Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Imperialism Trump-style

Donald Trump is a felon, a convicted criminal who, as president, pardons and releases back into the wild other criminals. A criminal who twice swore an oath before the world to uphold an American constitution in which he never believed and mocks with his every action.

Like this helluva distraction from what’s in the Epstein files (The New York Times):

President Trump said on Saturday that the United States had captured the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and was flying him out of Venezuela, in what would be a stunning culmination to a monthslong campaign by Mr. Trump’s administration to oust the authoritarian leader.

Breaking News: President Trump said that the U.S. captured Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader, and that he is being flown out of the country. Follow live updates. https://t.co/4dVueHlPuX

— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 3, 2026

It is too early to assess casualties on the ground, although the BBC has identified targets:

So far, we have confirmed three locations.

• Generalissimo Francisco de Miranda Air Base aka La Carlota – footage filmed at a distance shows two plumes of smoke and an explosion close to this military airfield in Caracas
• Port La Guaira – Caracas’ main conduit to the Caribbean Sea, located in Miranda state. Footage filmed nearby shows several plumes of smoke rising into the air, and at least one fire burning
• Higuerote Airport – also located in Miranda state, just east of Caracas. Footage filmed from two angles shows fire and repeated flashes on the ground, a possible indication of secondary explosions

Trump administration officials apparently will not separate families when it suits them. Per one report, the earlier indictment did not include Maduro’s wife:

Reactions

Sam Stein of The Bulwark reminds readers that in her Vanity Fair interview, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles said that a land attack against Venezuela would require congressional approval. Trump did not ask for one.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries did not get a heads up that President Donald Trump's administration was planning to strike Venezuela and capture President Nicholas Maduro, per sources.

HASC was not briefed either.

This has been pretty standard for the Trump…

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) January 3, 2026

“Based” Sen. Mike Lee (R) of Utah questioned the legality of this action at 3:22 a.m. ET in a pro forma tweet:

I look forward to learning what, if anything, might constitutionally justify this action in the absence of a declaration of war or authorization for the use of military force.

By 5:16 a.m. Lee had fallen in line:

Just got off the phone with @SecRubio

He informed me that Nicolás Maduro has been arrested by U.S. personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States, and that the kinetic action we saw tonight was deployed to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant

This action likely falls within the president’s inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution to protect U.S. personnel from an actual or imminent attack

Thank you, @SecRubio, for keeping me apprised

SecState Rubio means to keep other Republicans in line as well, reposting his own tweet from July:

pic.twitter.com/4e153jBOA3

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) January 3, 2026

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D) of New Mexico tweets:

The White House is confirming U.S. military operations in Venezuela tonight. Let us be clear: these strikes are illegal. The President does not have the authority to declare war or undertake large-scale military operations without Congress. Congress must act to rein him in. Immediately.

Sen. Andy Kim (D) of New Jersey reacts:

Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth looked every Senator in the eye a few weeks ago and said this wasn’t about regime change. I didn’t trust them then and we see now that they blatantly lied to Congress. Trump rejected our Constitutionally required approval process for armed conflict because the Administration knows the American people overwhelmingly reject risks pulling our nation into another war.

This strike doesn’t represent strength. It’s not sound foreign policy. It puts Americans at risk in Venezuela and the region, and it sends a horrible and disturbing signal to other powerful leaders across the globe that targeting a head of state is an acceptable policy for the U.S. government. This will further damage our reputation – already hurt by Trump’s policies around the world – and only isolate us in a time when we need our friends and allies more than ever.

Nicholas Kristof of the Times:

Several contradictory things are simultaneously true:
1. Maduro was an oppressive, unpopular and illegitimate ruler, disastrous for his country and the region.
2. Using the US to remove him may have been equally illegitimate.
3. Venezuela would be better off with a new government under the opposition’s Edmundo Gonzalez (who probably won the presidential election but is now exiled).
4. It’s not clear that Maduro will be replaced by Gonzalez. Maduro’s VP is still apparently in power, as are other regime figures and the Cubans who back them.
5. As we’ve seen in Iraq and Libya, it can be easier to topple a leader than to establish a new government; sometimes you get a worse leader, or Somalia-style chaos.

Democratic strategist Adam Parkhomenko:

If Nicolás Maduro is convicted and sentenced by the U.S. government for running drug trafficking networks, would Trump then pardon him the same way he just pardoned the former Honduran president who was also convicted and sentenced in the United States?

I think the bigger question is this: why did Trump protect and pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, a convicted drug trafficker, while turning Maduro into a political trophy? And the answer probably has a lot less to do with justice and a lot more to do with who was useful to Donald Trump at the time.

Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel:

This kidnapping of Maduro is not about drug trafficking, though the indictment against him is real.

It’s about getting a piece of the action.

I’m sure she really meant it then.

— David Corn (@davidcorn.bsky.social) 2026-01-03T12:25:22.880Z

"By proceeding without any semblance of international legitimacy, valid legal authority or domestic endorsement, Mr. Trump risks providing justification for authoritarians in China, Russia and elsewhere who want to dominate their own neighbors."

– NYT Editorial Board pic.twitter.com/b59K2ql5iB

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) January 3, 2026

Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project posts, “MAGA will conflate being critical of unconstitutional kidnappings with being Pro-Maduro. Watch. China just got a huge green light.”

Imperialist Russian President Vladimir Putin, invader of Ukraine, be like:

Meanwhile, back at the Epstein files: Pam Bondi Faces Fresh Fallout Over Withheld Epstein ‘Rape Island’ Docs

A Happy New Year story:

There are good people in this world.

Beavers are essential “ecosystem engineers.”

Kodi Jo Jaspers, manager of the Wenatchee Beaver Project, refers to beavers as “ecosystem engineers.” Aside from humans, beavers do more to shape their environment than any other species. These animals are not particularly fast or strong. Instead, they rely on their construction ability for protection from predators. Beavers use their sharp front teeth to harvest branches and trees as building material for their dams. A beaver dam creates a deep pond of water, at the center of which a beaver will construct its home. The pond then acts as a barrier between the beaver’s dwelling and potential intruders, much like a moat around a castle.

Beaver dams benefit a multitude of other species, including cold-water-loving trout and salmon. Beaver ponds store cool water in summer, creating habitat for the region’s important native fish species, like endangered steelhead and spring Chinook. This is especially important today with record high summer temperatures and longer periods of low flow conditions predicted to continue across the Pacific Northwest in coming years.

Additionally, beaver ponds store groundwater which fuels riverside vegetation. This vegetation, in turn, shades rivers and streams, further cooling the water for native fish. In many cases the stored groundwater also returns to surface flow in downstream reaches, providing important cool water to chill too-warm summer streams. This means that a healthy beaver population acts to conserve native fish species in the Wenatchee Valley, allowing future generations to witness iconic trout and salmon on this picturesque landscape.

Jaspers explains that beaver “affect our landscape on a big level when it comes to fire and climate resiliency.” Recent research suggests that beavers help to protect people and their property from wildfires. Riverside vegetation fed by beaver ponds acts as a fire break, stopping wildfires from advancing across the landscape. In 2021, twenty times more land was burned by wildfires in Washington and Oregon than in 2020. With increasing rates of wildfire in the region, beavers may be an important defense against fire-induced property damage and destruction.

They are on a mission from God:

It’s the Eisenhower Executive Building which I’m sure he’s going to rename for himself after he paints the whole thing white for some unknown reason. WTF is is he doing? (And why not gold??? Although I’m sure he’ll “decorate ” it with all that tacky gilt Home Depot garbage.)

Get a load of this:

Good to see the President is laser-focused on affordability for the American people! https://t.co/BlMxukUkTD

— Governor Newsom Press Office (@GovPressOffice) January 2, 2026

He’s paying for it himself? Sure he is…

The comments indicate that his MAGA cultists love that he’s doing all this “for the country.”

God help us.

Whether we like it or not

Andrew Prokop at Vox looks at the dynamics of Twitter since Musk took over and I think his analysis is correct.

Key takeaways

• Elon Musk’s changes at X (such as rolling back content moderation policies and creator payouts), plus progressives’ departure, have turned it into a platform where the right mainly argues with the extreme right.
• Now, even right-wingers like Christopher Rufo are perturbed by how popular bigotry and conspiracy theories are becoming on X, as feuds and controversies erupt there and shake the GOP.
• Meanwhile, the Trump administration remains obsessed with pandering to the online right, putting them out of touch with ordinary voters and endangering the multiracial MAGA 2.0 coalition.

He goes into the details of these bitter feuds and it’s very interesting. I follow it because even though I haven’t participated on X in years (I save my commentary for Blue Sky) I do read it and share videos here because it still provides information that I think is important. It’s a hellscape and nightmare fuel but I’ve never believed that putting your head in the sand is a good way to live in this world. But I see no reason to participate. Let them fight among themselves.

Prokop points out that this is happening largely because Musk himself made made changes that favor the right.

It turns out that once guardrails against bigotry and misinformation are removed, there’s a huge audience-side “demand” on the right for both.

“On the right, the public mind is now shaped by the X algorithm,” right-wing activist and X power-user Christopher Rufo recently wrote, arguing that X has usurped the role formerly held by Fox News. But, he went on, “the platform’s algorithm seems increasingly hijacked by bad actors who peddle baseless conspiracies” for “clicks, dollars, and shares.”

You don’t say.

In all this lies the seeds for the potential destruction of the MAGA 2.0 coalition. Controversies over antisemitism are shaking right-wing institutions like the Heritage Foundation. Overt bigotry and an obsession with online nonsense seem ill-suited to retaining the loyalty of the voters of color who backed Trump for the first time in 2024.

Prokop lays out the case for why the platform remains important and it’s mainly because political and media elites are still participating. But there’s more to it than that. It’s a window into the right that you just can’t get anywhere else.

He notes that before Musk, the progressive side of Twitter often went too far using twitter’s most powerful tool, the pile-on, resulting in infighting and empowerment of the extremes. (It arguably created much of the backlash against “woke” simply by elevating some of the more fringe ideas.)

Now the worm has turned and I would suggest that progressive politics were far less damaged by that than what is happening on he right simply because whatever excesses there were didn’t bleed into mainstream politics nearly as much. Nazis and masked secret police are just a little bit more threatening to real life than some college kids demanding that people put their pronouns on their social media feeds. The first is an extremely dangerous political shift that has some very profound historical echoes while the second is more of a consciousness raising exercise (and even something of a fad at times.) People are annoyed by woke. They are terrified of fascism.

The progressive exodus from Twitter combined with Musk’s heavy hand resulted in huge changes to the culture of the platform:

All this helped change right-wing norms and standards on what is acceptable to say publicly, to the dawning horror of some in the movement. After being bombarded with anti-Indian attacks in October, conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza — not exactly the most politically correct guy around — wrote: “In a career spanning 40 years, I have never encountered this type of rhetoric. The Right never used to talk like this. So who on our side has legitimized this type of vile degradation?”

Rufo, for his part, is not exactly uniformly opposed to racially charged conspiracy theories: He happily spread the accusation that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio last year. But he’s been perturbed by three ideological trends he saw gaining steam among parts of the right: racialism, antisemitism, and conspiracism. These trends have only worsened as the year continued — for instance, in the conspiracy theories over the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Oh heck. That’s quite a problem isn’t it? Not one that most of us who’ve been watching the right for a long time weren’t aware of, however. These attitudes have been present as long as I can remember and have been rising to the surface ever since Rush Limbaugh and newt Gingrich started pushing it out over 40 years ago. Where did they think this was going to lead?

X has grown more extreme amid a remarkable context: The second Trump administration is the most online in US history, with many current top officials positively obsessed with how they are viewed among the online right, and turning to X first to assess that.

Indeed, Trump administration policy seems to be driven in part by Trump’s own personalistic whims, in part by White House adviser Stephen Miller’s anti-immigrant fanaticism, and in part by various officials’ independent attempts to try and impress online right influencers.

[…]

This continued obsession with pleasing the fringiest figures on the right does not seem to have been very successful at making Trump popular — his approval rating is mired at about 42 percent, with 54 percent disapproving of his job performance. Yet his administration has plowed ahead with its base-pleasing strategy regardless, either mistaking X for ordinary voter sentiment, or thinking X is more important to their future career prospects than ordinary voters are.

Prokop points to the Minnesota Somali story as an example of the right trying to unite around a liberal target and it’s always possible they can create enough noise to get Tim Walz’s scalp. But that won’t solve their problem The power struggle is real and it’s not going anywhere.

Lol:

 President Donald Trump said he’s dropping — for now — his push to deploy National Guard troops in Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon. “We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again – Only a question of time!” he said in a social media post Wednesday.

He just decided to do it because well, he just did. The fact that even his toadies on the Supreme Court refused to issue an emergency order overturning lower court decisions that he’d exceeded his authority had nothing to do with it.

This was one of his few setbacks from the high court and, of course, he couldn’t admit it.

Perhaps more importantly, I think he feels he doesn’t really need to send in the National Guard now that he’s got the money flowing to fully staff his secret police force. They only answer to Stephen, Kristi and Corey Lewandowski rather than a bunch of military stiffs who have been brainwashed into thinking there are rules and laws. By this time next year, we will probably have tens of thousands of masked psychos and criminals marauding through the streets rousting anyone who looks at them sideways.

If Trump gets lucky they will be violent enough to provoke serious resistance allowing him to invoke the Insurrection Act. That’s always been Plan B. He’s not worried.

I guess he couldn’t find a movie star to threaten yesterday so he came up with this:

Hay MAGA? Did you vote for this? Trump is threatening war against Iran now because the government is repressing protests. I’m guessing he figures nobody will remember that he wanted to shoot the George Floyd protesters and was talked out of it. (I think we can be pretty sure that if such a thing were to happen today, no one would try to stop him.)

Lawyers Guns and Money wrote:

Other details he won’t concern himself with: How will an attack help Iranians who are protesting because Iran’s economy is in the shitter? If he kills members of Iran’s leadership, who will take their place? Also, what will the neighbors think?

Shortly after, Ali Larijani, a former parliament speaker who serves as the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, alleged on the social platform X that Israel and the U.S. were stoking the demonstrations. He offered no evidence to support the allegation, which Iranian officials have repeatedly made during years of protests sweeping the country.

“Trump should know that intervention by the U.S. in the domestic problem corresponds to chaos in the entire region and the destruction of the U.S. interests,” Larijani wrote on X, which the Iranian government blocks. “The people of the U.S. should know that Trump began the adventurism. They should take care of their own soldiers.”

As an aside, I had to look around for an outlet that did not paraphrase around his typo. Fortunately, Fox News would not dare alter the wisdom of Trump of the Thin Blood & Thinner Skin.

Hah!

We know Bibi talked to him about doing another “mother of all bombs” attack when he was here a couple of days ago. I assume he is just looking for excuses to help out his good bud. This one seems like a foolish one since it would almost certainly rally the country to the government’s side but Trump isn’t exactly known for his strategic savvy. I would guess Bibi will warn him off using that one.

This is the stupidest timeline. So, incredibly, overwhelmingly stupid.

Comedy writer thwacks Trump’s memorial to himself

Perhaps you’ve seen it, the website at trumpkennedycenter.org. The Washington Post heralded its coming creation back in December:

“As soon as Trump began gutting the Kennedy Center board earlier this year, I thought, ‘Yep, that name’s going on the building,’” explains Toby Morton, a comedy writer with “South Park” and “Mad TV” credits who buys political domains and turns them into satirical websites as a form of activism. All year, Morton followed news of Trump’s takeover of the institution — how the president purged many of its existing board members, replaced them with loyalists, then announced plans to personally host the Kennedy Center Honors — and in August he snapped up the rights to both trumpkennedycenter.org and trumpkennedycenter.com.

And here we are:

When on December 18, Roma Daravi, spokesperson for the venue, announced, “The Kennedy Center Board of Trustees voted unanimously today to name the institution The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” Morton’s bet paid off. The comedy writer “purchases domain names then creates parody websites that lampoon their subjects,” Vanity Fair observes.

And thus this dedication on Morton’s site:

Welcome to TrumpKennedyCenter.org

A national cultural center dedicated to legacy, loyalty, and the careful presentation of history.

Here, tradition is preserved, narratives are curated, and performances are elevated beyond mere art. What is remembered matters. What is omitted matters more.

We invite you to experience culture as authority, pageantry as truth, and excellence as defined by those in power.

Daravi continued, “The unanimous vote recognizes that [Trump] saved the institution from financial ruin and physical destruction.”

I have yet to see any evidence to support that Trumpian smear.

Deborah Rutter, the former Kennedy Center president fired by Trump, calls the statement a “malicious” distortion of the facts displaying a reckless disregard of the truth. She acknowledges financial strains. But Rutter contends that the center simply faces a maintenance backlog like many federal buildings (NPR from May 2025):

In 2021 the Smithsonian, another institution that receives federal funds, estimated its deferred maintenance backlog at more than $1 billion.

A House committee has approved a proposal for an enormous budget increase for the Kennedy Center. It would allocate more than $250 million to the Center, most of which would go towards repairs. That’s a sixfold increase from the roughly $40 million the center has received from Congress each year.

In her statement, Rutter said that in each of her 10 years as president, the Kennedy Center’s budget “served as a blueprint for our operations and programming — standard and responsible practice in arts management.”

Morton’s parody may not be the final word on Trump’s sacrilege:

It’s unclear how long that URL will be useful, however. On Monday, Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio filed a lawsuit to force the removal of Trump’s name from the center, saying in her filing that the name change violates the Constitution. “Only Congress has the authority to rename the Kennedy Center. President Trump and his cronies must not be allowed to trample federal law and bypass Congress to feed his ego,” Beatty said in a statement. “This entire process has been a complete disgrace to this cherished institution and the people it serves. These unlawful actions must be blocked before any further damage is done.”

This has got to be a satisfying nod for Morton:

Morton announced Sunday via social media that he’d recieved support in his satirical effort from Kerry Kennedy, a niece of former president John F. Kennedy as well as the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy and sister of current Health and Human Services head, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

RFK Jr. was likely too ‘roided up to catch the joke.

Newer! Bigger! Unaffordable!

Move over Blue Monday. Red Friday’s here.

Americans start 2026 with sticker shock. “Millions of Americans will face higher healthcare costs starting January 1, 2026, as enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expire after Congress failed to extend them,” reports Scripps News service:

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates annual out-of-pocket premium payments for subsidized enrollees will increase by an average of 114%, though the exact amount varies widely depending on individual income, state and other factors.

Anecdotally, I’ve heard of some people’s premiums rising 2x, 3x, and even as much as 8x. Higher than some mortgage payments.

It’s not as if Democrats didn’t try to stop this (CBS News):

Democrats forced a 43-day government shutdown over the issue. Moderate Republicans called for a solution to save their 2026 political aspirations. President Trump floated a way out, only to back off after conservative backlash.

In the end, no one’s efforts were enough to save the subsidies before their expiration date. A House vote expected in January could offer another chance, but success is far from guaranteed.

The subsidies drove ACA enrollment to record levels. Now, those who could afford coverage last year have the rug safety net pulled out from under them. The official enrollment period for 2026 ends Jan. 15, although it already has expired in some states.

The Hill notes:

Young people will see the greatest rise in uninsurance rates compared to other age groups, according to Matthew Buettgens, senior fellow in the health policy division at the Urban Institute.

Among racial groups, Black non-Hispanic people are projected to see the largest increase in uninsurance rates, with white non-Hispanic people following closely behind at 25 percent. 

Across the income spectrum, people making between 250 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty level — those who fall in the middle of the eligible population — will see the largest percent gain in uninsurance, projected at 26 percent.  

[…]

Experts estimate somewhere between 2.2 million and 7.3 million people will decide against renewing their insurance because of the price hike. 

So thank a Republican politician every chance you get.

Trump on New Year’s Eve:

I am struck by how often he is characterizing people as complainers. Coming from the world’s sorest loser and history’s greatest whiner it really takes some nerve.

Do you think any of his followers will ever notice that these juvenile insults of famous people (that everyone knows are lies) are incredibly stupid? Nah…

What’s he so mad about? This probably:

When Clooney played Murrow last spring, CBS News was settling a frivolous lawsuit with Trump so that he’d approve the sale of its parent company, Paramount, to Skydance. That enraged Clooney, as did ABC News’ similar settlement with the president over a defamation claim.

“If CBS and ABC had challenged those lawsuits and said, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ we wouldn’t be where we are in the country,” Clooney says. “That’s simply the truth.”

He’s only grown more alarmed as David Ellison, Paramount’s new owner, has reshaped CBS News’ coverage in a more MAGA-friendly way by installing conservative commentator Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief. “Bari Weiss is dismantling CBS News as we speak,” Clooney says. “I’m worried about how we inform ourselves and how we’re going to discern reality without a functioning press.”
[…]
“It’s a very trying time,” Clooney says. “It can depress you or make you very angry. But you have to find the most positive way through it. You have to put your head down and keep moving forward because quitting isn’t an option.”

What is surprising, though, is that before Trump set the country on a MAGA course, Clooney and the reality-TV star were friendly. “I knew him very well,” Clooney says. “He used to call me a lot, and he tried to help me get into a hospital once to see a back surgeon. I’d see him out at clubs and at restaurants. He’s a big goofball. Well, he was. That all changed.”

Trump doesn’t like being called a goofball.

A new piece in the Wall St.Journal should have been a real blockbuster. Sadly, it was released during the holidays so it didn’t get the traction it might have otherwise. It shows that for years Mar-a-lago was supplying girls to Jeffrey Epstein.

Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t just a frequent visitor to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The club was also sending spa employees—usually young women—to Epstein’s nearby mansion for massages, manicures and other spa services, according to former Mar-a-Lago and Epstein employees.

The house calls went on for years, even as spa employees warned each other about Epstein, who was known among staff for being sexually suggestive and exposing himself during the appointments, according to the former Mar-a-Lago employees. 

The spa occasionally provided house calls for members. Epstein wasn’t a dues-paying member of the club, but Trump told staff to treat him like one, the employees said. Epstein had an account at the spa where his companion, Ghislaine Maxwell, booked appointments on his behalf.

This stuff is particularly damning:

By the time Epstein was banned from the spa in 2003, disquiet over his presence at the club had been bubbling for years—including from Trump’s second wife, Marla Maples, who in the mid-1990s warned her husband and others there was something “off” about Epstein, according to former employees. 

Maples, who married Trump in 1993, widely shared concerns with Mar-a-Lago staff about Epstein soon after the club opened in 1995, according to former employees.

Please. It was obvious that Trump knew exactly what was going on and he enlisted his employees to help. Does anyone seriously believe that he didn’t know that Gislaine Maxwell was recruiting girls from his spa? That his best bud Jeffrey didn’t tell him all the details? Come on. He used to call up Epstein himself and give him a blow by blow (so to speak) of his own sexual adventures and Epstein would put him on the speakerphone and force his female assistant to listen to it. Their entire relationship was based on their sexual exploits.

I cannot for the life of me understand why this hasn’t been a focus of this investigation. I don’t know if Trump was personally having sex with the 15 year olds. He probably was. But he was almost certainly involved with or, at least, aware of Epstein’s trafficking operation, whether through his modeling agency or Mar-a-a Lago or, who knows, maybe even the beauty pageants. It’s obvious.

Here’s a gift link to the entire article. It’s a doozy.