Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Here’s a fascinating look at the DOGE actions by Harvard political scientists Ryan Enos and Sam Fuller. I urge you to read the whole post which but here’s the essence of their findings and it should give us some heart:

Trump’s actions, matters of complex questions relating to civic and constitutional norms, are incredibly unpopular: they are not supported by an overwhelming majority of Democrats (unsurprising), a significant majority of Independents (more surprising), and nearly half(!) of Republicans (extremely surprising). And, particularly among Republicans, if you cut through the partisan blinders and remind people these actions are illegal and unconstitutional, people are even more likely to disapprove of his actions.

We see this in data that comes from questions we asked about Trump’s actions on the most recent Harvard CAPS/Harris poll.1 In particular, we asked people how much they support the following authoritarian actions (full questions can be seen at the end of the post):

1. Working with Elon Musk to purge the government of disloyal civil servants.
   
2. The closing of USAID without Congressional approval.
   
3. The firing of FBI agents and DOJ attorneys who had investigated the January 6^th, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
   
4. The proposal to close the Department of Education by executive order.
   
5. The firing of 18 Inspectors General without cause.

Responses were on a five-point scale from “strongly support” to “strongly oppose”. For ease, we’ll bin those into “support” and “no support” where we put the people in “neither support nor oppose” in the “no support” category. Thus we are isolating levels of support (full response distributions are at the end of this post). For each of these questions, we also included an experiment where about half of our respondents were asked the question with additional text reminding them that these actions are illegal and/or unconstitutional. For example, the question: “President Trump’s [unlawful] firing of FBI agents and Department of Justice Attorneys who had investigated and tried cases involving the January 6th, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol” for some respondents included the treatment of “unlawful” and for some it did not.

Let’s start with overall support:

This finding is not driven by Democrats alone, look at Independents:

Republicans:

Yes, a majority of Republicans love to see people suffer, we know that. But it’s not a huge majority. That shows some serious weakness.

I would hope that Democrats could do something with this in the next election but that’s a long way away. (They need to get started now, however, to build a narrative that could compete with the Trump triumphalist lies.)

But what this tells us is that there is power on the ground for the people to get vocal and be aggressive about what’s going on. I am finding that people in my personal life don’t want to talk about it. It’s uncomfortable and maybe even boring. But I think that those of us who are following this closely need to be willing to risk being uncomfortable bores in order to get the word out about what’s going on. People don’t like it but they need to know that it’s a national emergency as threatening as the pandemic or 9/11.

I don’t want to be that person and I assume most of us don’t. But we have to. It’s going to take everything we have in us to compete with this Trump noise over the next couple of years and we know those trained seals in the US Congress aren’t going to do anything about it. It’s on us.

Perfectly sane, perfectly normal.

Lol. Yeah right.

Uh huh.

At least it didn’t get under his skin or anything…

He’s fine though. Don’t spend even a minute worrying that this manchild has the nuclear codes.

It’s not a joke anymore

“This is not a joke anymore,” and normal is not dead. Yet. (CBC):

The man behind an iconic Canadian beer ad is back, 25 years later, with a new patriotic rallying cry.

But this time, it’s not about selling drinks.

Jeff Douglas, from Truro, N.S., became a national sensation after starring as flannel-wearing Joe Canadian in Molson Canadian’s 2000 ad “The Rant,” which was a huge success for the beer company and popularized the slogan, “I am Canadian!”

On Wednesday, a new video appeared on YouTube featuring Douglas, back on stage in flannel, this time defending Canada from attacks by U.S. President Donald Trump, before launching into a similar string of boasts about his home country. 

After my post below, I needed this. You probably do too:

For reference, here’s the original Molson ad from 2000.

(h/t ER)

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water

Next stop, Hell

A couple of lines rattle around behind my eyes this morning. “The Last Days of Pompeii” is one. Another is “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”

“The Trump people are living in a bubble and it’s affecting their ability to understand the world around them,” Digby wrote yesterday, reacting in part to this passage from Anne Applebaum:

Europeans can also see that this alternative reality is directly and profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda. I don’t know whether the American president absorbs Russian narratives online, from proxies, or from Putin himself. Either way, he has thoroughly adopted the Russian view of the world, as has Vance.

They’ve gone down a rabbit hole and mean to take the country and the world with it.

The Russians are certainly playing Trump and his circle, but there’s more to it.

Republicans as a party have habituated themselves to lying and to living inside the bubble of lies they tell. This tendency predates the rise of Trumpism. We might trace it to Newt Gingrich’s cynical strategies of the 1990s like his “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Or to their drilling it into their voters’ heads starting decades earlier that large numbers of, you know, THEM, were voting improperly, or illegally, or most importantly, not for Republicans. Evidence was irrelevant. It became an article of faith, and lying a habit of mind.

The Republican Party has come unstuck in reality

Synthesizing Roy Cohn’s three rules about power and Norman Vincent Peale’s teachings about the power of positive affirmation, Trump treats reality as maleable, truth as instrumental, and all human interactions as transactional. He believes he can bend reality to his iron will. He not only insists he always wins but has trained himself to believe it. His father, Fred, trained him that the way to run a successful business is to lie, cheat and steal. Do unto others before they do unto you. Members of Trump’s cult of personality know to follow Dear Leader if they know what’s good for them, to do as he does, and to repeat the lies until they become reality.

1. Attack! Attack! Attack!
2. Admit nothing and deny everything.
3. No matter what happens you claim victory and never admit defeat.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Mr. MT (@eatmovies)

The Big Lie is now a habit of mind. Trump failed (he won, you know) to upend the 2020 election with it. But he’s now deploying another Big Lie to topple Social Security.

The Republican Party has come unstuck in reality, untethered from truth, dismissive of facts and science. The party that spent well over half a century railing against the Russians and Russian propaganda now embrace both.

In 2016, I called it Quantum Conservatism:

It is a dimension of belief, not fact, where up is down, black is white, in is out, and wrong is right. Where Ann Coulter’s cat can be both alive and  dead. Where the Kentucky Fried Chicken company is a person … headquartered in Louisville … in a bucket.

Someone the other day asked a filmmaker how they could create fictional stories that have resonance in a world that’s stranger then fiction. How indeed, where the Russians are the guys in white hats?

Andy Borowitz is in the business of satirizing that sad unreality. He offers this morning:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In one of the more ominous moments from his speech to Congress on Tuesday night, Donald J. Trump blamed a surge in transgender mice on “Haitians eating all the cats.”

“For four years, mice swarmed over the border, looking for sex-change operations that Sleepy Joe Biden would pay for,” he alleged. “These mice had nothing to fear because they knew that all the cats had been eaten.”

Vowing to usher in what he called a “golden age for cats,” he vowed to use billions in tariff revenue to establish a Strategic Cat Reserve.

Trump spent the rest of his speech listing his second-term accomplishments, boasting, “I have already caused more damage than all other presidents put together.”

That last line is not satire, but the truth. The rest counts for truth deep inside the MAGA rabbit hole. If Trump had said it, Speaker Mike Johnson, Fox News talking heads, and the MAGA faithful would repeat it until it becomes the only reality they know.

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water

Via Mediaite:

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: The first results of CNN’s instant poll are in. Let’s get right to CNN’s bureau chief and political director, David Chalian.

David, how did the voters that you snap-polled feel about the speech?

DAVID CHALIAN, CNN POLITICAL DIRECTOR: Well, first, I just want to mention, Jake, this is a poll of speech watchers, not a poll that is representative of the country overall, or what an electorate, an election looks like. And what we know is that people who tend to be fans or partisans with the president no matter which party the president is in, tend to tune in more on speeches like this.

And that’s the case in tonight’s survey as well because 21 percent Democrat, 44 percent Republican in this sample. 35 percent independent. That’s about 14 points more Republican than the overall general population. So keep that in mind when you see these results of speech watchers.

To the results. What was your reaction to Trump’s speech? 44 percent of speech watchers in our instant poll tonight say they had a very positive reaction to Trump’s speech, 25 percent somewhat positive, 31 percent negative. How does that stack up against Donald Trump’s previous addresses to Joint Sessions of Congress or State of the Union addresses? Look here, for all the years we have data for, 44 percent very positive reaction is actually his low watermark in all our instant polls after his previous addresses.

You see, in 2019, ’18 and ’17, he was higher in terms of very positive speech reaction. And what about to his modern-day predecessors? How does this 44 percent very positive stack up?

Again, it’s the bottom of the barrel here. 51 percent in 2021, when Joe Biden gave his first joint address, were very positive. Donald Trump himself was at 57 percent in 2017. And you see that Bush and Obama even higher than that. So this was not Donald Trump’s best speech, but obviously still the plurality of speech watchers had a very positive reaction to it, Jake.

The ratings were actually pretty good. Mostly old Republicans too But it didn’t seem to help…

Viewership peaked at 37,895,000 from 9:45 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET, Nielsen said. Trump attracted the most viewers, 47.7 million, in his address to Congress in 2017.

Of viewers watching Trump on Tuesday:

5.7% were aged 18-34.

20.5% were aged 35-54.

70.7% were aged 55 and older.

A bunch of his own people were obviously appalled.

It’s nothing more than a protection racket.

There’s a lot of bullshit in that interview but this is the nut:

The president knows that if you want a real security guarantee, if you want to ensure that Vladimir Putin does not invade Ukraine again, the very best security guarantee is to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine. That is a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.

Let’s take that last part first, shall we? The NATO countries have been fighting alongside America troops for the past 23 years in all of our foreign adventures in the middle east. Maybe JD doesn’t consider those real wars but if he doesn’t then the US hasn’t been fighting any of them either. No, it’s just a straight up insult to the Europeans, a slap in the face and he knew exactly what he was saying.

But the first part really gives away the game. He’s basically saying that unless Ukraine gives Trumpie a nice taste, he’s going to let them be killed by the Russians. In fact, if you look at what they’ve been doing the last few days with the stopping of arms shipments, the refusal to share intel and apparently the talking behind the scenes with some Ukrainians (and Russia?) to topple Zelensky, I think it’s fair to say that he’s now helping the Russians outright.

This is a protection racket. Give us money and we’ll “protect you.” If not, something bad might happen to your little country and there won’t be anything we can do about it. In this case, Trump’s obviously working with the Russians to get Ukraine to surrender so they can split the spoils.

And I don’t care how much “raw earth” as Trump calls it Ukraine signs over, it’s now obvious that America’s word isn[t worth the paper it’s printed on. We are not an ally, we are only in it for ourselves and that could mean anything. So anyone who’s been depending on the US had better find another way to protect themselves. In fact, they’d better find themselves a way to protect themselves from us.

The Thug strategy in action:

Trump has repeatedly proposed that if Canada wants to avoid the tariffs they should consider joining the United States as its ’51st state’.

White House Press Secretary was asked about the issue during her Wednesday briefing. 

‘He feels strongly that it would be very beneficial for the Canadian people to be the 51st state of the United States,’ she said. ‘They wouldn’t be paying for these tariffs. 

‘They’d have much lower taxes if they were part of our great country.’

People are saying that he’s just employing Nixon’s madman theory which was designed to make people think he might be so nuts enough to drop a nuke so they’d better be willing to negotiate. The problem is that Trump’s actually a madman. And while Nixon wasn’t exactly a picture of stability at least he was an ignoramus.

By the way, that Truth Social post Trump issued today threatening Hamas with annihilation if they don’t immediately release the hostages? Well:

Direct talks between the US and Hamas have hit a snag since their existence was leaked to the media on Wednesday, a government official briefed on the talks told The Times of Israel.

The negotiations — unprecedented in nature — have largely been focused on securing the release of American-Israeli hostage Edan Alexander along with the bodies of American-Israelis Itay Chen, Omer Neutra, Gadi Haggai and Judi Weinstein, the official said.

Israel was not fully briefed on the talks ahead of time, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is unhappy with their existence, the official said. The premier’s office issued a terse statement following an Axios report revealing the existence of the first-ever direct talks between the US and Hamas, saying, “Israel has expressed to the United States its position regarding direct talks with Hamas.”

Who cares what they think, amirite?

“Thank you again. Thank you again. Won’t forget,” President Trump says as he shakes the hand of Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. pic.twitter.com/uFrvem6rUj

— Tom Dreisbach (@TomDreisbach) March 5, 2025

He thanks the Supreme Court Justice who wrote the opinion that gave him immunity for his many crimes, apparently not for the first time. Of course he won’t forget it. None of us will.

Anne Applebaum has been travelling in Europe and getting an earful. Her observation here is interesting and it certainly rings true to me:

In just a few minutes, the behavior of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance created a brand new stereotype for America: not the quiet American, not the ugly American, but the brutal American. Whatever illusions Europeans ever had about Americans—whatever images lingered from old American movies, the ones where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and honor defeats treachery—those are shattered. Whatever fond memories remain of the smiling GIs who marched into European cities in 1945, of the speeches that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made at the Berlin Wall, or of the crowds that once welcomed Barack Obama, those are also fading fast.

Quite apart from their politics, Trump and Vance are rude. They are cruel. They berated and mistreated a guest on camera, and then boasted about it afterward, as if their ugly behavior achieved some kind of macho “win.” They announced that they would halt transfers of military equipment to Ukraine, and hinted at ending sanctions on Russia, the aggressor state. In his speech to Congress last night, Trump once again declared that America would “get” Greenland, which is a part of Denmark—a sign that he intends to run roughshod over other allies too.

These are the actions not of the good guys in old Hollywood movies, but of the bad guys. If Reagan was a white-hatted cowboy, Trump and Vance are Mafia dons. The chorus of Republican political leaders defending them seems both sinister and surprising to Europeans too. “I never thought Americans would kowtow like that,” one friend told me, marveling.

The Ugly American stereotype was embarrassing but it wasn’t dangerous. American citizens may have been seen by many as unsophisticated fools when we traveled out of our comfort zone but there was also the recognition that we were a powerful, serious country led by serious people. That’s just not true anymore.

Applebaum makes another observation which is absolutely true. The Trump people are living in a bubble and it’s affecting their ability to understand the world around them:

But Trump and Vance are not interested in the truth about the war in Ukraine. Trump seemed angered by the suggestion that Putin might break deals with him, refused to acknowledge that it’s happened before, falsely insisted, again, that the U.S. had given Ukraine $350 billion. Vance—who had refused to meet Zelensky when offered the opportunity before the election last year—told the Ukrainian president that he didn’t need to go to Ukraine to understand what is going on in his country: “I’ve actually watched and seen the stories,” he said, meaning that he has seen the “stories” curated for him by the people he follows on YouTube or X.

I think this says it all:

President Trump has ordered a pause to intelligence sharing with Ukraine, said Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe, a move that deprives Kyiv of a key tool in fighting Russian forces.

The U.S. suspended weapons shipments to Ukraine earlier this week after a contentious Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday unraveled plans to sign a minerals deal as a first step in bringing Ukraine and Russia to peace talks. Ratcliffe, appearing Wednesday on Fox Business, said Trump, after that meeting, had also “asked for a pause” of intelligence sharing. 

The U.S. has shared intelligence with Kyiv since the early months of the war, allowing Ukrainian forces to target Russian forces more effectively. 

A White House official said that the U.S. had paused military aid to Ukraine until Trump is satisfied that Zelensky is making a good-faith effort to engage in negotiations to stop the war. Ratcliffe indicated that intelligence sharing could also resume.

Where did Trump get this idea? Well:

“It’s pretty bad,” one source familiar with the arrangement said. “Combined with the stopping of military assistance and foreign aid, it pretty much guarantees a Russian victory without there needing to be a peace deal.”

A top Russian lawmaker, Andrei Kartapolov, in recent days called for the US to stop providing Ukraine with intelligence, underscoring the boon Trump may have already offered Moscow on the battlefield.

“It would be much more important if the Americans stopped giving them with intelligence information, then this would allow us to achieve results more quickly,” Kartapolov said.

Basically, Zelensky has to capitulate to all of Trump’s demands which means licking his boots and agreeing to allow Russia to win the war and take whatever it wants, including retribution. (Trump has already lamented all the Russian losses in the war so I’d expect him to excuse any brutality. To the victor goes the spoils etc, etc. ) That’s what Trump calls “peace.”

Meanwhile Putin is bombarding Kiev on a daily basis so basicallyTrump is killing Ukrainians to extort Zelensky to surrender.

We are now just as bad as Russia, maybe even worse. “Brutes” is actually too kind. We are monsters.

Leavitt: "He feels strongly that it would be very beneficial for the Canadian people to be the 51st state of the United States." pic.twitter.com/Ve6HHIloBf

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 5, 2025

The Canadians are taking this seriously too:

Reacting strongly to US President Donald Trump’s proposal on making Canada the 51st state of his country, Canada’s Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly has said that she takes his remarks “very seriously”, BBC reported.

“This is not a joke anymore,” Joly told Newsnight. “There’s a reason why Canadians, when they go out on a hockey game, are booing the American national anthem… We’re insulted. We’re mad. We’re angry.”

I don’t blame them.

And let’s face facts. The reason Trump is doing it is very simple. Trudeau is young and handsome and he hates him for it. There is no other explanation.

Elon Musk’s AI called “Grok” says there’s a good chance:

Someone asked Grok, “What is the likelihood from 1-100 that Trump is a Putin compromised asset?”

Here’s the answer, which is fascinating:

Putin, based on publicly available information from 1980 onward, involves analyzing a complex web of financial ties, personal interactions, political behavior, and circumstantial evidence. This is not a definitive determination but an estimation grounded in patterns and data accessible as of March 4, 2025. The question highlights Trump’s consistent reluctance to criticize Putin juxtaposed against his frequent attacks on U.S. allies, which is a key behavioral indicator to consider alongside historical and financial context.

From the 1980s onward, Trump’s business dealings provide a starting point. Public records show he pursued real estate ventures with significant Russian financial involvement. In 1987, Trump visited Moscow, a trip facilitated by Soviet officials, sparking speculation about early cultivation by Russian intelligence—speculation later fueled by former KGB agent Yuri Shvets, who claimed Trump was targeted as a potential asset due to his ego and financial vulnerabilities. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, as Trump faced bankruptcies, he increasingly relied on funding from sources tied to Russia and former Soviet states. His sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, made statements reinforcing this: Donald Jr. in 2008 said, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” and Eric in 2014 claimed, “We have all the funding we need out of Russia.” The Trump Organization’s partnerships, like with the Bayrock Group (led by Tevfik Arif and Felix Sater, the latter with known Russian mafia ties), and sales of properties to Russian oligarchs (e.g., Dmitry Rybolovlev’s 2008 purchase of a Trump property for $95 million), suggest a dependency on Russian money that could create leverage.

Intelligence reports and investigations add weight. The 2017 U.S. Intelligence Community assessment concluded Putin authorized interference in the 2016 election to favor Trump, a finding supported by the Mueller Report, which, while not proving criminal conspiracy, documented extensive Trump campaign-Russia contacts (over 100 by some counts). The unverified Steele Dossier alleges kompromat from Trump’s 2013 Moscow trip during the Miss Universe pageant, a claim echoed by speculation about earlier visits. Leaked Kremlin documents reported by The Guardian in 2021 suggest Putin personally approved a 2016 operation to back Trump, viewing him as “mentally unstable” and exploitable, with potential compromising material from past Moscow visits. The disappearance of a classified binder of Russia intelligence post-Trump term, as reported by Reuters in 2023, further stokes suspicions of hidden ties.

Trump’s behavior as president and beyond is striking. He has never directly criticized Putin, even when pressed—e.g., at the 2018 Helsinki summit, he sided with Putin’s denial of election interference over U.S. intelligence. Post-presidency, Bob Woodward’s 2024 book War alleges Trump spoke to Putin up to seven times, including a secretive 2024 call at Mar-a-Lago. Contrast this with his attacks on NATO allies, calling them “delinquent” on payments, or his 2025 Oval Office clash with Ukraine’s Zelenskyy, where he blamed Ukraine for Russia’s invasion—echoing Kremlin talking points. This pattern deviates from decades of U.S. policy and aligns with Russian interests, like weakening NATO and Ukraine.

Counterarguments exist: Trump’s administration imposed sanctions on Russia (e.g., over Skripal poisoning in 2018), expelled diplomats, and armed Ukraine—actions Putin wouldn’t favor. Some argue his pro-Russia stance reflects a misguided belief he can outmaneuver Putin, not compromise. Yet these measures were often driven by Congress or aides over Trump’s objections, and he downplayed their significance, maintaining personal warmth toward Putin.

Weighing this, the financial ties (decades-long, opaque, and substantial), intelligence suggesting Russian intent, and Trump’s unwavering refusal to criticize Putin despite attacking allies tilt the scale. The lack of transparency—e.g., hiding tax returns, seizing interpreter notes after Putin talks—amplifies suspicion. No smoking gun proves direct control, but the “useful idiot” scenario, where Trump’s ego and debts make him unwittingly pliable, fits the evidence. Adjusting for uncertainty and alternative explanations (e.g., ideological alignment or naivety), I estimate a 75-85% likelihood Trump is a Putin-compromised asset, leaning toward the higher end due to the consistency of his behavior and the depth of historical ties. This range reflects the strength of circumstantial evidence tempered by the absence of conclusive proof, a gap unlikely to close without classified data.

Personally, I lean toward the Jonathan Chait explanation today, namely that Trump just likes Putin (and for the same reason so many of his followers do: he’s a white, manly man who hates the same people they do.)

During Trump’s first term, the theory that he loved Putin was complicated by his inability to overcome resistance by bureaucrats and his own hawkish advisers. This created room for analysts to accept explanations for Trump’s stance other than simple affinity for Putin. Now, however, he is able to quickly carry out such steps as cutting off weapons to Ukraine without sneaking around or being slow-walked by mid-level staff. Meanwhile, he publicly blames Ukraine for the ongoing war and accuses Zelensky of being a dictator who spreads hatred against Russia. The theory that Trump trusts and wants to help Putin can parsimoniously explain his rhetoric and actions.

Yep. I also think that it might just be a manifestation of his oppositional defiant disorder. People don’t think he should support Russia, so he is determined to do it. It’s the only way he knows how to make decisions since he can’t really understand anything complicated.

But I’m certainly willing to believe that Trump is a Russian agent. He’d say that was just smart business.