Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

It’s a massive demonstration and it’s not just in the big blue cities:

That’s just a smattering of the posts coming from all over the world.

People are desperate to DO SOMETHING. This won’t change things in itself but the timing is perfect. Trump just crashed the world economy because he’s demented. This is just the beginning.

Aaaaand. It’s still all good!

Lol. Nothing to see here…

Political scientist Alan Abramowitz says in his new paper about the white working class in America, “it’s not the economy, stupid.” I think we knew this but it’s good to see some empirical study into the phenomenon. Pace Karl Marx, “class” is not just an economic designation.

Key points:

— While the state of the economy was likely an important factor in the 2024 presidential election and other recent contests, discontent over economic conditions doesn’t really explain the movement of white working class voters to the Republican Party in the longer-term.

— Rather, ideological realignment was probably a larger driver of white working class voters, once the base of the Democratic Party decades ago, into the Republican column.

Racial and cultural issues better explain GOP dominance with white working class

[…]

The dramatic shift in the partisan alignment of white working class voters over the past several decades, and especially the overwhelming support of this voting bloc for Donald Trump, has led to considerable speculation about the reasons for the rise of white working class Republicanism. Much of this speculation has focused on changes in the U.S. economy that have had a detrimental impact on the economic security and standard of living of this group. Since the 1970s, according to this theory, the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. as a result of automation and competition from low-wage countries like China and Mexico has devastated many working class communities and led to growing disillusionment with the Democratic Party, whose leaders were seen as complicit in these changes. Donald Trump, with his focus on the grievances of those who felt left behind by changes in American society, was especially effective in appealing to these disillusioned white working class voters.

In this article, I examine the rise of white working class Republicanism in American politics. Contrary to much of the conventional wisdom, I argue that economic discontent has very little to do with this phenomenon. Instead, I argue that the growing attraction of white working class voters to the Republican Party is a result of the ideological realignment of the political parties over the past 50 years. The growing divide between the Democratic and Republican parties over economic, racial, and cultural issues has led to an ideological realignment within the electorate. Groups with relatively conservative policy preferences, including white voters without college degrees, have shifted their allegiances to the Republican Party while groups with relatively liberal policy preferences, including white college graduates, have shifted their allegiances to the Democratic Party. These findings have important implications for the future of electoral competition and for party strategies.

I know you know this. We’ve traveled down the “economic anxiety” road for years now trying to explain Trump’s appeal. It’s really about hostility and grievance toward “the other” and Trump is a master at stoking that hatred.

But that’s not to say the economy isn’t relevant. Trump’s salesmanship and good fortune gave him a strong economy from Obama that was in the final phase of a recovery from the hell that he’d inherited from George W. Bush. He was constrained from doing all the cockamamie plans he had in his mind by people around him but also the Republicans in congress who were not yet united in their worship of the Golden God Trump. In the first two years they spent all their capital on tax cuts and banning Obamacare and came very close to achieving both. He lost the House in the midterms and hadn’t yet figured out that he was untouchable and could literally do anything he chose by executive fiat and no one would stop him. And then there was COVID.

This time he won on the basis of a “vibe recession” basically a bad hangover from the pandemic in which people just didn’t feel good about anything. He promised to fix everything on day one, particularly the cost of living and it is highly probable that his margin of victory consisted of people who were voting on the basis of their pocketbooks and just wanted to throw the bums out. What he’s doing now is going to send shock waves through the entire country and even some MAGAs are going to be shaken up by it. So the economy does matter and it is often a sort of stand-in for general discontent.

But what Abramowitz says is clearly the reason for the permanent migration of much of the white working class to the Republican Party. It’s a very big group and it’s what makes it hard to get beyond the polarization that makes our politics so fraught and our elections so close. I keep hoping that over time, as people grow up with diversity in our culture being just a normal fact of life that this will smooth out. But the backlash to this transition from a traditional white dominant American culture to a modern multi-cultural one is fierce and it looks like we’re going to go back and forth between “woke” and “broke” for a while.

Trump skipped a ceremony for fallen soldiers to play golf but don't forget the time Biden did something worse: attended the same ceremony and looked at his watch pic.twitter.com/1uI5sUvAUb

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) April 4, 2025

Yes, Trump went to a golf event at his club in Florida rather than attend the dignified transfer ceremony of the soldiers who died in Lithuania last week. But then they’re just a bunch of suckers and losers so what would we expect?

This is a minor atrocity by comparison to all the major atrocities of the last week but I just had to note it. All the years we’ve had to put up with the right waving the flag and “love it or leave it” and “these colors don’t run” and today they worship a man who could barely even be bothered to mention dead soldiers much less attend the ceremony to receive them back to the United States.

This isn’t a new thing for him. Recall in the first term:

 In the world of President Donald Trump, he has paid his respects to “many, many” returning soldiers killed in the line of duty, with daughter and top presidential aide Ivanka Trump adding that “each time” she has stood by his side at one of these ceremonies, it has hardened his resolve to bring troops home.

In the real world, Trump has traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware exactly four times ― fewer than half as many times as his vice president ― and avoided going at all for nearly two years after getting berated for his incompetence by the father of a slain Navy SEAL, according to a former White House aide who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Bill Owens, the father of William “Ryan” Owens, refused to shake Trump’s hand at that Feb. 1, 2017, encounter, the aide said, and then told Trump that he was responsible for his son’s death for approving the disastrous raid in Yemen without bothering to understand the risks.

“He refused to go back for two years, he was so rattled,” the aide said, adding that the main reason Trump had approved the raid just five days after taking office was that predecessor Barack Obama had refused to do so.

What’s more, Trump made the decision at a social dinner that included his son-in-law and top adviser, Jared Kushner, and then-chief strategist Stephen Bannon, rather than his National Security Council staff.

That’s how he rolls. And he’s getting worse.

He went to jail for Trump and that’s all that matters

They gave Trump a menu of tariffs to choose from and he picked his good buddy Pete’s special recipe:

Not long after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the administration’s economic staff went to work on a daunting task: determining tariff rates for dozens of countries to fulfill the president’s campaign pledge of imposing “reciprocal” trade barriers.

After weeks of work, aides from several government agencies produced a menu of options meant to account for a wide range of trading practices, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Instead, Trump personally selected a formula that was based on two simple variables — the trade deficit with each country and the total value of its U.S. exports, said two of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount internal talks. While precisely who proposed that option remains unclear, it bears some striking similarities to a methodology published during Trump’s first administration by Peter Navarro, now the president’s hard-charging economic adviser. After its debut in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, the crude math drew mockery from economists as Trump’s new global trade war prompted a sharp drop in markets.

Look, it could have been worse. He could have asked Laura Loomer to pick some numbers. Maybe Kanye West or Libs of TikTok.

Inside and outside the White House, advisers say Trump is unbowed even as the world reels from the biggest increase in trade hostilities in a century. They say Trump is unperturbed by negative headlines or criticism from foreign leaders. He is determined to listen to a single voice — his own — to secure what he views as his political legacy.

“He’s at the peak of just not giving a f— anymore,” said a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f—. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”

Speaking of a bad story:

4000 PTS DROP IN TWO DAYS.

$6 TRILLION GONE IN 48 HOURS

And he doesn’t give a fuck.

(Don’t you have somewhere to be?)

Donald Trump had a couple of mentors growing up. His father, Fred, taught him how to evade taxes. Attorney Roy Cohn taught him how to be an apex predator. Rev. Norman Vincent Peale taught young Donald to worship himself and “The Power of Positive Thinking” (1952). Peale officiated at Trump’s first wedding.

Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends & Influence People” (1936) seems not to be a Trump ur-text. Winning friends is not a self-loving, tax-cheating predator’s goal.

The Atlantic‘s Stephanie Bai examines how quickly Canadians unified to oppose a neighbor it once called friend until Donald Trump’s second term. They seem to have found their footing faster than Trump opponents south of the 49th parallel:

On the other side of the border, Americans who oppose Trump have struggled to come up with a unified response to his presidency. In part because of the speed and scale of his directives, it’s been hard to develop a protest message or strategy that is as ubiquitous as the “Buy Canadian” movement. Since January 22, the number of street protests in the U.S. has more than doubled compared with the same period at the start of Trump’s first presidency—but they also tend to be smaller in scale, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium. Jeremy Pressman, a co-director of the organization, told me that disorientation could be a factor affecting protests. Since taking office, Trump has signed off on a flurry of actions that empower ICE to detain and deport people without due process, pave the way for Elon Musk’s shadow presidency, gut the federal government, and grant mass pardons for January 6ers (while also floating the idea of compensating them for their prison time). What should the next protest focus on when so much of American life is under attack?

But bigger protests are not necessarily better, especially when the man living inside the White House’s perimeter fence would like nothing better than to turn a protest that gridlocks D.C. into a live-fire exercise for federal troops. (His SecDef seems open to it.) Thousands of regular, smaller actions across the country may bring neighbors’ defiance closer to Joe Average in Jefferson City, Missouri. They might send a signal that this is what “people like me” do without making protesters easy targets.

Protesting conditions in the U.S. are more fraught than they are in Canada:

Protesters also face an environment especially hostile to dissent. When Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist on a green card, was arrested in New York last month, the government did not provide evidence of illegal activity. And when Rümeysa Öztürk, a graduate student who co-authored an op-ed urging her university to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” had her visa revoked without her knowledge and was confronted by six masked federal agents last week, the Department of Homeland Security stated vaguely that she had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” Their stories are a warning from the Trump administration: Defiance can come at a steep price.

So be careful out there at today’s National Day of Action. Maybe leave your phone at home or turn it off before arriving. Review Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense. Be aware of your surroundings.

* * * * *

Have you fought autocracy today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5 (TODAY)
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Could it be partisan?

Yes, they did:

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A North Carolina appeals court sided Friday with the trailing Republican candidate in an extremely close state Supreme Court election, a ruling that could flip the result of the nation’s only 2024 race that is still undecided.

In a 2-1 decision with registered Republican judges composing the majority, a panel of the intermediate-level Court of Appeals ruled that ballots — likely tens of thousands of them — were wrongly allowed in the tally. But the ruling, if upheld, would give most of those voters a three-week window to provide additional information for their choices to count, or see the ballots get removed.

The disputed ballots are believed to favor Democratic Associate Justice Allison Riggs, who, after two recounts, held a 734-vote lead over Republican Jefferson Griffin in their race, which saw over 5.5 million ballots cast.

I’m busy with multiple projects (one related to this case), so I haven’t fully digested this ruling. But let’s just look at a small piece of the majority opinion (pg. 36):

Finally, as to the “Never Residents” voters, we conclude these purported voters
are not eligible to vote in North Carolina, non-federal elections, and the votes cast by
these purported voters are not to be included in the final count in the 2024 election
for Seat 6.

The judges base that conclusion on cases referencing an independent voter’s (over 18) intent (or not) to return to N.C. Thus, they argue, someone over 18 who cannot prove intent to reserve an address in N.C. is not eligible to claim N.C. as a voting residence or to vote in its state elections. “Residency for an absent, non-dependent, and emancipated adult is not inherited,” they majority writes. But here are the statutes they ignored:

§ 163-258.2. Definitions.
As used in this Article:
(1) “Covered voter” means any of the following:

e. An overseas voter who was born outside the United States, is not described in sub-subdivision c. or d. of this subdivision, and, except for a State residency requirement, otherwise satisfies this State’s voter eligibility requirements, if:

1. The last place where a parent or legal guardian of the voter was, or under this Article would have been, eligible to vote before leaving the United States is within this State; and
2. The voter has not previously registered to vote in any other state.

§ 163‑258.3. Elections covered.

The voting procedures in this Article apply to all of the following:
(1) A primary, general, or special election for federal or State office.

These statute sections protect voters wanting to exercise their rights from overseas. That assumes they are citizens over 18 (and independent if they choose). I’m not a lawyer, but don’t see anything in there about “emancipated” adults affirmatively establishing “a domicile of choice and having no intent to return to North Carolina.” But the court majority thinks that matters despite the black-letter law because black-letter law here is inconvenient. That’s some fine interpretatin’. (The NC statute mirrors the federal (UOCAVA law meant to guarantee the vote to Americans born outside the country but who never lived here.)

Judge Toby Hampson, the Democrat, offers a blistering dissenting opinion.

Why should you care? Because the GOP means to export this approach to overturning elections Republicans lose to your state, that’s why.

* * * * *

Have you fought autocracy today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5 (TODAY)
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Puppies, kittens and a good stiff drink. I have never needed it more.

And make it a double

IF YOU failed to spot America being “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far” or it being cruelly denied a “turn to prosper”, then congratulations: you have a firmer grip on reality than the president of the United States. It’s hard to know which is more unsettling: that the leader of the free world could spout complete drivel about its most successful and admired economy. Or the fact that on April 2nd, spurred on by his delusions, Donald Trump announced the biggest break in America’s trade policy in over a century—and committed the most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era.

“The most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era.”