Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Josh Marshal discusses the necessity of Supreme Court reform:

I’ve become something of a broken record on this. But repetition sometimes serves a critical purpose. Supreme Court reform is now the sine qua non of any reformist program in the United States, any program to re-implant/re-secure civic democracy in the United States. Filibuster reform, abolition of the filibuster, is comparably important. In fact, the two are interwoven with each other in such a way as to be almost indistinguishably joined together.

But a lot of people know the filibuster has to go. Reforming the Supreme Court, which involves one of several ways of breaking the power of the six corrupt Republican appointees, is a much harder lift. It’s not a harder lift in voting terms. It can be done by passing an ordinary law (once you’ve done away with the filibuster) and having a president to sign it. But for many in the political class, for many elected officials, it remains unthinkable. On the plus side, Democratic voters and opinion leaders have some time to lay the groundwork. The soonest anything can happen is January 2029. (You need Congress and the White House.) But there’s a huge amount of work to do. Because my sense is that Democratic officeholders, party elites, aren’t even close to being there. And there’s really no future without it.

After reviewing the arguments yesterday (and observing everything they’ve done in the last year) it’s clear that the Court is nothing more than an undemocratic, partisan faction in the U.S. political system. There may be a few instances where they push back on behalf of their wealthy patrons or reward some discrete conservative group that one of their wives is involved with that may not fully comport with Trump and MAGA but for the most part they are just part of the GOP political apparatus. They don’t even adhere to their own ideology anymore. It’s pretty much just serving Trump and his corruption and criminality. They are so beset by Fox News Brain Rot that they believe that drag queens are a bigger threat than authoritarianism and flagrant graft and cronyism.

We shouldn’t be surprised. most of the conservatives were political operatives in one way or another before they got on the court. The others are all corrupt themselves.

Marshall has written quite a bit about this reform agenda and here’s what he wrote recently about the Supremes:

Supreme Court reform. I said above that some of the decisions are hard. They cut against a lot of what we were taught about political life. This is one of them. It’s only in the last three or four years that I’ve come around to the necessity of it and it’s still sometimes hard to get my head around. But it is essential. With the filibuster in place, no broader anti-authoritarian reform, no retrofitting the house is possible. It’s the same with the Supreme Court. The current Republican majority is thoroughly corrupt and has hijacked the Constitution. They have cut free not only from precedent but from any consistent or coherent theory of the Constitution, no matter how wrongheaded. The purpose of the high court is not to run the country. It is to render decisions on points of constitutional and legal ambiguity in a good faith and broadly consistent manner. It is now engaged in purely outcome-driven reasoning, mixing and matching doctrines and modes of jurisprudence depending on the desired ends, with the aim of furthering autocratic and Republican rule. That is the heart of the corruption. Passing laws doesn’t matter if they can and will be discarded simply because six lifetime appointees don’t like them. That’s a perversion of the constitutional order. I know this one is hard to swallow for many people. It doesn’t come easily to me either. But the facts of the situation and fidelity to the Constitution require it. I’m not going to get into the specific kind of reform here. There are various ways to go about it. You can judge it by the end result. If you are for leaving intact the corrupt Republican majority’s absolute control over the political and partisan direction of the country, you should leave or be driven from office.

I suspect that it’s going to take a full scale repudiation of the Republican Party at the polls to enable this. What that means in American politics is that the Democrats probably need to win at FDR 1932 levels which is a 60-40% landslide. With our current media diets it’s hard to picture that but it is possible. And even with that kind of mandate, it will be a very heavy lift, especially with the right having been so radicalized over the past few decades. But that’s what has to happen.

IOKIYAR

Time from this morning:

The U.S. is showing signs of undergoing a “rapid authoritarian shift” as civic freedoms in the country decline following President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, a group that tracks the status of such liberties and the threats they face around the world is warning.

CIVICUS, an international network of civil society groups that advocates for stronger civil liberties, downgraded its assessment of U.S. civic freedoms from “narrowed” to “obstructed” in a new report on Tuesday, months after it added the country to a global human rights watchlist earlier this year.

“Long-established democracies are showing signs of rapid authoritarian shift, marked by weakened rule of law and growing constraints on independent civil society. Argentina and the USA exemplified this trend,” the report said.

Perhaps you noticed. Trump is weaponizing the rule of law against his enemies. Following the law and respecting civil liberties is now optional for those assigned to protect and defend yours.

“Somewhere along the line, [Democrats] decided that resisting Trump meant resisting the rule of law,” Laura Ingraham alleged on her Monday show. To illustrate, she played clip of people protesting an ICE raid in Tucson. Specifically, Rep. Adelita Grijalva. The freshman from Arizona, Ingraham claimed, was “brazenly” obstructing the agents. The rest was a predictable Great Replacement Theory rant about a Democrat plot to flood the country with noncitizen Democratic voters (or something).

I spotted several social media posts which featured Grijalva “breaking the law” for which she was noticeably not arrested (although she did catch some second-hand pepper spray). In the clip, Grijalva noticeably neither blocked, brushed, hit or attacked any federal officer. She just protested their presence and, presumably, ICE deporting peaceful undocumented residents without repecting their due process rights. I’ll have more to say on that another time.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration carries out extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean in violation of the rule of law, domestic and international. Here’s where this gets extra interesting for Pete Hegseth. The Society for the Rule of Law reports on a column in The Hill by Chris Traux, one of its members:

Truax establishes the legal distinction that prevents Hegseth’s actions from enjoying pardon protection. Although the President may pardon someone for offenses against the United States, “The War Crimes Act that authorizes the Department of Justice to prosecute war crimes using international law defines them as, among other things, a ‘grave breach of the Geneva Convention’ and violations of Articles 23, 25, 27, or 28 of the Annex to the 1907 Hague Convention.” Since war crimes violate international law, and since those crimes can still be prosecuted by the U.S. government, Hegseth’s actions remove him from the protection that a presidential pardon could give. “While Hegseth could be pardoned for committing murder in violation of federal law, he cannot be pardoned for committing a war crime, any more than an American president could have pardoned the Nuremberg defendants.”

Truax emphasizes the unique breadth of war crimes law and the range of penalties that can be applied. These consequences extend beyond the ability of any single president to mitigate, and raise serious legal and ethical questions for not only the Secretary of Defense, but for any armed service-members involved. “If you commit an act that violates the laws of war — especially one that results in an intentional killing — sooner or later, you can be held accountable, and the president cannot save you.”

Fingers crossed. As for holding Kristi Noem’s stormtroopers accountable for flagrantly (if not gleefully) violating residents’ civil liberties, that’s TBD.

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To Trump, you’re all Suckers And Losers, America

Donald Trump is gonna need new hats. SALA hats. Or maybe SASA hats (Short Attention Span America). Whatever. Another marketing coup to go with Trump’s administrative coup. Except the new Trump hats might need lots of ticky-tacky gold appliqué and a Chinese tariff waiver. What he won’t need is a fan base gullible enough to buy them in bulk. Trump is no rocket scientist, but he knows there’s a sucker born every minute.

Which brings us to the mortal threat that is Venezuela. Readers not from Short Attention Span America may have noticed striking similarities between the Bushies’ pitch deck for invading Iraq and how the Trump administration is selling his planned, undeclared and illegal war of choice against our South American neighbor.

Jon Stewart did, and last night issued a warning: “If you’re going to bring back early 2000s geopolitics, I’m gonna have to bring back early 2000s ‘Daily Show’ gotcha clips.” It seems like Trump is using the neocons’ sales manual. Stewart brought receipts.

.@jonstewart goes old-school Daily Show to show how Trump’s push for war in Venezuela is Iraq all over again pic.twitter.com/aOoiRNAlzl

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) December 9, 2025

I’d missed Sen. Tom Cotton (R) of Arkansas arguing on “Meet the Press” that “President Bush has every power under the Constitution to strike boats in international waters.”

Game. Set. Match.

I’ve complained that Democrats are in a rut. They keep doing the same things and expecting better results. Except Repunblicans keep running the same plays because they get the results they want.

So let’s revisit early 2000s “Daily Show” and see. In a 2004 interview, former President Bill Clinton cited a Republican smear campaign run against Sen. John McCain during the 2000 South Carolina presidential primary. (Sorry, the clip link is dead.)

Stewart: Do you believe that politics has gotten so dirty … that these kinds of tactics become so prevalent that this is the reason half the country doesn’t vote? Or this is the reason that we don’t get, maybe, the officials that we deserve?

Clinton: No, I think people do it because they think it works.

Stewart: That’s it? Simply a strategy?

Clinton: Absolutely. And as soon as it doesn’t work, they’ll stop doing it.

The Bushies took Americans for suckers in the run-up to invading Iraq. It worked. Now the “isolationist” Trump 2.0 administration is running the same play to justify invading Venezuela. As Clinton suggested 21 years ago, as soon as a strategy doesn’t work, Republicans will stop using it.

“There’s a sucker born every minute” could be on Trump’s headstone. He’d claim the quote as his own. Americans keep proving it right.

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Paul Krugman talks about the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy document in his news letter today, pointing out that there was a time when the U.S. was earnestly called “the leader of the free world.” But the assault on Europe is truly astonishing. He writes:

The political scientist Henry Farrell sums it up this way:

This is, quite straightforwardly, a program for regime change in Europe, aimed at turning it into an illiberal polity. Accomplishing this transformation would involve undermining existing liberal governments in cahoots with Europe’s own far right, and turning Eastern Europe into an ideological wedge against its Western neighbors.

Where is this attack on Europe coming from? Some readers may remember the old slogan from the War on Terror days, “They hate us for our freedom.” Clearly, MAGA hates Europe for its freedom. The people trying to turn America into an authoritarian, white supremacist state, who want us to forsake democratic ideals in favor of Volk, of blood and soil nationalism, want to see Europe go down the same path.

There’s also the role of the tech bros — billionaires who still describe themselves as libertarian but have in practice become hardline authoritarians with enormous sway over the Trump administration. After the European Commission imposed a modest fine on X for failing to obey its rules on transparency, Elon Musk declared that the EU should be abolished and threatened personal retribution against the “EU woke Stasi commissars” responsible for the ruling. And the Trump Administration is acting as the tech bros’ enforcer against Europe, threatening to keep steel tariffs high unless the EU scales back its tech regulations.

Moreover, this is part of a general pattern: the broligarchs hate Europe because the Europeans are trying to impose sensible limits to protect their societies from the well-documented psychological and economic harms that are inflicted by an unrestrained Silicon Valley agenda. For example, the EU is trying to limit the proliferation of digital hate speech as well as the pernicious effects of social media on the young. And more so than the US, it has sought to constrain the monopoly power of the tech titans like Google and Facebook. We should remember that the moderate antitrust and AI regulations adopted by the Biden Administration prompted the tech broligarchy to swing hard behind Trump in the 2024 election.

He points out that this leaves the field clear for China to step into the breach:

As of now, China is clearly the world’s largest single economy. But the group of nations that constituted the “free world” (as we knew it) is a much greater economic power than China. So by treating Europe and Canada as enemies rather than allies, Trump has destroyed any plausible capacity to stand up to China. In effect, Trump has chosen white supremacy over actual national greatness.

Second, that goes for Russia as well. Although Russia is far weaker than China, the US or the EU, the war in Ukraine has shown that an emboldened Russia can wreak long-lasting devastation. By attacking the EU, notably on the same blood and soil grounds that Putin attacked Ukraine — as well as by insulting Zelensky and releasing a “peace plan” that was clearly a Russian wish list — Trump has made it clear that our erstwhile allies cannot rely on us to stand up to Russian aggression. Should we be surprised that some allies have recently begun to refuse intelligence sharing?

Now, it’s important to admit that America often failed to live up to its own ideals in the past. For decades we championed freedom and equality abroad while practicing Jim Crow at home. We were a force for democracy and freedom in Europe, but we often propped up dictators and sometimes engineered the overthrow of democratically elected governments — often at the behest of American business interests — in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. So in a very real way, the tech broligarchy is trying to use the power of the US government to subjugate the EU the same way the United Fruit Company once used the power of the US government to subjugate Central America.

In truth, Europe is much closer to being Reagan’s shining city on the hill than Trump’s America. Yet it’s important to acknowledge that in the face of economic and immigration challenges, it too is having a hard time preserving its liberal democratic values. Those “patriotic” — i.e., neo-fascist — European parties are indeed on the rise. Yet, on the whole, Europe is dealing with its economic and social strains without giving up on its core values. For example, the recent Dutch elections, while not a decisive victory for the center, did at least push the far right out of government.

He concludes by pointing out that most Americans aren’t with Trump on this and still do have some ideals about freedom and democracy. (And they may value them much more than they did in the past after this brush with fascism.) All is not lost, by any means, but it’s going to take whole lot of work to get us back to a place where we can pursue those values.

I think Andrew McCarthy at National Review has this right. NBC reported that the first boat strike was based upon some list of alleged “narco-terrorists.” Since they are claiming that drug runners are the equivalent of ISIS and Al Qaeda, they are apparently using the rules of engagement that were used in the drone war over the past decade under every president since Bush. As McCarthy points out, however, that was authorized under the AUMF passed by Congress after 9/11 to fight terrorism. Just calling these people terrorists, or “narco-terrorists” doesn’t change the fact that they are trying to stuff the drug war into the war on terrorism without the congressional authorization that makes those actions legal. Neither does it change the laws of war, or the criminal code that makes these strikes shockingly immoral.

He surmises that Hegseth believes he’s just “killing terrorists” and what could be wrong about that? Well, as McCarthy explained, narcotics traffickers are not analogous to Jihadist terrorists for a variety of reasons. But he points out another twist in logic that I haven’t heard anyone else discuss:

These rudimentary distinctions inexorably caused the press and the public to question the double-tap strike in a way they would not have questioned a follow-on strike against actual terrorists (especially if, say, such terrorists had been transporting explosives rather than cocaine). In response to the intense criticism (as I related here), President Trump distanced himself from the double-tap strike, and an effort was made to distance Hegseth from it. The administration also pivoted to a defense that focused on the boat and its cargo rather than the operators against whom Hegseth had said it had been his intent to apply “lethal, kinetic strikes.”

This seemed to work for a few days because, habitually zeroing in on the wrong thing, the anti-Trump press had made the issue about whether the double-tap strike was a war crime, whereas the real issue is whether the campaign of lethal strikes against suspected drug boats without congressional authorization is illegal. Once it was clear that Hegseth hadn’t issued a second order specifically telling Admiral Bradley to kill the shipwrecked survivors, many lost interest in the underlying, flawed analogy between drug traffickers and jihadists and between cocaine and bombs.

Nevertheless, the NBC report regarding Bradley’s briefings to Congress shifts the spotlight back onto the boat operators. Indeed, according to NBC’s sources, when asked if Hegseth gave an order along the lines of “Kill them all,”

Bradley told lawmakers that the orders he received from Hegseth were to kill the individuals on the approved target list, which included everyone on the boat, then destroy the drugs and sink the boat.

Translation: the priority was killing the people who were on the boat; the drugs and the boat were secondary concerns. Now, while I am not a military veteran, it doesn’t make sense to me to think about the missile strikes in such sequential terms. The U.S. strikes simultaneously kill people, destroy cargo, and damage vessels to the point that at least some of them are instantly sunk — you don’t kill the people, then destroy the drugs, then sink the boat. Still, if NBC’s version of Bradley’s account is correct, what matters is that the top military priority was the people. That’s why there’s a list of them.

As Rich Lowry observed in his column (and I contended in the aforementioned discussion of Obama’s drone strikes), such a priority makes perfect sense when one is dealing with actual terrorists or the military forces of a foreign enemy…

But it is impossible to apply such logic to drug traffickers, which is why federal law’s extensive definitions of terrorist activity do not include narcotics-dealing. With drug dealers, the priority is always to prevent illegal narcotics from entering the U.S. market. Capturing and prosecuting the drug dealers is important but secondary. (You may notice that the Justice Department and law enforcement agencies host big press conferences every time they seize a significant narcotics shipment or stash, even on occasions when they arrest few if any of the drug traffickers.)

[…]

Bradley was also adhering to the Trump administration’s conceit that the boat operators are terrorists and that the cocaine packages are akin to bombs. By his lights, then, even though this seems perverse, it was okay to kill the boat operators as long as they weren’t too badly wounded. That is, if they were hors de combat (such that it would have violated the laws of war to kill them), there would have been no double tap. But, since they were still alive and functioning, they remained viable targets for “lethal, kinetic strikes” because they could theoretically have continued their “mission” of transporting the “weapons” (cocaine packages) that were strapped inside the remnant of the ship’s hull to which they clung.

Trump says that every boat blown to smithereens saves 25,000 American lives. That’s just insane, particularly since most of the boats they incinerated are carrying cocaine, which isn’t killing people, and that cocaine is going to Europe rather than the U.S.

We all know this is really about deposing Maduro (and possibly Petro in Colombia) and seizing the oil thus proving that Trump and his minions have the huge male appendages supposedly required to dominate the Western Hemisphere. They think they can scare everyone into bowing down and sucking their toes because they’ve been so successful at getting virtually every American elite institution (and plenty of foreigners) to eagerly demonstrate their eagerness to do just that.

All of this horrific murderous behavior is in service of that twisted, sick agenda.

America’s new landlords

Let’s not talk about affordability. Let’s talk about pain.

“We have a housing crisis, as you probably, painfully, know,” writes Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic. “Wouldn’t you like to have someone to blame for it?” I already knew who to name, but her headline was a dead giveaway: Private Equity Is America’s New Landlord.

Rental costs here in the Cesspool of Sin are out of control like most other places. But in fact single family home rentals here are ranked the highest in North Carolina. Apartments are not as high as Chapel Hill, but that’s not saying much. The average rent here is $1,451/month for a 781 sq ft apartment. I mentioned a month ago a 20-yr-old summer intern struggling to save any summer cash on his stipend while paying $1200/mo. for a short-term apartment. (It might have been $1500.)

The housing crisis has many fathers, Lowry explains: “restrictive zoning codes, arcane permitting processes, excessive community input, declining construction productivity, expensive labor, and expensive lumber.” It’s the kind of problem Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson complained about in “Abundance” while ignoring the gobbling of existing housing stock by private equity. They may be bit players in the grand scheme of things but that depends on where you live and work.

Lowrey writes (gift link):

Last month, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Center for Geospatial Solutions published a report showing that corporations now own a remarkable one in 11 residential real-estate parcels in the 500 urban counties with data robust enough to analyze.  In some communities, they control more than 20 percent of properties.

I figured that big investors might be picking up vacation rentals in Colorado and expensive apartment buildings in the Bay Area and the Acela Corridor. They are, the report’s authors told me. But these investors are pouring the most money into “buy low, rent high” neighborhoods: communities, many of them in the South and the Rust Belt, where large shares of families can’t afford a mortgage.

Struggling 20- and 30-somethings here feel the pain. So does Cleveland:

In Cleveland, corporations own 17.5 percent of residential real-estate parcels. In the city’s East Side, which contains many predominantly Black neighborhoods, just one in five homebuyers in 2021 took out a mortgage. The rest—many investors, presumably—paid in cash or took out a loan from a non-traditional financier.

Private equity is not why housing is so expensive in traditionally expensive cities, Lowrey explains, but “investor money is distorting the housing market in communities with low wages and decent-enough housing supply, pushing thousands of Black and Latino families off the property ladder.”

Owners of lower-priced apartments in historic neighborhoods here are letting maintenance lapse to force out renters and make the properties unaffordable to renovate. This renders them less-habitable and makes them easier to sell off to developers who buy them for the land and raze them to build high-rent condos and town homes in this tourist town. And further reduces affordable housing supply. What America saw Donald Trump do to the East Wing we’ve seen developers do to Victorian homes that once offered affordable apartments for lower-income residents.

Or private equity snaps up existing older single-family homes, does some modest renovation, and rents them out at high-dollar. And that’s in largely white neighborhoods.

Neighborhood activists typically find out about such plans after they are already done deals. By then their protests are to no avail. Out of curiosity, I perused new online property transfer records one Sunday for half an hour. I found that a real estate investment firm out of Boca Raton had snapped up four older homes on one street near downtown. They paid $1,050,000 for all four on 8/17/21. One they renovated was a 1925 2 BR, 1 BA, 1280 sq ft home they rented for $3,000 per month. I rented a similar one (1,000 sq ft) in ~1998 for ~$350/mo.

What activists might do instead is divvy up neighborhoods and assign someone to do what I did for a half hour once a month. If out-of-town investors begin snapping up homes on a street, a nonprofit collective might spot it and purchase key properties to thwart plans to raze the whole block to build town homes or new hotels. Better to intervene early than protest too late. Citizens are having to defend their communities from ICE. Why not from private equity?

Something must be done. Lowrey concludes:

If nothing is done, what’s happening to majority-Black communities in Ohio and Virginia and Georgia and Michigan might start happening in communities around the country. Private equity might not be causing the housing crisis, but corporate owners could end up making it a lot worse for everyone.

What are their names and on what streets do they live?

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Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

THAT, you see, would be the appearance of a conflict of interest

They’re not even trying to hide that fact that Javanka is pulling strings with the White House. Why should they? Nothing will ever be done about it:

Affinity Partners, the private equity firm led by Jared Kushner, is part of Paramount’s hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros Discovery, according to a regulatory filing.

Paramount is telling WBD shareholders that it has a smoother path to regulatory approval than does Netflix, and Kushner’s involvement only strengthens that case.

• Paramount is led by David Ellison, whose billionaire father Larry is a major supporter of President Trump.

Zoom in: Affinity Partners was not mentioned in Paramount’s press release on Monday morning about its $108 billion bid, nor were participating sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar.

It’s just straight up corruption, no holds barred. Kush and the Saudis are affiliating with Trump’s MAGA buddy David Ellison and Trump’s going to approve the merger. He said over the weekend that he’d be involved in the decision.

In a way it’s at least clarifying. They’re robbing the country blind and taking over the media the way they did in Russia and Hungary. At this point I think the only way to survive will be for the people to just stop buying what they’re selling. The only “guardrail” left is financial losses.

🚨 BREAKING: In an explosive moment on 60 Minutes, Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed Trump was “furious” that he signed the Epstein files discharge petition, because “it was going to hurt people.”

Let that sink in. pic.twitter.com/n57QsnlJu2

— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) December 6, 2025

That’s not the first time he said it. See this interview from before the election:

Fox News’ Rachel Campos-Duffy (wife of Trump’s current transportation secretary, Sean Duffy) began by asking the then-candidate whether he would declassify government files related to 9/11, and Trump said he would. She then asked about declassifying John F. Kennedy assassination files, and he again said he would. The co-host went on to ask, “Would you declassify the Epstein files?” referring to the federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the late millionaire pedophile who was arrested during Trump’s first term.

What viewers saw at the time was Trump replying, “Yeah, I would.”

But what those who tuned into the interview didn’t see was the rest of his answer.

In a video that resurfaced in light of the ongoing controversy surrounding his team’s handling of Epstein-related documents, Trump, after saying he supported access to the files, quickly added, “I guess I would. I think that less so because, you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would.”

Asked if such a move would help restore public trust, he added, “Yeah. I don’t know about Epstein so much as I do the others. Certainly about the way he died. It’d be interesting to find out what happened there, because that was a weird situation and the cameras didn’t happen to be working, etc., etc. But yeah, I’d go a long way toward that one.”

He loves to hurt people. Who is he so worried about?

I’m sure one person is himself. But who else?

The “peace president” accepted a very special honor last week. Having been denied the Nobel Peace Prize he so desperately covets, Donald Trump was awarded the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize, which was invented only last month by global soccer czar Gianni Infantino. The prize is a large trophy accompanied by a medal that made Trump so excited he snatched it from the box like a furtive five-year-old with a box of chocolates and put it on himself. Infantino, who is president of FIFA and one of the newer members of Trump’s admiring entourage (for some reason, he showed up a few weeks ago at a ceremony for the Gaza peace process), showered Trump with meaningless praise, saying, “You definitely deserve the first FIFA Peace Prize for your action, for what you have obtained — in your way — but you obtained it in an incredible way…”

He did not elaborate on exactly what actions he had in mind, but before the ceremony Trump had to pretend that he didn’t know he was receiving the prize and was asked whether that might conflict with a possible military strike against Venezuela. He replied that he had settled eight wars and that a ninth was coming, “which nobody’s ever done before.” He added, “I really want to save lives, I don’t need prizes, I need to save lives and I’ve saved millions and millions of lives and that’s really what I want to do.” He didn’t mention the killings in missile strikes on Caribbean fishing boats. Presumably, those lives aren’t among the “millions” he says he’s saved.

The optics of this silly flattery by FIFA, juxtaposed with the burgeoning Pentagon scandal, in which it appears that Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth are overseeing a policy of repeated war crimes against people in small boats thousands of miles from U.S. shores, was stark. Members of Congress emerged from a briefing with the Navy admiral in charge of the Sept. 2 strike, in which two survivors were summarily executed as they floated on broken pieces of a small speedboat. Legislators looked ashen and somber, and one of their number, Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., declared it “one of the most troubling things” he’d ever witnessed.

Some Republicans, however, such as Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, seemed highly aroused by these same images, reveling in the gruesome deaths of what seemed to be low-level local operators, probably paid a few hundred dollars to take their cargo from Venezuela to a Caribbean island, whence it may be shipped to Europe. Hegseth himself gave a fiery speech in California the next day, promising that the U.S. intended to continue the killing and telling the audience:

These narcoterrorists are the al-Qaida of our hemisphere, and we are hunting them with the same sophistication and precision that we hunted al-Qaida. We are tracking them, we are killing them, and we will keep killing them so long as they are poisoning our people with narcotics so lethal that they’re tantamount to chemical weapons.

It’s estimated that 42 million Americans have used cocaine, the drug that is most likely being trafficked to Europe from Venezuela. (If that many people have ingested chemical weapons, we have bigger problems.) Fentanyl, which is a genuinely deadly drug, is almost all trafficked over the southern border — and usually imported by Americans. Will Team Trump be executing those “narcoterrorists” too? Cotton says no, but there’s no logical reason why they should stop, given their current rationale.

As the president performed his “Trump dance” and the Village People delievered “YMCA” at the FIFA prize event, the U.S. military struck another boat, killing four more people. The strange dissonance became even more jarring when the administration finally released its long-awaited “National Security Strategy.” Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir makes short work of that embarrassing document:

It’s a long-term, deep-horizon manifesto for the reactionary-revolutionary Red Caesar regime dreamed of by [Stephen] Miller, [JD] Vance and the bro-genius billionaires. It imagines unilateral U.S. domination of the Western Hemisphere — the Monroe Doctrine, but with drones and AI — a Crusader-style reconquest of secular Europe by the white right, and a chummy division of the rest of the world into old-school spheres of influence, involving Russia, China, the Saudi monarchy and whoever else gets invited.

Meanwhile, here at home, Trump continues his war against all immigrants. He is now engaging in rank racism, calling Somali immigrants “garbage” and threatening to revoke the citizenship of anyone he finds distasteful, which by pure coincidence seems to mean all people of color. He is banning half the world’s population from entering the U.S. and virtually ending the asylum process for everyone except white South Africans. The sight of masked, armed secret police in unmarked vehicles brutally assaulting anyone they choose on streets all across America is straight out of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania. The language he uses is hostile, cruel, vulgar and degrading.

As the president performed his “Trump dance” and the Village People delievered “YMCA” at the FIFA prize event, the U.S. military struck another boat, killing four more people.

Now consider the absurdity of Trump’s insistence that he’s a prince of peace and just cares about “saving lives, millions of lives.” He actually said, “As president, my highest aspiration is to bring peace and stability to the world.” Sycophants are knocking each other over to give him prizes and kiss his ring, telling him exactly what he wants to hear. But the bigger question is whether anyone’s actually buying it?

This inconsistency has always been present in the MAGA coalition but until recently it hasn’t been quite as obvious. It’s not clear that his base is happy about it. Trump has always sold himself as a strongman, and his bizarre phony machismo has had inexplicable appeal for his followers. Now he’s falling asleep in public, spending most of his time redecorating and partying, and otherwise looking weaker every day. His paeans to peace strike a discordant note with the people who love him best for his nasty, smart-ass cracks and strong-arm tactics. Meanwhile the minority of old-style Republicans who would love for him to stop acting like a nasty schoolyard bully aren’t happy either, since they still hope he may behave like a serious president.The Pece

There hasn’t been any specific polling on this weird MAGA-world contradiction. But if you believe the overall numbers, Trump is now unpopular with a majority across all issues, even those that have traditionally been his strength. His approval ratings are now in the high 30s and low 40s. Independents are abandoning him in droves.

Mind you, the hardcore base is sticking with Trump so far because, like their idol, they can never admit they were wrong. But even they are starting to feel the dissonance of hearing this feeble, elderly man yammering about peace amid daily news footage of grotesque attacks on immigrants, boat strikes and increasingly bellicose warmongering. Some who took him seriously about America First isolationism are ready to abandon ship.

Whether this ends up truly splitting the Republican base remains to be seen. But this fault line in the coalition is widening by the day. No wonder so many GOP members of Congress are retiring next year. Who wants to stay around for the ugly implosion that’s just about to happen?

Salon

The hide-your-parents stage is here. You’re next.

The family of a deported Babson College student raised a public stink after her Nov. 20 arrest at Logan Airport. First, let’s review from last week:

Any Lucia López Belloza was flying home from Boston to surprise her parents for Thanksgiving. Instead, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested her (The Guardian):

She was allowed a phone call to her parents, who contacted a lawyer. The next day, a federal judge issued an emergency order barring her removal from the US for at least 72 hours until her case could be reviewed.

But the next morning, she was shackled at her wrists, ankles and waist and deported to her native Honduras, a country which she left at the age of seven and of which she has virtually no memory.

After all the press her arrrest received, immigration agents targeted her parents in Austin, Texas. (I’m assuming that the Sunday mentioned below is Nov. 30, the aftrenoon the New York Times ran this interview with her father, and not yesterday.) The Times ran this followup on Dec. 7 (gift link):

On Sunday, immigration agents appeared at the family home of a recently deported college student in Austin, Texas, according to the family and their lawyer.

The agents arrived in three unmarked vehicles, and one agent in a green vest marked E.R.O. — Enforcement and Removal Operations — rushed toward the student’s father, Francis López, as he washed his car, Mr. López said. He ran into his backyard and closed a latched gate. The agent forced open the gate and proceeded to enter the backyard.

Mr. López entered his house and locked the back door, he said. After about two hours, the agents left, without ever trying to communicate with the family or knocking on the door.

Rep. Greg Casar (D) represents the López family’s district. He said on Sunday that the government meant to send a message:

“To be clear, the Trump administration is targeting a college student’s family because that college student spoke out about the unjust way that she was treated by the federal government,” Mr. Casar said.

Jacob Soboroff of MS Now interviewed Any Lucia Lopez Belloza. The video ran on Dec. 4.

Author Madiba Dennie announced on Bluesky, “aaand we are officially in the hide-your-neighbors stage.” That was October 10. Now we are at the hide-your-parents stage. Soon we will be at the hide-yourselves stage. If the budding 2nd American Revolution Will Bunch teased on Sunday does not materialize and soon, it’s not a matter of if but when.

Unsubtle Hint: This is not a private fight.

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

No King’s One Million Rising movement 
50501 
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
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