And welcome to our annual celebration of the Great War on Christmas
Yes, it’s that time of year again when we all eat too many goodies, wear ugly sweaters and pose with Santa Claus alongside our semi-automatic weapons. It’s Christmas time in America.
And here at Hullabaloo it’s the time of year I ask you, my loyal readers, to put a little something into the old stocking to keep us going for yet another year.
I think you all know how vital political information is right now. In fact, it’s never been more vital. Back when I was a young person, the biggest problem for most Americans was trying to wade through the conventional wisdom of the establishment media to find out the truth of what our government was really doing. That’s still an issue today but in the last few years we’ve had to confront the overwhelming problem of cacophonous propaganda bombarding us from every direction via our now ubiquitous social media. It is very hard to sort through it all, even for me and I have no life!
Take this, for instance, from just this past weekend:
You can say this is just fringe, and it should be. But this kind of thing is filtering into the mainstream of American life in truly disturbing ways, sometimes helped by the mainstream media that doesn’t always know that it’s enabling the authoritarian right wing movement that’s benefiting from all this. The feeling of chaos this is creating is is the reason so many people are freaked out and may be looking for a strongman to fix it.
For reasons I will never understand, many of them seem to believe that Donald Trump, the make-up wearing, hairspray addled, narcissistic blowhard — the man who thought injecting disinfectant might cure COVID — is the guy we need to do it. Again, this is due to propaganda and the failure of the media, at least until recently, to recognize what’s happening and take action to inform the public.
But if you’ve been reading this site, you know better. We have been pounding on this threat since January 21, 2021 knowing that Trump’s exile to his Mar-a-Lago beach club was temporary and that he would be back with a vengeance in 2024. Literally.
As we enter the crucible of this epic election year, it’s never been more important to sort through the lies and the propaganda that comes across our screens. My morning man Tom and I aren’t perfect in our ability to see through all of it but after doing this for so many years we have pretty good bullshit detectors. We will follow this god-forsaken news cycle closely seven days a week and try to analyze and synthesize the important political stories along with those that add context and color to help all of us get through this fraught time.
I still feel confident that the American people are not going to put that sociopath back into the White House, despite the current polling. But it’s going to be a tough fight. If you can, I hope you will help us keep this site going for another year so that we can continue the mission.
I can’t tell you what your support has meant to me over the past years. If you can do it this year, it would mean the world.
cheers,
digby
And Happy Hollandaise everyone. We’ll get through this!
U.S. Presidents have been accused by their political rivals of wanting to be kings or dictators ever since the very beginning of the Republic. It’s even a charge that’s had some merit from time to time. In 1800 Thomas Jefferson charged John Adams with acting like a king when he expanded federal power and passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which basically made it a crime to criticize the government. But Adams lost his re-election and gracefully conceded, establishing the tradition of the peaceful transfer of power that until very recently was observed by every president.
Then there was Andrew Jackson whom his critics assailed as a would-be king for wielding his veto pen for political purposes and challenging the primacy of the Supreme Court to decide constitutional matters, among other things. But he too left peacefully after eight years. Abraham Lincoln was repeatedly accused of being a dictator during the Civil War for implementing numerous extreme measures including the suspension of habeas corpus and the jailing of journalists. And in the 20th century both wartime presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were called dictators for expanding the powers of the presidency. Roosevelt even ran for four terms, precipitating the 21st Amendment after he died limiting future presidents to only two.
A few years back, President George W. Bush jokingly said, “If this were a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier… as long as I’m the dictator” but except for that quip I don’t think there’s any example of a president or someone running for president actually saying that he planned to be a dictator … until Donald Trump. Not that anyone should be surprised by that. He is, after all, the president who plotted a coup to stay in office and fomented an insurrection to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power.
Last week, Fox News’ Sean Hannity asked Trump a simple question: “Do you in any way have any plans whatsoever have any plans if you are re-elected president to abuse power, to break the law, to use the government to go after people” and Trump said, “like they are doing now” and went on to talk about how he’s been indicted more than one of the greatest criminals of all time, “if you happen to like criminals” — Al Capone.
Hannity pressed the question again:
I want to go back to this one issue, though, because the media has been focused on this and attacking you. Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody.
Trump’s answer was, “except for day one.” Hannity was taken aback. Trump explained, “He says you’re not going to be a dictator, are you? I said, no, no, no. Other than day one. We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator. Okay?”
Actually, it’s not ok. If Hannity were anything but a Trump flunky he would have at least followed up and asked him exactly what plans he had to accomplish those two things on “day one.” But he didn’t because he knew that Trump was trying to be clever and have it both ways. He admires dictators and it’s clear from his stated agenda that he plans to implement it through the use of dictatorial powers. But he smugly said he just wants to use them for rather mainstream Republican policy goals rather than revenge which Hannity quickly acknowledged and then moved on. After all, the crowd loved it.
It was clear from Hannity’s question that he was worried about the fact that the media has finally focused on the threat of a second Trump term. He did everything he could to give Trump the opportunity to say, “Of course I’m not going to abuse my power or become a dictator, that’s ridiculous” but he couldn’t do it.
It’s starting to concern other people around him as well. Many of the stories last week featured background quotes from people dropping names of potential cabinet picks and other personnel choices which clearly spooked the campaign. Axios had reported that people like Tucker Carlson were on a short list for VP while cronies Steve Bannon and Kash Patel were named for other important posts in the administration. Patel immediately appeared on Bannon’s podcast to declare that they certainly did have big plans, one of which was to go after the media, “whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.” He told Bannon that they had a “bench” of “all-American patriots” that would get the ball rolling immediately.
This is likely what led senior campaign advisers senior advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita to issue a statement on Friday, saying that “no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official” unless it came from them. This was on the heels of a similar statement from a couple of weeks ago after the first flurry of reports about the planned dictatorship started appearing in the mainstream media, in which they proclaimed that “any personnel lists, policy agendas, or government plans published anywhere are merely suggestions.”
But that’s not true at all. Agenda 47, right there on his campaign web site, is hair raising. Here’s just one of the more recent videos in which he promises “take the billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments, and we will then use that money to endow a new institution called the American Academy” where there will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed.
Wiles and LaCivita can try all they want to distance the campaign from the likes of Bannon and Patel but they aren’t the problem. The candidate is.
You might have thought that Trump would press pause on all the dictator talk considering that his campaign is obviously getting very nervous about it. But no. He appeared before the New York Young Republicans over the weekend and repeated his “dictator on day one” line, making even less sense than before:
Trump: You know why I wanted to be dictator? I want a wall and drill, drill, drill..
Wiles and LaCivita wrote in their statement that “he is not interested in, nor does he condone, selfish efforts by ‘desk hunters” but that doesn’t seem to be the case:
Former U.S. president Donald Trump embraces Steve Bannon at the New York Young Republican Club’s Annual Gala at Cipriani’s Wall Street in New York City. Photo by @bing_guanpic.twitter.com/EXEgwiKf0t
The few professionals in the Trump campaign understand that it’s lethal for Trump’s chances in the general election if the public is actually informed of what he plans to do. Now that the press is no longer under the illusion that ignoring what he says is the best way to cover him, those pros are starting to realize that they can’t control Trump or the people around him. They aren’t the first to have that rude awakening. It would be a big relief if they were the last.
The clip illustrates how the GOP is dedicated heart and soul(?) to fitting its square-peg worldview into an other-shaped hole.
Speaker Mike Johnson, Brian Beutler offers, is dispersing “unreleased Capitol security footage from January 6 (to help pro-Trump propagandists lie about the insurrection) but not before he blurs the faces of the rioters (because the raw footage would make it easier for these lawless, often violent Trump supporters to face justice).” Johnson wants to both protect MAGA footsoldiers while aiding the right’s efforts to rewrite the history we saw with our very lyin’ eyes. That’s a rather delicate maneuver (subscription req’d):
[I]t’s a policy manifestation of the MAGA code, wherein January 6 can be anything BUT a violent insurrection orchestrated and encouraged by Donald Trump. It can be Antifa, or a false flag, or tourism, or a Patriotic Protest or any combination thereof. But not what it actually was. Call if Big Lie 2 Electric Boogaloo. The policy’s incoherent, because Trumpism is incoherent, until you view it through the prism of a personality cult.
But the footage isn’t actually exculpatory (or it wouldn’t have to be altered) and even altered, it won’t do much to help the rioters evade justice. What it could do is provide marginal Trump supporters a pretext to overlook January 6 in making judgments about Trump’s fitness for a second term. As Johnson himself put it in the same press conference, he wants to discourage Americans from accepting “some narrative” about the January 6 insurrection as “fact.”
“MAGA code” is nice phrasing. One can see it in mock-practice in the “Daily Show” clip. And Johnson’s “some narrative” = yer lyin’ eyes.
I’ve reached out to Mike Lee’s office to see if he still plans on asking the director of the FBI whether Kevin Lyons — a Trump supporter currently serving four years in federal prison — was actually an undercover fed. Will update if I receive a response. pic.twitter.com/pFs2BaB4d2
Beutler speaks with his former TPM colleague Ryan Reilly, author of “Sedition Hunters” about the history-rewriting efforts and how they’re going * :
BB: What is the ultimate purpose of the propaganda?
RR: The reality of what happened on Jan. 6 is not good for Republicans, full stop. If you take a step back for a moment, it’s sort of crazy that the GOP would want to continue highlighting Jan. 6 by releasing CCTV footage. You’d expect Republicans to downplay what happened on Jan. 6 and try to move on from the Capitol attack as much as possible. But the fact is that many of the same people who believed crazy conspiracies about the 2020 election now believe crazy conspiracies about Jan. 6, and reason and logic do very little to pull them back from the brink.
BB: Do Trump supporters need to have some stray footage to point to so they can claim everything was peaceful, or everything was Antifa? Why is that an easier sell than to say the insurrection was justified because the election was stolen? Is there some strategic value in the incoherence?
RR: It’s hard to follow the arguments because they get so mixed up, but the major themes are that Trump supporters were peaceful and the violence was caused by Antifa and/or the feds. One thing I’m amazed by is that there are a lot of conservatives who believe that federal bureaucrats are that capable, to be able to pull off this massive false-flag event and leave absolutely no trace. Didn’t realize conservatives thought the federal bureaucracy was so effective and full of super geniuses, but here we are.
If the feds were that “Mission Impossible” competent, it would have taken them a little over two hours to find and kill Osama bin Laden.
* Brian Beutler and Ryan Reilly. Are these two secret super heroes?
Reaganism was the Grinch that stole Christmases for decades. The rich got the elevator and the rest got the shaft. The chart above from Forbes is illustrative (although out of date).
George Packer reflects on several books on the era for The Atlantic. One, “Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream” by David Leonhardt of the New York Times I finished recently. It examines the economic and working class realignment away from Democrats since the early 1970s. Leonhardt notes the red-shift, and that Reaganism was part of it, but sees broader trends. A more technocractic turn among Democrats took their focus off the working class and neoliberal economics ascendant under Reagan undermined labor.
Leonhardt “shows that the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which liberal politicians sold as nondiscriminatory but still restrictive, opened the gates to mass immigration. The result put downward pressure on wages at the lower end of the economy. Again, racial resentment partly explains hostility to large-scale immigration, but Leonhardt shows that rapid demographic change can erode the social bonds that make collective efforts for greater equality possible.” That’s a slow burn.
Packer flips through a couple more books, their strengths and weaknesses, and concludes with this:
The argument over which matters more, economics or culture, may obsess the political class, but Americans living paycheck to paycheck, ill-served by decades of financial neglect and polarizing culture wars, can’t easily separate the two. All of it—wages, migrants, police, guns, classrooms, trade, the price of gas, the meaning of the flag—can be a source of chaos or of dignity. The real question is this: Can our politics, in its current state, deliver hard-pressed Americans greater stability and independence, or will it only inflict more disruption and pain? The working class isn’t a puzzle whose solution comes with a prize—it isn’t a means to the end of realignment and long-term power. It is a constituency comprising half the country, whose thriving is necessary for the good of the whole.
But are these technical and political analyses more of the same off-putting elitism the working class disdains from both liberals and conservatives?
Tressie McMillan Cottom believes the reason more people do not feel the good economy is as favorable as statistics show is because they do not speak to their lived, day-to-day realities. The vibe they feel is much more shaky.
The consumer experience sucks
Yes, Biden-sponsored legislation has helped working people more than any seen in a generation.
“But social reproduction — the caretaking of people, relationships and systems that make our society work — still had to be done,” Cottom explains. “Reallocating your spending from child care to student loan payments, for example, might be feasible, but it is not particularly enjoyable. That assumes one can find accessible child care or an in-network doctor or apartment. When stimulus funding ended, a lot of services people rely on became harder to find and afford.”
Child care, in particular, is a burden not accounted for in economic data:
People are struggling with mortgage interest rates, housing shortages and pricey grocery bills. They’re also consuming to make their lives work: on expensive, hard-to-manage child care, health care and convenience spending — things like restaurants, travel, delivery services, and on-demand help — which are necessary for balancing work and life demands. Even when those services are affordable, they are full of friction. That is a nice way of saying the consumer experience sucks. It is hard to schedule things, hard to get customer service, hard to judge the quality of what you are buying, and hard to get amends when an experience goes bad. There is a reason industry analysts have reported that customer brand loyalty is low and customer rage is high.
“As one of my colleagues recently put it, anyone who thinks he just has bad vibes hasn’t tried to find summer day care for young children,” Cottom recounts.
In short, people may have more money. But it has become harder to buy the services they need and more expensive to buy the goods that they want.The very wealthy can spend their way out of that bind, simply by paying more for housekeeping and grocery delivery and nannies. But everyone else needs some sort of partnership with the government to make the act of working not just affordable, but accessible. The Biden administration has not solved that bigger crisis (neither did the Trump administration). Whether Americans are blaming the right administration for their woes, their economic lives legitimately feel tougher even as they work more and earn more money.
As I’ve said before, humans — people — need to feel the economy serves them. What too many sense is that they serve the economy. Where’s the good vibe in that?
People need child care, and dentists, and affordable housing, and safe transportation, and accessible education. Telling them that to instead enjoy the fact that they can buy a Tesla is a fundamental misunderstanding of what economic policy is supposed to do, which is to make people’s lives better.
That’s more than an election-cycle project or new program. It’s a paradigm shift.
I realize it’s cheap and easy to make fun of Trump and that’s not what I’m trying to do here. I just think it’s vitally important that people are reminded of what he really is and how his mental faculties are going. Everyone has a slip now and again. I do too. And I know he’s always loved to sing his greatest hits.
But that’s not what these are. They’re takes on these scandals and events from the past as if they’re fresh. And he literally makes no sense at times, like the clip below when he says he wants to build a wall on Day One and literally in same breath says he already built it.
Also, he is dumb as a post.
While discussing about how corporations are leaving the country, Trump cites the example of ExxonMobil moving to Dallas pic.twitter.com/nryRgfPjkA
Trump claims a General who had seen soldiers die on the battlefield told him the bravest thing he ever saw was Trump’s “locker room talk” answer during the debate pic.twitter.com/j6cqtCjq3T
Trump says he can’t say “bad things” about President Xi because: the look, the whole thing, he stands in front of a million soldiers as they walk by pic.twitter.com/xQpOTA0f2m
Gaetz: Steve Bannon.. Rudy Giuliani.. President Trump, myself all under one roof and if Joe Biden is re-elected, that roof will be known as cell block A pic.twitter.com/RVKfLEoZJH
This is more that just the usual, tiresome “I know you are but what am I” nonsense. He’s right about Bannon, Giuliani and Trump but not because Joe Biden is threatening to put them behind bars if he’s re-elected (like someone else we know is doing.) It’s because all of them are under indictment. Unless he knows something we don’t, Gaetz was actually let off the hook by the DOJ for his predatory behavior with drugs and underage girls.
But yes, these people are accused criminals and they are going to trial and if they are found guilty they could go to jail. That’s how the Law and Order Party believes it should be for anyone but their crooked leaders.
We are told by the TV legal beagles that, in the interest of expediency, Jack Smith is going the extra mile to lay out the case he is planning to make and it’s becoming clear that he plans to make it clear that the election was not stolen which would be a real service:
Special counsel Jack Smith on Saturday sharply rejected former President Donald Trump’s contention that foreign governments may have changed votes in the 2020 election, laying bare new details about his team’s extensive probe of the matter and its access to a vast array of senior intelligence officials in Trump’s administration.
In a 45-page filing, Smith’s team describes interviewing more than a dozen of the top intelligence officials in Trump’s administration — from his director of national intelligence to the administrator of the NSA to Trump’s personal intelligence briefer — about any evidence that foreign governments had penetrated systems that counted votes in 2020.
“The answer from every single official was no,” senior assistant special counsel Thomas Windom writes in the filing.
The filing was part of the special counsel’s opposition to a bid by Trump to access a broad swath of classified intelligence as part of his defense against charges that he conspired to subvert the 2020 election and disenfranchise millions of voters, culminating in the violent Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Trump has argued that foreign governments fueled his supporters’ concerns about election integrity and that some classified evidence revealed potential meddling that justified his own professed fears about fraud.
But prosecutors say Trump’s new legal effort is just an extension of his election lies — and that, in fact, intelligence officials unanimously rejected the idea that foreign governments penetrated any systems that counted votes or could have altered the election tally itself. Rather, they said, intel officials documented some breaches of state voter registration databases that permitted various influence campaigns but were not capable of causing the vote-stealing scheme of which Trump has long sought to convince his followers.
Trump, Windom writes, tries to create a “false impression” and “manufacture confusion” by citing these “irrelevant network breaches” and conflating them with potential changes to the vote total.
To rebut these claims, Windom indicates that prosecutors asked Trump’s “former DNI, former acting secretary of DHS, former acting deputy secretary of DHS, former CISA director, former acting CISA director, former CISA senior cyber counsel, former national security adviser, former deputy NSA, former chief of staff to the National Security Council, former chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, presidential intelligence briefer, former secretary of Defense and former DOJ leadership” for any evidence of that foreign or domestic actors flipped a single vote from a voting machine in 2020.
They offered none, he says.
Windom also contended that Trump’s repeated effort to describe partisan bias in intelligence about the election belied that those making the assessments were his own appointees, buttressed by conclusions at a slew of intel agencies. Windom also specified that one noted instance of bias was allegedly committed in Trump’s favor by his own acting DNI.
Trump is gagged from trashing all the witnesses who spoke with the Special Counsel and told him that the election was legitimate. I expect that there are a whole bunch of former domestic officials who did the same. At the end of this, the record will be laid out in a legal proceeding proving that he is the pathological liar we know he is. The cult will never believe it but there may be a few who haven’t really paid attention who will finally be convinced.
Allies of Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán will hold a closed-door meeting with Republicans in Washington to push for an end to US military support for Ukraine, the Guardian has learned.
Members of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and staff from the Hungarian embassy in Washington will on Monday begin a two-day event hosted by the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank.
The first day includes panel speeches about the Ukraine war as well as topics such as Transatlantic Culture Wars. It is expected to feature guests including Magor Ernyei, the international director of the Centre for Fundamental Rights, the institute that organized CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) Hungary. Kelley Currie, a former ambassador under then president Donald Trump, said she was invited “but declined”.
According to a Republican source, some of the attendees, including Republican members of Congress, have been invited to join closed-door talks the next day.
The meeting will take place against a backdrop of tense debate in Washington over Ukraine’s future. Last week the White House warned that, without congressional action, money to buy more weapons and equipment for Kyiv will run out by the end of the year. On Wednesday Senate Republicans blocked an emergency spending bill to fund the war in Ukraine.
A diplomatic source close to the Hungarian embassy said: “Orbán is confident that the Ukraine aid will not pass in Congress. That is why he is trying to block assistance from the EU as well.”
Orbán is a frequent critic of aid to help Ukraine against the Russian invasion. Seen as Vladimir Putin’s closest ally inside the EU for the past few years, he was photographed smiling and shaking hands with the Russian president two months ago in Beijing.
Orbán recently demanded that Ukraine’s European Union (EU) membership be taken off the European Council’s agenda in December. The Hungarian leader posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter: “It is clear that the proposal of the European Commission on Ukraine’s EU accession is unfounded and poorly prepared.”
The Heritage Foundation is leading Project 2025, a coalition preparing for the next conservative presidential administration, and has in recent months hosted speeches by leading British Conservative party members Liz Truss and Iain Duncan Smith.
The thinktank has also been a vocal opponent of US assistance to Ukraine. Last year Jessica Anderson, the executive director of its lobbying operation, released a statement under the headline: “Ukraine Aid Package Puts America Last.” In August, Victoria Coates, Heritage’s vice-president, posted on social media: “It’s time to end the blank, undated checks for Ukraine.”
When Heritage celebrated its 50th anniversary last April, Orbán’s political director, Balázs Orbán (no relation), was invited as a speaker for the event. Heritage’s president, Kevin Roberts, repeatedly praised the Hungarian leader on X: “One thing is clear from visiting Hungary and from being involved in current policy and cultural debates in America: the world needs a movement that fights for Truth, for tradition, for families, and for the average person.”
In recent years Orbán has championed a transatlantic far-right alliance with a hardline stance against immigration and “gender ideology”, staunch Christian nationalism and scorn for those who warn of a slide into authoritarianism.
Try to imagine such a thing happening a decade ago. It seems impossible to believe. But Heritage and Orban love them some Putin — he’s a white strongman defending “traditional values” like jailing journalists and LGBTQ people. They love that. They only wish Trump could be such an authoritarian monster. But hey, they’re all talking about invading Mexico so who knows?
Update:
Oh Baby. Biden claps back hard on this one doing a little “counter-programming”
BIDEN KICKS DOWN THE GOP's CLOSED DOOR MEETING WITH ORBAN ALLIES: @POTUS shows his p*mp hand is strong with a fast, counter move hosting Zelenskyy in DC on the very same day GOP lawmakers are holed up in secret plotting how to back-stab his country. We've got your back, 🇺🇦. pic.twitter.com/VsaRgDqFyO
None of that matters. They have order from Dear Leader and they do what he wants:
House Republicans are preparing to formalize their impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden with a House vote this week, as their investigation reaches a critical juncture while right-wing pressure grows.
Up until this point, House Republicans have not had enough votes to legitimize their ongoing inquiry with a full chamber vote. The probe has struggled to uncover wrongdoing by the president which is why it hasn’t garnered the unified support of the full GOP conference.
Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy unilaterally launched the inquiry in September, even though he had previously criticized Democrats for taking the same step in 2019 when they launched the first impeachment probe of then-President Donald Trump without taking a vote at the beginning.
The dynamics for House Republicans changed, however, when the White House told the trio of GOP-led congressional committees leading the investigation that its subpoenas were illegitimate without a formal House vote to authorize the inquiry. The Trump administration made a similar argument against House Democrats at the start of his 2019 impeachment.
That gauntlet thrown by the White House has appeared to help reluctant, more moderate Republican members get on board with formalizing the inquiry.
The argument from Republican proponents of the effort, according to multiple GOP lawmakers and aides, is that a floor vote will strengthen their legal standing against the White House and fortify their subpoenas targeting witnesses like Hunter Biden, the president’s son, who has signaled he will not appear for his scheduled closed-door deposition this week.
“I didn’t come to Washington to expel a member of Congress or impeach a president,” Rep. Marc Molinaro, a swing district Republican from New York, told CNN. “The White House would do well by honoring subpoenas and participating in the investigation. If they chose not to and they obstruct, with all due respect, it’s the legislative branch’s responsibility to assert our right and responsibility to provide that oversight.”
