Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Out of the news but not out of the woods

A friend last night asked how recovery was coming along here in Asheville. The truth is we are out of the news but a long way from out of the woods. 

Some friends were in the Oval Office on Thursday to ask President Joe Biden to add a zero to the end of federal recovery aid already approved for Western North Carolina. Or at least for another $25.5 billion. The group also met with congressional budget staff on Capitol Hill to promote a larger aid package.

Locals are hoping the supplemental aid passes quickly because the next occupant won’t be as friendly to ye olde Cesspool of Sin™. The GOP-dominated legislature in Raleigh is already cutting us off. More on that in a moment.

This week, I sat down with @NC_Governor and elected officials from western North Carolina to thank them in person for their partnership as we continue our focus on hurricane recovery.

We're doing everything we can to get your communities what they need in these difficult times. pic.twitter.com/ad8Ti8s2h8

— President Biden (@POTUS) November 21, 2024

Recovery will take years. Downtown Asheville normally would be bustling with shoppers this time of year. For a local economy overdependent on tourism (don’t get me started), empty hotels and shops are dead weight on the city’s economy and on out-of-workers’ lives. Some storefronts are empty and for rent. Residents who left the area during the seven-week water outage may have found work where they relocated already, and may not return.

Recovery depots are still in operation for people (fewer now) from more remote areas of the county still without power or with contaminated wells needing testing, or with homes too damaged to be habitable.

It’s not in the news but it is still the reality on the ground. The town may look normal but normal will not return soon.

Disaster victims still need showers, laundry facilities, supplies, etc. A Board of Elections members told me on Friday relations are still camping out in her house eight weeks after Tropical Storm Helene dropped off a disaster.

A FEMA map I obtained on Friday (dated 11/19) displays the numbers of privately owned and rental residences impacted across Western North Carolina. The largest concentrations are in Buncombe County (Asheville metro). 

• 542 homes destroyed
• 1,600 homes with major damage
• 18,102 homes requiring habitability repairs

There are another 6,000+ rental residences destroyed, damaged, or requiring habitability repairs, meaning structural repairs and/or replacement of appliances and heating/cooling/plumbing/electrical systems.

Thanks to the New York Times for covering what I said on the floor: this is not a recovery bill — this is a purely partisan bill that takes aim at some of the foundational pillars of our democracy.https://t.co/2NzlFfXUJf

— Sen. Julie Mayfield (@MayfieldforNC) November 22, 2024

We mentioned this week North Carolina Republicans’ scramble in the lame-duck session to snatch power from Democrats who defeated their candidates under the guise of a disaster recovery measure. The GOP-dominated body remains “dead-set on refusing to provide meaningful relief for mountain communities hit hard by Hurricane Helene,” reports Smoky Mountain News.

“I’m deeply concerned that instead of help for Western North Carolina, that they used this storm as a front to engage in yet another power grab that I think hurts North Carolina,” Cooper told The Smoky Mountain News Nov. 22.

Three WNC Republicans voted against the bill but are likely to vote to sustain an expected Cooper veto. Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers, whose town flooded just three years ago, had stern words for Raleigh:

Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers praised the three western reps for sticking up for a region that consistently feels overlooked by Raleigh — perhaps for good reason.

“What you saw was fundamental, principled leadership and doing right by the people of Western North Carolina. That was not a hurricane relief bill; it was a bill that was trying to be marketed as one. Even when talking about the money, it just shifts money. It doesn’t allocate where it goes,” said Smathers. “It was a bill that was done behind closed doors, very quickly and not involving even the Republicans, even our own legislators. This is a bill that should not have been passed and should not exist and should be vetoed. And if it was Democrats doing it, I would say the same thing.”

Plenty of videos and podcasts (some of them sensationalized) show destroyed homes, crushed cars and piles of debris and downed trees along roadsides in residential neighborhoods and in more outlying areas. The destruction is not just along the rivers but on hillsides hit by slides and flattened by tornadoes or microbursts. Sometimes only a few yards and a few feet of elevation separate devastation and “normal.” No one really knows how long the cleanup will take.

Officials report 103 deaths across WNC, with 43 in my county, Buncombe. Our house painter reports he lost one of his best crew members to the storm.

A friend just returned from Hawaii reports that a year later the burned city of Lahaina is still a wasteland. They feel us, he said. We feel them.

“Who will be the targets tomorrow?”

This speech by then-Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in November 1994 was prophetic.

30 years ago today, I warned that America was becoming a two-tiered society composed of a few winners and a larger group left behind, whose anger and disillusionment could be easily manipulated.

I took a lot of heat for this speech at the time. Watch and tell me if I was wrong. pic.twitter.com/KcU7SVCiNT

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) November 22, 2024

Did anyone listen?

Animal Thanksgiving!

That’s from a couple of years ago, but I have to assume that zoos around the country will be doing something similar this year. Those are lemurs enjoying their T-Day dinner.

The Oregon zoo:

Denver Zoo:

We aren’t the only ones feasting today! Our leucistic raccoon sisters, Pecan and Cashew, enjoyed a delicious Thanksgiving feast made up of hard-boiled eggs, clams, crawfish, pineapple, edamame, sweet potato, green beans, peas and carrots. Raccoons are omnivores, so these items are all staples of their daily diet. Our Nutrition Team presented these foods in a fun new way for our girls!

These goats at Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma, Washington, had a lot to be thankful for this season, given a huge Thanksgiving feast of vegetarian fare and even “mocktails” made from beet juice, according to the zoo.

The richest man in the world is getting a lesson in Trump.

Doubts abound as to whether he will graduate in 2028 with a four-year degree in Trumpism: It is now a parlor game in Washington and Silicon Valley to speculate just how long the Musk-Trump relationship will last. The answer, as discarded aides from Mr. Trump’s first term will tell you, may depend on Mr. Musk’s ability to placate the boss and keep a relatively low profile — but also to shiv a rival when the time comes.

In short, how to play the politics of Trumpworld.

Most of the people who now surround Mr. Trump in the transition are battle-tested aides from his past fights, or decades-long personal friends. Mr. Musk is neither. What he brings instead are his 200 million followers on X and the roughly $200 million he spent to help elect Mr. Trump. Both of those have greatly impressed the president-elect. Mr. Trump, gobsmacked by Mr. Musk’s willingness to lay off 80 percent of the staff at X, has said the tech billionaire will help lead a Department of Government Efficiency alongside Vivek Ramaswamy.

I just love the fact that Trump thinks laying off staff at a social media platform (which, by the way, has become a total wingnut sewer and is failing at a rapid rate) is equivalent in any way to “reforming” the US Government. It’s absurd. Especially when you hear something like this:

In private meetings at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Musk shows little familiarity with policy or the potential staff members being discussed, but he returns repeatedly to a central point: What is required, he says, is “radical reform” of government and “reformers” who are capable of executing radical changes, according to two people briefed on the meetings, who insisted on anonymity to describe the internal conversations.

He’s no genius, I’m sorry. He’s a talented entrepreneur, obviously, but there’s no reason to believe he understands anything other than that. When it comes to philosophy, ideology, politics, history — the world — he’s no better than your average right wing troll on Truth Social, operating from a gut that favors bigotry, selfishness and stupidity. He’s clueless about government and he’s going to crash and burn.

He’s already feeling the need to lick some boot:

On Wednesday, in response to a headline describing him as Mr. Trump’s “closest confidant,” the tech billionaire went out of his way to praise “the large number of loyal, good people at Mar-a-Lago who have worked for him for many years.”

“To be clear, while I have offered my opinion on some cabinet candidates, many selections occur without my knowledge and decisions are 100% that of the President,” he wrote on X.

It appeared to be a recognition of a well-known lesson in Trumpworld: Don’t outshine the boss. At least if you want to stay awhile.

Mick Mulvaney says that Musk should be Trump’s “straight shooter” who tells it like it is:

“What makes Musk such a valuable adviser,” Mr. Mulvaney told The Times in an interview, “is that he has enough money — and enough other things to do — that he is uniquely situated to be the bearer of honest news. More than perhaps anybody else on the planet, he doesn’t need the job.”

Oh for sure! Musk needs to be up in Trump’s fave constantly telling him things he doesn’t want to hear. That’s the perfect job for him and Trump will be so appreciative. He respects that sort of thing.

It’s not going to work out. Right now Trump may be enjoying the fact that the richest man in the world is his BFF. But before too long he’s going to realize that the richest man in the world is trying to usurp him — the most powerful man in the world — and he’s going to get sick of him. At this point I wouldn’t bet on Musk being around even 3 months from now.

Trump is choosing people based on how they defend him on television and (surprise!) that’s not the best way to vet people for big jobs in the government. He’s already lost Gaetz. Who’s next?

The Wall St. Journal sez:

Members of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team were blindsided by the latest details to emerge about a 2017 sexual-assault allegation against Pete Hegseth, increasing their frustration with the man nominated to lead the Pentagon, according to people familiar with the matter.

The transition team, which hadn’t been told about the original allegation before announcing Hegseth, was surprised again late Wednesday night when the Monterey, Calif., city police released a report about the 2017 allegations. The heavily redacted report details a boozy night at a hotel in California, a poolside argument and two conflicting versions of what ultimately took place inside Hegseth’s hotel room.

The Monterey police said a redacted version of the report had been released to Hegseth on March 30, 2021. The transition team wasn’t told that a copy of the police report had been released to Hegseth previously, the people familiar with the discussions said.

“This is another instance of people being blindsided, so I think there’s rising frustration there,” said a person familiar with the transition. While the president-elect is still behind Hegseth for now, “if this continues to be a drumbeat and the press coverage continues to be bad, particularly on TV, then I think there is a real chance that he loses Trump’s confidence.”

Perhaps the great Colossus of Mar-a-lago may not be able to force through his daft TV rogues gallery after all? On the other hand he doesn’t really care about any of them. He just wants people who will carry out his revenge plans and there are plenty of those to choose from in today’s GOP. No big loss.

Tom wrote about the the ever slipping “mandate” this morning, quoting from that NY Times piece “The Landslide That Wasn’t.” Mar-a-lago is hopping mad:

Trump transition team spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt on Friday took aim at Politico and The New York Times for reporting on the fact that President-elect Trump didn’t win the popular vote by some resounding majority.

It was not massive and it was not historic. In fact, Harris has now received almost a quarter of a million more votes than Trump did in the higher turnout election of 2020 — you remember the ine he bragged about being the highest number by any incumbent in history?

Basically, we’re back to crowd size arguments. And if you ask a Trump supporter what’s going on they’ll either say the votes counted since election day are all fraudulent or that it’s fake news. Deal Leader got the greatest victory in the history of the world. Everyone knows that.

One step forward two steps back:

Women have made significant gains in Congress in recent elections, but that progress has stalled for the first time since 2016, falling short of the current record levels.

The latest woman to lose her race is Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola, with NBC News projecting her defeat to Republican Nick Begich in Alaska. One other female lawmaker, GOP Rep. Michelle Steel, is locked in a tight and uncalled race in Southern California, where she is currently trailing Democrat Derek Tran by a narrow margin.

If Steel also loses, the number of women in the next Congress, including both the House and the Senate, will reach 150 (including the eventual winner of Iowa’s 1st District recount between GOP Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Democrat Christina Bohannon). That means the next Congress could begin one fewer woman than the 151 who were in Congress on Election Day, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics — the first decline since 2010 and only the second since 1978.

151 out of 535. And shrinking.

Do we really think that the fact that Kamala Harris is a woman of color had nothing to do with the election results? Come on…

Contrary to his customary bragging that he won the election in an unprecedented landslide, President Donald Trump’s percentage of the popular vote has fallen below 50% and every day it drops a little bit lower as the final votes are tallied up. According to the Cook Report, as of Tuesday, he was at 49.94 percent, and Harris was at 48.26, a difference of a mere 1.68%. He won fair and square but to call it an overwhelming mandate to dismantle the government is ridiculous.

Obviously, Trump will always maintain that his victory was the greatest in history and that nobody’s ever seen anything like it. But in Washington it’s clear that Trump’s win was not the overwhelming validation of his agenda that we were told in the days after November 5th. Over 50% of the people voted against it, just as they did in 2020 and in 2016. Perhaps some Republicans waking up from their stupors and realizing this accounts for the fact that the fever broke yesterday for the first time since election day. Matt Gaetz withdrew his nomination for Attorney General proving, as my colleague Amanda Marcotte writes, resistance is not futile. [INSERT LINK PLEASE]

As Marcotte points out, the pressure was mounting from the public and press over Gaetz’s egregious ethics violations and details from the House ethics committee was starting to leak out. Gaetz withdrew after being informed that a new accusation that he had sex with an underage girl at one of his raucous drug fueled parties was about to drop. But as the Bulwark’s Marc A. Caputo reported, it was Trump calling him to say that he didn’t have the votes in the Senate and wouldn’t be confirmed that finally forced him to throw in the towel.

Ever since Trump and Elon Musk and the rest of his crack transition team gathered at Mar-a-lago to plot his triumphant return to the White House in January, they’ve been throwing around threats and intimidating members of the House and Senate. Many of them, like Rep. Roy Nehls, R-Tx., seem to positively love it:

Rep. Troy Nehls (R., Texas): "If Donald Trump says, 'Jump three feet high and scratch your head,' we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That's it." That's it.pic.twitter.com/F3Vsco9ld3

— Jay Nordlinger (@jaynordlinger) November 17, 2024

Considering how often Republicans have done just that, anyone could be forgiven for thinking that’s exactly what they all intend to do. But a funny thing happened when Trump weighed in on the Senate Majority leadership vote to replace Sen. Mitch McConnell , R-Ky., shortly after the election. Top adviser Elon Musk along with others such as RFK Jr, Tucker Carlson, Vivek Ramaswamy and Charlie Kirk all endorsed Florida senator Rick Scott, tacitly letting it be known that Trump himself would be happy with his election.

Trump himself only intervened with an edict before the vote, demanding on his Truth Social platform that “Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments… We need positions filled IMMEDIATELY!”

All three contenders, Sen. John Thune , R-S.D., John Cornyn, R-Tx., and Rick Scott R-Fla. agreed to allow Trump the ability to make recess appointments if necessary, a constitutional but rarely used gambit which had been obstructed by both parties over the last decade through a series of parliamentary maneuvers. The question everyone was asking was, why would he need it? He had a Senate majority of at least 52 votes (now 53.) Why wouldn’t his own party be able to muster the necessary votes to confirm his cabinet?

In the end, John Thune was elected (by a secret ballot) which was the first clue that Trump’s iron grip may not be as strong as assumed. Thune is a Mitch McConnell protege, looked at with suspicion by the MAGA crowd, and considered more establishment institutionalist than Trump loyalist. Scott, the choice of Trump’s firebrand advisers, only got 13 votes.

We soon found out why Trump was signaling that he needed recess appointments when, on the same day Thune was elected, Trump named Gaetz followed by a succession of hacks, weirdos, extremists and kooks, none of whom are remotely qualified for the massively important jobs they’re nominated for. For a time it seemed as though Trump had arrogantly decided to bypass the advise and consent role of the Senate altogether and simply force the House and Senate to recess during which time he would just appoint his entire cabinet. It was a strongarm move meant to let the Senate know that they are merely there to do his bidding and nothing more.

Then last Sunday night, renowned New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer tweeted that Mitch McConnell had told a gathering “Message to Trump Team: There will be no recess appointments.”  She deleted the tweet not long after, apparently due to a misunderstanding about the meeting being off the record but MAGA world was incensed, obviously because it was true. McConnell will not be the majority leader next year but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know things.

Philip Bump at the Washington Post reported that the House is digging in its heels on their part of the recess appointment gambit as well:

Similarly, it’s been reported without denial that enough House Republicans are unwilling to adjourn the House to give House Speaker Mike Johnson a pretext for claiming the House and Senate are in disagreement, which might give the president the power to adjourn Congress.

Somewhere along the line the US Congress decided that it’s not going to entirely give up its constitutional prerogatives so that Trump can install his cavalcade of carnival sideshow acts into the most powerful jobs in the world. And that was in spite of the fact that One Trump adviser told ABC News that they’d done some serious arm twisting telling the Senators that “anyone on the wrong side of the vote is buying yourself a primary. That is all. And there is a guy named Elon Musk who is going to finance it.” (Nice little congress you have there, be a shame if anything happened to it…)

There’s a decent chance the Senate will reject Hegseth, Gabbard and RFK Jr as well. As Bump notes, “their confirmations were never going to be easy, but Gaetz’s withdrawal both increases the amount of scrutiny that they face and establishes a precedent under which scandal-marred candidates step aside.”

It’s always safe to bet on the ultimate cowardice of Republicans in the face of Donald Trump so I won’t get my hopes up. But this episode shows one thing: Trump lost. Bigly. Within a little over two weeks he’s already blown the appearance of invincibility, demonstrating once again that he is an incompetent egomaniac whose psychological unfitness creates nothing by chaos. As we all know, there aren’t many guardrails left but Trumpian dysfunction is actually one of them and it’s still fully operational. 

Also, our numbers matter

Heading into Season 2 of “The Apprentice Goes To Washington,” we are already seeing Donald Trump’s flacks insisting he won a mandate bigger even than his first inauguration crowd. Even without Sean Spicer around to parrot it, you know know the line by heart: “Like nobody’s ever seen.” There will be big strong men with tears in their eyes agog at Dear Leader’s yuge mandate, etc.

Not so. The New York Times subhead reads: “The latest vote count shows that Donald J. Trump won the popular vote by one of the smallest margins since the 19th century.” But if Trump is still breathing, he’s still selling the rubes crap like Trump steaks and Trump sneakers and Trump NFTs and Trump Bibles:

The disconnect goes beyond predictable Trumpian braggadocio. The incoming president and his team are trying to cement the impression of a “resounding margin,” as one aide called it, to make Mr. Trump seem more popular than he is and strengthen his hand in forcing through his agenda in the months to come.

[…]

With some votes still being counted, the tally used by The New York Times showed Mr. Trump winning the popular vote with 49.997 percent as of Thursday night, and he appears likely to fall below that once the final results are in, meaning he would not capture a majority. Another count used by CNN and other outlets shows him winning 49.9 percent. By either reckoning, his margin over Vice President Kamala Harris was about 1.6 percentage points, the third smallest since 1888, and could ultimately end up around 1.5 points.

Johnson beating Goldwater in 1964 with 61% was a lansdlide. Nixon wiping the floor with McGovern with 61% was a landslide. Reagan besting Mondale in 1984 with 59% was a landslide. I grew up with Lyndon Johnson. I voted in the 1984 election. Donald, you’re no Ronald Reagan.

Peter Baker adds:

Mr. Trump would not be the first newly elected or re-elected president to assume his victory gave him more political latitude than it really did. Bill Clinton tried to turn his 5.6-point win in 1992 into a mandate to completely overhaul the nation’s health care system, a project that blew up in his face and cost his party both houses of Congress in the next midterm elections.

George W. Bush likewise thought his 2.4-point win in 2004 would empower him to revise the Social Security system, only to fail and lose Congress two years later. And President Biden interpreted his 4.5-point win over Mr. Trump in 2020 as a mission to push through some of the most expansive social programs since the Great Society, then saw Republicans take control of the House in 2022 and the White House and Senate two years after that.

One can hope Trumpty Dumpty has an even greater a fall.

I don’t expect one as dramatic as Nicolae Ceaușescu’s (nor do I wish it), but the improbable has been happening with unnerving regularity over the last decade, almost as if “Q” had changed the gravitational constant of the universe without us knowing.

James Aames reminds TikTok how quickly things can go sour for dictators who send troops after their own people, as Trump is crazy enough to try. “Our numbers matter.”

As the Trump regime takes shape for the impending implementation of the fascist manifesto Project 2025, I am reminded of another fascist authoritarian who misjudged the true extent of his power. The date is December 21, 1989. The dictator's name was Nicolae Ceaușescu. 😳👇 pic.twitter.com/csxJTGBUqF

— Bill Madden (@maddenifico) November 21, 2024

How many Trump supporters share his agenda?

Adam Serwer considers how easily voters he spoke to across the South dismissed Donald Trump’s worst traits as media propaganda:

During the last weeks of the campaign, when I was traveling in the South speaking with Trump voters, I encountered a tendency to deny easily verifiable negative facts about Trump. For example, one Trump voter I spoke with asked me why Democrats were “calling Trump Hitler.” The reason was that one of Trump’s former chiefs of staff, the retired Marine general John Kelly, had relayed the story about Trump wanting “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” and saying that “Hitler did some good things.”

“Look back on the history of Donald Trump, whom they’re trying to call racist,” one Georgia voter named Steve, who declined to give his last name, told me. “If you ask somebody, ‘Well, what has he said that’s actually racist?,’ usually they can’t come up with one thing. They’ll say all kinds of things, and it’s like, ‘No, what?’ Just because the media says he’s racist doesn’t mean he’s racist.”

We on the left criticize voters on the right as existing in a disinformation bubble. But is that right? Perhaps we political junkies exist in one of our own? Sewer considers how blithely Trump voters tune out information that corrodes confidence in their tribal leader.

This is consistent with Trump voters simply ignoring or disregarding facts about Trump that they don’t like. Democratic pollsters told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent that “voters didn’t hold Trump responsible for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, something Trump openly boasted about during the campaign.” Sargent added, “Undecided voters didn’t believe that some of the highest profile things that happened during Trump’s presidency—even if they saw these things negatively—were his fault.” One North Carolina Trump voter named Charlie, who also did not give me his last name, told me that he was frustrated by gas prices—comparing them with how low they’d been when he took a road trip in the final year of Trump’s first term. That year, energy prices were unexpectedly depressed by the pandemic.

Many Trump voters seemed to simply rationalize negative stories about him as manufactured by an untrustworthy press that was out to get him. This points to the effectiveness of right-wing media not only in presenting a positive image of Trump, but in suppressing negative stories that might otherwise change perceptions of him. And because they helped prevent several worst-case scenarios during Trump’s first term, Democrats may also be the victims of their own success. Many people may be inclined to see warnings of what could come to pass as exaggerations rather than real possibilities that could still occur.

A 2024 candidate told me this week he was stunned by how many people across the region were disengaged from politics and knew little about current events. We’re not just talking conservatives, he said, but left-leaners as well. What’s happening in Washington that impacts their lives is as remote as the state capital four-to-six hours away.

As I keep saying, “normal” people are busy with their lives. Too busy to devote the kind of time and focus people like me do to current events. The job, the kids, the mortgage, the car repair, the storm damage … those are the only current events for which they’ve reserved mental bandwidth. What they think they know about everything else reaches them in snippets, factoids, like what “anyone is talking about” at the beauty parlor. What reaches them is the MEG economy (the price of milk, eggs, and gas). On those atmospherics and on tribal fidelity they cast their ballots. If they cast their ballots. Close to 90 million eligible voters stayed home in 2024.

So those who voted for Trump (and those who stayed home) may be shocked to find that what they don’t know can hurt them, Serwer suggests. They may be shocked when Trump actually pursues “the most extreme right-wing policies” he campaigned on and they dismissed as Trumpish bluster. What do average voters actually know about the cranks and crooks Trump wants to appoint to positions where they can do families harm?

This speaks to an understated dynamic in Trump’s victory: Many people who voted for him believe he will do only the things they think are good (such as improve the economy) and none of the things they think are bad (such as act as a dictator)—or, if he does those bad things, the burden will be borne by other people, not them. This is the problem with a political movement rooted in deception and denial; your own supporters may not like it when you end up doing the things you actually want to do.

All of this may be moot if Trump successfully implements an authoritarian regime that is unaccountable to voters—in many illiberal governments, elections continue but remain uncompetitive by design. If his voters are allowed to, some may change their minds once they realize Trump’s true intentions. Still, the election results suggest that if the economy stays strong, for the majority of the electorate, democracy could be a mere afterthought.

The car needs new tires. The price of bacon increased. Are they living in a bubble or are we?