Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

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.

* * * * *

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

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

The right has been skeptical of the State Department since the McCarthy era when they claimed it was crawling with commies. So it surprised me that we haven’t seen this until now:

A draft of a Trump administration executive order proposes a drastic restructuring of the State Department, including eliminating almost all of its Africa operations and shutting down embassies and consulates across the continent.

The draft also calls for cutting offices at State Department headquarters that address climate change and refugee issues, as well as democracy and human rights concerns.

The purpose of the executive order, which could be signed soon by President Trump, is to impose “a disciplined reorganization” of the State Department and “streamline mission delivery” while cutting “waste, fraud and abuse,” according to a copy of the 16-page draft order obtained by The New York Times. The department is supposed to make the changes by Oct. 1.

Shutting down embassies across Africa seems particularly stupid. Do they think Africa is going away ? Or are they just planning to wage war against the whole continent? I can’t imagine why anyone thinks this is a good idea.

And yeah, why should we concern ourselves with climate change and refugee issues? Those are totally irrelevant issues to the United States Of America. Great idea.

Lol. The real story here must be a doozy:

We’ve learned in the last few days that the TV host pete Hegseth is having a difficult time handling the job over at the Pentagon. And now we’ve learned that the Deputy FBI Director, which used to be a serious job for a long term professional FBI employee since he is the one tasked with the day to day management of the bureau, is spending his time “being a man” with the boys at Quantico rather than learning how to do the job for which he’s totally unqualified. It seems like a pattern.

Uhm… no. It’s clear. He’s a young MAGA cultist, gun nut known for his extremist views. Considering the history of young, MAGA cultist gun nuts who commit violence I don’t think it’s a stretch to eschew going the extra mile to make sure you don’t make any assumptions about motive. They could have written the article without saying the motive is “a mystery.”

Ikner had just transferred to Florida State University from Tallahassee State College and enrolled this semester as a political science major. He remains hospitalized with serious but non-life-threatening injuries after he was shot by law enforcement, police said. 

As the investigation widened Friday into what led to the gunfire, students who knew the accused gunman described him as a troubled young man who openly talked about having a weapon.

“He would joke about mass violence,” said Lucas Luzietti, who shared a national government class with Ikner when he was at Tallahassee State College. “And he did talk about how he used guns and had access to them.”

“He espoused the election denialism belief that Joe Biden was not the legitimate president, he said that Rosa Parks was in the wrong, he also talked about how Black people are ruining his neighborhood and Stonewell was bad for society,” Luzietti said. “He would also talk about how multiculturalism is dangerous.” 

Reid Seybold, a senior at FSU who said he first met Ikner at Tallahassee State, recalled Ikner being asked not to return to a political discussion club at his former college because of “white supremacist rhetoric and far-right rhetoric.” 

He had a tumultuous childhood in which his parents fought over custody. He ended up changing his name (but unlike JD Vance, only once.) I suppose it’s possible that he was just mad about his grades or something but his extremism indicates that his motive is very likely not “a mystery.”

Seems pertinent for some reason.

JD Vance is such a phony shape-shifter that I don’t believe that he’s sincere about being a Catholic convert any more than anything else. His visit to the pope, ostentatiously carrying his kid around to prove his natalist bonafides, was ludicrous. It was widely reported that the Church dispatched the pope’s second in command to meet with him and they had an “exchange of opinions.”

Pope Francis was absent from Vance’s conversation with Cardinal Pietro Parolin. However, the statement said there was “an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by war, political tensions and difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners.”

It called for “serene collaboration” between the White House and the Catholic Church in the United States—a seeming hint to the tensions that have brewed between the two since President Donald Trump took office.

A statement from Vance’s office about the meeting, however, did not include migration among the topics of conversation.

Vance did meet with the Pope on Easter but they didn’t say much. The pope is clearly quite ill. Vance told him he prays for him every day. (Sure he does…)

After the encounter, Francis was wheeled out to the Loggia of Blessings overlooking St. Peter’s Square to cheers from a crowd of 35,000. He offered a silent blessings and a short, breathless greeting before Archbishop Diego Ravelli, master of apostolic ceremonies, read aloud Francis’s Easter speech — known as an Urbi et Orbi, from Rome to the World — which presented a worldview in stark contrast with the Trump administration’s.

“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.”

Basically, the Catholic Church told Vance to fuck off. Not that Vance cares one way or the other. This was all performative “traditionalism” for the rubes. But it should say something to the Catholic faithful who might believe that Trump and Vance are doing God’s work.

What’s up Russ Vought’s sleeve next?

TPM’s Josh Marshall issued a series of whatever-they’re-calleds on Bluesky last night that merit a closer look and more validation. There doesn’t seem to be anything new on this at TPM this morning, so….

2/ Keep those caveats in mind. I relay these takeaways essentially as heads ups of things to look out for. In the retribution dept the reorg permanently downsizes the US Embassy in Canada to a sub-skeleton crew. “no more than 10 consular officers” etc. Similarly drastic cuts to all other personnel.

3/ It appears to essentially abolish what we now know as the foreign service. Immediately ends the foreign service exam. Institutes new system based on things like “demonstrated charisma”, “verbal authenticity”, “alignment with President’s foreign policy vision”, et al.

4/ Embeds DOGE-centric scrutiny of all spending; ends generalist global rotation in favor of four regional corps for the world – says new statute will be needed for that but start now anyway; dramatically reduces staff of Dept at home and abroad; shuts down several pages worth of offices at State.

5/ Bureau of Humanitarian Affairs inherits whatever is left of USAID. There’s a lot more there but those are some toplines.

I’ve got a couple of retired FSOs nearby who will be interested to hear that there is talk (likely from Project 2025 mastermind Russ Vought) of zeroing out their beloved diplomatic corps and friends still in its employ.

Scarecrow: I haven’t got a brain… only straw. 
Dorothy: How can you talk if you haven’t got a brain?
Scarecrow: I don’t know… But some people without brains do an awful lot of talking… don’t they?

A commenter notes that Trump lacks the authority to kill off the Foreign Service. But then Trump does an awful lot of things he doesn’t have the authority to do, doesn’t he?

Marshall replies:

There has already been an awful lot of coloring outside the guardrails by the Trump 2.0 administration. So much so that a 7-2 U.S. Supreme Court majority felt the need to put the ol’ quaheedus on Trump-Miller-Bondi efforts to spirit away yet another batch of non-citizen(?) detainees to Nayib Bukele’s “CECOT holiday resort” without so much as a “But Judge, they’ve got the wrong man.”

Suddenly, Justice Samuel Alito (joined by Clarence Thomas) is concerned that his colleagues on SCOTUS are not following established procedures in ordering Donald Trump to stop violating established procedures.

Alito complains that “issuing an order at midnight” to stop Trump 2.0 from jetting its Venezuelan prisoners out of reach of constitutional “due process” protections was both unnecessary and inappropriate. It sure as hell would have been appropriate if the prisoner in question was Thomas billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow, don’t you think?

It seems our would-be monarch was peeved at the “UnSupreme Court” majority. A showdown is surely coming.

As OldDudeFella observes, “Our country is already being run by criminals.”

* * * * *

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

Hell, no

A few of us were out in the streets on Saturday at hundreds of anti-Donald Trump rallies across the U.S. and abroad. There were many discouraging words about our would-be monarch. (Not enough is made of the fact that as much as Trump loves to cosplay as a gilded nobleman, there is nothing of nobility in him.)

Social media lit up, of course, but the press this morning took little notice that from coast to coast opposition to the return of a king was visible and boisterous. “Nationwide protests” are nowhere on The New York Times front page. Look closely and you might spot 11 words about them at the bottom left of The Washington Post’s. (I’ll throw in a few more photos from Asheville’s rally below.)

It is of course a busy news and cultural weekend. Today is Easter Sunday, celebrated by Christians around the world. The U.S. Supreme Court issued an order early Saturday for the Trump administration to stand down plans to fly more ICE prisoners to a concentration camp in El Salvador.

Major outlets are still watching to see if Trump 2.0 will heed the court’s injunction or launch another round of Calvinball noncompliance-as compliance. And Saturday was the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution with those shots fired at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. Somehow, seeing living Americans revolt against a man crazier and meaner (in several adjectival senses) than King George III did not attract as much media attention.

Previewing Ken Burns’s new series on the American Revolution, Slate’s Henry Grabar begins with a quote from Thomas Paine: “The strength and powers of despotism consist wholly in the fear of resisting it.” (Review Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s comments on fear of speaking out.)

Grabar considers how the American Revolution, once considered “a conservative inheritance” now faces pushback from the left. Toby Sackton, a Lexington celebration organizer, hopes to avoid “a commemoration that doesn’t recognize the parallels between what was happening in 1775 and some of the things we’ve seen in the first hundred days of Trump.”

I met a former Republican at our local rally who sees clearly the parallels. John Tandler, a.k.a. The Soapbox Patriot, has begun traveling the U.S. and delivering a short speech in colonial garb that draws out those parallels.

Grabar writes:

In a speech in nearby Concord on Saturday morning, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey planned to make the parallel to current events explicit: “We see things that would be familiar to our revolutionary predecessors: the silencing of critics, the disappearing of people from our streets, demands for unquestioning fealty… Together, we will protect the freedoms that were won here. We will defend the rule of law. We will claim our freedom of speech. And we will not be intimidated by the words or actions of a would-be king.”

But sometimes the source material is so strong that it doesn’t need any editorializing. As the journalist Josh Marshall put it on this week about a different 200-year-old document: “Anyone who has read the Federalist Papers in their totality knows that somewhere between a third and a half of the essays are very specifically talking about Donald Trump.”

A powerful example of this phenomenon occurred during Donald Trump’s first year in office, when NPR live-tweeted, with no commentary, the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 2017. Some conservative users took it as an attack on Trump, and it reads much the same way today. “Cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world”? “Transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”? Americans may mistake those 249-year-old grievances for last week’s headlines.

One group of people who wouldn’t? Immigrants seeking citizenship, who are required to study the document for their citizenship test. Some will be in Lexington on Tuesday, when the 250thbirthday of that first skirmish concludes with a new tradition: a naturalization ceremony.

Lost in the current focus on the American Revolution is the fact that it is the history of only part of this continent-spanning nation. A friend raised out West reminds me that by the time the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, far to the west, Santa Fe, New Mexico was already the colonial seat of New Spain. Spanish, French, British and Russian colonizers of the west coast and Pacific Northwest were already writing their own history, one that’s not taught to school children. As if the only important American stories happened in the original colonies.

It is why when people complain to me about “the Democratic Party,” I might remind them that there is no The  Democrats. There are 57 diverse party organizations (50 states, the territories, the District of Columbia and Democrats Abroad). The western states trickled into the union over nearly two centuries, each with their own charters and bylaws, local histories, and local languages and customs (not all of them European). The Democratic National Committee may organize the quadrennial convention and administer the national voter file, but it is not the One Ring that rules them all.

What unifies us, when it does, is a set of governing principles, equality under law, and faith in a more perfect union that is now under greater threat than since the Civil War (another Ken Burns subject). Some of us, it seems, are less committed to this country than they profess. They want a king again.

Hell, no.

(h/t DC, SR)

* * * * *

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