Were there moments that you missed? Anything that happened that’s on the cutting room floor?
I don’t think there’s anything I missed that I wish I’d gotten. I’ll give you a little anecdote: Stephen Miller was perhaps the most concerned about the portrait session. He asked me, “Should I smile or not smile?” and I said, “How would you want to be portrayed?” We agreed that we would do a bit of both. And then when we were finished, he comes up to metoshakemy hand and say goodbye.
And he says to me, “You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people.” And I looked at him and I said, “You know, you do, too.”
The new Quinnipiac Poll says that voters really hate the Democratic Party and think they’re worse than the Republicans on the economy and immigration but better on protecting democracy and health care. It’s hard to believe they’ve won all those races in the off-year elections. However, they really don’t like Trump and I suspect that’s the motivating force. They want to create some kind of block on his agenda which is extremely unpopular.
Here are some highlights:
POWER OF THE PRESIDENCY
When it comes to using the power of the presidency, 54 percent of voters think Donald Trump is going too far, 37 percent think he is handling it about right, and 7 percent think Trump isn’t going far enough in using the power of the presidency.
“Is the often described ‘most powerful person in the world’ wielding too much power? More than half of Americans believe President Trump has crossed that line,”added Malloy.
TRUMP JOB APPROVALS
Forty percent of voters approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president, while 54 percent disapprove, unchanged from Quinnipiac University’s October 22 poll.
Voters were asked about Trump’s handling of eight issues:
the military: 46 percent approve, while 51 percent disapprove;
immigration issues: 44 percent approve, while 54 percent disapprove;
deportations: 42 percent approve, while 55 percent disapprove;
foreign policy: 41 percent approve, while 54 percent disapprove;
trade: 40 percent approve, while 55 percent disapprove;
the economy: 40 percent approve, while 57 percent disapprove;
the Russia – Ukraine war: 35 percent approve, while 55 percent disapprove;
health care: 34 percent approve, while 59 percent disapprove.
THE ECONOMY
Thirty-four percent of voters describe the state of the nation’s economy these days as either excellent (3 percent) or good (31 percent), while 65 percent describe it as either not so good (35 percent) or poor (30 percent), which is similar to Quinnipiac University’s September 24 poll.
Nearly half of voters (48 percent) think the nation’s economy is getting worse, 30 percent think it’s getting better, and 21 percent think it’s staying about the same.
BIDEN VS. TRUMP: THE ECONOMY
Asked who they think is more responsible for the current state of the economy: Joe Biden or Donald Trump, 57 percent of voters say Trump, 34 percent say Biden and 10 percent did not offer an opinion.
IMMIGRATION
A majority of voters (55 percent) think the Trump administration is being too harsh in its treatment of undocumented immigrants in the United States, 36 percent think the Trump administration is handling this about right, and 6 percent think the Trump administration is being too lenient in its treatment of undocumented immigrants in the United States.
Fifty-seven percent of voters say they would prefer giving most undocumented immigrants in the United States a pathway to legal status, while 35 percent say they would prefer deporting most undocumented immigrants in the United States.
BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP
Seven out of 10 voters (70 percent) think the Supreme Court should keep the 1898 ruling in place that under the U.S. Constitution anyone born in the United States is a U.S. citizen, regardless of their parents’ citizenship, while 24 percent think the Supreme Court should reverse the ruling.
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS
Job approval ratings for four Trump administration officials:
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: 39 percent approve, 53 percent disapprove, with 8 percent not offering an opinion;
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: 38 percent approve, 49 percent disapprove, with 14 percent not offering an opinion;
Director of the FBI Kash Patel: 35 percent approve, 51 percent disapprove, with 14 percent not offering an opinion;
United States Attorney General Pam Bondi: 31 percent approve, 51 percent disapprove, with 18 percent not offering an opinion.
Forty percent of voters are either very confident (17 percent) or somewhat confident (23 percent) in vaccine information cited by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while 57 percent are either not so confident (10 percent) or not confident at all (47 percent).
Forty-five percent of voters are either very confident (25 percent) or somewhat confident (20 percent) in Pete Hegseth’s leadership of the U.S. military, while 47 percent are either not so confident (7 percent) or not confident at all (40 percent).
EPSTEIN FILES
Twenty-six percent of voters approve of the way the Trump administration is handling the Jeffrey Epstein files, while 65 percent disapprove and 9 percent did not offer an opinion.
SUSPECTED DRUG BOATS & VENEZUELA
Voters 53 – 42 percent oppose U.S. military attacks to kill suspected drug smugglers on boats in international waters.
Voters 63 – 25 percent oppose U.S. military action inside Venezuela.
RUSSIA – UKRAINE
When asked about the war between Russia and Ukraine, 48 percent of voters think Donald Trump is favoring Russia too much, 36 percent think he is striking about the right balance, and 3 percent think Trump is favoring Ukraine too much. Thirteen percent did not offer an opinion.
There are some more confusing stats showing that around 50-55% of people feel that the they are personally not having problems affording the cost of living which suggests that the same dynamic that was present in the Biden years is still at work: many Americans are doing ok themselves but perceive that other people are not. Trump took full advantage of that during the campaign. Now he has to deal with it himself.
This poll does not give anyone much hope about the Democratic Party since everyone, including Democrats, apparently hate their elected officials. But I suspect that’s reflexive at this point — they have looked weak in the face of the GOP onslaught and, let’s face it, Americans don’t like losers. I don’t think that means they won’t vote for them next November.
Negative partisanship is a powerful thing and people really hate Trump and they see the GOP as the party of Trump enablers, which is correct. The off-year elections show that while they may hate “the Democrats” write large, they are fine with the Democrat they are being asked to vote for — from Mamdani to Spanberger. I’m not worried about that.
The White House has installed a series of plaques under Trump’s new “Presidential Walk of Fame.” On Biden: “Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President” On Obama: “One of the most divisive political figures in American History…creation of the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax”
How long are they going to let this continue? The man is demented. And it’s very dangerous to the country and the world.
Between this and the Reiner post, I think it’s clear that we have reach a pivot point. He’s going down fast and we are in trouble. Apparently, no one can stop him (and that’s assuming anyone wants to. I suspect they all share his puerile mindset by now.)
Here’s today’s happy holiday message from the White House:
Jingle bells, jingle bells, Jingle all the way! Oh, what fun it is to ride on a free flight out of our country! 🎶✈️ pic.twitter.com/yUKePUQ2Sp
I don’t know what 12 year old they have hired to do those videos but they’re disgusting. But then everything they do is now on the level of the average 7th grade bully. Even the war we are about to start.
Trump is staging a prime time address tonight. The word is that it’s going to be one of his grotesque onanistic celebrations of himself so I think I’ll just watch the clips later. I suggest your do that too. If he announces the invasion of Venezuela I’ll let you know.
Try to enjoy this holiday season, folks despite all this. The government has gone mad but the country is still functioning and people are awake to what’s going on. We can survive this if we keep our heads and stick together.
In that Susie Wiles expose, Chris Whipple asked Marco Rubio about Putin’s intentions:
“There are offers on the table right now to basically stop this war at its current lines of contact, okay?” he said. “Which include substantial parts of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which they’ve controlled since 2014. And the Russians continue to turn it down. And so…you do start to wonder, well, maybe what this guy wants is the entire country.”
Ya think?
Wiles told Whipple that Trump has always believed Putin wants the whole thing. Considering his behavior toward Zelensky, it’s pretty clear he’s fine with that. Indeed, he’s probably happy to see it — he hates Ukraine because Rudy Giuliani told him that they were behind the strategy to expose his Russia ties.
Meanwhile, we have the Secretary of State sounding like the most naive man on the planet. I’m sure he knows exactly what Putin is after and it certainly appears that he too is fine with it.
Meanwhile, here is Putin this week:
If Ukraine refuses to engage in "substantive" talks, russia will achieve the liberation of "its historical lands" by force — Putin.
"The goals of the 'special military operation' will undoubtedly be achieved. We would prefer to do this and eliminate the root causes of the… pic.twitter.com/mPnqnZ5Bn8
The dictator in this picture is shorter than he appears.
The Trump administration is busy with its ethnic cleansing campaign (someone told Trump to call it reverse migration) and trying to keep an expanding set of controversies in the air. Still, it was not too busy to issue a new National Security Strategy. Anne Applebaum believes it is anything but.
In his drive to overturn all things Biden, Trump terminated a series of agreements worked out last year between diplomats from “places as varied as Italy, Australia, and Ivory Coast” and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center to “jointly expose malicious and deceptive online campaigns originating in Russia, China, or Iran.”
The center’s former head, James Rubin, called this decision “a unilateral act of disarmament,” and no wonder: In effect, the United States was declaring that it would no longer oppose Russian influence campaigns, Chinese manipulation of local politics, or Iranian extremist recruitment drives. Nor would the American government use any resources to help anyone else do so either.
The recent publication of the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy showed that this decision was no accident. Unilateral disarmament is now official policy. Because—despite its name—this National Security Strategy is not really a strategy document. It is a suicide note. If the ideas within it are really used to shape policy, then U.S. influence in the world will rapidly disappear, and America’s ability to defend itself and its allies will diminish. The consequences will be economic as well as political, and they will be felt by all Americans.
Applebaum perceives several authors behind the effort the way scholars see the Bible. Those authors do not reflect the views of the Republican Party as a whole, nor of the U.S. government, but of “a particular ideological faction” now influencing foreign policy. It cannot (or refuses to) identify any countries that wish to harm the U.S. or any actions they are taking to do so.
The document portrays China not as a geopolitical competitor but as a trading rival. It dismisses other adversaries as weakened or else ignores them.
The U.S. spent the decades after World War II competing against geopolitical rivals and gaming out how to counter challenges to world peace and American power. Not anymore. It views the world, as Trump does, through a business lens. It directs our national security experts to focus instead on trade threats, to “control over our borders,” “natural disasters,” “unfair trading practices,” “job destruction and deindustrialization.”
Who does this document see as a threat? European liberal democracy:
This is what this radical faction really fears: people who talk about transparency, accountability, civil rights, and the rule of law. Not coincidentally, these are the same people whom the MAGA ideologues hate and dislike at home, the same people who are fighting to prevent MAGA from redefining the United States as a white ethnostate, who oppose the corruption of America’s democratic institutions, and who object when Trump’s friends, family, and tech allies redirect U.S. foreign policy to benefit their private interests.
Because kleptocrats gonna kleptocrat.
European and American liberal democracy is so dangerous to their project, in fact, that the MAGA ideologues seem to be planning to undermine it. They don’t want to meddle in anyone’s internal politics anywhere else on the planet: “We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change.” The glaring exception to this rule is in Europe. Here, it is now American policy to “help Europe correct its current trajectory,” language that implies that the U.S. will intervene to do so.
The Great Replacement Theory may go unmentioned, but is there in spirit. Europe is in fact on the verge of “civilizational erasure.” It worries that “certain NATO members will become majority non-European,” meaning less white and less Christian. Applebaum points out the irony that it is more likely that the United States could be “majority minority” first. Unless Stephen Miller has his way.
“The only possible conclusion”? Applebaum proposes:
The authors of this document don’t know much about Europe, or don’t care to find out. Living in a fantasy world, they are blind to real dangers. They invent fictional threats. Their information comes from conspiracist websites and random accounts on X, and if they use these fictions to run policy, then all kinds of disasters could await us.
If the U.S. survive this period, JV Last writes at The Bulwark, the right will accuse those like Applebaum (and we here at Hullabaloo) who raised the alarm about Trumpism of being alarmist:
Look how overwrought you were, they’ll say. You spent a decade telling us that Trump was trying to overturn democracy. But the fact that we don’t live in a dictatorship proves that Trump was normal and that we should never listen to you hysterics.
Our success will be used to discredit us, like a quantum theory of suicide:1 If democracy survives, then that is proof that it was never under threat in the first place.
Trump and Trumpism was never really a threat, see? Right-wing COVID survivors insist the same. Just a flesh wound. I’ve had worse. “The people who did this to America will never pay a price. And if we defeat them, our success will be used as an argument against us,” Last laments.
Donald Trump has ordered Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro to come out with his hands up. More or less. In one of his Truth Social posts, Trump boasts, “Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America.”
It’s a wonder he bothered to qualify it with the words following armada. For the short-fingered vulgarian, everything is about size.
Trump added his signature like-nobody’s-ever-seen verbiage: “It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” That last bit about “Land,” etc. appears completely delusional.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday he is ordering a blockade of all “sanctioned oil tankers” into Venezuela, ramping up pressure on the country’s authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro in a move that seemed designed to put a tighter chokehold on the South American country’s economy.
Trump’s escalation comes after U.S. forces last week seized an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast, an unusual move that followed a buildup of military forces in the region. In a post on social media Tuesday night announcing the blockade, Trump alleged Venezuela was using oil to fund drug trafficking and other crimes and vowed to continue the military buildup until the country gave the U.S. oil, land and assets, though it was not clear why he felt the U.S. had a claim.
The White House is in damage-control mode over 1) the Pentagon’s Sept. 2 double-tap strike on two defenseless survivors of its (illegal?) missile attack on an alleged drug boat (26 such strikes to-date), 2) Trump’s Truth Social post about Rob Reiner’s murder (a “combination of preposterous grandiosity, obsessive self-regard and gratuitous spite,” per conservative columnist Bret Stephens), 3) the too-revealing Susie Wiles interview with Vanity Fair, and 1) in preparation for the by-law deadline on Friday for the administration to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. And still the peace-prize-envious, “no more stupid wars” president finds time when not watching TV or issuing noxious posts to prepare for a war of choice in South America.
Blockade: President Trump announced that the United States would impose a blockade on all “sanctioned oil tankers” going to and from Venezuela, in an escalation of the administration’s monthslong pressure campaign against Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela. The move could lead to a drop in revenues that the Venezuelan government and its state-owned oil company get from oil exports. But the announcement left much unclear, including how many oil tankers would be affected. Read more ›
Boat strikes: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to share video of a heavily scrutinized Sept. 2 military strike on a suspected drug boat during briefings with Congress on Tuesday. Mr. Hegseth faced calls to share unedited video of the attack, in which a follow-up strike killed two survivors, but said he would play it only for the House and Senate Armed Services committees. Mr. Hegseth added that it would not be made public. Read more ›
Travel ban: President Trump expanded his broad travel restrictions to 20 more countries on Tuesday, limiting travel from several African nations and fully blocking travel from Syria and four other countries, as well for people with travel documents issued by the Palestinian Authority. Earlier this month, officials blocked immigration applications for people from the 19 initial travel ban countries, causing panic and canceling citizenship ceremonies.
In that Vanity Fair bombshell, Susie Wiles describes Trump as someone who “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.” It’s the truest thing she said. He is completely unleashed and is just saying “fuck it, I’m doing it” to anything that passes through his vacuous mind. And he’s getting away with a lot, either because nobody anticipated that we would ever elect such a delusional ignoramus or because others with power are letting him.
It’s dangerous but in the hands of someone with an agenda it would be even worse. The fact is that Trump is so inept that it keeps him from fully enacting the tyranny he already thinks he has. Zack Beauchamp at Vox has this:
If you want to understand how the US government works today, you should study President Donald Trump’s attempt to pardon a woman named Tina Peters last week.
Peters is a former Colorado election clerk and a die-hard believer in the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. In 2021, Peters committed a series of crimes in an attempt to “prove” election fraud occurred — including, most seriously, allowing a fellow 2020 truther to make copies of the actual hard drives of Mesa County voting machines. A Colorado jury convicted her of seven crimes last year, and a judge sentenced her to nine years in prison.
Last Thursday, Trump intervened on Peters’s behalf, declaring he was “granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election.” On its face, this is menacingly authoritarian: the president abusing his powers to protect a woman who literally compromised the integrity of America’s vote-counting on his behalf.
Yet, Trump’s order is also something else: impotent.
The Constitution explicitly states that the presidential pardon power only applies to crimes committed “against the United States,” meaning federal rather than state crimes. Peters was convicted in a Colorado court under state law, and, thus, cannot be pardoned by the president. The state’s governor, attorney general, and secretary of state have all rejected the legality of Trump’s order; Peters remains incarcerated.
Trump’s actions were reported, in the New York Times and elsewhere, as a “symbolic” pardon. But that framing gives Trump too much credit. If you read his full post on Truth Social, there’s no indication that this is anything but a genuine attempt to do something clearly illegal. He genuinely seems to think that he can pardon her for state crimes, even though he very obviously cannot.
The Peters case represents an especially clear example of what I’ve come to see as the defining style of the second Trump administration: an incompetent form of authoritarianism that can best be described as “haphazardism.”
Haphazardism is authoritarianism without vision, a governing style defined by a series of individual attacks on democracy without any kind of overarching logic, strategic structure, or clear end state in mind. These attacks can do (and indeed have done) real damage to the American political system, but they are often poorly executed and even self-undermining — preventing Trump from ruling in the truly unconstrained manner he seems to desire.
“Is he succeeding at breaking democracy? Yes,” said Steve Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and author of How Democracies Die. “Is he succeeding at consolidating autocratic power? No.”
The whole article is interesting, particularly his insightful analysis of how the authoritarian ambition interacts with the ignorance and encroaching senility.
So, is the United States under Trump’s haphazardism a democracy or an authoritarian state?
Harvard’s Levitsky is one of the leading voices arguing that America is already living under a form of authoritarianism. Indeed, he published a new piece with frequent coauthors Dan Ziblatt and Lucan Way making this case just last week.
Yet, when I spoke to Levitsky on the phone, he distinguished between an authoritarian government and an authoritarian regime. The former refers to the way in which the people in power are ruling at the present moment; the latter refers to whether they are taking steps to permanently change the political system into something in which they and their allies can hold power indefinitely.
For Levitsky, Trump’s “systematic and regular abuse of power” is enough to establish that America currently has an authoritarian government. But, he does not believe that we are living under an authoritarian regime — believing that Trump’s authoritarian actions were likely to be “reversed” in the near future. He, thus, characterizes the current American situation as most likely to be a “mild and short-lived burst of authoritarianism” (with the major caveat that even “mild” authoritarianism is still quite dangerous).
Like Beauchamp I think we are still a democracy even if we’re hanging by a thread. And Al it depends upon what the Supreme Court decides to do. But I’ve always thought that our greatest defense is probably Trump’s stupidity so at least we have that.
I know that many of you don’t have subs for Vanity Fair to read the Susie Wiles story. They don’t offer gift links so I can’t share that with you. But Peter Baker at the New York Times does a good run down and I can offer you a gift link for that. He hits the important highlights.
Vance described Wiles’s approach to the chief’s job. “There is this idea that people have that I think was very common in the first administration,” he told me, “that their objective was to control the president or influence the president, or even manipulate the president because they had to in order to serve the national interest. Susie just takes the diametrically opposite viewpoint, which is that she’s a facilitator, that the American people have elected Donald Trump. And her job is to actually facilitate his vision and to make his vision come to life.”
In other words she is an enabler of a man she knows is psychologically damaged:
As a child, Susie also absorbed the zeitgeist of her father’s 1970s Manhattan. “Much of what Donald Trump remembers about the New York of the ’70s I lived through with my dad,” she said. “So when he talks about Frank Sinatra’s bodyguard, I know that name.” Steve Witkoff, Trump’s real estate friend turned special envoy, says Wiles and Trump are creatures of that same bygone era: “That whole world of the Copacabana and Sammy Davis Jr. and all, those are things that he wants to talk about.”
The most valuable gift Susie got from her dad was hard-earned. Summerall was an absentee father and an alcoholic, and Wiles helped her mother stage interventions to get him into treatment. (Summerall was sober for 21 years before his death in 2013.) “Alcoholism does bad things to relationships, and so it was with my dad and me,” Wiles said.
“Some clinical psychologist that knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say. But high-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” Wiles said Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality.” He “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
She claims that he has a “possessive and addictive type personality.”
This is not news to any of us who have viewed him for the last decade. He believes his I omnipotent. And it’s largely because everyone around him is engaged in fervently licking his boots 24 hours a day. And because he is such a narcissist he doesn’t care if they are sincere about it — in fact he actually prefers them to be insincere because it shows how powerful he is to be able to make people suck up to him.
She calls Vance a conspiracy theorist and implies that he is a shape shifter without a center. Clearly she prefers Rubio as Trump’s successor whom she laughably claims would never betray his own sense of integrity. (They both come out of the Florida GOP.)
I have no idea why Wiles decided to do this. David Axelrod on CNN speculated that Wiles may have thought this was for a retrospective piece after she was out of office, it’s that revealing. (Yikes!) But she’s a pro and it seems unlikely that she didn’t know this would come out at this time.
So far, Trump is sticking with her giving a weird interview to the NY Post in which he says:
“No, she meant that I’m — you see, I don’t drink alcohol. So everybody knows that — but I’ve often said that if I did, I’d have a very good chance of being an alcoholic. I have said that many times about myself, I do. It’s a very possessive personality.”
He can’t read a long article so he doesn’t know the extent of her comments. And he doesn’t understand them, obviously.
He said he still has full faith in Wiles but we’ll see. I had already read some commentary that had Wiles in trouble even before this so I wouldn’t count on her being there next year at this time. Of course that assumes that Trump ever gets a sense of what she actually said. He’s so out of it that he may never know the extent of it.
Once again, thanks so much for your generosity. I’m always so surprised and grateful that people are still interested in our scribblings. It’s a privilege to be able to do it and we couldn’t continue without your kind support.
It’s been a tough few days. The violence and loss of the past weekend has cast a pall over this holiday season and it feels just a little bit discordant to celebrate, well… anything. Not that we don’t see an atrocity every day in one way or another. The economy is getting worse and worse, our standing in the world has collapsed, masked thugs are marauding in the streets and abducting people while the “Department of War” is conducing a murder spree on the high seas. And that’s in addition to the wanton destruction of the federal government as perfectly illustrated by Trump’s demolition of the East Wing of the White House without any consultation or approval. But in the last few days we’ve been reminded of the ongoing horror of gun violence and terrorism — and the grotesque character of the president of the United States in the face of all that.
The mass shooting at Brown University in the same moments as a violent terrorist attack in Australia over the weekend was jarring enough. When the news of the Reiners’ death hit and Trump acted like the barbarian we know him to be it just felt like a knock out blow. The last thing I want to do — or, I suspect, you want to read —- is cheerlead.
But the fact is that as bad as things have been and continue to be, the country has not succumbed to this authoritarian onslaught. Sure Republicans are all fully in the tank and have proved themselves to be nothing more than potted plants. And yes, many of the elites have shown their true colors and eagerly capitulated to Trump, apparently under the assumption that they could maintain their respected reputations having done so.
They will not. We won’t forget what they did. These were powerful people with the means and the expertise to fight back and they chose not to. The law firms, universities, CEOs and Wall St Masters of the Universe either made a calculation that Trump was omnipotent and therefore they needed to be on his good side or that jumping on his bandwagon presented some lucrative opportunities. It was either cowardice or greed. In no case can it be justified.
However, even all that has not been enough to sustain Trump’s assault. His trajectory has been slowed, if not halted, by the public, the lower courts and his administration’s ineptitude. (His own mental deterioration is taking a toll as well.) MAGA is at each others’ throats, Republicans in Congress are running around like Chicken Little unable to make any decisions and the vaunted White House discipline is starting to fail as evidence by the publishing of a startling series of interviews with Trump’s (formerly?) trusted chief of staff Susie Wiles:
We often spoke on Sundays after church. Wiles, an Episcopalian, calls herself “Catholic lite.” One time we spoke while she was doing her laundry in her Washington, DC, rental. Trump, she told me, “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vance’s conversion from Never Trumper to MAGA acolyte, she said, has been “sort of political.” The vice president, she added, has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” Russell Vought, architect of the notorious Project 2025 and head of the Office of Management and Budget, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” When I asked her what she thought of Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, she replied: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” (She says she doesn’t have first-hand knowledge.)
Their incompetence, extremism and corruption combined with the public rising up in rebellion stands a very good chance of ending this awful experiment in reality show politics. But it’s not going to be easy. Cornered animals tend to lash out with violence.
I hope you’ll stick with us as we continue to document the atrocities heading into the midterms when maybe we can truly stop the bleeding. We follow the news cycle closely, keeping our eyes on the zeitgeist 24/7 and try to give you the highlights as we see them. Hopefully you find that useful as you try to make sense out of the cacophony of news, propaganda and hype.
Those of you who support us are instrumental in keeping the blog free for those who don’t have the means and that means the world to me so thank you for that. After all, we’re all in this together.
If you’d like to toss a few coins in the Christmas stocking, you can do so here or at the snail mail address over on the left.
Come November 2026, Alabama voters could see two familiar names on the ballot for governor. On Dec. 13, former Democratic Sen. Doug Jonesannounced his candidacy, joining current GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who defeated him in his 2020 reelection bid by 20 points. (Both candidates have primary elections in May.)
With President Donald Trump and the GOP’s declining poll numbers, the stage appears to have been set for Democratic wins in the 2026 midterms — and possibly including surprise victories like the one that took Jones to the Senate in 2017 and foreshadowed a big blue wave the following year.
The 2017 Alabama Senate special election pitted Jones against Republican nominee Judge Roy Moore to fill the seat of GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions, who had been tapped as Donald Trump’s attorney general.
But that race foreshadowed more than Democrats’ victory in the 2018 midterms. It was a referendum on what we now know to be common behavior among many of our political and business elites: the creepy habit of powerful older men targeting underage girls for sex. It’s not that such a thing was unheard of before, but with #MeToo and, more recently, revelations from the Epstein files — that show no signs of stopping — we now know it has been a much more pervasive activity among the nation’s elite than previously understood.
In 2017 it was quite a revelation that Moore, the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court whose claim to fame was an insistence on displaying the Ten Commandments in (and outside) public buildings, allegedly had a long history of coercing girls and young women into tawdry sexual situations. Although he had been under clouds of corruption for some years and was highly controversial, this came as a shock to the Alabama electorate — and it opened the door for Jones to be the first Democrat elected statewide in nearly two decades.
Best known as the man who prosecuted Ku Klux Klan members responsible for one of the most notorious events in the Civil Rights Movement — the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four Black girls on Sept. 15, 1963 — Jones had an excellent reputation in the state as a former U.S. attorney. Unfortunately, because the special election was only to serve out the remainder of Sessions’ term, Jones had to run again in 2020 and was beaten by former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville, a man who said during his campaign that the three branches of government are “the House, the Senate and the executive.”
Since then, Tuberville has been a train wreck in the Senate. He has continued to display an astonishing ignorance about civic life, such as when he suggested postponing Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, apparently unaware that the Constitution sets the date as Jan. 20. But Tuberville has also become infamous for a series of racist gaffes, which have been beyond the pale even for MAGA politicians. In October 2022, he compared the descendants of enslaved people to criminals. The following year, he claimed that white nationals are unfairly labeled as racist. (He later attempted to walk back his comments.) At a Trump rally in 2024, he said that Democrats “want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.”
Tuberville’s rhetoric on immigration is as bad as Trump’s. During a June interview in which he was discussing immigration and sanctuary cities, he lambasted “these inner-city rats [that] live off the federal government…it’s time we find these rats and we send them back home.”
Republicans are confident that Tuberville will win the governorship — even though he apparently doesn’t live in Alabama — and don’t see Jones as any real competition. Jones, however, clearly believes that conditions have changed dramatically since 2020 and that Tuberville now has a record he will have to defend — unlike five years ago, when he was just a good-old boy-football coach. That record includes acting as Donald Trump’s rubber stamp and embarrassing the state with his ignorance.
It’s untelling if that will be a deal breaker; Republicans outnumber Democrats in voter registration by 19%, and a majority of Alabama voters could agree with Tuberville. But 2025 has seen upsets in unexpected places. Mississippi Democrats broke a Republican supermajority in the state Senate in November by flipping two seats. On Dec. 9 in Georgia, a Democrat won a deep red seat in the state House. For the first time in three decades, Miami’s mayor will be a Democrat. On the other hand, despite the party’s hopes, Democrats lost the chance for a pickup in a widely watched race in Tennessee’s seventh congressional district.
Based on Alabama’s electoral map, a Jones victory in November seems impossible. No Democrat has held the governorship since 1998. Then again, back in 2017 most people thought there was no way Roy Moore could be beaten — and Doug Jones surprised them. Maybe it will happen again.
