Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Aside from the obvious, his actual performance was just terrible. Here a just a couple of data points I ran across this morning:

I guess when people say they liked his policies, they meant his policies to deny people health insurance.

How about this one?

Or how about Trump’s claim that his tax cuts were the largest in history. (“nobody’s ever seen anything like it!”)

How about Trump’s new crusade against Joe Biden in which he claims that nobody died on his watch? He lied, of course:

65 military personnel died in war zones during Trump’s administration.

It’s common for some gold star families to blame the administration in charge for the deaths of their loved ones. Weirdly, since Benghazi it only seems to be right wing gold star families blaming Democrats. I didn’t see much of this during Trump’s tenure. Maybe all the families of the fallen were Trump fans? Or, more likely, the non-Trump fan families weren’t interested in becoming part of a political campaign.

Bill Sher at the Washington Monthly has more on this:

Trump is betting that he can make inroads on the anti-war left, with the help of Kennedy and Gabbard, by portraying himself a peacemaker battling warmongers Biden and Harris.

Evidence for that charge is also scant. If Biden and Harris have so deeply embroiled America in endless war, how is it that fewer American soldiers have died in combat during their administration than in Trump’s? How is it that fewer soldiers have died in combat than in any administration since Jimmy Carter?

According to the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System, which tracks annual casualty data, 65 soldiers died in “hostile action” during the four years of the Trump administration, versus 13 under Biden through 2022, the last year tabulated. The Washington Monthly’s Zach Marcus reviewed combat-related deaths announced in Pentagon press releases over the previous two years and identified three additional hostile action deaths, for a total of 16. That’s a 75 percent decline.

You are likely familiar with the incidents that caused the 16 deaths, as there are only two: the August 2021 suicide bombing at an Afghanistan airport and the January 2024 drone attack on an American military base in Jordan, for which the loose-knit Iranian-backed militia Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed responsibility.

The reason why the Biden-Harris administration has suffered so few hostile action deaths is because it ended the so-called “forever war” in Afghanistan. Most of the deaths were a tragic consequence of leaving that combat zone, not from deepening any foreign conflict.

In leaving Afghanistan just short of the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Biden and Harris closed the book on the failed neoconservative project of exploiting that traumatic event to expand American hegemony across the Greater Middle East with American ground troops.

How exactly are we on the verge of World War III? In Trump’s narrative, it’s because of the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza wars.

Trump places heavy emphasis on the Afghan bombing deaths to argue Biden and Harris are so incompetent that they facilitated fresh conflicts. He told the National Guard conference, “It gave us Russia going into Ukraine. It gave us the October 7 attack on Israel. Because it gave us lack of respect.”

This tenuous, self-serving argument collapses upon minimal scrutiny.

Read on. It’s a good analysis.

Trump’s only national security and foreign policy is to blather about money, “make friends” with despots who see him coming a mile away, tariffs as a “negotiating” posture that doesn’t work and doing the opposite of whatever his predecessors did. He is an imbecile in most ways but in this way in particular.

Pithy turns of phrase for dysfunctional personalities

Tim Miller of The Bulwark appearing the other day on MSNBC used the phrase “emotional support cougar” to describe the over-made-up groupies who decorate Donald Trump’s Mar-al-Lago resort. The term seems not to have originated with Miller, but perhaps with comedian Carla Collins. Miller deployed the phrase to reference Trump’s regular need to run home to them in his Florida safe space.

But the desperation behind the need is broader than Trump, his sons, and his hangers-on.

Over at The Garden of Forking Paths, Brian Klaas explores the epidemic of toxic masculinity embodied by Trump and guys like Elon Musk. The day after Gov. Tim Walz modeled a healthier masculinity in addressing the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a professional purveyor of the destructive kind, Andrew Tate, was placed under house arrest by a Romanian judge for human trafficking in minors.

Klaas describes the type with a few more pithy phrases:

On the one hand, Tate—a fool so dense that light bends around him—embodies what is often referred to as “toxic masculinity,” a whole suite of severe character flaws.2 For our purposes, I’ll focus on a subset of Tate’s destructive deficiencies which are much more widely held, a specific model of masculinity that pretends one can only be a “real” man if they engage in constant abusive performative insecurity.

In this world, men must not only constantly be peacocks, but peacocks who overcompensate for their lack of genuinely magnificent tailfeathers by buying big guns and flashy cars while confusing women for property and wrongly conflating high wealth with high value.

Tate sells this form of warped masculinity as a product, including a $50 monthly subscription service to the “Real World”—previously known as “Hustlers University”—where he will teach young disciples how to get rich quick on the internet. Or, for the low, low price of just $7,979, you can join The War Room, an online community of Tate superfans that is billed as being “a global network in which exemplars of individualism work to free the modern man from socially induced incarceration.” What an erudite wordsmith one must be to create so much meaningless ambiguity with so few words of drivel!

The fact that internet vipers like Tate are so financially successful indicates that there is a social malaise among rudderless young men; if there weren’t, nobody would pay him absurd amounts of cash—or for this demographic, cryptocurrency—to tell them how to amass control over more worldly objects (which includes women in Tate’s antediluvian mindset).

As James Bloodworth writes, for the men on Andrew Tate’s courses, “Women are viewed as a resource on a par with sports cars and infinity pools – something to show off and deploy to convey your alpha status to other men. The contemporary manosphere has taken the concept of the trophy wife and expanded it into the trophy harem.”

How alpha must Trump be then? He doesn’t have to buy emotional support cougars. They pay him for admission to his club!

What’s particularly spooky about Tate (both British and American) is how well known he is in England where “one in five young British men — have a ‘favourable’ or ‘very favourable’ view of Tate.”

Tate’s strategy of trying to capitalize on the social angst of young men is nothing new. It’s simply dressed up in a new guise and packaged in a slick digital offering. What Tate is bottling up and selling online is an emotion that the sociologist Michael Kimmel identified a decade ago as aggrieved entitlement.

This concept refers, essentially, to the rage-filled sentiment among some men—particularly white men in the West—that they are the innocent victims of a world that’s becoming fairer by race and gender. Some report feeling emasculated by women holding any power. Many believe they are entitled, through fake pseudoscientific allusions to biological determinism and the grace of their genes, to being on top. Andrew Tate’s favored moniker, Top G, is no accident. The chumps toil at the bottom. The champs climb over whoever they need to in order to regain the top.

And at the top, it turns out there’s a lot of performative insecurity: fast cars, big guns, plastic bodies—the empty trappings of a broken person’s idea of what it means to project the illusion of a successful life.

Emotional support cougars, aggrieved entitlement, performative insecurity. Otherwise known as a public health crisis like “deaths of despair.”

It’s a poison in modern society. Not only are these abhorrent, backward views associated with higher rates of gender-based violence that leads to men beating and murdering women, but they are also killing young men, too.

It’s tough to muster sympathy for men who have adopted assholery as a lifestyle even if it’s killing them.

Walz is the counterpoint, Klaas believes, arriving not a moment too soon:

Beyond the biography, though, Walz represents one important rival model of masculinity to Andrew Tate. And it’s not just that he looks like—and is—a Midwestern Dad who likes football and knows how to fix cars and makes lame jokes while posting photos of his pets on social media.

Instead, it’s that Walz inverts the Tate philosophy on every front. For Walz, the chumps are those who speak a big game but are losers because they do nothing to strengthen their communities. The champs are those who need no praise or vanity to help others; who acknowledge their weaknesses and thank those who they’re indebted to; and are those who are never afraid to showcase emotional vulnerability. (The fact that Gus Walz’s unscripted tearful excitement in honor of his Dad became a lightning rod for ghouls in the Tate-adjacent MAGAsphere as an indication of beta male emotional weakness only underlined how utterly broken those men are inside). And, crucially, Walz feels empowered, not emasculated, to be working with a powerful woman.

You don’t need an extortionate online course to teach you how to be a good neighbor, a kind friend, a caring partner, or a community leader, either.

Walz therefore offers a form of quiet, inspiring masculinity that transcends traditional gender roles because it has a powerful message: being a good man and being a good person are the same thing.

If you want a perfect encapsulation of the conservative world view, I wrote early in my tenure here,

you need look no further than “A Boy Named Sue,” a song made famous by Johnny Cash and (ironically) written by the late Shel Silverstein, a writer of children’s books.

“Son, this world is rough, and if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough…

It’s the name that helped to make you strong”

Not a good father. Not a good husband. Not a good citizen. But strong. It’s all that matters.

That and having a few cougars hanging on your elbow.

Tim Walz on Labor Day

The Labor Day clip of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaking in Milwaukee (“very good at this” below) went viral on Monday. After I transcribed and posted the gist of it on several platforms, it went nuts on Mastodon. (Don’t ask me why, but I seem to get more traffic on Mastodon than on X, Blue Sky or Threads.)

As a teacher and coach for years, Walz said, “I was a dues-paying member of my union.” When Republican critics accused him of being “in the pocket of organized labor,” he said, “That’s a damn lie. I am the pocket!” Want to attack him for standing up for collective bargaining, for fair wages, safe working conditions, for health care and retirement, have at it.

Democrats have to run for something, Walz continued, not just against the other guys. Fair wages and safe working conditions, expanded health care and addressing climate change, etc. are on Democrats’ agenda. Just one vote made the difference in moving Minnesota forward. “That’s our vision for the country,” Walz said in asking the crowd to give Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and President Kamala Harris working majorities.

Donald Trump opposed efforts to raise the minimum wage and Republicans back “right to work” laws meant to undercut workers’ power to negotiate for pay and benefits, Walz continued.

We know what right to work means, Walz went on. “It means the right to work for less money. It means the right to work in dangerous situations. It means the right to work with no pensions.”

Tim Walz continues to be very good at this pic.twitter.com/he2ovVCDUg

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 2, 2024

Democrats have to run for something. But it’s also important to be informed, Walz told the crowd. Project 2025 should be subtitled “How to screw the working people.” That’s the Trump-Vance agenda. They’re even going after the 40-hour work week, looking to bring back child labor, and going after Social Security and Medicare while giving the rich another tax cut:

Here’s the money quote:

You tell me who in Wisconsin is sitting around saying, Damn, I wish they’d give billionaires tax cuts and screw me over. Damn, I wish they’d take my health care away. I wish they’d underfund my public school. I wish they would make my job more difficult and more dangerous, and then at the end of the day, I wish they’d make me work till I’m 75 years old. No one’s saying that. No one’s asking for that agenda. What they’re asking for is to be treated fairly with dignity. That’s what we ask.

Full speech here.

“This choir riff proves that we are truly living in the era of @anatosaurus now,” tweeted Anand Giridharadas who devoted a chapter of “The Persuaders” 2023 to Anat Shenker-Osorio’s efforts to change how Democrats communicate in plain-speak. Walz does it naturally.

Walz: They talk about small government. Small enough to be in your bedroom, small enough to be in your exam room, small enough to be in your library telling you the things you should make decisions about. pic.twitter.com/CxsPsAYhZw

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 2, 2024

Walz: The Wall Street Journal… they did another story that said oh, he's actually richer than his statement says because he has a “defined benefit pension plan.” That is my wish for every American to have a defined benefit pension plan. pic.twitter.com/kVYYLa3rNK

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 2, 2024

Turn in your hymn books to page Tim Walz.

Since Trump is determined that we are going to talk about the Afghanistan withdrawal let’s talk about it. Kevin Drum has the best discussion that I’ve seen:

Regular readers know that I’ve long been annoyed by the relentless use of the word chaotic to describe the Afghanistan withdrawal. Of course it was chaotic. It’s like saying the D-Day landings were chaotic. There’s no way anyone conducts an airlift of 100,000 people in a neat and orderly way from a city that’s just been overthrown by the Taliban.

In any case, since it’s back in the news it’s worth reviewing how the Afghanistan withdrawal played out:

1. In early 2020 Donald Trump negotiated with the Taliban for a withdrawal date of May 1, 2021, and the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners held by the Afghan government.
2. Over the next year Trump pushed hard to reduce US troop levels. By the end of his term he had reduced the US presence to 2,500 troops.
3. When Joe Biden took office, he moved the withdrawal date out to September 11. Trump criticized the change. “We can and should get out earlier,” he said.
4. In July Biden changed the withdrawal date to August 31. At this point, the Taliban was fighting but hadn’t yet taken over a single province. The broad assumption was that when the US withdrawal eventually took place the Afghan government would still control the country. The US, naturally, was committed to protecting the government through the withdrawal.
5. That changed suddenly because the Afghan army collapsed faster than anyone expected. On August 15 the Taliban took over Kabul and the president of Afghanistan fled the country. With only two weeks to go, this made a large-scale evacuation imperative.
6. The withdrawal started chaotically, but within a few hours the Army restored order. Meanwhile, despite the Trump administration’s longtime policy of delaying visa requests, which left a huge backlog of unprocessed applications, the State Department worked heroically to process visas for Afghans who wanted to leave the country.
7. In two weeks, the Army evacuated about 90% of Americans in Afghanistan and nearly 100,000 Afghan nationals. By any kind of historical standard, this was a superb performance under the most difficult circumstances imaginable.

The entire operation had only one serious failure: the death of 13 American service members (and 170 Afghans) to an al-Qaeda suicide bomber at Abbey Gate. Multiple investigations by the Pentagon concluded that there wasn’t really anything that could have stopped it.

Everyone processes grief differently, and I can’t bring myself to reproach the families that blame Biden for the deaths of their children. But the fact remains that Biden wasn’t at fault; the Army wasn’t at fault; and deaths in the line of duty are a natural occurrence in war.

The withdrawal wasn’t handled perfectly, but there weren’t any huge mistakes. Nor was it really possible not to withdraw given the situation Biden inherited: the Taliban’s takeover was inevitable as soon as Trump signed the withdrawal agreement with them. It might well have been inevitable even without that. After 20 years it was as clear as it could be that there was simply no more the US could do, and Biden showed a lot of political courage in facing up to that.

In the end, despite everything, the evacuation and airlift were considerable successes—and it’s remarkable that the only serious casualties came from a single al-Qaeda suicide bomber. The blame for that rests squarely on al-Qaeda and no one else.

One hopes that Trump’s need to cast blame and the media’s egregious coverage of the event doesn’t mark it otherwise historically but I think Kevin gets it right. It could never have been anything but a nightmare. Biden was the only president who had the nerve to face that..

The comments over at Kevin’s place are interesting too if you’re of a mind to pursue this.

Oh and by the way, here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know:

During Trump’s very weird event with Moms for Liberty last week he lied many times as he always does. And this particular lie is one he keeps telling and it keeps not being true. After telling them that he had wanted to make Ivanka “UN Secretary” (which would not have been possible) he said this:

“Daddy, I just want to help people get jobs….” Yeah right.

Reality (from 2019)

Trump signed an executive order creating the National Council for the American Worker, co-chaired by Ivanka Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. One of the council’s priorities is asking companies across the US to sign the Pledge to America’s Workers. The pledge involves “committing to expand programs that educate, train, and reskill American workers from high-school age to near-retirement,” according to the White House.

Two hundred companies have agreed to the pledge, with each providing different numbers of training opportunities. This brings the total number of opportunities pledged to just over 6.5 million. (See the full list.)

CNN’s Senior Economics Writer Lydia DePillis checked out a similar claim made by Ivanka herself last year as she discussed the pledge. “We’re up to 6.3 million new jobs,” Ivanka said last October. That claim, DePillis found, was rather exaggerated.

First, the pledge does not translate to millions of immediate training opportunities. In a press release from the administration, the pledge is described as a commitment to “new opportunities over the next five years.” Secondly, these are better understood as training opportunities, not necessarily “jobs.” In the same press release last year, the White House described these opportunities as “apprenticeships and work-based learning, continuing education, on-the-job training, and reskilling.” These opportunities can be for current employees.

Lastly, many of these opportunities pledged were already planned by the companies. As CNN previously reported, Walmart’s pledged amount over five years would just about match the rate that its program Walmart Academies has trained since it started in 2016. The Associated Builders and Contractors provides a similar example as it pledged to provide roughly as many opportunities in five years as it trains in one year.

In sum, it’s inaccurate to suggest that the number of training opportunities pledged are “jobs.” The timeline for these opportunities spans five years. And many of them match existing company goals and numbers. It’s simply not true that Ivanka Trump has “created millions of jobs,” as her father claimed.

She claimed it too. But then she’s a Trump. They all lie as easily as they breathe.

The Republicans have spent the last four years caterwauling about the “Biden Crime Family” and its alleged connections to foreign countries, especially China. They called it the greatest corruption scandal in American history. There was no evidence of this, of course. But they just repeated it relentlessly and pushed hearings and investigations until the old “where there’s smoke, there must be fire” dynamic kicked in.

Well, here’s a raging, out of control conflagration and nobody cares:

[W]ith Trump running for the presidency once more … foreign governments — including brand-new regimes that weren’t involved in Trump’s first whirlwind in the White House — have only spied new opportunities to burrow into his pockets and into a second administration.

Many of these networks are already known, if forgotten. Trump’s financial links with regimes in places like China, Kazakhstan, or Indonesia were already reported in detail during his presidency. Even after Trump left the Oval Office, the revelations about his subterranean financial links as president with foreign regimes continued spilling out; it was only this year, for instance, that congressional investigators revealed that the first two years of Trump’s presidency included countries as far afield as Qatar, Kuwait, Turkey, and many more patronizing Trump businesses. Any of these details on their own would be exceptional — can you imagine how much any other presidential candidate’s secret Chinese bank account would dominate a news cycle? — but they’ve been subsumed in the broader morass of Trump’s scandals. They’ve become, to an almost shocking degree, normalized.

They are completely normal. The media didn’t even really care about the bombshell Washington Post report by some of its top investigative reporters about the 10 million dollar gift (bribe) by Egypt to Trump’s campaign back in 2016. Why would it care about the ongoing bribes Trump is taking from Saudi Arabia and other middle eastern countries much less the dubious deals Jared Kushner is making with authoritarian despots all over the globe he reports in the article.

Trump exists on a different dimension than everyone else. They succeeded in making the fact that he is always awash in scandal, corruption and criminality into such a mundane story that he’s no longer held responsible for any of it. It’s quite a trick.

It’s labor day and the blue-collar billionaire, friend of the working man has quite the record:

Here is a montage of Trump lying to workers and failing to deliver pic.twitter.com/5YmzWZnYp4

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 2, 2024

Here’s something he said just a couple of weeks ago that ought to make his union fans think twice, but it won’t:

Video for Labor Day: Trump praises billionaire Elon Musk for firing workers who were striking for better pay and working conditionspic.twitter.com/zHSPsK7bxe

— Mike Walker (@New_Narrative) September 2, 2024

That’s illegal, of course. But as we know, the law means nothing to Trump. Or Musk, for that matter.

How about this one?

Trump on union workers: “They get their little 5 percent, they get another 2 percent… All of a sudden they’re making more money than the people that own the company” pic.twitter.com/zpH3OMYZKz

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 2, 2024

Happy labor day to all the suckers and losers who work for a living.

I was going to deconstruct Trump’s inane interview on Fox last night but Tom addressed it well earlier and I came across this and thought it was well done.

Trump ran through most of his greatest hits, mangling them like an aging crooner who forgot the words. And Levin sat there like a potted palm.

(I know that Steve Schmitt is an asshole — at best — but when he’s right, he’s right. Especially about Mark Levin.)

Trump is cooking up some plans of his own too

He’s going to let the foxes right into the henhouse and one fox in particular:

Behind closed doors, former president Donald Trump and his advisers have been talking for months about forming a commission led by prominent business executives to comb through the government books to identify thousands of programs to cut.

Lately, one particularly famous candidate has made clear he’d be up for it: Elon Musk. And he may have much to gain personally from the endeavor.

On several occasions, including on X, the social media platform he owns, the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive has expressed interest in being part of a “government efficiency commission” aimed at eliminating wasteful regulations and spending. Musk in August posted an apparently artificial intelligence-generated image of himself behind a lectern labeled “Department of Government Efficiency,” with the acronym DOGE — a meme-based cryptocurrency Musk has previously embraced.

Musk’s potential involvement in a government regulatory and spending commission has sparked concerns from ethics experts who point to conflicts of interest that could emerge between such a post and his business empire. But Trump advisers are eager to bring in prominent corporate leaders to compile a high-profile list of federal excess, reprising efforts similar to those led by President Ronald Reagan and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who once published an annual “Waste Book” on allegedly frivolous spending.

Trump last week downplayed the idea that Musk would join his Cabinet — but also said Musk might be a helpful consultant to the federal government.

“He wants to be involved, but look, he’s running big businesses and all that … so he can’t really” be in the Cabinet, Trump said on the Shawn Ryan Show. “He can sort of, as the expression goes, consult with the country and give you some very good ideas.”

Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

Musk has increasingly used X as a megaphone to support Trump and bash his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. But as the two billionaires have moved into a closer political alliance, scrutiny is mounting over the potential financial benefits a potential second Trump administration could deliver to Musk.

Scrutiny is mounting? Really? Gee, that’s good to know.

It’s not just Musk, although I can see why they chose to focus on him. It’s the idea itself. “Open the books to see what programs to cut” is such a ridiculous concept I don’t know where to start. This is the government we’re talking about not a grocery store chain.

I don’t have the energy to get worked up today about yet another completely insane Trump notion. Suffice to say that there is no end to it. (And if he wins, Elon Musk can do whatever he pleases.)