Donald Trump proved critics right again on Tuesday.
All this time I thought one of strongest motivators for Donald (Mr. Insecurity) Trump’s was to get the world to stop “laughing at us” (him). It’s considered one of the reasons he ran for president after sitting through some skillful mocking at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “Saturday Night Live” comedian Seth Meyers and President Obama (Did you know he’s Black?) both roasted Trump as unserious.
“Donald Trump has been saying he will run for president as a Republican — which is surprising, since I just assumed he was running as a joke,” Meyers jabbed as Trump sat stone-faced.
“That evening of public abasement, rather than sending Mr. Trump away, accelerated his ferocious efforts to gain stature within the political world,” wrote Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns after the 2016 Super Tuesday primaries. “And it captured the degree to which Mr. Trump’s campaign is driven by a deep yearning sometimes obscured by his bluster and bragging: a desire to be taken seriously.”
I’ll show you (and get even, more than even), Trump thought. Now headed into his second term as president after President Joe Biden’s interregnum, Trump means to show the world just how serious he is.
So Trump on Tuesday announced Pete Hegseth, a “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host, as his next secretary of defense. Hegseth has for years hosted host Fox’s New Year’s coverage. No, seriously.
President-elect Donald Trump’s Tuesday night surprise pick of a conservative commentator and television host as his Pentagon chief shocked Washington, which had expected the nominee to be a seasoned lawmaker or someone with defense policy experience.
National security officials and defense analysts had braced for surprises from Trump after experiencing his first four years in office. But even grading on that curve, they say the announcement of Fox News host and decorated Army veteran Pete Hegseth caught them totally off-guard.
“[Trump] puts the highest value on loyalty,” Eric Edelman, who served as the Pentagon’s top policy official during the Bush administration, said in an interview. “It appears that one of the main criteria that’s being used is, how well do people defend Donald Trump on television?”
One assessment was more blunt. “Who the fuck is this guy?” said a defense industry lobbyist who was granted anonymity to offer candid views. The lobbyist said they had hoped for “someone who actually has an extensive background in defense. That would be a good start.”
Yup, that will show ’em. That will stop “them” from laughing at “us.” This guy:
This is Trump's pick for Secretary of Defense, Peter Hegseth.
Wow. Trump picking Pete Hegseth is the most hilariously predictably stupid thing.
— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) November 13, 2024
This means you
Jeff Sharlett dove into Hegseth’s book, “War on Warriors,” and found, per the introduction, Sharlet tweets, that Hegseth believes “the military is anti-white, conquered by a ‘diverse’ ‘infection’ intent on breaking the military–which would be treason. Which justifies the self-declared ‘extremism’ of his response.”
Wondering whether Sec Def Hegseth might be willing to deploy US military against Americans, domestically? Chapter 1 of his new book: 6/ pic.twitter.com/viOQNimXxT
Yeah, when Trump orders him to have troops to shoot protesters in the legs, Hegseth would only ask, “How many times?”
Politico:
The top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, expressed concern that Hegseth doesn’t have the experience to tackle the Pentagon bureaucracy.
“I confess I didn’t know who he was until 20 minutes ago,” Smith told reporters. “And he certainly doesn’t seem to have any background whatsoever in DOD policy.”
He also said he’s concerned about a Pentagon chief without extensive relationships with allies at a time when the U.S. has “a lot of irons in the fire” in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
“I see no evidence that this person has relationships whatsoever with our overseas partners,” Smith said. “How is he going to do when working on the various coalitions that we have?”
Trump doesn’t care so long as Hegseth’s lips are firmly attached to his ass.
Christmas just came early for Moscow, Pyongyang, and Beijing.
[Sorry, server maintenance delayed the post this morning.]
Talk of who will fill President-elect Donald J. Trump’s new Cabinet has already inspired rampant speculation, and a chart of potential picks from CNN revealed “a deep bench of idiots, freaks and wannabe tough guys,” according to John Oliver.
“That chart f—ing sucks,” The Last Week Tonight host said Sunday. “It looks like a ‘choose your fighter’ screen where the only thing they’re fighting is the arc of the moral universe. It looks like an advent calendar where every circle opens up to a tiny piece of literal shit. It looks like a game board for Guess Who? Oops! All a–holes.”
No doubt about it.
I totally identify with this rant by Oliver. No it is not easier. It’s horrible:
John Oliver has a message for people who think his job is easier with Trump as president. pic.twitter.com/tSmyrXVkm7
I don’t think people realize that exit polls are just polls. They’re good, as polls go, because they ask a lot of people what they think and what they voted for on the day of the election. But it takes several months for the numbers crunchers to adjust and analyse the data alongside the actual results and it is often substantially different than what we thought on the morning after the election.
Anyway, Ryan Cooper at the American Prospect suggests that we put our hair shirts in the closet for the time being and deal with the fact that half of the American public has no idea what they’re in for:
Now that Donald Trump has won, again, a furious debate on the left side of the political spectrum has erupted, as Democratic Party factions jostle for position by casting blame on everyone but themselves. For my part, while I can’t help but have some suspicions, it will be six months before we have detailed data on where demographics actually landed, and at time of writing California is not even done counting. Any serious conclusions are premature at this point.
A more interesting conundrum, however, is the maddening fact that Trump paid little or no electoral penalty for his numerous hideously unpopular positions. A developing body of evidence suggests that a critical mass of voters simply did not hear about these positions, or did not believe them if they did. (The most bleak thread in this story are interviews with unauthorized immigrants who say they would have voted for Trump if they could, assuming that surely he would not deport them, as they’re honest and hardworking folks.)
Broadly speaking, it seems this decisive stratum of the electorate (the don’t-knows or those who dismissed Trump’s positions) was dissatisfied with the status quo under President Biden for one reason or another, and cast a protest vote for Trump, assuming things will turn out about as they did during his first term. These people are about to learn the hard way how wrong they were.
He does an excellent run down of the whole agenda and it’s as terrifying as we thought. But he brings up something I haven’t heard mentioned much and it’s truly astonishing:
A more uncertain danger, but perhaps riskiest of all, would be a crypto meltdown leading to a general financial panic. During the campaign, Trump did an about-face and became a big crypto guy because the industry gave him tons of money. Now, the industry is certain to avoid any serious regulation under his watch. And like any Republican, Trump is certain to install Wall Street stooges in the SEC and other regulators.
From a 30,000 foot view, crypto is akin to the pre-New Deal securities market that produced phenomena like the deranged property speculation frenzy in Florida swamps from 1924-26, except without the swamps. It’s pure speculation and nothing else, where every type of financial scam is running rampant, perhaps because the post-2008 wariness about financial gambling has subsided, and young people today having no direct experience of the crash. Crypto fanatics are reacting jubilantly to the Trump victory, with Bitcoin surging well past $80,000 and retail investors flooding into crypto exchange traded funds (ETFs).
We already saw the risks of crypto with the bankruptcy of FTX and several other crypto firms in 2022, brought down by crimes on a Bernie Madoff-esque scale. But many keystone crypto institutions, above all the big stablecoins like Tether that are critical for moving money in and out of crypto, did not collapse during the panic. Tether’s balance sheet is comically suspicious, and even if it weren’t, if the history of finance teaches anything it’s that these kind of institutions always blow themselves up eventually unless government forces them to behave responsibly and protects them from self-fulfilling panics.
Over the last few years crypto haw insinuated itself into the financial system, with big firms like BlackRock offering crypto ETFs (which is also booming). So next year we are likely to have another rapidly inflating crypto bubble with essentially no regulation or oversight, only this time hooked into the normal financial system, with corrupt Trumper goons at the head of all the financial regulators. Even if they manage to bail out the big companies with tons of free taxpayer money, as Bush and Obama did in 2008, millions of regular people are going to lose their shirts.
I will confess that I find the whole crypto thing a bit mystifying and that’ backed up by professionals I know who call it a scam. But the Trump grifter family is all in on it so you can bet we’re not going to see any regulation of it. Good times ahead…
This is the kind of thing I’m going to be focusing on for the moment. I am not interested in self-flagellation and will be looking for better data on what happened in this election as time goes on. I doubt I’ll have any great insights into “what the Democrats have to do,” but I’ll pass on any that I think are worth sharing.
I do think I have some insight on what the Republicans are doing and I will be keeping an eye on all that as I have for the last 9 exhausting years. (Just when I thought I was out, he pulled me back in…)
As Cooper concludes:
This is far from a complete list of the horrors Trump might unleash during his second term. Whatever they turn out to be, it will be critical to pin the blame where it belongs.
People’s views about what elections “mean” are utterly incoherent. If you think this is a mandate, then Obama should have received total deference from the GOP and the media both times!
Quick and dirty GPT-made graph of popular vote for the president by year. Tell me if you can see the mandate!
Bush Jr said he had a mandate and immediately massively cut taxes for the rich. (“I got capital and I’m gonna use it!”) Trump had never heard the word and didn’t know what it meant. Now he’s claiming to have gotten the biggest landsliude victory in world history.
But it wouldn’t matter if he’d been installed by the Supremes like Bush was. He’ll do what he wants. And that’s because mandates are irrelevant to right wingers. Power is the coin of their realm and they will ruthlessly use whatever they have to achieve their goals.
In Scranton on Wednesday, Matt Wolfson, a 45-year-old former construction worker, looked around at poverty in the Rust Belt city and thought the nation needed a change in leadership.
Wolfson said he didn’t love the dictatorial aspect of Trump’s personality, but thought it could help keep the country out of wars and maybe bring peace to some other conflicts, including in Ukraine.
“He’s good and bad. People say he’s a dictator. I believe that. I consider him like Hitler,” Wolfson said. “But I voted for the man.”
I guess he thinks Hitler had his good points? Hey, nobody’s perfect, amirite?
We’re getting a lot of that “look what you made me do” rationale from Trump voters (and frankly quite a few Democrats as well.) If only liberals (aka “vermin”, “scum”, garbage” “low IQ”) didn’t look down on the Real Americans none of this wouldn’t have happened. In fact, I think it’s clear that if only Democrats would just agree with everything Republicans say and do, none of this would have happened.
This is entirely predictable. It’s happened after every Republican win in my lifetime. Interestingly, no navel gazing ever occurs after Democratic victories. Even when they try, as they did after 2012, nobody paid any attention and the press shrugged.
I find that it’s best to just let this work itself out. There are always lessons to be learned but we generally end up more or less back in the same place because the divisions in our country exist regardless, even if we aren’t always as divided (and hostile) as we have been lately. It’s a fight over values, morals, philosophy and ideology and telling people not to make judgments about each other when we seeriously disagree is useless.
Having said that, it’s long been my observation that the right side of the dial really hates the left and the left mostly just doesn’t care much that they are hated. And that’s really the problem. The right consistently tries to be provocative in order to gain attention and it works sometimes but in the end the left just isn’t that interested in their bs. They probably should be but that does not translate to becoming more like them.
I’ve never understood why that’s such a common assumption. Understanding doesn’t mean capitulation. It certainly doesn’t mean agreeing with them. But for too many, that seems to be the first thought.
And then there are those who automatically think that because the country moved right, the obvious response is to go further left. But that’s a story for another post.
Homan: if you're in the country illegally, you shouldn't feel comfortable.. If I'm in some other country illegally, I’m not going to be comfortable. When you enter this country illegally, you have committed a crime, you're a criminal and you're not off the table. pic.twitter.com/wutLfqXNHX
Hannity can see that this (apparently drunk) guy is going to be a nightmare for Republicans, not to mention the country. But there’s nothing he can do.
These people won’t see it coming:
They absolutely don’t think any of Trump’s policies will apply to them. It’s a wild suspension of disbelief.
Watch to the end of this too. These voters are deluded:
A Latino family who voted for Trump speaks out. Not going to lie—this is tough to watch.
SPOILER ALERT: It was about the economy. Trump’s threats of mass deportation didn’t matter to them, as they believe it won’t affect their undocumented relatives, because they aren’t… pic.twitter.com/uh2MrvAObC
Then read this about some undocumented workers who themselves don’t believe they will be deported. Sigh.
I assume that some Latino Trump voters are fine with deporting undocumented immigrants. That’s an old story: pulling the ladder up behind them. But there are an awful lot of stories out there just like these folks who think that if you’re a good person and “haven’t done anything illegal” and happen to be undocumented that they aren’t going to come after you. No. They consider undocumented people to be criminals and they are going to deport them.
Sure they say they’re coming for the gang members “first” but let’s be clear. Gang members and criminals have always been deportable. Nobody’s been sitting around saying, “we really don’t want to arrest MS-13 because they’re refugees.” The point of this is to terrify undocumented people, including DREAMers, by the way. These folks who voted for Trump had better hope their good, law-abiding undocumented relatives don’t get a speeding ticket or need to go to the hospital with appendecitis. If they come into contact with authorities of any kind they’re going to be in big trouble.
If you think they won’t do it, ask yourself if you thought doctors would let women bleed out in parking lots because they were having a miscarriage and they were afraid to give them the care they need because of abortion bans. There are plenty of places in this country that will eagerly help this sadistic monster and his henchmen finger anyone who isn’t in the country legally. Being “good” has nothing to do with it.
And, by the way, those folks in that video who are naturalized citizens? They need to think twice too:
Here in still-purple North Carolina, the 2024 election clock ran out at 7:30 pm last Tuesday. But that doesn’t mean we’re done. We’re in overtime.
The contest to hold the critical seat of state Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs is razor thin and closing as local boards of election count more absentee and provisional ballots. We’re out on the streets urging voters (friendlies, we hope) whose absentee ballots need defects corrected, or who need to present acceptable IDs at their local Board, to git ‘er done. The “curing” deadline is Thursday, close of business.
So I’ve got to get rolling. As pundits from the Church of the Savvy blame Democrats for the American carnage that comes next and treat Donald Trump’s 75 million voters as having clean hands, let Stuart Stevens you offer some reassurance. (You already know what I think.) [Emphasis mine]
I've been involved in winning presidential races and races that lost. One common thread is that everyone seems to have a reason why you won or lost which usually reflects a personal perspective or agenda.
So here's mine: I think VP Harris ran a very good campaign that operated…
I’ve been involved in winning presidential races and races that lost. One common thread is that everyone seems to have a reason why you won or lost which usually reflects a personal perspective or agenda.
So here’s mine: I think VP Harris ran a very good campaign that operated at a high level. She had a great convention, crushed Trump in a debate, and put on a series of big event rallies that were the best I’d ever seen.
As a Republican operative, I spent years pointing out flaws in the Democratic Party and I’m not here to say it doesn’t need to go through a period of questioning and self-reflection. Those are much larger questions than one election and one campaign. But the Republican party is an anti-democratic movement, attacking the pillars of American democracy from elections to the judicial system.
I understand those who say that if there had been a “normal” Democratic primary, the results would have been better. Maybe. But think about it. In modern political history, every time a sitting VP has run for the nomination, that VP has won. Perhaps it would have been different this time and the eventual nominee would have emerged stronger for the process. But more likely there would have been a bloody primary fight that left the nominee broke and trying to patch together a fractured party to face a Republican party that has become Donald Trump’s party. In all probability, VP Harris would have won that primary and been in a weakened and vulnerable position when it was finally resolved in May or June.
I would say to my Democratic friends to go through this post-election process with open minds and hearts but never doubt that the Democratic party is the only pro-democracy party in America. No one will have a position in Trump’s administration who is not an election denier adhering to the Big Lie. That’s toxic to a country’s sense of self and the damage will take a generation to repair, if it is possible to heal.
Losing an election does not mean that you were wrong and they were right. It means you lost an election. I grew up in Mississippi watching my parents back candidates opposed to segregation. When those candidates lost, and they did for a long time, my parents didn’t question if they were on the right side. They didn’t ask themselves if the majority who supported segregation had proven the justness of their cause by winning.
The mid-terms start after the Super Bowl. It will likely be a good election for Democrats and then the 2028 presidential race will be upon us. After a loss, the days seem long but the months will pass quickly. Reflect, rest up, but come back prepared to fight. Fight not because victory is assured but fight because not to fight is to give up. And if we do that, we no longer deserve to call ourselves Americans. Read less
I started my day by texting the voters with defective absentees who weren’t home when I dropped by yesterday. See you tomorrow.
“Blinded by the Right,” David Brock’s memoir of his time as a conservative operative contains anecdotes on Grover Norquist, the anti-tax radical (by G.W. Bush-era standards), once considered “field marshal of the Bush plan.” Among them, his fondness for rhetoric like Lenin’s “probe with bayonets, looking for weakness.” Lenin’s portrait hung in Norquist’s Washington living room, Brock writes. And another: “Grover Norquist sent out an invitation to a post election party at his Capitol Hill home. Quoting from the movie Conan the Barbarian, it said: ‘TO CRUSH ENEMIES, SEE THEM DRIVEN BEFORE YOU, AND HEAR THE LAMENTATIONS OF THEIR WOMEN.'” Brock added the all-caps.
Norquist was tame by standards of the first Donald Trump administration. That was the Trump who deployed tear gas and rubber bullets outside the White House to clear the streets for a photo-op. His generals convinced him shooting protesters in the legs was uncool.
Trump 2.0 really does mean to deport millions. Tom Homan, his incoming Border Czar and Project 2025 author, doesn’t need Janine Melnitz answering his phone and saying, yes, of course, they’re serious.
Stephen Miller proves that only in America can a young Jewish boy grow up to be a degenerate Nazi.
Michele Goldberg suggests you consider Trump’s first staff picks if you thought he wasn’t serious. The column’s photo is Trump adviser, Stephen Miller. He always looks out of place without an SS uniform and cap with a death’s head:
In a speech to this year’s National Conservatism Conference, Homan, who oversaw Trump’s family separation policy, promised a “historic deportation operation” from which no undocumented immigrant would be safe. “No one’s off the table in the next administration,” he said. “If you’re here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.”
Then, on Monday, Trump named the obsessively anti-immigrant Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff. Miller’s portfolio, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in The Times, “is expected to be vast and to far exceed what the eventual title will convey.” Miller has been forthright about his desire to purge immigrants here illegally, as well as many here legally, from the United States.
Among other things, Miller has said that Trump would cancel the temporary protected status of thousands of Afghans who fled here after the Taliban’s takeover and take another stab at ending DACA, the program that protects from deportation some immigrants brought to the United States as children.
Most significantly, he’s laid out plans to use National Guard troops to help arrest migrants en masse, warehousing them in military camps while they await deportation. No one should be shocked when this happens. I suspect some will be anyway.
Norquist was darkly joking. Guys like Miller and Homan really do look forward to hearing the lamentations of the women.
Rounding up and deporting the undocumented and refugees is just until Miller and Homan get around to denaturalizing the rest who “unlawfully obtained citizenship” or don’t meet their approval.
Here’s the lede from that 2020 piece Miller referenced by Katie Benner:
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said Wednesday that it had created an official section in its immigration office to strip citizenship rights from naturalized immigrants, a move that gives more heft to the Trump administration’s broad efforts to remove from the country immigrants who have committed crimes.
The president’s friends (Elon Musk), of course, will get a pass.
Introducing today’s “The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent,” Sargent writes:
During the campaign, Donald Trump openly advertised that as president, he’ll use the state to retaliate against his enemies in every way he can. Now The New York Times reports that some of his advisers are urging him to absolutely make good on that threat. And right on cue, Trump erupted on social media, calling for investigations into people supposedly spreading false rumors about his intention to sell shares of his Truth Social—a revealing indicator of the types of abuses of power that we can expect from a second Trump term.
New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser offers Sargent an image of the Trump 2.0 that we didn’t need:
For someone like Donald Trump—and for all administrations, but particularly for Trump—personnel is policy in effect.
And you’re alluding to this very chilling interview that I had with a former very senior national security official who spent a lot of time in the Oval Office with Trump himself, who told me not long after Trump’s term ended, that this person viewed Trump as the velociraptors in the first Jurassic Park movie. You remember the children run to hide from the velociraptors in the kitchen and they think they’re safe because they’re behind the locked door, and then click, they hear the door handle turn because the velociraptor has learned how to open the door. They’ve learned how to adapt while hunting their prey. The point was Trump understands far better what’s needed to have an administration and a White House that does his bidding rather than having people around him who saw themselves as guardrails against his own inclinations.
Those who held in check Trump’s blacker impulses won’t be around to stop him after January 20. Republicans on the Hill won’t lift a finger to stop him, and the Supreme Court’s given him near-complete immunity.
Glasser adds:
Remember that in his first term in office, Donald Trump would go around, he would go to events … He spoke at an event, for example, in the summer of 2019 in which he literally said, The Constitution gives me the power to do anything I want. So he already believed that even before this immunity decision and it’s quite possible that Trump will pick various fights, because that’s what he does in any role that he’s ever been in, and then say, Here, I’ve gone very, very far out on a limb because who’s going to stop me? Who’s going to stop me?
And Trump willl be working from a template handed him by his pal in Moscow:
My husband and I were correspondents [in Russia] in the first few years of Putin’s term, and Putin moved with extraordinary speed and focus to dismantle the fledgling institutions of Russian democracy. That has been the template and the playbook for other would-be authoritarians who are working within a democratic system. The speed and rapidity with which Trump can make very big changes in our system has been an under-appreciated aspect that I think is now going to kick in.
I’m very sure we are all not going to appreciate what comes out of Trump 2.0. It’s Trump’s enemies and immigrants who will not appreciate it first.
I have already written about the incumbent rout all over the world theory. I’m persuaded that was probably the main driver of this election. It’s just sad that the Republicans are so far gone that they put up their previous loser, a convicted felon who attempted a coup d’etat, but that’s how we roll here in ‘Murica. We are so exceptional.
I think the second point is just obvious. We have never had a woman president and a rank misogynist brute beat the two that we have managed to nominate. The racism is as American as apple pie and you don’t have to be a political scientist to know that it has an effect.
But the third reason is something I think we need to explore much further. Our mediaecosystem is in deep, deep trouble and regardless of the macro political influences, we are going to be under threat of this fascist movement.
Michael Tomasky at The New Republic wrote a very good piece on this. He notes that people are rightfully stunned that we would elect someone like Trump. Didn’t they know how unfit he is? And why didn’t they?
The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.
Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.
If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.
I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails.) But in the late 1990s, and after the Internet exploded and George W. Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media grew as well along with the Internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting web sites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, VC-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google starting eating up the revenue pie.
And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.
This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.
He rightly observes that this is why Trump won and why he exists in politics in the first place.
In fact, I think Trump isn’t even a political figure at all. He’s a celebrity cult leader. And the right wing media is what makes him accessible to the fan base.
Tomasky asks you to imagine Trump winning if there were no Fox News and all we had was The NY Times and Walter Cronkite. It’s very hard to imagine. In fact, he suggests that if that had been the case, the Republicans, as they have done in the past, would have banded together to put him away.
But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence, but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015-16, Fox made Trump possible.
And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him. I discussed all this Thursday with Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America, who watches lots of Fox News so the rest of us don’t have to. He made the crucial point—and you must understand this—that nearly all the crazy memes that percolated into the news-stream during this election came not from Trump or JD Vance originally, but from somewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem.
Trump and MAGA are creatures of the rightwing media ecosystem not the other way around. It’s not that there’s some super talented “messaging” team that understands exactly how to reach all those Trump voters with what they want to hear. Their right wing media (and their audiences) are telling them what they want to hear.
And what did they know about Harris and Trump?
I asked Gertz what I call my “Ulan Bator question.” If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? “You would know that she is a very stupid person,” Gertz said. “You’d know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you.”
Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he’s been “the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years,” that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is “doing it all for you.”
As he points out, this is just what millions of people believe is “the news” and describes how they are absorbing it at home, work and in their commute. And I would add that Trump has also indoctrinated them to believe that anything else they hear is “fake.” So even if they happen to come upon reality, they simply don’t believe it.
This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.
Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.
Terrifyingly, they are just getting started. They are hoovering up newspapers everywhere with their eyes on the last of our papers of record. They want total dominance and they have the money to buy it. Just look at what Musk has done with twitter.
He says, “Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it’s too late, which it almost is.”But just look how the publishers of the LA Times and the Washington Post behaved in the run up to the election seeing how close it was going to be. And the weird sanewashing of Trump in the NY Times throughout the campaign. They were cowards. I wouldn’t expect much from them.
So who is going to do this? I honestly don’t know. Tomasky mentions the social media platforms only in passing but I think they are even more of a concern. And that’s where I suspect the opposition may be able to make some inroads. New media is still being created and there are plenty of directions it can go that could benefit the opposition and be accessible by people who don’t get their information through the press. Like Tomasky, I hope that people are thinking about this because between the disinformation, propaganda, oligarchical interests and authoritarian motivations we could be looking at a very bleak future beyond Trump.
