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Oddsmakers bet against reality-based community

When I Googled Andy Borowitz‘s name just now, the AI offered “Is Andy Borowitz satire?” Why Google Borowitz? In reading the Breaking News headlines at The New Republic‘s landing page, it strikes me that in our new autocratic reality it’s becoming harder than ever to distinguish reality from satire. Viewed slightly askance, any of TNR’s headlines might be a Borowitz headline. Reality is challenging satire to a fight to the death.

Fox Host Suddenly Gets Amnesia About Trump’s Plan to Deport Citizens
Republican Says Pete Hegseth’s Group Chat Is Fine Because of … 9/11?
Trump Sends the Economy Tanking Over Fight With Fed Chair
Ron Johnson Goes Full 9/11 Truther in Deranged Rant
MAGA Republicans Get Ready to Gut Medicaid to Help Trump

See what I mean? (from Borowitz’s site):

Houthis Send Friend Request to Hegseth’s Wife
Trump Urges Vatican to Select New Pope from Cast of “Fox & Friends”
Harvard to Award Trump Honorary Doctorate for Making its Approval Rating Soar

Scrolling down the TNR page is a column echoing a Bluesky post from former FBI agent Asha Rangappa. She responds to a Donald Trump Truth Social spew about how we must deport “violent criminals and terrorists” without court hearings because, he claims “without exaggeration,” that doing so would take 200 years. Fail to send them all to a foreign gulag post haste and “we are not going to have a country any longer,” Trump says, replaying one of his greatest hits from at least 2015. Back then it was about securing the border. His reissue is about voiding constitutional rights.

Rangappa responds:

Congress literally created an Alien Terrorist Removal Court for the expeditious removal of aliens who are designated as terrorists, under a preponderance of evidence standard.

I think problem isn’t the time it would take, but the fact that the government would have to produce actual evidence

The problem is that Mr. Truthful Hyperbole is a bit short on evidence against both Kilmar Abrego Garcia and the Fifth Amendment. Thus, the TNR subhead reads “That’s precisely why the accusations are getting wilder.” The administration admitted in court (where lying can get an attorney prosecuted and disbarred) that its whisking Abrego Garcia off to El Salvador was an “administrative error.” But since mini-Roy Cohn never admits an error, outside of court Trump lackeys simply raise the ante.

Melissa Gira Grant writes:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt doubled down, not only insisting that Abrego Garcia was “a foreign terrorist and an MS-13 gang member” but even accusing him of “human trafficking”—a wild new claim.

[..]

The day after Leavitt’s vile accusation in the White House press room, the Department of Homeland Security issued an elaborate press release purporting to provide records of Abrego Garcia’s wrongdoing, writing that “intelligence reports found that he was involved in human trafficking.” The basis for this report, apparently first generated on April 17, was a traffic stop in Tennessee in 2022, after which Abrego Garcia was sent on his way with a verbal warning about his expired license. No suspected trafficking was reported by the state trooper on the scene. DHS called this a “bombshell” report. “The facts speak for themselves, and they reek of human trafficking,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said of the report. Abrego Garcia’s wife said he was likely just driving people to construction sites for work, as he often had. This is extremely thin stuff for a trafficking accusation.

So why did the administration suddenly layer on a new allegation? It’s part of a broader escalation. Around the same time, Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Fox, “Every liberal journalist who has called him a ‘Maryland man’ and saying he was rightfully in this country should be apologizing tonight to President Trump.”

Kneel before Zod, you worms!

Then on April 18 Trump posted a badly doctored photo purporting to show Abrego Garcia’s hand with “MS-13 tattooed on his knuckles.” Gives ham-fisted a new meaning, doesn’t it? Trump 2.0 is turning reality on its head.

The courts are not immune to this bullshit but are still resistant to it. Grant notes that “the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued a ‘blistering‘ order against Trump and Abrego Garcia’s removal.” Bullshit detecting is their business, after all.

Trump 2.0 “underestimated how many people would refuse to go along” with his campaign of terror against immigrants, explains Grant. “Every day they have to hear demands to bring Abrego Garcia home makes their lies about him less powerful.” The whole thing would make great satire if it weren’t also true that Trump’s terror campaign is worldwide.

When Haitians were the scapegoats du jour, Trump brayed, “They’re eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats.” Trump is stealing Borowitz’s act. Headlines since he took office demonstrate that. Except he’s not acting.

The massive public protests against Trump are not just about his assault on immigrants or on reality. Protesters presume the constitutional rights of all Americans are next. Because where will Stephen Miller turn once he runs out of noncitizens to gulag?

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Every single January 6th defendant got full due process. Only the most violent people who assaulted police officers weren’t released pending trial. They had lawyers and access to all the evidence. Those who chose to plead innocent had full trials by jury and were allowed to present evidence at their sentencing. None of them were abducted off the street with no notice, sent to secret detention and shipped off to foreign gulag never to be seen again.

Stephen Miller is even more demented than Trump but that’s not saying much. I sometimes worry that he’s so out of control he could do something truly crazy although I can’t honestly think of anything worse than what he’s doing already. He is truly nuts.

The best send-up ever

Poor Bill Maher didn’t see this coming. But he should have …

Imagine my surprise when in the spring of 1939 a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Old Chancellery with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler. I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship. No one I knew encouraged me to go. “He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.” But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side — even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.

Two weeks later, I found myself on the front steps of the Old Chancellery and was led into an opulent living room, where a few of the Führer’s most vocal supporters had gathered: Himmler, Göring, Leni Riefenstahl and the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII. We talked about some of the beautiful art on the walls that had been taken from the homes of Jews. But our conversation ended abruptly when we heard loud footsteps coming down the hallway. Everyone stiffened as Hitler entered the room.

He was wearing a tan suit with a swastika armband and gave me an enthusiastic greeting that caught me off guard. Frankly, it was a warmer greeting than I normally get from my parents, and it was accompanied by a slap on my back. I found the whole thing quite disarming. I joked that I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as un-Führer-like. That amused him to no end, and I realized I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human. Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard — the public Hitler. But this private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.

Here’s a gift link for the whole thing. It only gets better.

I particularly like that he got the utter naivete of Maher’s assumption that Trump was the “real him” in private. It didn’t occur to him that Trump was putting him on? So much for Maher’s alleged hardboiled realism.

Thank you Larry David.

Wealthy Democrats should take them up

Josh is creative and I think these two ideas are just excellent. We are essentially fighting an information war with the right in which reality is being subsumed by the cacophony of lies and propaganda generated by the right. It’s a problem. Here are a couple of easy ways to combat it:

Since January 20th, and actually back into November, I’ve had a series of projects I’ve desperately wanted to see done. My first was a simple but clean and easily shareable site to track core economic statistics from the end of the Biden administration through Trump’s presidency. Simple, objective, core economic data — here’s where Biden left off, here’s where Trump is. At the time I envisioned a different start to the administration. I figured it would be like 2017 where Trump took the quite good economy he inherited, mostly left it alone, maybe juiced it with tax cuts and rebranded it as his own. I was pretty confident this was a good bet since most of the Biden numbers were about as good as they could be. For employment, inflation, growth they would be pretty hard to top. So there wasn’t much chance Trump would end up looking much better than Biden. You simply can’t get unemployment much lower than 3%. I saw it as a way of deflating what I figured would be the standard Trumpian rebrand, where he talked constantly of the catastrophic Biden economy and his own era of prosperity with data that was actually marginally worse.

Needless to say, things have played out a bit differently. But it seems even more important now. And to be clear, what I envisioned wasn’t just pulling these numbers out of the dense or un-user friendly Fed or Commerce Department websites but making the comparisons immediate, intuitive and above all shareable. We exist in many overlapping worlds of social and influencer ecosystems. Share buttons are nice. But what you really want is the ability to, with a couple clicks, create a shareable image — memes — you can push out across social ecosystems. Ideally you want different versions that use the visual idioms that are native to certain platforms — Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, etc.

I still want to create that or convince someone else to do it. Well executed, these things are vastly more powerful than things that much more money is spent on. That is especially the case when they play into or provide idea structures with which to understand things people are seeing and feeling. If people start seeing prices go up, they’ll be looking for explanations for why. We hear a lot about how the information space is heavily weighted toward the right today. And that’s true. But thinking that can also be a crutch. It’s overstated, even more it’s significance and permanence are overstated. Things can change very quickly when what people hear doesn’t match with their lived experience.

All this endless throat-clearing leads me to my new idea. You hear constantly about all the law breaking being done by DOGE and other parts of the Trump administration. It’s true. Whole departments get shut down in defiance of congressional statutes, laws about information privacy are being broken right and left. There are endless numbers of insider deals and sweetheart contracts being doled out. We see again and again where people say if there were a functioning Justice Department this or that would have triggered an investigation. But in politics, and really in all life, things that are vague are meaningless. They are too inchoate or uncertain to drive action. They can’t be pieced together with other hard facts to assemble anything of consequence. As we see them at present, they end up as little more than background noise.

Here’s what I envision — a small group of researchers and lawyers, let’s call them the DOJ in Exile. This small office I’ve created pulls together all these stories and all those to come. My team orders them into things that are awful but simply not part of the criminal law, those that could be prosecuted with creative but serious-minded uses of available statutes and those which appear to involve straightforward criminal conduct. Then they break them down into specific statutes. They name names. They can produce what amount to indictments in waiting. I could go through many more permutations here. But the concept and question is what would a real Justice Department be doing right now? Since it’s not a real Justice Department with the ability to compel testimony, make arrests and bring criminal charges, we don’t have the need for secrecy. You can discuss and publicize what you’re finding.

Needless to say, my small team would be minuscule compared to the Public Integrity Section of the DOJ. But they could do quite a lot. And, to be clear, I don’t envision going out and generating new facts. I imagine working primarily from credible published accounts of what has happened. There’s quite a lot you can learn by carefully sifting through publicly available information. A real investigation would need to validate and confirm these details in ways that would hold up in court. That’s fine. The point of the exercise is to provide an outline and a guide to probable, credible outcomes.

This seems obvious once you think about it. As Marshall says, there’s good reason to think it could be meaningful:

Quotes from former prosecutors saying that this or that is probably illegal or would have prompted an investigation in the past is all meaningless. You need to make it concrete and specific. You put the arguments on paper in ways that can be validated or disputed by other people knowledgeable about the law. You provide details which people can use to make public arguments. As much as anything, you provide a sense of scale. Firm it all up, package it all together, make it possible for the average person to leaf through and see what’s happening — that’s profoundly important and valuable.

The second point is that it keeps some public and prosecutorial memory. This administration won’t be in power forever. Very high on the list for any successor administration will be to avoid the mistakes of the Biden administration. Lack of accountability and consequences spurs even greater levels of lawbreaking. It will be a record and a guide which future prosecutors can consult.

The third and closely related point is deterrence. People are doing anything and everything right now. They’re not necessarily the worst things but some of the clearest criminal conduct is taking place with contracting and sharing of people’s private data which the government collects for one and only one purpose. Insider trading is another massive area of possibilities.

Personally, I think the second is the most powerful. There is a real danger that the memory of what used to be considered the rule of law and the norms that buttress it being lost. It’s been 10 years of degradation already.

I would suggest that a project like this could be taken up for the medical research that’s being flushed down the toilet as well. I certainly hope that the scientists who are being dismissed have at least taken personal custody of their data. The losses in that regard are liable to be catastrophic if these monsters get away with this.

I urge you to read the whole thing. He provides a lot more detail and a thorough rationale. If you are or know someone who is capable of doing something like this I would suggest you go for it.

That piece is just heartbreaking but you should watch it anyway. And it’s not just them:

The World Food Programme suspended malnutrition treatment for 650,000 malnourished women and children in Ethiopia this week due to severe funding shortages, the U.N. agency said, with millions more at risk of losing access to aid.

WFP gets financing from 15-20 donors including the United States but many of them have cut funding this year, said Zlatan Milisic, WFP Country Director in Ethiopia. The agency has received exemptions from U.S. President Donald Trump’s aid freeze that has disrupted humanitarian work around the world, he added, but little for 2025 so far.

We keep hearing about “exemptions” and DOGE restoring people and grants but they never seem to actually materialize. People are already getting sick from the lack of HIV meds and now we are allowing children to starve because Trump and Musk are immoral imbeciles.

Donald Trump is whining about "the fake news" TO CHILDREN at the White House Easter Egg Roll.

This man is deeply unwell.

Put Gramps to bed. pic.twitter.com/Igm3Tk5IZ2

— Art Candee (@ArtCandee) April 21, 2025

Trump is following through on his pledge to lower prices pic.twitter.com/0GZT4qiUSf

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 21, 2025

Apparently Bessent has been begging him to stop but he just can’t help himself. This is from last week:

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly cautioned White House officials that any attempt to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell would risk destabilizing financial markets, according to two people close to the White House granted anonymity to share details of private discussions.

Bessent’s private message reinforces what President Donald Trump already knows but comes as the president’s anger with the Fed chair is growing because Powell hasn’t shown signs that he will cut interest rates soon. It also comes against the backdrop of widespread market turmoil over the administration’s far-reaching trade war.

Trump’s fury with Powell burst into public view on Thursday morning, when he said in a post on Truth Social that his “termination cannot come fast enough!”

Any attempt to remove Powell — a legally questionable option Trump considered in his first term — would feed instability in markets already woozy from the recent tariff whiplash. Investor confidence that the central bank will make decisions based on the path of the economy rather than on short-term politics is a key underpinning of the U.S.’s global financial reputation.

“I don’t think he’ll do it but frankly this is a grenade with the pin pulled,” said one person familiar with the situation, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, referring to the president’s longstanding frustrations with Powell, “so there are no guarantees.”

Great.

According to all the financial pundits, this drop today is entirely because of Trump’s comments.

I posted this earlier but it’s worth doing again because it’s so important. Krugman on the threat:

… we really, really don’t want someone that crazy dictating monetary policy.

The reason we don’t want politicians in direct control of monetary policy is that it’s so easy to use. After all, what does it mean to “ease” monetary policy? It’s an incredibly frictionless process. Normally the Federal Open Market Committee tells the New York Fed to buy U.S. government debt from private banks, which it does with money conjured out of thin air. There’s no need to pass legislation, place bids with contractors, deal with any of the hassles usually associated with changes in government policy. Basically the Fed can create an economic boom with a phone call.

It’s obvious that this kind of power could be abused by an irresponsible leader who wants to preside over an economic boom and doesn’t want to hear about the risks. This isn’t a hypothetical scenario. Consider what happened in Turkey, whose Trump-like president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, recently arrested the leader of the opposition. When the global post-Covid inflation shock hit, Erdogan embraced crank economic theories. He forced Turkey’s central bank, its equivalent of the Fed, to cut interest rates in the belief, contrary to standard economics, that doing so would reduce, not increase inflation. You can see the results in the chart at the top of this post.

How can we guard against that kind of policy irresponsibility? After the stagflation of the 1970s many countries delegated monetary policy to technocrats at independent central banks. Can the technocrats get it wrong? Of course they can and often have. But they’re less likely to engage in wishful thinking and motivated reasoning than typical politicians, let alone politicians like Trump.

What makes Trump’s attempt to bully the Fed especially ominous is the fact that the Fed will soon have to cope with the stagflationary crisis Trump has created. Trump’s massive tariff increase will lead to a major inflationary shock:

Moreover, Trump has also created huge uncertainty by radically changing his policies every few days, which will depress spending and may well cause a recession:

Not incidentally, Trump has been able to pursue these destructive policies because U.S. law gives the president enormous discretionary power over tariffs. And now he wants the same kind of discretionary power over the Fed.

As a consequence of Trump’s destructive tariff regime, the Fed will soon face a dilemma. Should it raise interest rates to fight inflation, or should it cut rates to fight recession? It’s a really hard call, and it’s quite possible that Jay Powell will get it wrong. Trump has made Powell’s dilemma even worse with his attempted bullying, because a rate cut would be seen by many as a sign that Powell is giving in to avoid being fired.

But one thing we know for sure is that we don’t want Trump making that call. Like Erdogan, he has embraced crank economic doctrines to justify his policies, in Trump’s case the ludicrous claim that tariffs won’t raise consumer prices. Does anyone doubt that when inflation rises, he’ll dismiss it as “fake news”?

No, no, no…

Trump has been cowed by the financial markets up until now. But he’s not entirely sane I don’t trust that he won’t do it if Navarro or some other nut advises him to go for it. As his dementia creeps in he’s more and more prone to impulsivity.

I know it may be impossible to accept, but it turns out that a weekend news host with a long record of personal misconduct may not actually be capable of leading the most powerful military on earth after all. Unfortunately, it does appear that the Defense Secretary is not living up what the president and the entire Republican Party apparently believed was his vast potential based upon his “central casting” good looks and white supremacist tattoos. He’s in trouble again and this time it’s coming from inside the house.

Hegseth had already showed the recklessness and lack of judgment many of his former co-workers at Fox News, hardly a bastion of wokeness, said worried them when he was nominated. (He was known to have a very messy personal life with excessive drinking, affairs, baby mamas and even a rape charge.) He promised the Senators who confirmed him that he would not take a drink while Secretary of Defense and there is no evidence he’s broken it. But his judgement is even worse than his critics anticipated.

First of all, he appears to be obsessed with his Fox News culture war issues, particularly DEI, and spends an awful lot of time worrying about things like physical fitness rather than the big picture. His first acts as Defense Secretary was to fire the top women and Black leaders in the chain of command, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, whose record of accomplishment was stellar. His directives to purge the military of transgender people and every reference to race, sex or ethnicity have resulted in some extremely embarrassing misfires such as removal of baseball great Jackie Robinson’s and the Navajo code-talker’s web pages.

In fairness, as odious as Hegseth’s eagerness to go about it might be, that agenda is Donald Trump’s as much as his own. The problem is that he’s so ridiculously underqualified for the real job of running the Pentagon that the whole place is starting to come apart and it’s happening at the hands of Hegseth’s own closest allies who are apparently at each others’ throats.

We all know about the Signalgate scandal in which Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Waltz put together a group chat on an unsecure ap and accidentally added the editor in chief of the Atlantic, who naturally reported it. Aside from the idiocy of the move itself, one of the most egregious screw-ups on that chat was the Defense Secretary sharing imminent war plans. The administration tried to finesse it by saying that war plans aren’t classified which is pathetic, but they managed to quiet the calls for Hegseth to resign. But last night the N.Y. Times reported yet another chat, this one at Hegseth’s instigation, and it’s even worse than the other one.

Reportedly, Hegseth had an ongoing group called “Defense | Team Huddle” which also chatted over Signal with whom he also shared the war plans. Only this group included his wife, his brother and his personal lawyer, the latter two having been given some kind of make-work jobs at the Pentagon. And Hegseth used his personal phone this time to spill the beans.

Hegseth has been criticized for bringing his wife along to meetings with foreign military leaders where sensitive information was exchanged so it would seem that he considers her a top adviser. Why he thought it was appropriate to inform her, his brother and former personal lawyer about war plans is a mystery. Again, the man has a serious judgement problem.

You may wonder where the NY Times got this information. We don’t know for sure but it’s not too hard to guess. There has been a very puzzling purge of Hegseth’s closest advisers over the last few days. Politico reported this week that former senior adviser Dan Caldwell, former deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, the deputy Defense secretary’s former chief of staff were “under investigation for a series of leaks that included reports about Elon Musk’s visit to the Pentagon, military plans for the Panama Canal, a second carrier headed to the Red Sea, and a pause in the collection of intelligence for Ukraine.” Caldwell, Selnick and Carroll all say that’s not true and they were not among those being given polygraph tests.

You will note that they do not defend Hegseth, their former good friend. The skuttlebut is that they clashed with Joe Kasper, Hegseth’s chief of staff. But he too has left his position on Friday to take one in another area. Right now, Hegseth has no chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, or senior adviser. Politico reported:

“There is a complete meltdown in the building, and this is really reflecting on the secretary’s leadership,” said a senior defense official. “Pete Hegseth has surrounded himself with some people who don’t have his interests at heart.”

You might also say that Pete Hegseth can’t manage his way out of a garbage bag. This turmoil is caused by his closest staff who are all at each others’ throats. The buck should stop with Pete, don’yt ou think?

Meanwhile, another of his close pals, a true blue MAGA follower named John Ullyot who formerly worked as the Pentagon spokesman writes an op-ed in Politico on Sunday night saying the Pentagon has been in total chaos for the last month and that it’s hard to see how Hegseth survives. He claims more bombshells are on the way.

If you wonder how Hegseth has responded to all this, I think this says it all:

I recall that when Hegseth was confirmed there were some old hand types saying “good luck” when people would say he was going to come in and totally revamp the Pentagon in Trump’s image, pointing out that it’s the biggest bureaucracy in the world with many decades of experience fighting bureaucratic battles. I can’t speculate what happened here but if I had to bet I’d bet on the Pentagon over Hegseth. Normally, this would bother me but in this case I’m afraid I have to hope that the Pentagon bureaucracy wins. The man is a monumental national security risk.

Donald Trump is a tool

Speaking of the logic of fear, Paul Krugman offers some observations this morning on where Trumpism means to take us all. What drives our cult-leader president, Krugman writes, is “rage toward people who, he imagines, think they’re smarter or better than him.”

Since Donald Trump is clearly the smartest and best person in every room he enters, anyone who doesn’t abase themselves at his grandeur is a potential target for that rage:

And he and the movement he leads, composed of people possessed by similar rage, are seeking retribution. Retribution against whom? Yes, they hate wokeness. But three months in, it’s obvious that the MAGA types want revenge not just on their political opponents but on everyone they consider elites — a group that, as they see it, doesn’t include billionaires, but does include college professors, scientists and experts of any kind.

A student of 20th-century history knows where that leads. But Trump was never much of a student of anything except “winning” at all costs.

Don’t try to sanewash what’s happening. It’s evil, but it isn’t calculated evil. That is, it’s not a considered political strategy, with a clear end goal. It’s a visceral response from people who, as Thomas Edsall puts it, are addicted to revenge.

If you want a model for what’s happening to America, think of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

[…]

Once you’ve seen the parallel between what MAGA is trying to do and China’s Cultural Revolution, the similarities are everywhere. Maoists sent schoolteachers to do farm labor; Trumpists are talking about putting civil servants to work in factories.

Except there is calculated evil. It’s just not Trump’s. The teetotaler-in-chief is drunk on power. He may not be strategic or have “a clear end goal” beyond revenge, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one behind what his White House is doing. Trump thinks he’s the smartest person in the room. He’s not. He is clearly not smart enough to know that he is being used by the suck-ups around him to advance their evil plans, not his. But they do align with his menu of grievances.

Trump’s obsession with tariffs seems to have come from Peter Navarro, plucked from an Amazon book list. His obsession with immigrants? From Stephen Miller, the “Rasputin-like” architect of the Muslim ban and family separation. Trump’s dismantling of the government? From Elon Musk and his “tech bro Maoism.” And from Russell Vought, a principal author of Project 2025 and now director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Trump is no strategist. He wants revenge. In his second term, his thirst for power has overtaken his natural avarice. Navarro is an economic crank. Miller would look snappy in an SS uniform. Musk is another self-obsessed kook, but so rich that Trump warms himself in his glow. Burned once by hidden-camera video, Vought operates now more behind the scenes than the rest. The American Torquemada, is a Christian nationalist who wants a cultural revolution … for Jesus:

Vought is convinced that America is facing an existential threat – a situation he has likened to 1776 and 1860: (Counter-) Revolution and total war, that is what America must face if it is to survive. What gives Vought hope is his devotion to Donald Trump, “uniquely positioned to serve this role” as the leader of such a revolutionary counter-offensive against the evil forces of “unnatural” leftism. Literally, in Vought’s words, “a gift of God.”

This is oversimplified, of course. The point is, Trump only thinks he’s in charge. He famously “does whatever the last person in the room tells him to do,” writes Marcy Wheeler. “And often as not, the last person in the room is Stephen Miller.” Think of Miller as Tolkien’s Gríma Wormtongue:

We’ve already seen that the three cabinet secretaries struggling to assert control over their own agencies deferred to Stephen Miller when he told the participants of the famous Signal chat what Trump thought.

That is, it’s not just that Stephen Miller is often the last one in the room with Trump. It’s not just that Stephen Miller’s policy ideas are batshit insane (and that he’s the author of Trump’s most egregious abuses of power). It’s also that Miller often stands in as the Word of DOGE, the Word of Trump.

If Miller is Wormtongue, then Vought is Saruman working a strategy deeper but less visible than Miller’s. Contra Krugman, there are political strategies at work. They are just not Trump’s. He’s a tool, a puppet.

Point that out to him every chance you get.

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Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Sic transit gloria mundi*

“Pope Francis is dead at 88” is the front-page banner headline this morning. R.I.P. His death wasn’t unexpected. Francis had “empathy for the disenfranchised” and “defended the marginalized.”

Sadly, the first thing the headlines brought to mind was a joke that I heard (not about Francis) over the weekend.

A guy comes into the coffee shop every morning, picks up a morning paper off the rack, scans the front page, and sets it back down. As friend notices the daily behavior and finally asks what he’s looking for. An obituary, the man says. Obituaries aren’t on the front page, the friend advises. The guy replies, “This one will be.”

Francis, Bishop of Rome, was the leader of the largest Christian denomination, and its first Latin American pontiff. The New York Times account says Francis was a pope who “clashed bitterly with traditionalists in his push for a more inclusive Roman Catholic Church, and who spoke out tirelessly for migrants, the marginalized and the health of the planet.” Quite a contrast with the butt of the joke.

Avoid “the logic of fear”

Archbishop Diego Ravelli, master of apostolic ceremonies, read Francis’s Easter speech yesterday morning:

“How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized and migrants,” Ravelli read, without mentioning a country or person. In a later passage, he said, “I appeal to all those in positions of political responsibility in our world not to yield to the logic of fear which only leads to isolation from others, but rather to use the resources available to help the needy, to fight hunger and to encourage initiatives that promote development. These are the ‘weapons’ of peace: weapons that build the future, instead of sowing seeds of death.”

The butt of the joke eats a big bowl of contempt for breakfast each morning. He offered a very different Easter message.

Matthew 7:15-16 (KJV)

15 Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
16 Ye shall know them by their fruits.

* Wikipedia

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense