believe that the same country that has time and again overcome its mistakes to bend its future toward justice will make the same mistake twice…. I know that we know we are better than this.
Two professionals who had based their careers on knowing the country turned out to be badly wrong about its nature, as expressed on November 5, 2024. It turns out that we are not better than this. That is why I thought last night of the famous verse from Little Gidding: We are arriving where we started, and knowing the place—our America, of this moment—for the first time.
This darkness has always been in us. And it’s shown itself in various heinous ways in the past. But Fallows, Stevens and Carville believed, as did I, that at this moment in time, at least, we were better than that. We are not.
There is something wrong at the core of our political culture and our society at large that’s reasserting itself through Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. We can’t pretend any longer that it isn’t real and very possibly enduring.
Try, at least
Simon Rosenberg offers some advice I’m too obsessed and upset to take. Nevertheless:
There will be plenty of time to assess what happened and where we go from here. I am going to go slow and take my time. I suggest you do the same. Take care of yourself and your friends. Take long walks, spend a little more time with your kids, call an old buddy. Return to a hobby you miss. Enjoy life. Enjoy it. Take your time, now, and avoid diving into a world of half-baked hot takes, bad faith commentary, angry Tweets and crowing MAGAs.
I wake up this morning with one overarching sentiment – pride in all that you did this election to fight for your democracy and your freedoms. Our family left it all out there on the playing field. We gave more money than has ever been given. We built the biggest grassroots machine that’s ever been built. We wrote more postcards, made more calls, whipped off more texts and knocked on more doors than ever before. I wake up this morning with no regrets, knowing I worked as hard as I could over these few few years. I know many of you feel the same way, and I want to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. It is has been an honor of a lifetime to be in community with all of you these last 20 months, doing more and worrying less, together.
He adds something we here have been on about for some time:
I still think many on our side and in the establishment simply do not understand the nature of the conflict America finds itself in today. Trump and his global allies are playing a different game than we are used to. They have invented a whole new deeply illiberal game with all sorts of new pieces and rules. We have been slow, dangerously and recklessly, slow in recognizing how the rules of the game have changed.
Brian Beutler offers more of the same on the slowness to adapt.
Don’t get me started. Not today.
Be careful what you wish for, MAGA
“Where do we go from here?” Digby asks this morning. She doesn’t know. Nor do I. Just as I don’t know how she had the emotional stamina to write it.
All this time, I told friends last night, it seemed as if observers of the MAGA cult were studying the grotesque creatures of Looking Glass World. People such as Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and RFK Jr. Facing a second Donald Trump presidency, with J.D. Vance as heir apparent and a Supreme Court MAGAfied for the rest of my lifetime, it feels this morning as if Looking Glass World was, in fact, studying us. Except the image that came to mind wasn’t from Lewis Carroll, but Rod Serling.
IMDB summarizes “Eye of the Beholder” from “The Twilight Zone”:
Janet Tyler is in hospital having undergone treatment to make her look normal. It’s her 11th trip to the hospital for treatment and she is desperate to look like everyone else. Some of her earliest childhood memories are of people looking away, horrified by her appearance. Her bandages will soon come off and she can only hope that this, her last treatment, will have done the trick. If not, her doctor has told she will be segregated with a colony of similar looking people.
It is a place where Janet can find acceptance among her “own kind.” Banishment is how her society deals with its grotesques. Serling reflects in the episode’s coda, “On this planet or wherever there is human life, perhaps out amongst the stars. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Lesson to be learned – in The Twilight Zone.”
Except Trump is not known for being that compassionate. He’ll want to impress the strongmen of the world, hoping that finally the Vladimir Putins and Viktor Orbáns will admit him as a member of their version of Mar-a-Lago. There will be banishment for immigrants, segregation for minorities, self-segregation, either within the U.S. or abroad, for those with the means and their remaining strength to resist.
“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” Our system of law and order has always been capricious in this country. One system for the rich and another for the rest. Trump will use the power of the presidency to quash federal prosecution of his own crimes and pressure states to drop theirs. He’s promised to use law enforcement to exact retribution against his enemies, to unleash federal and local police against those he deems thugs, including Americans exercising their First Amendment rights, protesters and press included.
Trump has abused that de facto dual system his entire life to avoid consequences for his own criminality. With sheer doggedness and deep pockets, he’s learned he can, if not defeat opponents, stall them, wear them down until they go away.
This morning, exhausted after years of pushing back, I wonder how much I’ve got left.
We won all our in-county races here in Buncombe County (as we do) despite Hurricane Helene’s ravages. Josh Stein defeated the “Black Nazi” running for N.C. governor. But it looks like a mixed bag on the rest of our state races, including judicial ones. Democrats defeated the author of the “bathroom bill” running for attorney general, and the home-schooling conspiracist who would be superintendent of public instruction. I haven’t had time to score the legislative balance.
The world must be shuddering this morning. Ukraine especially, along with NATO. Trump’s supporters soon may find the protections they thought the Constitution afforded them are as worthless under Trump and Project 2025 as Trump NFTs.
A second aphorism comes to mind as I close. Be careful what you wish for, MAGA.
I don’t have any idea
Donald Trump has once more won the presidency. It’s as shocking as it was the first time and even more terrifying. We should have seen this coming from all the polling which showed that the race was tied nationally and in the swing states. Of course it was possible. But I think a lot of us, myself included, once again fell for the illusion that America is too fundamentally decent to elect someone like Donald Trump. We were wrong.
In 2016 that starry-eyed naivete led to the deep despair that we all felt when Trump eked out a win over Hillary Clinton. And in 2020 we believed that dream was vindicated when Joe Biden turned the tables and eked out a win over Trump. And here we are again, caught in a swirling vortex from which we can’t seem to escape.
The funny thing is that until recently I had assumed that the contest was going to be political trench warfare again and the result would be very close. It has seemed to me for a while that we’re in an ongoing war between two coalitions that can be defined as pro-democracy and anti-democracy and they have roughly equal political strength. The razor thin margins in the congress and these incredibly tight presidential races bear that out.
Yes, Donald Trump is the leading figure in this fight as the man who best articulates the anti-democratic coaliton’s impulses but he also hinders them with his crudeness and lack of discipline. Meanwhile, the pro-democracy coalition is diffuse and leaderless but is helped by the fact that it’s less crazy. Joe Biden managed to pull it out in 2020 in the middle of a global pandemic when there were just enough people in the right states to recognize that Trump wasn’t up to dealing with it. He was also a white man, which clearly makes that choice easier for some people. (It cannot be a coincidence that the rank misogynist brute, Donald Trump beat the two highly qualified Democratic women he ran against.)
I knew all this. And I assumed 2024 would be a tough race for Biden to win although I thought he would probably be able to do it because he managed to “deliver” on so many of his promises, particularly on the economy, which many smart people assured me was the key to winning over voters. Surely, the people would start to see that inflation had abated and the job market was great and that interest rates were coming down, right? All that new manufacturing in the swing states had to count for something. But when it became clear that he could not campaign effectively and he turned it over to his Vice President who seemed to electrify the pro-democracy coalition I began to believe that this time it would win decisively. I was fooling myself.
Donald Trump bungled the worst health crisis in a century, has been found guilty of fraud and liable for defamation and sexual assault, and is currently under indictment for stealing classified documents and attempting a coup in 2020. He acted deranged and demented on the campaign trail and it changed nothing. When he said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any votes, he was right. There is literally nothing he can do to make his faithful followers move away. And that’s because it’s really not about him, it’s about them.
Trump has solidified his grip on nearly half the voters in this country because, as journalist Lindsay Beyerstein tweeted last night, “he created a conspiracist permission structure to ignore or deny all the facts and focus on hate.” Our modern information ecosystem, the social media and cable news silos have allowed him to construct an alternate reality for the Republican Party and they eagerly accept it because it feeds their sense of fear and loathing of the other. And it isn’t just the kooky QAnon conspiracy types — he managed through sheer repetition to convince otherwise normal people that his first term was a golden age of peace and prosperity and that the country today is a dystopian hellscape because the price of eggs is higher than it was five years ago.
On some level these people know that’s all nonsense and Trump knows it too. This anti-democratic coalition has a deep, entrenched grievance with the modern world and they use politics to express it:
Nichols added, “resentment and false nostalgia (and affluence and boredom) are deadly threats to democracy, as we’re about to learn.”
It’s not about policy no matter how much people insist that it is. We know this because in places like Missouri voters just passed initiatives for abortion rights, an increase in the minimum wage, and paid sick leave, all Democratic policies, while overwhelmingly voting for a Republican senator and a president who strongly oppose these things. This is about aesthetics and attitudes. A majority of Americans want an autocratic strongman show and Donald Trump and the Republicans are happy to give it to them.
The anti-democracy coalition under Donald Trump is on the verge of fascism. He and many in his party are already there. We know this because we know their plans. We’ve all been discussing Project 2025 and Agenda 47 and Schedule F for months now. Trump’s mass deportation policy may never come to full fruition but they will certainly make an example of some people if only to entertain the base. Recall how much they loved those migrant flights to Martha’s Vineyard and the like a year or so ago. Some televised knocking down of doors and throwing crying women and children onto buses ought to give them a thrill (a double thrill when the Democrats get hysterical about it.)
Here’s Trump promising RFK Jr “a good time” messing around with the public health system:
We know about Trump’s plans for the economy and since his tariff obsession is his only economic and foreign policy idea, it’s unlikely that even his business buddies will be able to talk him out of it. Foreign allies are no doubt meeting with their national security people as we speak, implementing plans to distance themselves from the United States, knowing Trump’s affinity for autocrats like Russia’s Putin and Hungary’s Orban. America’s adversaries are licking their chops. They know Trump is a pushover.
But the vengeance policy is what’s going to animate Trump the most. His enemies list is long and he will make sure they pay. It’s what he lives for:
Here’s a message from one of the people mentioned as possible Attorney General or White House Counsel:
We survived Trump’s first term, (although his erratic rhetoric and policies during COVID did result in many unnecessary deaths.) But everyone knows by now that this second term is not going to be the same. The Republican establishment has been purged of dissenters and Trump will have only MAGA loyalists in his inner circle. Trump’s new “Government Efficiency” czar Elon Musk is already promising that there will be “hardship” (not for him, of course) as they slash the government safety net that so many Americans depend upon. Everything from environmental regulations to abortion rights to free speech is on the chopping block. And who will stop them?
Can we survive it again? Probably. But it’s going to be much harder. The question is whether the Resistance has the energy to do it all again or will it pull back and just watch it all burn out of sheer exhaustion? After all, they tried their best. They ground out many wins between 2016 and today. But in the end they lost it all again. What’s next?
I just didn’t want to believe it
Mea culpa, I got this one very wrong. As someone wrote on twitter earlier:
He was the worst President in history. And when he got voted out, he tried to stage a coup. Then he stole national secrets and sold the ones he didn’t store in the bathroom. He was convicted of fraud, found liable of sexual assault and convicted of 34 felonies. He is half a billion dollars in debt, owned by God only knows who, and the biggest national security risk the nation has ever had.
But at least he’s not a Black woman.
That was a bridge too far. She ran a good campaign, they did everything they could. Half the country just wants what Trump is offering: a strongman sideshow.
The world is a much more dangerous place today than it was yesterday. The bad guys won.