Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who’s supported this site this year. It’s a validation of the work we put into it and I appreciate it so much. It appears that indy media, however small, is going to be more important than ever in these next few years. Thanks to you, we’ll be here doing our best to make sense of it all.

I don’t honestly know what most people care about anymore but I do know that some of us still find Trump’s attempted coup one of the most shocking events we’ve ever witnessed. A president inciting a mob to storm the Capitol during a joint session of Congress to overturn the presidential election is the most destabilizing event in recent memory. That we’ve put that president back in the White House is a very disturbing sign that this country has lost its moorings.

Trump discussed his plans to pardon the insurrectionists in his recent TIME Magazine interview:

Well, we’re going to look at each individual case, and we’re going to do it very quickly, and it’s going to start in the first hour that I get into office. And a vast majority of them should not be in jail. A vast majority should not be in jail, and they’ve suffered gravely. And I say, why is it that in Portland and in many other places, Minneapolis, why is it that nothing happened with them and they actually caused death and destruction at levels not seen before? So you know, if you take a look at what happened in Seattle, you had people die, you had a lot of death, and nothing happened, and these people have been treated really, really badly. Yeah, it’s an important issue for me. They’ve suffered greatly, and in many cases they should not have suffered.

Trump doesn’t care about much and he certainly doesn’t feel as if he has to reward anyone. But these people were loyal to him and they did what he wanted them to do. To the extent he is capable of caring about anyone beyond himself, I think he cares about them. It’s almost certain that he’s going to do it.

Dan Pfeiffer took a look at the political ramifications of this decision should he do it. He says it would be a case of historic malpractice:

Despite Donald Trump’s election, people are not okay with what happened on January 6th. A Data for Progress poll from January 2024 found that nearly three-quarters of voters believe that those involved in storming the Capitol did the wrong thing. More than 60% believe what happened on that day was a “violent insurrection,” and only 16% believe it was a “peaceful protest.” Accounting for the whole poll, it’s clear that only about a third of Republicans believed Trump’s arguments about the assault on the Capitol.

An Ipsos poll from earlier this month found that 61% of Americans disapprove of Trump pardoning people who were convicted of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. More than six in ten Republicans support the pardons, which is alarmingly high and doesn’t bode well for our two-party system. However, now should be the apex of Donald Trump’s political power. He just won 94% of Republican voters, yet only 61% of Republicans approve of the pardons.

He points out that no polling anywhere thinks this should be a priority. And he believes this presents an opportunity for Democrats:

According to the exit polls, Trump won 9% of voters with an unfavorable opinion of him. None of these voters will be surprised when Trump says offensive things, stomps on previously sacred norms, or lies. The less politically engaged Trump voters aren’t fully aware of the breadth of the Trump agenda, including the details of Project 2025, but they knew the bet they were making. They were willing to take a chance on Trump if he addressed prices and the border (with prices being a much greater part of the equation).

If Trump’s first act is to pardon convicted criminals, some of whom violently attacked police officers, that is a violation of the deal he made with voters. We need to juxtapose everything he does with a failure to address prices. Every moment pardoning a rioter or seeking retribution against his political enemies is a moment not spent lowering the cost of gas and groceries. As Trump admitted in his Time Magazine interview, prices are unlikely to come down; and when prices stay high, it’s because Trump and the Republicans are focused on helping themselves and their political allies rather than helping American families.

I could not agree with him more. Whether it will make a difference I don’t know but as I wrote earlier, that comment in the same TIME interview about lowering costs being “hard” after his repeated promises to do so should be hung around his neck every time he does anything else. If Democrats can do nothing else (and it increasingly appears that they can’t) they can do this much. Hammer the price of eggs over and over and over again the minute he gets into office and remind everyone that he said the price of everything, housing, rents, cars, eggs etc., was going to go down. It’s literally the easiest political rhetoric on the planet.

I know I’m going to keep doing it and if regular people do this on social media maybe some of the Democrats and serious pundits will do it too. One of Donald Trump’s true insights about modern politics was that repetition is necessary to push any ideas through the information vortex.

I hope you enjoy the fact that Tom Sullivan and I spend a ridiculous amount of time picking through all the great analysis and information out there and try to synthesize it into accessible and (hopefully) entertaining ways. If you do, I’d be grateful if you could put a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking this season.

Hang in there everybody. We’ll get through this if we stick together.

Cheers,

digby

And Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Public Notice’s Noah Berlatsky analyzed Trump’s TIME interview so I didn’t have to. It truly is astonishing that he is apparently considered some sort of political savant considering how incoherent he is. Here’s an excerpt of the Public Notice piece:

To quote from our analysis of his previous Time interview, “even after four years as president, Trump has virtually no grasp on any policy issue beyond empty talking points, most of which are lies.” And he ain’t changing.

Even when Trump is trying to sound reasonable, he’s hampered by the fact that his knowledge of issues never goes deeper than talking points. Perhaps even worse, he’s clearly in thrall to the world’s worst conspiracy theorists and authoritarian rulers.

Obviously, his admission that it’s “hard” to bring down prices is the takeaway from this interview and Berlatsky gives it the full treatment, But there’s more. Here he was on abortion:

I’m not sure he even knows what the abortion pill is but he most certainly was not “strongly against” stopping it. Right now he’s struggling to appear “presidential” so he thinks he’s being moderate but it’s pretty clear he really doesn’t give a damn about reproductive rights and as a result will very likely allow his right wing zealots to have their way.

Berlatsky writes that Trump is weirdly trying to distance himself from the harsh transgender stance he took on the campaign trail. This is a man who ran vicious ads against trans people on a loop and said daily that schools were performing gender reassignment surgery against the parents’ wishes! But here he is dismissing the issue as

Cute. He goes into Trump’s discussion of Ukraine and Israel in which he proves once again that he is completely uneducated on the subject and has no interest in learning anything about it. It’s all about how it “never would have happened” if he had been president and that it will all stop once he is simply because he declares that it will or very bad things will happen. Same old same old.

He went on and on about expelling immigrants and as Berlatsky writes, he talked about how he would punish any foreign country that refuses to accept them:

Time also asked Trump where he would send migrants if their home countries do not want to accept them. He tried to dodge, saying “I’ll get them into every country, or we won’t do business with those countries.” But when pressed, he acknowledged he might in fact might have to build concentration camps to house them.

“I don’t care,” he said. “Whatever it takes to get them out.”

“I don’t care” is not generally what you want to hear from a president, especially when he’s discussing plans to conduct militarized deportation raids in parts of the country that don’t want them. But based on this interview, and on the entire rest of his political career, “I don’t care” does seem to sum up Trump’s approach to most issues that don’t directly involve puffing up his ego.

After a decade at the center of Republican and American politics, Trump continues to barely pretend to understand the broad outlines, much less the nuances, of his own agenda. When he talks about abortion, or tariffs, or trans people, or concentration camps, or Ukraine, or Gaza, he cheerfully flatters himself and talks about how great he’s going to make everything. But he offers few policy details, and when he does, those details are almost always conspiracy theories and lies.

By contrast here’s a 15 minute interview with the president everyone says is demented. Joe Biden is no Barack Obama or Bill Clinton when it comes to oratory or political analysis. But he’s not Donald Trump either. It’s amazing that America hates this man and loves the addled weirdo who clearly has no idea what he’s talking about.

It’s a damn shame Joe Biden isn’t getting a second term.

Watch him actually answer questions like an adult with depth—then compare it to Trump’s word salads. The downgrade is almost comical.pic.twitter.com/czlHEThc8e

— Chris D. Jackson (@ChrisDJackson) December 18, 2024

It looks like Kash Patel isn’t the only one implementing the vengeance agenda and Russ Vought won’t be the only ones demanding total loyalty in the executive branch. Others are helping with the dirty work:

Staffers working for the DOGE duo, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have contacted some of Trump’s first-term cabinet secretaries and asked them to prepare two lists of people they served with: one for political appointees and the other for career officials. The listmakers are then to write an “A” by the names of those they believe Trump should bring back or keep, and a “B” by the names of those they think should be blacklisted or fired.

Of course, civil servants (the career officials) are typically protected from political raids at agencies, but Trump has vowed to use Schedule F, an executive order that would make them fireable—and these plans for mass layoffs will almost certainly wind up before the courts.

I would have thought those two would be huddled over spreadsheets and policy papers deciding the BIG QUESTION of how to slash a third of the government in the first year. Spending time figuring out which members of the last administration were disloyal to Dear Leader seems a bit trivial for the DOGE. But then Musk seems to be spending most of his time socializing at Mar-a-Lago so it’s hard to say what they’re really doing.

By the way, Musk isn’t content with meddling in American government. He’s got his sights set on the UK too. (And he’s hosting his own events at MAL, apparently.)

As rumors swirl that Musk is planning to throw his wealth behind the UK's right wing, Nigel Farage was hosted by the MAGA billionaire at Mar-a-Lago.https://t.co/JDU0HunCUV

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) December 17, 2024

Farage is the face of Brexit which is very unpopular now. I wonder if Musk’s big bucks can get him over the top like they did Trump? Does his massive wealth make him believe he can take over the world? It kind of looks that way…

Nancy Mace says she is concerned that the drone sightings off NJ is either aliens from another planet or Russia/Iran/China searching for a missing nuclear warhead. pic.twitter.com/Uf6GiEm84v

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 17, 2024

"Something strange is going on" — Trump suggests that the government is covering up that the "drones" over New Jersey are actually UFOs pic.twitter.com/1ii7Lu9QUe

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 16, 2024

These are elected GOP officials. They are not fake tweets.

How many Democrats does it take to change a light bulb?

Lefties’ fondness for novelty goes only so far. Democrats are policy liberals (sort of) and campaign conservatives. Party culture is built around seniority and whose “turn” it is to move up the organizational ladder. There is ageism in that, but also resistance to generational change. (I wrote about our local changing of the guard a few years back.) That’s visible in real time in the contest for ranking member of the House Oversight Committee between Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.).

Politico:

House Democrats have solidified the generational shake-up at the top of their committees, after significant behind-the-scenes influence from both current and former leaders of the caucus.

The caucus faced tough races for the Agriculture, Oversight and Natural Resources Committees. Rep. Angie Craig (Minn.) won the nod for the top party spot on Agriculture, beating incumbent Rep. David Scott (Ga.), who’d faced long-standing questions about his health, and Rep. Jim Costa (Calif.). Rep. Gerry Connolly (Va.) won the Oversight recommendation over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.). And Rep. Jared Huffman (Calif.) earned the nod for the Natural Resources Committee against Rep. Melanie Stansbury (N.M.) after Rep. Raúl Grijalva (Ariz.) stepped down.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.) is also poised to take the top Democratic spot on the Judiciary Committee, though Steering will now take votes on uncontested panel spots on Tuesday.

AOC did not win the recommendation during a Monday meeting of the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee (Axios):

What we’re hearing: Connolly defeated Ocasio-Cortez 34 to 27 on Monday, according to multiple lawmakers present.

• Ocasio-Cortez said after the vote that she will continue to contest the role when it goes to a vote of the full caucus.

Democrats’ interest in change goes only so far.

A friend observed pithily, post-election, “Any Dem leader or consultant who blames the party for turning a deaf ear to the working class, of being too elite, is not to be trusted. Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester lost their well-earned, populist seats to carpetbaggers, monied grifters.”

Yet Democrats who have spent long careers on Capitol Hill still insist the key to winning elections is more focus on kitchen table issues in a political era fueled by right-wing billionaires and the disinformation ecosystems they (not the RNC) constructed over decades. Nonetheless, “kitchen table issues” might as well be Democratic catechism in an age in which politics isn’t really politics anymore.

Democratic power-players in Raleigh two years ago lined up to reelect the incumbent state chair (a former state legislator). Under her tenure, Democrats left 40 percent of legislative seats uncontested. Democrats also lost two state supreme court seats. The new Republican majority swiftly overturned the previous court’s ruling establishing representative congressional districts and allowed the GOP-controlled legislature to draw three more congressional seats for Republicans. Yup, leading state Democrats wanted to reelect that chair over feisty 25-year-old Anderson Clayton, the eventual winner and soon media darling.

Wonder of wonders, David Graham wrote in The Atlantic on Nov. 7: Democrats Actually Had Quite a Good Night in North Carolina.

Organizers believe change has to come from the gound up. We changed the guard in our county almost 20 years ago. The guard changed in Raleigh two years ago. It’s only now changing on Capitol Hill. And at that, slowly.

Thank you sharing this Sanctuary of Sanity with us each day.
Happy Hollandaise!

They obey the call

How many times have “Twilight Zone” references popped into your head lately? These times are as surreal as they are threatening. Except there’s no Rod Serling to offer a pithy observation on the human condition or to offer a moral coda to each day’s news. For those among the uninfected, there is only a collective shaking of heads, a silent prayer, at the behavior of MAGA millions, titans of industry, and newsies genuflecting before the Great Orange Oz.

Witnessing this “Great Capitulation,” Michelle Goldberg writes:

Different people have different reasons for falling in line. Some may simply lack the stomach for a fight or feel, not unreasonably, that it’s futile. Our tech overlords, however liberal they once appeared, seem to welcome the new order. Many hated wokeness, resented the demands of newly uppity employees and chafed at attempts by Joe Biden’s administration to regulate crypto and A.I., two industries with the potential to cause deep and lasting social harm. There are C.E.O.s who got where they are by riding the zeitgeist; they can pivot easily from mouthing platitudes about racial equity to slapping on a red MAGA hat.

Are they really falling at his feet driven by calculated, economic self-interest? Or are they entranced by power, like the Eloi by the Morlocks’ sirens? Since the launch of this republic there have been among us those who wish to rule and freedom-and-liberty types who in their hearts yearn to be subjects. In Trumpism, both are having a moment. The situation is, at minimum, a dark signal of what lies ahead until (and if) American good sense resurfaces.

Goldberg sees it too:

Collectively, all these elite decisions to bow to Trump make it feel like the air is going out of the old liberal order. In its place will be something more ruthless and Nietzschean.

Gary Legum of Wonkette watched a Trump press conference on Monday and marvels at the reporters filing into Trump’s gilded lair (like the Eloi or ABC News) to be eaten:

Which brings us back to our original thought as we watched the media let Trump steamroll over it as he has for a decade. And that is how absurd it is that reporters still, still, after all this time, troop into these rooms with Trump like a bunch of lemmings, knowing they will be lied to, knowing they will be berated and threatened and insulted, and dutifully write it all down without standing up for themselves and their profession.

[…]

We watched four years of such scenes during Trump’s first term, and we find it unreal that we will be watching the same sorts of spectacles for another four. We can’t believe we get another four years of White House reporters scribbling down Trump’s rambling horseshit without noting that Trump has always rambled through every press conference and interview, and that 95 percent of the stuff he promises never happens.

Imagine if you will — and you won’t strain doing it — little Donny standing before the class, bullshitting his way through another oral report on a book he hasn’t read. He boldly utters vague generalities disconnected from the novel in his stubby fingers and, with the long experience of moneyed privilege, expects everyone listening to buy it like Trump Bibles or Eau de Trump.

Thank you sharing this Sanctuary of Sanity with us each day.
Happy Hollandaise!

Trump only cares about his agenda of deportation, revenge, tariffs and personal profits. He’s fine with Elon doing whatever as long as it doesn’t interfere with his own agenda. The Daily Beast reported in his last term that when pressed about the rising deficit, he would say:

“Yeah, but I won’t be here,” the president bluntly said, according to a source who was in the room when Trump made this comment during discussions on the debt.

The episode illustrates the extent of the president’s ambivalence toward tackling an issue that has previously animated the Republican Party from the days of Ronald Reagan to the presidency of Barack Obama.

But for those who have worked with Trump, it was par for the course. Several people close to the president, both within and outside his administration, confirmed that the national debt has never bothered him in a truly meaningful way, despite his public lip service. “I never once heard him talk about the debt,” one former senior White House official attested.

He never talked about it when he ran for reelection both times either. I have to believe that he’s appeasing his new best friend, the richest man in the world, but he really does not care about the debt because he knows that he’ll be out of office, possibly dead, if all these worst case scenarios come to pass (which they probably won’t.)

The Muskswamy commission is looking to recommend massive, unprecedented cuts to the entire government including the so-called entitlements. Many GOP members of Congress are excited at the prospect of finally getting that done. Whether that happens with that very tight margin in the House is another story. And there are people in his orbit absolutely determined to fire federal government workers (or force them out some other ways) and they may make some headway but it isn’t quite as easy as they think.

The one thing that gives me hope is Trump’s narcissism preventing him from caring enough to put any of his clout behind this stuff. It’s all about him and these are not his issues.

He wants his tax cuts to be extended and expanded because that puts money in his own pockets. He wants to put on a big deportation show although how extensive that will be is up in the air. He wants to use tariffs to bully and intimidate other countries but he’s too stupid to understand that they have power to do the same thing and it’s going to blow up in his face. If he succeeds in doing all these things the economic consequences will be extreme but I have a sneaking suspicion that his undeniable ability to lie and have people believe him will allow him to not go to the extremes on those issues and just say that he did. (“See, promises made promises kept and everything worked out fine!”) Our completely fragmented and ineffectual information ecosystem will allow him to get away with it.

As for his desire to get revenge on his enemies and profit from the presidency, I think he might just get that done, at least to some extent. Nobody cares about the corruption so he can just write himself checks from the US Treasury or steal the White House silver and get away with it. As for the vengeance agenda, I imagine his administration will do many things to make his enemies pay, from IRS audits to lawsuits to criminal investigations, costing his targets dearly. I don’t know if we will ever reach that “at long last sir, have you no decency” moment because I’m not sure our society is really concerned with decency at the moment.

But in the end, I do believe that his own ignorance, laziness and narcissism may be the tool that saves us. He’ll get his pet issues and steal massive sums of money. But I don’t think there is quite enough bandwidth in this rogues gallery of neo fascists, D-list pols and egomaniacs to get their agenda passed as well. I may very well be wrong, though. It wouldn’t be the first time.

The AP reports:

A former FBI informant pleaded guilty on Monday to lying about a phony bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden and his son Hunter that became central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress.

[…]

Smirnov will get credit for the time he has served since his February arrest on charges that he told his FBI handler that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had paid President Biden and Hunter Biden $5 million each around 2015.

Smirnov had been an informant for more than a decade when he made the explosive allegations about the Bidens in June 2020, after “expressing bias” about Joe Biden as a presidential candidate, prosecutors said.

[…]

No evidence has emerged that Joe Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes as president or in his previous office as vice president.

While Smirnov’s identity wasn’t publicly known before the indictment, his claims played a major part in the Republican effort in Congress to investigate the president and his family, and helped spark a House impeachment inquiry into Biden. Before Smirnov’s arrest, Republicans had demanded the FBI release the unredacted form documenting the unverified allegations, though they acknowledged they couldn’t confirm if they were true.

During a September 2023 conversation with investigators, Smirnov also claimed the Russians probably had recordings of Hunter Biden because a hotel in Ukraine’s capital where he had stayed was “wired” and under their control — information he said was passed along to him by four high-level Russian officials.

But Hunter Biden had never traveled to Ukraine, according to Smirnov’s indictment.

Smirnov claimed to have contacts with Russian intelligence-affiliated officials, and told authorities after his arrest this year that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about Hunter Biden.

Nobody seems to care that James Comer and the House Oversight Committee spent years pursuing this nonsense. They’ve moved on to haranguing Biden for pardoning Hunter so it’s all water under the bridge.

If you want to know where they get their information,here’s the breakdown:
YouTube 90%
TikTok 63%
Instagram 61%
Snapchat 55%
Facebook 32% (down from 71%)
WhatsApp 23%
X 17% (down from 33%)
Reddit 14%
Threads 6%

I have to wonder about the Youtube use. It could just be music or some other very specific interest there but if they ever get caught up in something and go down the Youtube rabbit hole it’s very dangerous. That site is full of disinformation and it’s very compellingly presented.

I don’t know what to do about it exactly. YouTube is extremely valuable. I use it constantly myself. But if you don’t know what you’re looking at it can be disorienting and destructive. I use Tik Tok much less, but I go there enough to see how much fun it is and understand why the kids like it so much. And from what I gather it’s full of disinformation too.

If we weren’t working overtime to destroy the education system we might try something like this:

Being able to identify hoaxes, avoid scams and debunk propaganda is a civic skill required in today's information society. That's why the curriculum of students in Finland includes media literacy lessons, aimed at safeguarding a precious resource: the truth.

Correspondent Chris… pic.twitter.com/wRTLxAW5Hg

— CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 (@CBSSunday) September 29, 2024

Once again, thanks to everyone who has contributed so far to our annual Happy Hollandaise fundraiser. It’s reassuring to know that people value what we do here and want us to continue as we face the next year of difficult challenges. I am so appreciative of your continued encouragement and support.

As I contemplate the next year of covering politics, I can’t help but think about our probable new FBI Director Kash Patel’s famous declaration:

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.” — Kash Patel, future FBI Director.

Trump just showed one of those tactics is already working with that ABC settlement of 15 million and a forced apology from Trump nemesis George Stephanopoulos. It’s ugly.

This morning he held a press conference and indicated that he expect to do more of this and it appears he thinks it will work:

Trump says he plans to sue Ann Selzer and the newspaper in Iowa that published her poll showing Trump losing just days before the election pic.twitter.com/ujSmW3GTTM

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 16, 2024

Q: I want to expand on the defamation lawsuits. Could you see moving that to other people with individual platforms, social media influencers–

TRUMP: Or newspapers. Yeah. Oh, I do. I do. I think you have to do it. pic.twitter.com/qQifFRjRNh

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 16, 2024

He has sued for defamation before and lost. But he seems to think, perhaps correctly, that he has the media on the run. This ABC capitulation sends a strong message that it’s best to play ball and you can imagine that plenty of corporate media leaders want their people to go easy right now. The zeitgeist seems to be that Trump is a colossus who must be appeased.

I suspect that independent media is going to be more important than ever. We’re looking at a period of tremendous stress on the information ecosystem with massive disinformation and propaganda programs, the right wing media encroaching on all public spheres, big money manufacturing Trump friendly press for its own purposes and the degradation of the kind of traditional media that might have operated outside all of this. The ability to find out the truth and make rational decisions for ourselves and our country as a democracy is very tenuous right now.

We’ll keep fighting the good fight here, spending our time seeking out the truth as we see it. There’s an awful lot to sort through these days but it is possible to do it if you have the time and the experience to cut through the bullshit. Here at Hullabaloo we’ve been at this a while and although we’re hardly perfect, we have pretty well honed BS detectors.

If you think it’s valuable to have independent analysis and a view of our politics from beyond the beltway, I hope you’ll throw a few coins into the Hullabaloo stocking if you can. But even if you don’t, please stop by from time to time. We are here seven days a week trying to make sense of this crazy world.

Keep the faith.

cheers,

digby