I so relate to that. I imagine many of you do too. But it’s best to just grit your teeth and let it go. It’s hard to leave a cult.
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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
The startling extremism of the Trump regime, even compared with other modern wannabe dictatorships, is obvious to the naked eye. But I always find quantification useful. So I was very pleased to see that the estimable John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times has risen to the occasion, producing an index of democratic backsliding that lets us compare the trajectory of the United States under Trump with those of other nations we used to view as cautionary tales. (I’ve looked at how the index is constructed, and it’s reasonable.) We’re on a uniquely steep descent, at least for modern times.
It’s a horrifying picture. Yet the flip side of the naked extremism of the MAGA power grab is that it has produced a remarkably strong backlash. The size and determination of civil resistance to ICE has been incredible and inspiring, like nothing we’ve seen since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Republicans are being punished at the polls: On Saturday a deep-red Texas Senate district that went Trump +17 in 2024 voted in a Democrat with a 15-point margin.
So what happens now?
I keep asking two questions as ICE runs wild. First, what is the strategy here? How do Trump, Stephen Miller, etc. think this is going to work for them? Maybe their initial belief was that a display of force would shock and awe their opponents into submission. It’s not happening, yet they just keep ramping up the threats and violence, apparently not knowing how to do anything else.
The obvious answer is that there isn’t any strategy. These people aren’t evil masterminds — evil, yes, but masterminds, no. They’re just thugs too crude and undisciplined to control their own thuggishness. They were caught off guard by the strength of the resistance because the very concept of citizens standing up for their principles is alien to them, and they still can’t believe it’s real.
The second question is, how does this end? Most immediately, what will happen during and after the midterm elections? Everything points to a blue wave in November. Yet many people in MAGA simply can’t accept losing power — among other things, their actions over the past year mean that if they lose power, many of them will go to jail.
Actually, Trump will pardon everyone so they needn’t fear that at all. But losing power is a deep, deep fear because they are afraid of other kinds of retribution — loss of work, status, money, community acceptance. They aren’t just going to go quietly we know that. The stakes are much, much higher than they were in 2020 — and the country is much more focused.
As Krugman notes:
[I]t’s just being realistic to say that MAGA will try, somehow, to prevent voters from having their say. Will ICE try to prevent blue districts from voting? If that fails, will they reject the results, in a midterm version of Jan. 6? Call me alarmist, but remember: The alarmists have been right, and the people telling us to calm down have been wrong, every step of the way.
Yep. Expect the worst with these people and plan accordingly. It will be very hard for them to steal 2026 if the turnout is huge.
I’ve been saying this for years. G. Elliott Morris does some sophisticated analysis of the voting population and proves, once and for all, that this idea that there is a huge number of people “in the middle” who are some who splitting the difference between the policies of the two parties which makes them “moderate” is nonsense. That group is just disengaged people who have no ideology at all:
The vast majority of the “moderates” are just completely non-ideological. Just over 80 percent of the respondents who scored between a -2 and 2 on either economic or social ideology had an ideological thinking score of 0 or 1. These “moderates” are not moderate, they’re disengaged. They didn’t express centrist views balancing left and right, or a preference for moderation on policy. They expressed no ideological views at all.
I took all 4,500 classified respondents in Steve’s data and calculated the following composition of the electorate based on voters scores on the three variables (”ideological thinking,” left-right economic policy, left-right social policy).
- Disengaged (34%): Low ideology scores and no clear issue positions
- Issue-focused but not ideological (25%): Mention economic or social concerns without ideological framing
- Ideological right (19%): Clear conservative positioning
- Ideological left (16%): Clear liberal positioning
- Mixed/moderate (6%): True centrists or ideological misfits
The “center” of American politics isn’t populated by careful centrists weighing “both sides” of the policy debate, or people who want the Democrats or Republicans to retreat from extremism. It’s populated by people who want their daily lives to be easier and aren’t really thinking about politics at all.
I have often quoted from this piece by Chris Hayes from over 20 years ago. It’s as correct today as it was then and yet political strategists are just allergic to accepting this notion and planning accordingly. You can’t win those people over with issue oriented campaigns because they don’t understand politics enough (and don’t care.) It certainly doesn’t mean that “moderating” on issues is what they are looking for.
Democratic strategists have personal incentives for thinking otherwise but unless they think they will somehow benefit from more of what the MAGA folks are offering they need to wise up. As Morris writes:
The median voter isn’t moderate, at least in how they describe what they like about the two major parties. Our data suggests that when it comes to how they feel about parties, the average American isn’t thinking ideologically at all.
Instead, most people are thinking about conditions: prices, wars, group conflicts, and whether things just feel like they’re getting better or worse. This suggests that a campaign more about conditions of daily life and the country would be more successful than seeking out issues or groups you can campaign against to seem ideologically “heterodox” (the 2025 word of the year for DC strategists and pundits).
This also explains why “moderate” candidates don’t automatically win. Contrary to the strategy implied by Median Voter Theorists, if you’re pitching yourself as the sensible centrist, you’re appealing to a constituency that barely exists. Just as the No Labels candidate for president. The voters in the middle aren’t there because they carefully weighed the options; they’re there because they’re not paying attention to the ideological debate at all.
I guess that means for these people it really is all about “vibes.” And if that’s the case then the Democrats should win with no problem. The vibes in the country are horrific, perhaps the worst I’ve ever seen. And it’s not just the economy. It’s the chaos, the violence, the insecurity, fear and pessimism. Trump can toot his horn all he wants, day in and day out, but he’s not convincing anyone that there is morning in America. This country is in deep trouble and even the non-ideological among us know it.
There’s reason why self-described Independents are abandoning the Republicans in droves.
The delicate flowers of ICE were so scared of people making hand gestures that they had to pulled them over the next day, pull their guns and threaten to shoot them:
Agent: These guys were all threatening us yesterday with hand guns.
…
Agent: Hand guns, like threatening to shoot us.Reporter: You mean like with hand symbols?
A: Pulling them out, trying to engage us.
R: Pulling out literal guns?
A: No. Making… assuming we were going to do something.
These poor fellas need a safe space. The streets of Minneapolis are triggering them. (No pun intended.)
Let’s just take a look at those four items.
The first one is being pooh-poohed by all the experts. “He can’t do that, the constitution is clear that states control elections.” He’s just having a tantrum.
Ok, but who’s going to stop him? How would he “take over” the election systems and “nationalize” elections? I don’t know. Declare martial law? Say we’re at war? Do you doubt that he is capable of trying anything?
Perhaps he could do it the same way they did it in Georgia. I don’t know where he came up with “15 places” but I assume he’s thinking about states where the Republican Party has control and could unilaterally declare that certain big city elections offices are corrupt (or something.) I’m not sure where this might be and it’s doubtful that he can get enough critical mass to swing an election doing this but you never know.
I still believe that the real plan is to contest the election and throw the next Congress into chaos as the cases wend their way through the courts. And who knows what the Supremes might do if it gets to them? I’m sure Johnson and Thune will be happy to help.
Republicans are now saying that state control of elections is wrong because they have different standards so maybe the Supremes are open to that argument now”
I doubt he’s going to get anywhere with this but I’m not going to dismiss these threats because I still recall this:
This time he will still be president and he has a crew of ruthless henchmen in the DOJ, DHS and the military who will do his bidding. So, no one should be too sanguine that he won’t do anything. The only thing that mitigates against it is that he’s drunk with power and only cares about himself so he no doubt figures he can do whatever he wants whether he has a GOP Congress or not.
Pirro? I think she may have had an extra glass of wine at dinner. That statement is like waving a red flag in front of the gun nuts.
Blanche: That’s a great quote and should be what he’s remembered for. “It’s not a crime to party with Epstein.” Love it.
Trump’s tantrum about Harvard is hilarious. Harvard refused to buckle under to his administration’s blackmail. So now he’s going to sue, just like he’s using Trevor Noah and the IRS and the DOJ and anyone else who looks t him sideways. But the fact is that Harvard won and he lost. If only all the elite institutions had banded to get her and told him to pound sand last year, this administration would have gone differently.
It was just another morning for the GOP — and the rapidly accelerating destruction of America.
Donald Trump announced last week that he is suing the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion because a contractor leaked his tax returns. This isn’t the first time the president has sued the federal government. He has already filed claims against the Justice Department for $230 million over the investigations into Russian collusion and the stolen classified documents. In each of these cases, it will be up to the agencies, which he oversees, whether to settle — with him. Gosh, I wonder what he’ll decide?
When asked about this curious arrangement over the weekend, Trump told the press, “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself… We could make it a substantial amount, nobody would care, because it’s gonna go to numerous, very good charities.” Evidently, American taxpayers are going to have to pay for yet more of Trump’s grievances — and give him what will almost certainly be a nice tax write-off. That’s assuming these “very good charities” aren’t along the lines of his defunct Trump Foundation, for which he was sued by the state of New York for funneling funds to himself and barred from ever running a charity in the state again.
Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University, told the New York Times in October that Trump’s “the ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it… It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.”
There was a time when that would have been true. But today, the administration’s corruption and profiteering are so blatant and commonplace that they hardly merit anything but a brief notice in the media.
When the Times asked him why he was openly doing deals in his second term after largely adhering to long-held norms against conflicts of interest in his first, Trump wasn’t wrong in his response: “Because I found out that nobody cared. I’m allowed to.” (He went on to claim that he previously prohibited his kids from doing business and didn’t get any credit for it, and then he saw “what went on with Biden.” Trump also noted that he “has a very honest family.”)
But it isn’t exactly true that nobody cared. There were several lawsuits filed against Trump during his first term over his business interests. The Supreme Court sat on them for months, as they often do with thorny questions that might require them to let their partisan flags fly, and then dismissed the cases after Trump lost the election, saying they were moot. As the Brennan Center noted at the time, “[A]ny future president can use the Trump experience as a guide to avoid the constitutional prohibition on foreign emoluments. So long as foreign governments’ political spending is laundered through a future president’s business, he or she can make the argument that this is perfectly fine since Trump did it.”
Was that prescient or what? The Brennan Center also noted that all a president with only one term has to do is run out the clock, which the courts are happy to help him do. And Trump, lucky fellow that he is, essentially has had two single terms and will almost certainly be able to do the same thing again.
Now he is openly fast-tracking pardons, handing them out to everyone from drug kingpins to personal business associates willing to pay top dollar to lobbyists who will advocate for them. The going rate is reportedly set at a million dollars. The money mostly goes to the middle men, but one can assume it gets spread around in various ways.
In the case of “crypto’s richest man” Changpeng Zhao — a billionaire felon who was sentenced to a four-month prison term in 2024 after pleading guilty to federal money laundering charges — the money spreading reportedly came in the form of a deal his company struck that hinged on using a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency from World Liberty Financial, a stablecoin company partially owned by a Trump family entity. The result, according to the Wall Street Journal: World Liberty’s credibility was enhanced and its market capitalization skyrocketed to over $2.1 billion (from $127 million). The paper also reported that “World Liberty raked in about $1.4 billion in revenue over the past year…far more than the president’s real-estate portfolio ever earned annually.” In October 2025, Zhao received a pardon from Trump.
The New Yorker’s David Kirkpatrick has been tracking Trump’s graft for the last several months and recently published an update to mark the president’s first year back in office. By Kirkpatrick’s reckoning — and he’s very conservative in his estimates — Trump and his family have made at least $4.05 billion in the last year alone. This does not count any of the pre-existing Trump Organization properties and businesses, and he even generously left out the “funny-money assets he couldn’t readily cash out without setting off a fire sale that would eviscerate their value,” such as Trump’s shares in his social media company Truth Social.
Most of the profits have come from crypto markets, which Trump’s son Eric is spearheading, along with special envoy Steve Witkoff’s son Zach. There is American Bitcoin, a company to which Eric and Donald Trump Jr. have lent their name and nothing else in an arrangement that makes Hunter Biden’s penny-ante Burisma deal look like a sidewalk lemonade stand. But the big one is World Liberty Financial — the very company that became entangled with Zhao. According to Kirkpatrick, the president is listed on the web site as a “co-founder emeritus” with sons Eric, Donald Jr. and Barron, along with Witkoff and his son Zach, who serves as CEO. (Again, recall the GOP’s shrieking over Hunter Biden “trading on his father’s name.”)
There have already been several scandals associated with this scheme. But this past weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported on what appears to be a massive bribe from the man known as the United Arab Emirate’s “spy sheikh.” Sheikh Tahnoon, a senior member of the Emirati royal family, reportedly took a secret ownership deal worth $500 million in World Liberty just prior to Trump’s inauguration. A couple of months later, the U.S. agreed to sell advanced artificial intelligence chips to the UAE, a move that surprised most national security experts, since up until then there had been serious concerns about them being diverted to China. According to the Journal, Witkoff — Trump’s Middle East envoy — also got a $31 million piece of the action.
Considering the vast sums that are changing hands, it’s grimly amusing that Trump himself is still hawking consumer goods, including an online merchandise store owned by the Trump Organization. (He also has a little “store” in the White House where he keeps the merch to give away to foreign dignitaries anxious to get their hands on a “Trump was right about everything” hat.)
At this point, you may be wondering if the Republican House Oversight Committee, which spent years investigating Biden and his son’s dealings in Ukraine from a decade before, will be looking into these billion dollar deals. The answer is no. Kentucky Rep. James Comer, who chairs the committee, explained that “the difference between the way the Trump family operates and the Biden family is they’re admitting they’re doing this.”
Apparently, the new rules are that the more flagrant the corruption the more legal it is.
Salon
Donald always wanted to be a gangster
John Ganz this morning follows Lenin’s advice and digs a little deeper into “Who stands to gain?” from Donald Trump’s Stephen Miller-run ethnic cleansing project. Adam Tooze at Chartbook this morning pointed Ganz to a Financial Times piece: “Companies reap $22bn from Trump’s immigration crackdown.” It turns out that a surprising number are “regional, dynastic family businesses and major GOP donors. In addition, they have engaged in legally questionable practices.”
Ganz elaborates:
For instance, the top company at the top of the list, Fisher Sand & Gravel, is owned by the Fisher family of Dickinson, North Dakota. The Fishers give generously to the Republican Party, and Tommy is a guest on conservative TV and talk radio, where he may have caught Donald Trump’s eye. The Fisher business has a bit of a checkered past: environmental violations, shady labor practices, and most notably, fraud.
From Wikipedia:
In 2009, Micheal Fisher, then-owner of Fisher, pled guilty to nine counts of felony tax fraud,[11][12][13] being sentenced to 37 months in prison and over $300,000 in restitution. Amiel Schaff, FSG’s former chief financial officer, and Clyde Frank, FSG’s former comptroller, also pled guilty to one count each of conspiracy to defraud the United States in 2009. The 2009 Department of Justice settlement required FSG to pay a total of $1.16 million in restitution, penalties and fines, implement measures to prevent future fraud at the company, and cooperate with the IRS in audits of its tax returns.[14]
And this next part is a little bit too on the nose:
Another former head of the company, David William Fisher, pled guilty in 2005 to possession of child pornography of a 10 year old child and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Although in exchange for his guilty plea, the charges of sexual exploitation of minors was dropped.[15][9] He was released on April 30, 2010.[16]
You can go down the list and check; SLSCO, CSI Aviation, and Barnard Construction all have a similar pattern: a regional, closely-held company that is “politically integrated,” so to speak.
That is, GOP donors seeing handsome returns for their investments in political donations. They belong to the Epstein class or are at least adjacent to it. Out there where questionable deals are handshake-informal and, Ganz writes, “often downright criminal.”
When you add in the presence of Thiel-backed firms like Anduril, you begin to get a picture of the Trump coalition’s material basis. It’s an alliance of this family-based regional scam capital and a reactionary fraction of the tech sector that focuses on defense and security. Then you add in ICE’s function as an employment program for the Trumpenproletarian mob and all the illiterate influencers and, voila, you have the class composition of actually-existing American fascism, which characteristically enough, is also a racket. It’s the mob from top to bottom.
As far back as he can remember, Donald, Fred Trump Sr.’s second-choice heir to the Trump Organization, always wanted to be a gangster.
Just banal
The divide in the country is often described as right vs. left. In Lakoffian terms, a divide between “strict fathers” and “nurturant parents.” But there is another, less talked about divide.
We saw it in the Wall Street wilding leading up to the financial crash, and in the coke-fueled “greed is good” 1980s, and in the self-delusions of trickle-down economics and the Laffer Curve. We see it in what I’ve dubbed the Midas cult, twisted souls who believe anything that might be turned into gold should be. Most recently, we see it in corporate CEOs, law firms, and universities willing to sacrifice their democratic birthrights to keep the money machine turning. And in Donald Trump.
Trump, the professional conman and self-promoter, is famously said to have refused to visit Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Paris, in 2018. He blamed rain. Trump reportedly said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In another conversation, he called the fallen “suckers.” During a 2017 Memorial Day visit to Arlington National Cemetery, he stood with then-homeland security secretary John Kelly beside the grave of Kelly’s son, Robert, killed in 2010 in Afghanistan at age 29. Sources told The Atlantic that Trump turned to Kelly and said, ““I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
I revisited those events in light of something Paul Krugman writes about our country’s slide into autocracy. (I’d argue that we’re beyond that.) Krugman contrasts the acceleration of democratic backsliding under Trump to that of Hungary and other recent examples. (Digby touched on this on Sunday.)
“It’s a horrifying picture. Yet the flip side of the naked extremism of the MAGA power grab is that it has produced a remarkably strong backlash. The size and determination of civil resistance to ICE has been incredible and inspiring, like nothing we’ve seen since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s,” Krugman writes.
That national backlash has stunned the congenitally cocky Trump and his boot-licking lieutenants.
Krugman continues:
I keep asking two questions as ICE runs wild. First, what is the strategy here? How do Trump, Stephen Miller, etc. think this is going to work for them? Maybe their initial belief was that a display of force would shock and awe their opponents into submission. It’s not happening, yet they just keep ramping up the threats and violence, apparently not knowing how to do anything else.
The obvious answer is that there isn’t any strategy. These people aren’t evil masterminds — evil, yes, but masterminds, no. They’re just thugs too crude and undisciplined to control their own thuggishness. They were caught off guard by the strength of the resistance because the very concept of citizens standing up for their principles is alien to them, and they still can’t believe it’s real.
Standing up for principles is a concept “alien to them.” It simply does not compute. There must be something monetary in it for citizens to gather en masse in the frigid streets of Minneapolis. Otherwise why face off against Trump’s mercenary thugs on behalf of neighbors? Especially those of different races and ethnicities?
Politifact recently addressed the only explanation that makes sense to a man without principles. They must be getting paid:
“The thugs that are protesting include many highly paid professional agitators and anarchists,” he said Jan. 18 on Truth Social.
“They’re paid agitators and insurrectionists,” Trump said at a Jan. 20 press conference.
The next day in Davos, Switzerland, Trump said the “fake” protests were “done by agitators and professional insurrectionists. … They’re professional troublemakers.”
He added, “We are looking very strong at the money, too, in Minnesota and other places.”
Politifact concludes “social media posts we found that claimed to show evidence of paid protesters were either AI-generated, recycled conspiracy theories or unsubstantiated.” (I’m sure the amount of backpay George Soros owes me is staggering.)
Trump the pitchman came to power having convinced large swaths of Americans that he had their backs, understood their struggles, was more American at his core than snooty liberals. His base has yet to come to terms with the fact that he and his inner circle neither understand them nor share their values. Self-aggrandizement is not among the virtues recognized by any of the world’s major faiths.
I waited tables for several years after getting my first degree. Customers regularly asked if I was in school. When I told them that I’d graduated, they asked in what. Philosophy. Their eyes would glaze over. You could see the gears going around in their heads as they asked themselves how that (philosophy) translated into [mentally rubbing their fingers together] cold, hard cash. They’d ask, “But what are you going to do with it?”
I’m still doing it.
And there it is again: the divide. What’s not marketable has no value. What the Trumps and those who bend their knees to them cannot fathom is why anyone would risk their lives in defense of the Constitution, the principles behind it, and the rights enshrined therein. Why people would face police dogs, fire hoses, beatings, and jail to demand that America make good on the promissory note that came back marked “insufficient funds” if they weren’t being paid?
The same government reactionaries who once brutalized American citizens during the Civil Rights era 60 years ago are back at it. Back, like the fascists the Allied dead who lie in Arlington and Aisne-Marne sacrificed their lives to defeat 80 years ago: for democratic principles, for their neighbors, and for foreigners they did not know. And to defeat the banality of evil.
The divide is too great. They’ll never understand.
Trump: "These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally. The Republicans should say, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that I won that show I didn't win. You're gonna see… pic.twitter.com/H5hT3OvtLE
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 2, 2026
Trump: “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally. The Republicans should say, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that I won that show I didn’t win. You’re gonna see something in Georgia.”
Did you think he didn’t mean it? He does. Whether he can pull it off is another question. He’ll just do it anyway and wait for someone to stop him.
Don’t worry. It’s obviously unconstitutional and I’m sure the Supreme Court will get around to dealing with it sometime before 2038. They only move quickly when it will benefit Trump.
The following grotesquely racist email was written in 2013, nine years after Trump supposedly exiled Epstein from his life for being “a creep.”
It would have been nice to know who the person who wrote the original email was but the DOJ redacted many of the names of the powerful so it’s going to be hard to ferret out the details. But there are a whole bunch of emails like this in the files which indicate that Trump was hanging with Epstein for years beyond 2004. And it explains why there was so much “PR” talk about their friendship among Epstein and others once Trump got traction in the presidential race in 2016. Their relationship was anything but ancient history.