Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Free speech for me, but not for thee

It’s that time of year again. A nip is in the air (regionally). Christmas trees whiz by strapped to the roofs of sedan. Clauses are everywhere this time of year. Thus, Baby Jesus is battling Lucifer over the Establishment Clause. One of the battle fronts this year is in Iowa “where the Satanists have antagonized the Christians with a goat’s head wreath in the Des Moines capitol building.”

See, because the Supreme Court ruled that Christians could erect Christmas displays on state property if other faiths get to erect theirs … you know where this is going. Satanists each year make a pointed point about the foolishness of it all by erecting displays honoring Lucifer.

Amanda Marcotte weighs in on this less-clebrated holiday tradition:

Every year, Christian conservatives discover the Satanic display and have a loud, public temper tantrum about it. In this, Satanists prove their point: Conservatives claim to respect religious plurality, but it’s a lie. The overt religious iconography on government property was always about promoting the Christian nationalist view that theirs is the only “real” American religion. 

Of course. Christian nationalists get a secret thrill every time a defeated Ramses (Yul Brynner) utters, “His god – IS God.” And they want everyone to know it around the pagan winter solstice. Like skin color and religion, it’s always about dominance.

So state Rep. Brad Sherman will be damned (poor choice of words?) if he’ll let this affront to the Savior go unchallenged. Citing the preamble to the Iowa Constitution, Sherman demands that Gov. Kim Reynolds order removal of the ram’s head display (Des Moines Register):

“According to these opening lines of our Constitution, the foundation for laws and continued blessing and success in Iowa is based on these points: 1. There is One Supreme God. 2. Blessings over this state come from the One Supreme God. 3. We must depend upon the One Supreme God if we want to enjoy continued blessings,” Sherman writes.

He says it is “a tortured and twisted interpretation of law that affords Satan, who is universally understood to be the enemy of God, religious expression equal to God in an institution of government that depends upon God for continued blessings.”

God and your tax dollars, he means.

Iowa lawmaker calls for Gov. Kim Reynolds to remove satanic Capitol display https://t.co/fFdeOn3x55

— Des Moines Register (@DMRegister) December 11, 2023

Marcotte opines on the annual freakout:

It’s hardened into a ritual because both sides get something out of it. The fundamentalists get a chance to freak out and use this as evidence for their lurid conspiracy theories claiming demonic forces are out to get them. The Satanists and their fans get a chance to remind everyone that Republicans are hypocrites who never really believed all that “free speech” talk. This year, the annual rite is playing out in Iowa, where the Satanists have antagonized the Christians with a goat’s head wreath in the Des Moines capitol building. 

Blunt force of censorship

The holiday tradition this year rings harmonic with arguments over free speech, protests for and against Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, “alleged anti-semitism on campus,” and the trap Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y) laid last week for university presidents in a House hearing on campus antisemitism.

But while people get into often-incomprehensible arguments over the finer points of defining “genocide” and “free speech,” what is getting lost is the most important issue: Republicans are a bunch of lying hypocrites. It’s this message the Satanic Temple is trying to remind us all of with their holiday display. The MAGA right has been wailing for years about the alleged threats to free speech from hazily defined social pressures like “wokeness” and “cancel culture,” but when it comes to opinions they don’t like, they don’t hesitate to call for the blunt force of censorship.  

As many people pointed out, Republicans have defended genocidal and violent rhetoric for years now under the guise of “free speech.” Trump’s unsubtle calls for violence against his perceived enemies have led to an attempted murder of the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, R.-Calif., threats against government employees and even private citizens, and, of course, the insurrection of January 6, 2021. Dehumanizing rhetoric against Black Lives Matter protesters and “great replacement” theory have led to mass murder, shootings, and conservatives crashing cars into protests. But when liberals call for social media companies to curb the ugly rhetoric using their legal powers to self-regulate, a chorus of right wing whining about “cancel culture” erupts. We do not need to litigate how real the threat of campus anti-semitism is, in order to see how Republians use tensions over hate speech and the First Amendment to advance their “free speech for me, but not for thee” agenda 

‘Twas always thus.

“To give quarter to the enemies of God is pathetic and contemptible,” complained one woman. “God placed you in a position of authority for such a time as this,” griped a man. Others quoted Bible verses at him that appear to call for literal murder of unbelievers or insisted that a true Christian believes the Bible trumps the constitution. Same thing happened across social media. Wherever the story about the Satanic altar appeared, the comments are completely dominated by Republican voters wailing about how the government needs to censor this, that the purpose of government is to uphold Christianity, and that the Founding Fathers supposedly agreed with them. 

This satanic statue was erected in the Iowa state capitol this past week.

It’s increasingly clear we’ll either have Christian Nationalism or Satanic nationalism.

Which way western man? pic.twitter.com/JszOcsRHUS

— Smash Baals (@smashbaals) December 9, 2023

Watch how quickly the right pivots on Second Amendment absolutism when minority groups begin arming themselves for the civil war that right-wing militias are arming for to wage against democracy. See how quickly the right gets selective about whose religion the First Amendment protects when “lesser” faiths demonstrate that they don’t know their place.

Marcotte concludes with her broader point:

This kind of thing is why it’s so gross to see Republicans cynically exploit fears of anti-semitism to promote their culture war narratives about “campus leftism” and “political correctness.” The Satanic Temple’s trolling exposes the bare truth, which is the GOP is rapidly becoming a Christian nationalist party full of people who want to find a way to use government power to marginalize and silence non-Christians, or who are even those who are just critical of conservative Christianity.

If only they had a Red Sea handy to drop on the rest of us.

And Happy Hollandaise everyone!

What else is new?

Axios reports that there’s some dissonance in the House Freedom caucus. They’re voting for new leadership and there seems to be a bit of a problem:

An influential member of the House Freedom Caucus won’t run for a leadership spot, citing a recommendation by the group’s board that Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) serve as its next chairman.

“I am concerned that our group often relies too much on power (available primarily due to the narrow majority) and too little on influence with and among our colleagues,” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) told his fellow members in a letter sent Sunday.

“I ask that we consider how to best increase our influence while preserving our power to move policy in the right direction. I strongly feel that Bob Good as Chairman will impair that objective.”

“I do not have an alternative nomination, but as my final fiduciary duty as a board member, I ask that you prayerfully consider electing someone else as Chairman of the House Freedom Caucus.”

Davidson’s push against Good comes just ahead of the HFC’s scheduled election to tap a new leader of the group, with the Ohio Republican arguing that “we must not miss the opportunities to achieve what can be done.”

Oh, how reasonable. How, dare I say, moderate?

But come on, what’s the real reason?

Good endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over former President Trump, and has gotten pushback over his vote to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Ok, now I get it. It’s just more MAGA drama. Even the wingnuttiest of wingnuts can’t get on the same page. (And it’s entirely possible that the word has come down from on high that there shall be no leadership jobs for DeSanctimonious traitors.)

They’re making an effort. Will it be enough?

Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop takes a look at how the media is handling Trump’s threats to democracy. He notes the flurry of articles in recent days exposing the authoritarian Trump agenda for his second term and examining his increasingly fascistic language and makes the same observation that I did earlier about the Trump campaign obviously getting nervous about it.

However:

Back in January, as part of an article laying out the media dynamics CJR’s staff would be watching this year, I wrote that I would be interested to see how media outlets continued to center—or didn’t—threats to democracy; I’d observed some progress on this front in 2022, but also feared that last year’s midterms—which brought defeat for the most ardent Trumpian election deniers running to assume oversight of the country’s election infrastructure—could push the question down the media agenda even though the threat hadn’t dissipated. That fear has not been realized, not least due to Trump’s frightening rhetoric and multiple indictments, and work like that of the Times and The Atlantic has kept the threat visible. If anything, though, the threat is even more real than it was this time last year, and I’m not convinced that the broad sweep of political coverage has kept pace with that reality. Political media has certainly not undergone the cultural reset required to elevate the future of democracy over more trivial pursuits—to a world where that question is not the subject of special series and issues, but the baseline norm. I also wrote in January that the press serving democracy would require more than just highlighting the loudest threats to it. That subtler work, too, remains incomplete.

Even the clear-eyed coverage has not been beyond reproach: The Nation’s Joan Walsh and Chris Lehmann indicted recent reports for treating the threat of Trumpian authoritarianism as an inevitability, when it can in fact be stopped (“Preachments of authoritarian fatalism are infinitely more seductive than the painful exercise of learning from one’s mistakes,” Lehmann wrote); the media critic Dan Froomkin argued that political reporters don’t seem interested in finding out why such a vision appeals to so many Americans. And much national political coverage this year has not been clear-eyed in the first place: as I’ve tracked in this newsletter, too much of it has remained obsessed with the election horse race, continued to treat Trump as an entertainment draw (particularly in the breathless coverage of his indictments) or otherwise played into his hands (exhibit A: the CNN town hall packed with his cheering partisans), and, most fundamentally, treated him as both an election subverter and a normal candidate.

In recent weeks, I’ve observed more of the same unevenness. When Trump compared his opponents to vermin, some headlines in major outlets centered the fascist lineage of the term, but others euphemized it and the story as a whole was arguably underplayed; the same could be said of other Trump remarks that would have made the front pages a few years ago but now don’t—a function, perhaps, of what the political scientist Brian Klaas has called the “banality of crazy.” Meanwhile, a political-media narrative has coalesced that Nikki Haley, a rival for the Republican presidential nomination, is surging even though she remains miles behind Trump in the polls—a narrative, as Politico’s Jack Shafer noted, that smacks of media wishcasting for horse-race drama. Listening to TV news chatter following last week’s Republican debate—which Trump once again skipped—it sometimes felt as if we were in a normal election, without Trump’s shadow looming over it. In fact, the debate, like others before it, was a sideshow. Sign up for CJR’s daily email

I wrote in January that saving democracy would require media scrutiny of the functioning of America’s political and media systems as a whole, beyond Trump. On its face, this year brought a great deal of that—a central story line was dysfunction in Congress, and much of the coverage I saw was laudably clear-eyed about Republican responsibility for it. Often, though, that same coverage treated the drama more as personalized palace intrigue than a fundamental structural problem. Within the media industry, the debate on Fox between Florida governor Ron DeSantis and California governor Gavin Newsom—while flawed in its execution—offered a template for debating competing political visions absent an immediate horse race (DeSantis is running for president; Newsom is not), only for much of the follow-up coverage to cast the event as a confusing aberration and shove it through the mangle of horse-race analysis anyway. For a 2021 CJR issue on reimagining political coverage, I profiled Mehdi Hasan, of Peacock and MSNBC, whose explicitly pro-democracy approach and tough interviews with politicians from both sides of the aisle themselves were a template for more vigorous political journalism, albeit one rooted in Hasan’s unapologetic progressive views rather than performed neutrality. Last month, his shows were canceled. (He’ll stay at MSNBC as a guest anchor and on-air pundit.)

I continue to believe that American political journalism needs a radical reset to better serve democracy: less focus on the horse race and entertainment; more focus on policy; more cutting interviews; deeper thinking. Bad coverage of Trump is, to my mind, a function of these sorts of broader pathologies, which will take years to fix, if they’re fixable at all. But taking at least a step toward more accurate coverage of Trump and the threat he poses should be easy—increasingly, it only requires reporting what he himself is pledging to do and has already done, and describing it directly and honestly, as Goldberg, Baron, and others have. The potential reasons for downplaying his rhetoric are myriad: boredom (it’s just Trump bloviating), a failure to take it seriously (…it’s just Trump bloviating), a fear that accurate reporting will read as hysterical and biased amid a political-media culture that prizes civility, a vision of politics so gamified that members of the elite press don’t believe Trump will come after them, even as he and his allies promise just that. At this point, all these reasons are indefensible.

I can’t emphasize enough how vitally important it is that the media keeps this up. Only relentless exposure of the threat Trump brings will be able to counter the propaganda and biased narratives that have taken over pour political culture over the past year. People are drastically misinformed about the economy and the administration’s accomplishments and there’s no way in this environment to hold the Democrats responsible when half the country is sticking its fingers in its ears and singing “lalalalalala” to avoid hearing anything from politicians or political parties unless they are already on the team.

It’s up to the media to push the truth out there by repeating it over and over again. And even then, the best hope is that a percentage of swing voters and the Democratic base will come out to vote to keep the worst from happening.

Kate Cox, the Texas woman who is carrying a fetus with a fatal anomaly, has been forced to leave the state to get her needed abortion:

The announcement came as Kate Cox, 31, was awaiting a ruling from the Texas Supreme Court over whether she could legally obtain an abortion under narrow exceptions to the state’s ban. A judge gave Cox, a mother of two from the Dallas area, permission last week but that decision was put on hold by the state’s all-Republican high court.

“Her health is on the line. She’s been in and out of the emergency room and she couldn’t wait any longer,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which was representing Cox.

This is horrifying. Cox has the ability to pay for this and pay for an attorney. Other women in her position aren’t.

The horror of these creepy men like the criminal Ken Paxton and that grotesque anti-abortion zealot Supreme Court just John Devine deciding such issues is overwhelming. I think this will be a problem for the Republicans politically but many, many people will have to suffer in the meantime.

Jennifer Rubin’s piece today on this subject is on point:

The Texas case has far-reaching ramifications. Any state ban presents doctors, patients and judges with an untenable decision: Violate the law, or violate the essential humanity and well-being of a woman? Voters, who have approved an unbroken string of seven abortion measures (the latest in Ohio) on state ballots and who tell pollsters in higher numbers than ever that they support abortion rights, know this basic truth.

Republicans, still in denial about the overwhelming unpopularity of their position and the handicap it places on their candidates, likely will confront this issue in virtually every race up and down the ballot. Democrats who leaned into the issue in 2022 and 2023 won handily. They show no inclination they will hold back in the 2024 elections.

At the presidential level, where GOP candidates keep touting a national ban, abortion might again be a decisive issue. President Biden’s campaign certainly believes so. “This story is shocking, it’s horrifying, and it’s heartbreaking — it’s also becoming all too commonplace in America because of Donald Trump,” Biden’s campaign said in a written statement after the Texas decision. “As Trump proudly brags, it was his Supreme Court picks who provided the deciding votes to overturn Roe v. Wade, allowing Republican extremists across the country to pass draconian bans that are hurting women and threatening doctors.” The campaign reiterated that if “Trump or other Republicans running for president get to the White House, they will try to ban abortion nationwide and the dystopian reality that women like Kate Cox in Texas are facing could be the reality everywhere.”

Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. sneered in his majority opinion that reversed nearly 50 years of abortion rights precedent, “Women are not without electoral or political power.” Neither are men, who also support abortion rights. Moreover, if Dobbs attempted to get the courts “out of” the abortion issue, it has failed miserably.

To the contrary, bans have opened a Pandora’s box of litigation as doctors, courts and women try to make sense of laws ill-suited to determine medical decisions. Courts will be more deeply involved than ever as vague and unworkable laws come before them and as women such as Cox seek refuge in the courts. Dobbs has only enmeshed courts more deeply in difficult health-care decisions.

As abortion rights activists predicted, Republicans remained trapped in a dilemma of their own making. Having catered to extreme antiabortion forces and backed extreme and unworkable abortion bans in a slew of states and nationally, they cannot retreat from their stance without infuriating their base. Seeing the political wreckage in the wake of Dobbs, they are unable to step away from a policy that is wildly out of step with a large majority of Americans. They should prepare to reap the political whirlwind in 2024.

I hope so. The lives of women and the well being of millions of families are on the line.

The case is “at the apex of public importance”

Josh Kovensky at TPM reports:

Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court on Monday to take up Donald Trump’s claim of presidential immunity, seeking to speed up a question which could delay the former president’s trial on charges he conspired to subvert the 2020 election. The trial is currently scheduled for March 4, 2024 in D.C.

Trump lost his claim of absolute immunity at the district court and has appealed that ruling to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. But rather than wait for the appeals court to hear the case, Smith is now asking the Supreme Court to weigh in on whether presidential immunity protects Trump from prosecution for crimes related to his efforts to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election.

“It is of imperative public importance that respondent’s claims of immunity be resolved by this Court and that respondent’s trial proceed as promptly as possible if his claim of immunity is rejected,” Smith wrote in the petition for writ of certiorari.

Smith asked the high court to consider two issues. One is whether immunity protects former presidents from prosecution for crimes committed while in office. The other is whether former presidents have constitutional protection from federal prosecution if an impeachment, but not a conviction, has occurred before the start of criminal proceedings.

The court needs to resolve those two questions as soon as possible because of the momentous stakes that the Trump Jan. 6 case has for the rule of law, Smith wrote. That principle — that nobody is above the rule of law — is “at its zenith” in the Trump Jan. 6 case, Smith argued.

“The United States recognizes that this is an extraordinary request,” he wrote. “This is an extraordinary case.”

The question of how much immunity from prosecution the law affords presidents for acts taken while in office remains largely unexplored. In typical Trumpian manner, the former president staked out a maximalist view in in his motion to dismiss. There, he maintained that presidential immunity protects him from prosecution from anything he did while in office.

The district court judge ruled against Trump last week, setting the question up for a battle at the appellate level. But Smith is asking the Supreme Court to take up the matter now, bypassing the appeals court. In the staid world of elite lawyering, it’s an extraordinary request.

There are signs of urgency all over the petition and in Smith’s conduct. He asked the court for a briefing schedule “that would allow the case to be resolved as promptly as possible,” and then followed up with a request that if the court declines to hear the case now, it do so in a way that would allow it to hear it “immediately” after a ruling by the D.C. Circuit.

Smith also asked the D.C. Circuit in a simultaneously filed motion to expedite proceedings there.

Listed as a signatory to the Supreme Court petition is famed former deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben, who oversaw criminal matters which went before the Supreme Court. His work with Smith was not previously known.

Smith referred to the one case that has some applicability to the urgency and uniqueness of the case:

In U.S. v. Nixon, Smith wrote, the court agreed to take the case on an expedited basis. That involved similar issues of presidential immunity: Nixon fought unsuccessfully to block the Watergate grand jury from obtaining tapes of his conversations. There, Smith noted, the Supreme Court was able to hear and rule on the case in a timeframe which preserved the original trial date.

And, Smith added, the court should take the case partly because of the completely unexplored nature of the question — and charges — at hand.

“While no precedent supports respondent’s claim as a former President to criminal immunity, the government acknowledges that this Court has not addressed a comparable claim,” he wrote.

In the past the Court has rarely heard cases in these circumstances but that’s changed recently:

The Supreme Court hears cases before appellate process concludes when, per a rule cited by Smith in the petition, a showing has been made that the case is of “imperative public importance.” It’s a rare remedy, but one that the court has recently become more willing to adopt. University of Texas Law Professor Steve Vladeck blogged last year that as of January 2022, the high court had taken 14 early grants. From 2004 to 2019, they took none, he found.

Smith spent relatively little time laying out his argument for why the case is of supreme importance, instead saying what’s clear: addressing Trump’s conduct in trying to overturn the election is obviously of public interest.

“It requires no extended discussion to confirm that this case—involving charges that respondent sought to thwart the peaceful transfer of power through violations of federal criminal law—is at the apex of public importance,” Smith wrote.

I do not want to get my hopes up on this. I can easily see the high court either refusing to hear it which would likely delay the case, possibly even beyond the election. They may be saying to themselves that we have an election coming up and that means the people will decide, sort of like Mitch McConnell’s fatuous reasoning in delaying filling the Scalia case on the court. Of course, just as he did when he filled the Ginsburg seat within six weeks of the election, they will find a reason to do the opposite if this question comes up again. I’d guess they might assume that is highly unlikely so they don’t need to worry about it.

I’m honestly not counting on the courts being able to do much to enlighten the public about Trump’s criminality before the election. If we are lucky, the Court will decide to take their jobs as protectors of the rule of law seriously. But I see little evidence so far that this right wing majority has any commitment to doing that.

In the end, the denouement of this crisis has always been the election next November. It all comes down to that.

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!

*Keep scrolling for new stuff. 🙂

The media finally caught on to his plans

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.

[THE URL : https://rumble.com/v3ur3mp-agenda47-the-american-academy.html]

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..

Crowd and Trump: build the wall

Trump: We did pic.twitter.com/6ugNSwAFnw

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 10, 2023

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_guan pic.twitter.com/EXEgwiKf0t

— corinne_perkins (@corinne_perkins) December 10, 2023

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.

Anything but “violent insurrection”

Let’s begin with this clip from “The Daily Show”:

All this Republican congressman has to do is say the word "guns" pic.twitter.com/sS8HQnXF5G

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) December 8, 2023

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

— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) November 19, 2023

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?

Economic theory vs. economic reality

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.

John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s “Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes” makes a similar argument, writes Packer, but argues for more cultural centrism and less attention by the Democratic Party to its activist wing of professionals and social justice warriors.

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.

None. None at all.

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

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 10, 2023

Trump: You know why I wanted to be dictator? I want a wall and drill, drill, drill..

Crowd and Trump: build the wall

Trump: We did pic.twitter.com/6ugNSwAFnw

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 10, 2023

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

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 10, 2023

The following aren’t examples of decline. He’s always been this stupid:

Trump says climate change is a “con job” because “some boats” got stuck in ice in the Arctic pic.twitter.com/ltj190Nnzz

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 10, 2023

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

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 10, 2023

Trump: These people that are major criminals, very few of them have had the honor of being indicted four times pic.twitter.com/4Qb17VTKpV

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 10, 2023