Truly Trump is an innovator. Bribery is legal when you turn it into a mutually agreed upon contract that is the result of a settlement of a civil lawsuit. And the NDA keeping people from talking is legal too!
When Donald J. Trump sued CBS for $10 billion days before the 2024 election, accusing the company of deceptively editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, many legal experts dismissed the litigation as a far-fetched attempt to punish an out-of-favor news outlet.
Now Mr. Trump is back in the White House, and many executives at CBS’s parent company, Paramount, believe that settling the lawsuit would increase the odds that the Trump administration does not block or delay their planned multibillion-dollar merger with another company, according to several people with knowledge of the matter.
I will not be surprised to hear of corporate executives down at Mar-a-Lago whispering that if Trump were to sue them over… whatever … they would have to talk to their board about “settling it”, if you know what I mean.
The Trump “Rolling Thunder” operation, as former presidential adviser Steve Bannon calls it, hasbeen in full effect in the week and a half since Donald Trump was restored to the presidency. Day after day, one atrocity after another has been perpetrated on the American people as Trump and his henchmen take a wrecking ball to the federal government. Do they know what they’re doing or are they just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks?
Over the course of these 10 tumultuous days Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of all the January 6th rioters and his Justice Department has closed any pending cases. Various agencies have fired and demoted personnel, some of which can only be seen as acts of retribution such as the firing of career prosecutors who worked on the Jack Smith Special Counsel cases and the dismissal of almost all the Inspectors General.
Much of what he’s done so far has focused on rescinding civil rights policies and imposing new discriminatory ones even rescinding an executive order that goes back to the mid-60s signed by Lyndon Johnson mandating non-discrimination by government contractors. His big donors no doubt applauded his chutzpah is just outright declaring that there is no longer any need to ever hire another woman or racial or ethnic minority. Money well spent.
And then there is his draconian immigration agenda, which is off to a fast start. He started by declaring that the government would no longer recognize birthright citizenship despite its being in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. That one has been stayed by a federal court and will wind up in the Supreme Court where Trump says he expects to win.
When you see just a few of the items laid out like that it truly does seem like an unstoppable juggernaut. But a couple of things happened this week that changed the zeitgeist.
Until the last couple of days, the opposition has seemed to be paralyzed, trying to get its bearings under the onslaught. (There’s not really any excuse for that since all of this was telegraphed for months by Project 2025 and Trump’s own rhetoric but it is what it is.) When the Office of Management and Budget put out a memo on Monday night ordering a “temporary pause” on all federal-government grants and loans, people woke up.
The memo was an embarrassment, going on about Marxism and transgenderism and the non-existent Green New Deal but that’s to be expected — all the memos and orders from the new administration sound like they were written by right wing social media troll-bots. What was shocking about it was that it actually caused a firestorm that Republicans couldn’t ignore.
The next day websites went down and people all over the country were calling their Reps demanding to know what was up. Senators reportedly “hit the ceiling.” And rather than just telling everyone to shut their traps and deal with it as they’ve been saying for months to anyone who questions their odious policies, the White House backed off.
According to the Atlantic’s Ashley Parker, they claim the memo wasn’t vetted by Trump’s deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller as it should have been and went out without his ok. (If that isn’t a CYA, I don’t know what is. )
The order ended up in court with a judge issuing a stay prompting them to “rescind” it. Press Secretary Karolyn Leavitt then went out and made it clear they really didn’t mean it:
This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze.
It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo.
Why? To end any confusion created by the court's injunction.
The President's EO's on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.
That understandably did not impress the judge who issued a restraining order saying that Leavitt’s comments about the memo vs the order were “a distinction without a difference.”
It was a blunder and a big one considering how important this “impoundment” gambit is to the Project 2025 architects that are running the program to destroy the federal workforce. These were said to be the meticulous planners who knew what they were doing and it ended up waking up the press and the opposition and even alarming some Republicans. And if Stephen Miller is running away from it you can bet that there’s friction between them and the White House already.
The other big blunder came from co-president Elon Musk who apparently unilaterally copied and pasted the “buyout” memo he sent to Twitter employees and sent it to the entire 2.3 million federal workforce offering them a bogus “inducement to resign” that was so vague it could mean almost anything, causing yet another wake-up call/firestorm.
According to the Washington Post, Musk has taken over the Office of Personnel Management, the independent agency that runs the human resources department for the federal government and staffed it with a bunch of Silicon Valley cronies with a mandate to start gutting the federal government immediately. If that process goes as well as it did when he bought Twitter and purged the company of most of its employees, the American people are not going to be amused. It wasn’t good. Seeing as many of the people he promised severance pay never got it and are suing him, Democrats like Virginia Senator Tim Kaine are right to be urging their federal employee constituents not to accept his “offer.”
It’s one thing if Musk is actually running the government while Trump is just holding press conferences and ceremonially signing orders but it’s another if he’s screwing up as he clearly did with this buyout email. It’s possible that he got a Trump thumbs up on his way out to play another round of golf one afternoon but according to the Post none of the senior officials in the White House or the career staff at the OPM knew about it.
Trump has empowered people like Musk and Vought (even though he’s still working on the outside not having been confirmed yet) and they are running their own shows. I don’t think he cares much what they do but he’s got to remember that it all blows back on him when they screw up. And they are screwing up bigly.
Whether that means he’s ready to cut anyone loose remains to be seen. But it’s certainly proved one thing. We were told that this was a different caliber of people than the first term and they would come in knowing exactly how to efficiently work all the levers of power to enact the MAGA agenda. Well, it turns out that they are just as incompetent as the man they work for. They can still do a ton of damage just by throwing all this stuff against the wall. But a well-oiled, systematic, authoritarian machine they aren’t. I’m not sure that’s any better but it’s good to know what we’re dealing with.
As Digby reported yesterday, Sen. Chuck Schumer, one of several Beltway Democrats past their expiration dates, is catching shit from a half dozen Democratic governors. They are mad as hell at Donald Trump’s newest reality show, the Project 2025 Demolition Derby, and they’re not going to take it anymore. They insist somnolent Democrats on Capitol Hill — how did Trump put it? — fight, fight, fight.
Paul Krugman concurs in his newsletter, offering similar political advice he normally eschews:
Today, however, I’m going to make an exception, and offer three words of advice to Democratic politicians and MAGA opponents in general: oppose, oppose, oppose. And make noise. A lot of noise. Don’t make conciliatory gestures in the belief that Trump has a mandate to do what he’s doing; don’t stay quiet on the outrages being committed every day while waiting for grocery prices to rise. I can’t promise that taking a tough line will succeed, but going easy on Trump is guaranteed to fail.
Trump and his MAGA minions deserve no quarter and certainly no deference. Republicans gave Obama and Biden none and Democrats should respond in kind.
Democrats’ first mistake is assuming that he won because his “issues” held salience for voters who somehow missed his being morally and intellectually bankrupt while being sanewashed by the press. Other pundits Krugman’s read, as I have, seem to be drinking their own Kool-aid. If only Democrats had paid more attention to this (pundit’s pet) issue and less to that one, etc. Oh, the price of eggs!
But Democrats can’t just sit around waiting for Trump’s promises to fail. They need to constantly challenge him on the issue, keep reminding voters that he lied about it all through the campaign, and hang rising prices around his neck every step of the way.
Nor, as I see it, should they narrowly focus on kitchen-table issues. One reason low-information voters may have believed Trump’s nonsense claims about being able to reduce prices is that some of them really thought he was the brilliant manager he played on TV. The reality, however, is that the Trump administration has made a complete shambles of its first 10 days, especially with their it’s on, no it isn’t, yes it is spending freeze that is both destructive and clearly illegal, and has itself been frozen by the courts. It would be political malpractice for Democrats not to make an issue of Trump’s raging incompetence.
The Attention Age
What’s it going to take, Democrats? A high school cheerleading squad to chant it in front of the U.S. Capitol? Actually, the spectacle will get them more press than another caucus presser. Sure, they’ll be condemned by the right. But as Chris Hayes points out in “The Sirens’ Call,” Donald Trump dominates the messaging battlespace because in his mind any kind of attention is good attention, even the worst kind. This is something Democrats don’t get.
Hayes told Anand Giridharadas, “Democrats have been conflict-averse and conflict draws attention, and have also not understood how important it is to get attention, even if you run the downside risk.”
That’s not exactly Krugman’s message, but it rhymes:
So Democrats and MAGA opponents shouldn’t hold their tongues and try to make nice with Trump in the belief that he represents the will of the people. Americans are just starting to find out that they guy they elected and his policies aren’t at all what they thought they were voting for. And we should do everything we can to accelerate their awful journey of discovery.
One Democrat who gets it is AOC, as Digby pointed out. Hayes does as well:
And the one person who gets it is someone who figures prominently in your last book, who you profile, is AOC, who is the best at this of Democrats. Whatever you think about her, whether you agree or disagree with her politics, as an attention age politician, she is by far the most gifted.
The Schumers are living in the past and past their primes. Their seniority is a liability in the attention age.
Remember when politicizing a tragedy was gauche? Not just among Republicans inside the Beltway but among Fox News hosts and right-wing talkers? Well, those tragedies typically involved mass shootings, often at schools. But a mass casualty event in D.C. involving an airliner and an Army helicopter in the first month of Donald Trump’s watch? It’s a perfect opportunity for the president to make political statements and display his skill at stopping the buck anywhere but his desk.
Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post documents that the president’s rants attributing blame for the midair collision on his doorstep this week to DEI policies were four Pinocchios-worthy (gift link):
In the aftermath of the deadly collision between a jetliner and a Black Hawk helicopter at Reagan National Airport, Trump held an extraordinary news conference during which he speculated on the cause of the accident. At length, he attacked former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for imposing what he called “a big push to put diversity” that he said weakened the Federal Aviation Administration.
Reading from a 2024 Fox News report — which he incorrectly identified as being two weeks old — Trump listed conditions that he suggested disqualify people from being air traffic controllers: “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.”
[…]
But here’s the rub: During Trump’s first term, the FAA began a program to hire air traffic controllers with the conditions that Trump decried.
You can get the rest at the gift link. Suffice to say Trump’s press statements are epic bullshit, a word Trump applied on camera to former Biden transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg’s remarks on the crash.
In Trump’s first term, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post kept a count of Trump’s lies and misstatements. The paper quit counting somewhere upward of 30,000. Trump 2.0 appears intent on setting a new record. It’s not clear yet if the Post under publisher and CEO Will Lewis will restart the count. But, hoo-boy, Trump’s comments on the midair collision had fact-checkers scrambling. They will have steady work until Trump finds a way to early retire them as well as tens of thousands of federal employees.
David Graham of The Atlantic notes Trump’s evil Chauncey Gardiner-ness for his similar obsession with television. Trump likes to watch. Then he comments profusely and demonstrates for the world that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He can’t even pull of seeming to be president and is clearly not interested in doing the job for which he was hired:
Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Trump ally, has claimed that Trump wasn’t even running the government during his first term. During the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, Matt Yglesias notes, Trump was more interested in offering punditry on how the government was doing than acting like the head of the executive branch. And on January 6, 2021, according to federal prosecutors, Trump sat at the White House watching the violent sacking of the Capitol and doing nothing to stop it.
]…]
One vignette from the first Trump administration illustrates the dynamic. In April 2019, as the White House was juggling half a dozen serious controversies, Trump called into Fox & Friends and yakked at length about whatever happened to be on his mind until even the hosts couldn’t take it any longer. Finally, Brian Kilmeade cut in and brought things to a close. “We could talk all day, but looks like you have a million things to do,” he said. Trump didn’t appear concerned about it.
What’s odd is that even as Trump acts so passively, his administration is moving quickly to seize unprecedented powers for the presidency. In part, that’s because of the ideological commitments of his aides, but Trump also has a curious view of presidential power as an à la carte thing. He’s very interested in acquiring and flexing power to control the justice system, punish his enemies, and crack down on immigration, but he’d just as soon get the federal government out of the emergency-management business.
Those ideologue-aides and multibillionaire Trump backers have their hands so far up Trump’s back that you might see their fingers waggling in his mouth. Like the fictional Gardiner, they decided the simpleton would fit their hands like a glove and be a perfect remote-control president.
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, has reportedly been criticised by some of the party’s state governors for not resisting Donald Trump’s agenda and cabinet nominees strongly enough.
The exchange took place in a conference between Schumer and six Democratic governors that laid bare differences within the party over how to counteract a seemingly rampant Trump as he wreaks upheaval across the political landscape with an avalanche of executive orders, the New York Times reported.
The governors, led by JB Pritzker of Illinois and Maura Healey of Massachusetts, pleaded with Schumer to slow down the confirmation of Trump’s cabinet by persuading fellow senators to vote against his nominees wherever possible. They said the party needed to generate more public opposition than senators had managed in the chamber so far.
The appeal came in the week the Senate is meeting to confirm two of Trump’s most contentious cabinet picks, Robert F Kennedy Jr, as health and human services secretary, and Tulsi Gabbard, for the role of national intelligence director.
In response, Schumer said Democrats had damaged the political standing of the new defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, during his hearings, in which he was narrowly confirmed, and of Kennedy in the opening day of his confirmation hearing on Wednesday.
They clearly don’t agree with the “strategy” they’ve come up with to ignore Trump, capitulate on the border and crime and talk about “kitchen table issues.” They seem to think that the total dismantling of government as we know it might require just a little bit more energetic opposition.
Ky Governor Andy beshears aid that he focus on the desecration of democracy should take a backseat to a message about how Trump is hurting ordinary Americans:
Trump appeared more animated by the prospect of acquiring Greenland than on tackling the high prices of eggs and other groceries, which he promised to bring down on “day one” during his presidential campaign, Beshear reportedly said.
In fact, Schumer addressed the rising egg prices and the effects of bird flu and challenged Trump to act in a Senate floor speech on Monday
A floor speech!! Well never mind then.
Tim Walz wants more television appearances touting Democrats’ positive ideas and Kansas Governor Laura Kelly wants a “down and dirty” social media outreach. Schumer is Cory Booker, who is in charge of social media, is doing a great job.
The Democrats can talk about kitchen table issues all they want. And if they can frame them in terms of all the damage Trump is doing to average Americans all the better. But the only logical strategy is to oppose what Trump is doing, across the board, unanimously. Nothing Trump can do that might have a tiny bit of positive effect (a rare occurrence) that’s worth giving him even the slightest bipartisan cover.
Total opposition, daily press conferences stating their opposition and why, using massive social media presence (and not just X and Facebook) but podcasts, substacks, every single way they can to get out the word, speaking in one voice against the policies that Trump is enacting is job one. They need to express their horror at his Project 2025 agenda and be relentlessly persistent about it to break through the noise.
It’s not fun but it’s at least part of what’s needed and anything less is just empowering him.
I wrote a couple of days ago about the polling that shows people really don’t like Trump’s policies. And it’s true. But I listened to one of the Bulwark’s podcasts last night that had Sarah Longwell pointing out that while she hears that in her focus groups, she does not see much energy and intensity about it. People are opposed but they don’t feel very strongly about it.
Maybe that will change organically as this unfolds. But I think leadership from elected Democrats is required either way.
Update —
Here’s someone who gets it:
Yes, this administration is dangerous and cruel, but they are also shockingly dim and incompetent.Opportunities are everywhere. Make everything as hard as possible. Resist every demand. Refuse entry without a warrant. Don’t take the buyout. Their problem solving skills are 📉
Trump: "Mexico and Canada have never been good to us on trade. They've treated us very unfairly on trade. And we will be able to make that up very quickly because we don't need the products that they have. We have all the oil you need. We have all the trees you need, meaning the… pic.twitter.com/hxLGJxuzJo
President Trump on Thursday reiterated that tariffs are coming against Canada and Mexico on Saturday, though he said the scope of those levies is still up in the air.
Why it matters: Canada and Mexico are the top U.S. trading partners, and his ongoing tariff threats have sparked fears of an economically damaging trade war.
In a question-and-answer session with reporters in the Oval Office, Trump confirmed his previously stated plan to impose tariffs on Feb. 1.
“Mexico and Canada have never been good to us on trade. They’ve treated us very unfairly on trade,” Trump said, adding: “We don’t need what they have.”
The U.S., Mexico and Canada have been joint parties to free trade agreements for decades, first NAFTA and then the USMCA.
Bloomberg is reporting that he’s going with the 25% tariffs. I haven’t seen that confirmed anywhere else. But it’s certainly causing trouble already:
Trump’s 25% Tariff Vows Send Canada, Mexico FX Tumbling
President Donald Trump’s renewed pledges to slap 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico on Feb. 1 jolted foreign exchange markets late in the New York trading session, sending currencies from both countries plunging against the US dollar.
The Mexican peso slid 1.1% and Canada’s dollar fell as much as 1.2% after Trump told reporters at the White House he would follow through on trade restrictions, which he’d vowed during his inauguration, on Saturday. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index erased an early loss to gain as much as 0.2%.
All because he’s mad that they haven’t properly licked his boots.
Enjoy your guacamole today because it’s going to be unaffordable before long.
Trump's press conference today, blaming the FAA's hiring of women and black people for the crash – was disgusting. Especially after he just threw the FAA into chaos, ousting the Administrator and the whole FAA safety board.
All I know is that had President Biden forced out the FAA chief under pressure from his top adviser and his corrupt motives, and then the next week there was a plane crash that killed more than 60 people, Republicans would be howling that it was an impeachable offense.
I’m glad to see Democrats going after him this way. The Republicans created this blame game. Them’s the rules.
Trump says the DCA plane crash does not make him reconsider the wisdom of sending blanket resignation offers to FAA employees pic.twitter.com/8PeN2h9spX
The Federal Aviation Administration’s leader stepped down on Jan. 20, months after Elon Musk demanded that he quit. The move by Michael Whitaker means the FAA has no Senate-confirmed leader for one of the biggest crises in its history because he quit before Donald Trump took office. Whitaker ran the FAA for just a year but announced in December that he would step down on Jan. 20, as the new president was sworn in.
Nobody has taken his place. Last week, specialist aviation site The Air Current reported that industry veteran Chris Rocheleau had been sworn in as deputy FAA administrator, which would put him in acting charge of the agency. The Wall Street Journal had first reported that he would become deputy.
Whitaker’s departure came after he clashed with Musk, who is now in charge not just of SpaceX but of the new Department of Government Efficiency. In September Whitaker had proposed fines of more than $600,000 for SpaceX, prompting Musk to demand his resignation and promise to sue.
Whitaker, Space.com reported in September, told a congressional committee that the fines were “the only tool we have to get compliance on safety matters.” But Musk had kept up the attacks on X, at a time when he was campaigning at Trump’s side. On Sept. 17 he accused Whitaker’s agency of harassment, posting, “The FAA space division is harassing SpaceX about nonsense that doesn’t affect safety while giving a free pass to Boeing even after NASA concluded that their spacecraft was not safe enough to bring back the astronauts.”
And in a reply to a tweet by an Australian YouTuber who posts videos about space and who has said the FAA “should not exist,” Musk accused Whitaker of standing in the way of his vision of putting human life on Mars.
“The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!” he tweeted at Marcus House.
By the way:
The FAA had already been wrestling with persistent shortages of air traffic controllers. And this week, air traffic controllers were included in the Trump administration’s offer of buyouts to all federal workers.
The investigation into the crash will be led by the independent National Transportation Safety Board, which is chaired by Jennifer Homendy. She has also clashed with Musk, over the safety of self-driving software in his Tesla cars.
Look for her to be labeled DEI and disparaged as incompetent right out of the gate. Only white males are capable of anything but picking crops and having babies.
Nobody said much about this when it happened a couple of weeks ago but maybe they should have:
Here’s a useful heuristic for Democrats — if something makes Trump more popular, don’t do it. Confirming Trump’s nominees with substantial bipartisan majorities could make Trump more popular. Allowing him to sign a border security bill that Democrats only supported because they didn’t want to seem soft on the border (in an election that takes place in November of 2026?)seems like a bad idea.
It’s not hard. Trump should be at the apex of his popularity and he is substantially less popular than any newly elected President in history.
Here’s one way to think about making Trump and the Republicans less popular:
Donald Trump and the Republicans control all three branches of government. They are the only ones with the power to solve pressing problems or address people’s needs. Trump declared that he can fix everything and that America is in a “Golden Age.” He is responsible for all outcomes. Trump will take credit for anything good. Our job is to make sure he gets the blame for everything else. That’s certainly how the GOP and the media treated President Biden. During several news cycles of Biden’s presidency, he was hammered on the difficulty of buying a turkey on Thanksgiving or people’s gifts not arriving in time for Christmas.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Egg prices going up because of the avian flu? That’s on Trump. People not getting needed aid because of the federal funding freeze? Trump’s fault. Crime and disorder happening around the country? Trump. Chaos abroad? Trump. A collapse in the Gaza ceasefire? Also Trump.
The world has felt particularly chaotic in recent years. Part of that is real, and part of it is the refracted lens of social media. Trump won the presidency despite his flaws because he promised to make everything better. We need to hold him accountable when he fails.
God yes. All of it.
For instance, last night we had a catastrophic plane crash. Trump let Elon Musk fire the head of the FAA two weeks ago. It’s his fault.
Whitaker — who held the post for only a year and had four years left in his term — announced he would step down after President Trump was sworn in, leaving the FAA without a leader in a time of virtually unprecedented disaster for the agency.
Elon Musk, a close Trump advisor who also heads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had called for Whitaker’s ouster after the erstwhile FAA chief proposed more than $600,000 in fines for SpaceX — Musk’s aerospace firm.
But this represents millions of our fellow Americans:
Philip Bump discusses how COVID lies ended up helping Trump and how it’s affecting the way Republicans see the health institutions today:
After insisting with crossed fingers that the coronavirus wouldn’t pose a significant risk to the United States, Trump in early 2020 endorsed broad restrictions aimed at limiting the spread of the virus. The economy stumbled. His reelection bid looming, Trump reverted to trying to wish the whole thing away. He turned government officials such as Anthony S. Fauci into scapegoats, casting them as hyperventilating scolds.
The politics of Trump’s base are heavily predicated on rejecting authority, so the play worked like a charm. In fact, it outran Trump, whose support for the rapid development of vaccines targeting the virus became something of an albatross among Republicans who viewed the inoculations as left-wing nonsense.
On the right, the surreal narrative about the pandemic triumphed over reality — just as would the anti-establishment, conspiratorial narratives about the legitimacy of Trump’s reelection loss and the violence of his supporters at the Capitol.[…]
In retrospect, the right’s repercussion-free rejection of reality was likely one of the engines of the Democrats’ own grim fantasy. There was no obvious political price incurred among those who railed against mask-wearing or vaccination efforts. Perhaps, then, the political price would be an electoral one, a literal Darwinism that manifested on Election Day.
It didn’t. More than 1 million Americans died during the pandemic that began on Trump’s watch — and in the next presidential election Trump returned to office. He won in part by embracing the surreal narrative about the pandemic and, upon winning, tapped Kennedy to run the agencies that ensure vaccine availability and respond to future pandemics.
This will almost ensure that if (when) we face another health emergency the response will be much worse than it was before. But in MAGA Bizarroworld it won’t matter how many people die. They want to own the libs so badly they’re willing to die for it.
