Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Shooting someone on Fifth Avenue was small-time

As far back as he can remember, Donald Trump always wanted to be a gangster.

He fantasized about shooting people in the middle of Fifth Avenue and getting away with it. He grew up learning tax dodges from his father. He learned tough-guy bluster from mob consigliere, Roy Cohn: attack attack attack; admit nothing, deny everything; always claim victory. He bought concrete from firms run by mafiosos Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano for building Trump Plaza and Trump Tower.

City and State NY report, while “Trump’s behavior and language have also been likened to that of mobsters by several news outlets, who have noted that his speech is often peppered with terms typically used by members of the mob, like late Gambino family boss John Gotti,” the short-fingered vulgarian, like so many bullies, “has skin of gossamer” and never had the guts or the stomach to go beyond boasting.

He ran for president not to be president but to build his profile, enjoy the public attention, and enhance his family brand. Then on November 8, 2016, to his surprise, he won. His mafia stylings that worked in New York brought legal scrutiny in D.C.

Now with Elon Musk’s help he actually gets to kill people in bulk from the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue and get away with it. But the man who doesn’t use email and discourages note-taking knows how to hurt people without getting his hands dirty. He learned that in New York City. Handed a Get Out of Jail card from the Roberts court, Fifth Avenue now seems like small potatoes.

The Wall Street Journal:

The Trump administration has terminated $800 million in grants to Johns Hopkins University, spurring the nation’s top spender on research and development to plan layoffs and cancel health projects, from breast-feeding support efforts in Baltimore to mosquito-net programs in Mozambique. 

The cuts, which are in addition to threatened trims to National Institutes of Health grants, are related to the university’s work with the U.S. Agency for International Development. The school is preparing to shrink its Baltimore-based affiliated nonprofit, JHPIEGO, that since the 1970s has worked closely with the USAID and has already stopped work on a number of international health projects. 

Hundreds of thousands could die of treatable diseases worldwide

Trump has stopped weapons shipments to Ukraine and cut intelligence support. More people will die, says a Ukrainian MP (The London Times):

Ukraine’s key weapon systems were dramatically weakened on Wednesday after the US severed its intelligence sharing with Kyiv, leading to warnings that the move will result in more civilians dying.

Weapons systems stopped receiving data they rely upon to hit Russian ­targets, hampering Ukraine’s ability to effectively defend itself against ­incoming attacks. There were also fears that those personnel operating UK-supplied equipment, such as Storm Shadow cruise missiles, could struggle to identify military positions without intelligence from the US.

Kira Rudik, a Ukrainian MP, told Times Radio that the “brutal” decision to pull American intelligence sharing after ­denying the country military aid meant “so many people will be doomed”. While insisting that the move would not change Ukraine’s resolve to fight on, she said: “It is obviously brutal and I cannot imagine how many people will pay the ultimate price for the ­decision.”

Trump’s choice for Health and Human Services secretary, vaccine skeptic RFK Jr., recommends eating better and ingesting castor oil for avoiding the measles outbreak that’s spreading on his watch (ABC News):

The measles outbreak in western Texas is continuing to grow with 25 cases confirmed over the last five days, bringing the total to 223 cases, according to new data published Tuesday.

Almost all of the cases are in unvaccinated individuals or in individuals whose vaccination status is unknown, with 80 unvaccinated and 138 of unknown status, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. At least 29 people have been hospitalized so far.

Two deaths are reported so far, one child in West Texas and an adult in New Mexico. Both were unvaccinated. More are coming.

Trump’s team of DOGE assassins led by Musk is busily performing “hits” on tens of thousands of civil servants more loyal to their country and their missions than to Mafia Don. They’re losing their jobs. They may lose their homes soon enough.

Proposed cuts to Medicare could leave tens of millions of low-income Americans without health care, force rural hopitals to close, and likely cause more unnecessary deaths.

In true Mafia Don fashion, Trump hopes to bribe citizens into keeping their mouths shut about it by issuing a “DOGE Dividend” (USA Today):

The $5,000 dividend checks would come from the claimed savings that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), accrues on the path to its savings goal of $2 trillion, President Donald Trump said in February.

“We’re considering giving 20% of the DOGE savings to American citizens and 20% to paying down the debt,” Trump said in a during the Saudi-sponsored FII PRIORITY Summit in Miami Beach last month.

If it happens, people will get “a piece of the action” taken out of the hide of neighbors who’ve lost government jobs or private-sector jobs that cease to exist because Musk has cancelled contracts that paid their mortgages, fed their families, and supported local businesses.

As far back as he can remember, Donald Trump always wanted to be a gangster. But getting rich as a mobster is nowhere near as sweet as being able to destroy the lives of tens of thousands of people you’ll never know. And get away with it. That’s power. Mobsters just whack individuals. Donny and Elon have an entire republic in their sights.

Meanwhile, where I live boxes of breakfast cereal now go for $5.

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Jake Tapper doesn't bother fact-checking Rep. Brandon Gill as he lies that Trump "inherited an economy and country that is bankrupt" pic.twitter.com/lajVtrdbEu

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 11, 2025

Trump’s Grand Narrative that rationalizes all the chaos and extreme policies is that Biden left him the worst economy since the Great Depression, maybe even worse than that. They are all saying that it was in a massive crisis requiring emergency measures to keep the country from collapsing.

The media is not correcting them and people are all too eager to believe that the price of eggs is a catastrophe and that we must to anything and everything including decimating the federal government in order to bring it down. We are a very stupid country and our mainstream press is not helping.

Trump believes, and not without reason, that he can convince most Americans that up is down and black is white and he may just do it. It’s Bizarro World.

Reality just last fall:

Look what Biden inherited and what he did with it:

And yes, inflation spiked briefly in the wake of the pandemic due to the supply chain being disrupted but look where it ended up: right in the range of where it had been during the previous 10 years. By October it was down to 2.6%. (Let’s see how that holds up with Trump reckless temper tantrums.)

I don’t want to hear anyone agreeing that the economy was in crisis when Trump took over. It is now and it’s all on him, every single bit of it. If he had any faculties left he would have played it cool and had Elon do some “studies” and hold off on the tariffs and he could have ridden the Biden recovery to success the way he rode Obama’s. Instead he’s acting like the demented old man he is and here we are.

Kevin’s wife, Marian, posted this last night:

With a heavy heart, I have to tell you that after a long battle with cancer my husband Kevin Drum passed away on Friday, March 7, 2025.

No public memorial services are planned.

In lieu of flowers, please donate to the charity or political cause of your choice.

A Facebook page, ‘In Memory of Kevin Drum’, has been created as a place for friends and family to share memories of Kevin. I encourage you to post your thoughts and memories there.

Thank you to all the wonderful blog readers who supported, encouraged and challenged him through the years.

He will be greatly missed.

Kevin was one of the earliest bloggers, maybe even a bit before me, and like a vanishingly few number of us he kept to the form over these last 20+ years. First with CalPundit, then Political Animal at the Washington Monthly, his eponymous blog at Mother Jones and his last one called Jabberwocking he was a blogger to the core.

They were all great blogs, delivered with his characteristic sharp, informative style. He was one of the people who created the form way back when this whole thing was the wild west and his particular method was unique in its calm, clear, analytical style which we all linked to in order to back up our more hyperbolic analyses. We trusted him to be right and he always was.

He invented Friday Cat blogging as a way for all of us to take little breather at the end of the week and remind our readers and ourselves that we were human beings. ( My Friday Night Soother was modeled on it.) Kevin and his famous cat Inkblot were even featured in the NY Times:

“It brings people together,” said Kevin Drum, who began the cat spotlight last year on his own blog, Calpundit (www.calpundit.com). “Both Atrios and Instapundit have done Friday catblogging. It goes to show you can agree on at least a few things.”

Kevin wrote for many years at Mother Jones and did important work there. His pieces on lead poisoning were seminal and according to his friend and former publisher Paul Glastris at the Washington Monthly should have won the Pulitzer Prize and I agree. (Glastris’s tribute is well worth reading.)

He was not only a great blogger, he was a real mensch. His former Mother Jones editor Clara Jeffrey revealed on BlueSky that he had always refused raises, telling them to give the money to younger journalists. He was always kind to me as well. Although we lived not far from one another we only met in person a handful of times, once when he generously hosted a book party for Rick Perlstein’s book Nixonland. But we emailed from time to time although I did not reach out as often as I should have as his illness progressed over the past few years.

I read his blog religiously, however, and I learned so much from his writing, all the way until the end. I will miss it very much. R.I. P. Kevin. Say hi to Inkblot.

Says the man who has withheld military aid and intelligence to Ukraine just in the last week, resulting in dozens of lost innocent lives. (Also, Israel has just cut off electricity to Gaza. No doubt Trump is cheering them on.)

I think this is the clearest sign of his dementia. He’s convinced himself that he can make this happen. It’s ridiculous.

Josh Marshall had some thoughts on this on BlueSky today that I thought were insightful:

The word “trade war” gets thrown around casually. They’re usually more tits for tats, escalating diplomatic eye-poking. But what Trump is doing now with Canada, just upgraded with new tariffs this morning, is more and more like waging a war against our neighbor albeit it economic means.

The tariffs now are far, far beyond anything with an economic or trade logic behind them, even in the sense of creating pressure for an agreement. These are more like trying to wreck Canada’s economy and immiserate its people. Combine that with endless demands for an anschluss and you see the true nature of what’s happening here.

Those of in the US who are ashamed of Trump’s shambling moral degeneracy and predation can’t help but see the 51st state horseshit as fundamentally stupid. But in its totality, I’m sure it seems like more than stupid to our friends and neighbors in Canada because at the end of the day the US probably could starve the Canadian economy.

And of course, we have nuclear weapons, the most powerful military in the world. Of course, that’s craziness to even talk of such things. But do you know you where Trump’s limit really is? I didn’t think so.

Seriously, you have to think about it. He’s decompensating every day and he’s getting more and more irrational and aggressive. There is nobody in his inner circle to stop him.

Yes, that’s the worst case scenario and maybe it’s hyperbolic to even bring it up. But even if he doesn’t go that far, look how far they are willing to let him go:

Here’s quote from Mike Johnson who is allegedly a smart guy. Does this make any sense at all to you?

Don’t cross the King — or his friends:

We knew that the U.S. pardon attorney was fired by the Trump Justice Department on Friday in a new purge of senior attorneys. Now we know why.

In a interview with the NYT, Elizabeth G. Oyer says she was terminated hours after she refused to go along with a rushed, last-minute attempt to put actor Mel Gibson on a list of people who would have their gun rights restored.

Gibson cannot legally carry a firearm after a 2011 domestic violence misdemeanor conviction.

Oyer describes a careful deliberative process to come up with a list of people whose gun rights could be safely restored then her growing dismay as that process was circumvented to try to add Gibson, who had not been vetted.

Oyer said she came under increasing pressure to sign off on Gibson, culminating in a call from a senior official in the office of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche: “He then essentially explained to me that Mel Gibson has a personal relationship with President Trump and that should be sufficient basis for me to make a recommendation and that I would be wise to make the recommendation,” she said.

They’re actually saying this stuff out loud now, not even trying to make up some kind of story to cover their corruption. Blanche, who was a US Attorney for many years and definitely knows better, just told her flat out to do it for the boss. The corruption is complete.

Can someone please tell me why that drunken lunatic Mel Gibson should be able to own a gun? He’s rich enough to hire security 24/7 and probably does. He’s nuts and he’s dangerous and can only need one to threaten or shoot someone when he’s drunk or angry.

Musk: “The waste and fraud in entitlement spending — that’s the big one to eliminate. That’s the half trillion, maybe 600 or 700 billion a year. That’s also the mechanism by which Democrats attract & retain illegal immigrants by essentially paying them to come here & then turning them into voters.”

Put it in an ad and get it on the air. Play it until he’s gone or until November 2026.

The lying and conspiracy theories have turned tens of millions of Americans into monsters:

As Francis Collins, longtime director of the National Institutes of Health, took to the steps below the Lincoln Memorial on Friday for a sound check before speaking at the Stand Up for Science rally, he was confronted by an agitated protester who warned, “You’re going to prison.”

The incident was witnessed by a reporter from STAT, and the man afterward identified himself only as “Jeff” and said he was there to protest Collins’ oversight of NIH, and specifically the agency’s funding of gain-of-function research at a lab in Wuhan, China, where some believe the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have originated. “He’s an indicted felon, he lied before Congress,’’ Jeff, baselessly, told the reporter.

The confrontation was the latest public manifestation of the dramatically altered public image of Collins, from a near-legendary geneticist who led the Human Genome Project and was beloved by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle — and was asked to stay on by President Trump in his first term — to a target demonized by Trump’s Make America Great Again followers. 

Collins told STAT he is so concerned for his personal safety that he has hired security at his home.

“If I become more outspoken now, as I was on Friday, about the harms that are being done, it probably increases my visibility and the chances that such threats or maybe even real actions will become more likely,” he said. “I don’t know what to do about that. I can’t go hide under my desk.” 

What have we become?

#Donalds_Desaparecidos

“So we’re disappearing people now? Nice to know,” Charlie Pierce writes at Esquire. He’s responding to the Department of Homeland Security over the weekend arresting Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and green card holder, over his participation in protests against Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Donald Trump’s DHS is now creating Desaparecidos.

Zeteo:

According to the advocates, at around 8:30 PM, Khalil and his wife – who is eight months pregnant – had just unlocked the door to their building when two plainclothes DHS agents pushed inside behind them. The agents allegedly did not identify themselves at first, instead asking for Khalil’s identity before detaining him.

The agents proceeded to tell Khalil’s wife that if she did not leave her husband and go to their apartment, they would arrest her too. The agents claimed that the State Department had revoked Khalil’s student visa, with one agent presenting what he claimed was a warrant on his cell phone. But Khalil, according to advocates, has a green card. Khalil’s wife went to their apartment to get the green card.

“He has a green card,” an agent apparently said on the phone, confused by the matter. But then after a moment, the agent claimed that the State Department had “revoked that too.”

DHS had already sent him to a detention facility in Louisiana before a federal judge issued an order blocking Khalil’s deportation.

Pierce continues:

Are we now allowing the rendition of legal residents to black sites in the United States? Where would he be in Louisiana? Angola? That would be fun. There are six federal prison facilities in that state. One of those facilities in Oakdale was the subject of a Department of Justice report in 2020 for refusing to follow the Covid protocols mandated by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons during the pandemic. Eight prisoners died there.

The New York Times reported:

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement on Sunday night that Mr. Khalil had been arrested “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.”

“Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” she said. “ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump’s executive orders and to protecting U.S. national security.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared a link on X to a news article about Mr. Khalil’s arrest and issued a broad promise: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

“Aligned”? So, Khalil was arrested for wrongthink. One hopes Khalil wasn’t flown to Louisiana by helicopter.

Whether or not one agrees with the Gaza protests, the action of Trump 2.0 against Khalil appears to be part of a systemic attack on the First Amendment that is now S.O.P. for the Trump administration.

Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin last week sent a letter to Georgetown University — a private university — threatening that “that his office will not consider hiring anyone affiliated with a university that utilizes DEI,” the Washington Post reported:

Martin added two questions: “First, have you eliminated all DEI from your school and its curriculum? Second, if DEI is found in your courses or teaching in any way, will you move swiftly to remove it?”

William M. Treanor, the dean and executive vice president of Georgetown Law, responded:

The First Amendment, Treanor wrote, “guarantees that the government cannot direct what Georgetown and its faculty teach and how to teach it,” noting that the Supreme Court “has continually affirmed that among the freedoms central to a university’s First Amendment rights are its abilities to determine, on academic grounds, who may teach, what to teach, and how to teach it.”

Martin, Treanor wrote, was threatening to deny students and graduates of Georgetown opportunities until Martin approved its curriculum, and he said the school looked forward to confirming that applicants for employment would receive “full and fair consideration” in the future, adding that the Constitution was clearly on Georgetown’s side.

“Given the First Amendment’s protection of a university’s freedom to determine its own curriculum and how to deliver it, the constitutional violation behind this threat is clear, as is the attack on the University’s mission as a Jesuit and Catholic institution,” Treanor wrote.

All of which has landed the United States of America under Donald Trump on a watch list of countries with “faltering civic freedoms” (The Independent):

CIVICUS, a nonprofit organization that serves as an advocate for democracy, added the U.S. to the list on Monday. It’s the first watchlist of the year.

Claiming the U.S. was “once a global champion for democracy and human rights,” CIVICUS said Trump’s attempts to remake the federal government in his vision and remove the U.S. from global participation have raised concerns that it is infringing on democratic freedoms.

The U.S. joins the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Chile, Slovakia and 37 other countries on the list of countries with “narrowed” civic freedoms.

How’s the water in that pot, froggies? Warm enough yet?

Update: Fixed photo heading. Pinochet : Chilean. (h/t SS)

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

Citizens are restless

Some items from the Threads feed this morning.

View on Threads

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Coming soon to MAGAstan.

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

All the silicon valley tech bros worship Ayn Rand and see Elon Musk as our own John Galt. Actually, not so much. Paul Crider at the Bulwark:

MANY AMONG THE SILICON VALLEY ULTRA-RICH dominating the news think of themselves as heroes out of an Ayn Rand novel. Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen prate on about how we are living in Atlas Shrugged now. Peter Thiel has spoken at the annual gala of the Randian Atlas Society. These figures and their peers are discussed in the popular press with frequent reference to Rand. Meanwhile, many (though by no means all) devotees of Rand’s writings idolize Musk…

But a deeper examination reveals these oligarchs resemble Rand’s heroes far less than her villains. Elon Musk in particular is a grab-bag of Randian vices. […]

A central virtue in Rand’s ethics is self-esteem. Musk’s arrogance, his apparent conviction that he is the main character of history on a quest to take humanity to Mars, may seem like an overabundance of self-esteem… Musk’s compulsive attention-seeking is a sign not of self-esteem but of a desperate need for external validation. This is a man who cheats at video games to look impressive.

No doubt about it. He’s as much of a cheating narcissist as Trump and that’s saying something.

Musk is unquestionably a looter in Rand’s schema. Musk’s companies rake in billions of government subsidies, and Tesla has only been able to stay solvent with government assistance. One might forgive this in the interest of ramping up electric vehicle production in order to replace internal-combustion vehicles. But Musk uses his coziness with the state as an economic weapon. Musk himself has said, “Take away the subsidies, it will only help Tesla,” a clear admission that he would use state power to cripple his competitors. […]

Both Musk (through SpaceX) and Thiel (through Palantir) are major defense contractors, which means their financial interests are in the hands of the politicians they fund. Rand in Atlas Shrugged calls this the “aristocracy of pull” to describe how power in Washington operated by crooked deals and favors between connected insiders—business leaders and politicians.

Many of the villains in the book thrive in this environment.

Then there’s the sick quest for domination:

As the article points out his current Twitter feed is filled with that sort of talk. Here’s today’s gem:

Isolated, this could just be shitposting, itself a venerable enough craft. But Musk’s blitzkrieg through the federal agencies, shuttering offices and firing career employees with jocular contempt, lays bare the truth: He enjoys the feeling of hurting those he considers his enemies, along with bystanders, in the knowledge that everyone is powerless to stop him.  Whether it’s his Twitter takeover or dismantling government agencies, Musk takes an arsonist’s delight in destroying things that people value, and have reason to value.

This author describes Rand’s heroes this way and it’s not that:

The heroes of Atlas Shrugged take no such pleasure in destruction or in the subjugation of others, even when it is necessary. Led by Rand’s fictional mouthpiece, John Galt, each of the heroes gives this oath: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine” (emphasis added). To dominate others is to sacrifice their rational interests and happiness for the sake of your own.

Frankly, that may have been the idea but I’ve never seen a Randian who wasn’t a domineering asshole. Still, the point stands. By Rand’s own telling Musk is no John Galt.