Moral and Professional Failure

 I checked on the digital front page of the Times. The lead stories are about the Supreme Court's secrecy, some stuff about Gaza reopening, Minneapolis/ICE, the Grammys and a state visit from the President of Colombia. Only after those clusters of stories do you get anything on Epstein, and that is about the Justice Department "accidentally" posting pictures of victims' faces and nude bodies.

Now, those are all pretty important stories and exactly the sort of things I hope the Times continues to cover.

However, there has been no massive front page story on the actual contents of the released files. Some of that is because they released so much and some of that is because a lot of what they released are anonymous tips and unsubstantiated allegations -  perhaps not false, but not substantiated. Hopefully, the Times (and their lawyers) are simply combing through the files and trying to corroborate what is in them.

The thing is, what was in there is a story. Maybe THE story. We also know that Trump won't sue, because that would entail discovery.

Trump is floundering, when your opponent is drowning, stick a hose in his mouth.

There's Something Happening Here

 Yesterday, there was a special election in a Texas state Senate race. Trump carried the district by 17 points in 2024. Yesterday, the Democrat won by 14 points, a 31 point swing. Democrat Taylor Rehmet spent almost no money compared to his well-funded and Trump-endorsed opponent and still won a landslide. Rehmet is an Air Force veteran and union leader and the sort of male-coded candidate that I personally think will overperform, due to vibes about Democrats being too female, too minority centered. 

Fox News actually does respectable polling, and they have Democrats winning the generic ballot by 6 points, the highest they've ever recorded. As Morris notes, generic ballot polling doesn't tell us what will happen this November, but the party that doesn't control the White House usually picks up about 6 points between January polling and November voting. They start this cycle in the strongest position that they have ever been in. 

Republicans are doubling down, in many ways, on the racism of their immigration policies. Even Americans who might support tighter border controls are not thrilled with the images coming from Minnesota. Trump (or Miller) thinks that they can just change the optics by firing Bovino and his Nazi wardrobe, but that's actually not the imagery that has people enraged. It's five year old Liam Conejo Ramos being arrested for the crime of being brown. 

Meanwhile, with Republicans falling further and further underwater, the slow leak of Epstein files show that that story isn't going away either. As I wrote on Friday, Trump's policies are even less popular than he is himself. Oddly, with Democrats it's usually the opposite. Democratic policies are generally pretty popular - healthcare, taxing the rich, actual infrastructure spending, better education - but Dem pols usually poll worse. Once Trump's personality cult has to assimilate the fact that he really is a pedophile and rapist - if they even can assimilate that information - then the bottom truly does fall out. 

The prevailing fear many of us have right now as we look at the political dynamic is that Trump will throw everything at the wall to try and subvert the midterms in nine months. As of now, he has been largely confined to more or less "legal" attempts like gerrymandering mid-decade. As America rejects him, he will grow more and more dangerous, Stephen Miller will get more and more fevered in his assault on the Constitution. 

However, last night's election results could mean that they won't be able to pull it off. 

The Discontent of Content

 Let's just recap yesterday's Friday news dump with Richardson. 

- Millions of Epstein files were released, with Trump's name prominent in many of them, and many with his name were the then subsequently scrubbed. Among the allegations were forcible and statutory rape by Trump and beating up a girl. 

- They arrested journalist Don Lemon for recording a protest at a church. They had to venue shop in order to find a grand jury willing to indict, as judges turned them down.

- Massive protests in subzero weather, which barely registered in the media.

- Trump threatened military action against Iran.

- Trump announced his candidate to head the Federal Reserve...and his name was in the Epstein files.

- We have a partial government shutdown, though Republicans and Democrats agreed in funding for everything but DHS, while they try and rein in the abuses there. Because Mike Johnson is a toady, he has the House in recess, but we shall see if they come back and keep the lights on.

- Oh yeah, Catherine O'Hara died, but that's not really relevant to this.

Among the many lenses through which to view Trump and his cronies is the lens of "Content Creator" - itself a vacuous designation of "just some idiot with a camera." Bannon and Trump have seized on the micro-attention spans of America and provided a firehose of "content" that thwarts efforts to grasp and understand (and counter) all of his awfulness. You think shooting a VA nurse in the back is bad? How about we go ahead and arrest a journalist? You like that? No? How about we bomb Iran?

The thing is, it gets old after a while. It gets exhausting. Those of us who are slaves to following the news have been exhausted since this time last year. For most Americans, it's background noise...until you shoot a VA nurse in the back ten times. 

I saw my conservative cousin paste something on Facebook, which is the usual nonsense about Trump. "I wish he didn't tweet so much. I wish he wasn't so verbally mean and crude. But, gosh darn it, he's authentic and I just can't quit him." The thing is, unless you are part of the 27%, you simply get exhausted. This shit ain't OK.

Anyway, we probably are going to war with Iran to distract from the evidence in the Epstein files that Trump may have killed someone.

The Fault Line

 Morris makes an important - really important - point. Trump maintains a level of popularity that exceeds his policies. For whatever reason, people like Trump. They don't like his policies. This is why Republicans perform so much worse when he's not on the ballot.

The military-style occupation of Minneapolis is the new child separation policy. As Trump's policies become more and more unpopular, his own popularity plummets. The GOP should see that plummet further. What's more, his voters stay home.

He's old. He looks like shit. Death comes for us all. When he's gone, that movement will collapse.

It's Not Going To Get Better

 While I've argued that we have to celebrate the small victories, like Greg Bovino getting canned, that should not obscure the fact that the authoritarian march of Trump is not abating. They and the Republican Party is more or less committed to his project of turning America in a competitive authoritarian state, like Hungary. They might try and round off some rough edges, like shooting people in the back on the street, and they will seize any opportunity to try and rally their base, but it sure seems like we have reached a tipping point.

Things are not going to get better on their own, and may in fact get worse in the short run.

At this point, I'm back to actively rooting for some sort of massive own goal, like an economic collapse or the leaking of those damned Epstein Files.

The Red, White And Blue Revolution

 Krugman compares the resistance to ICE in Minneapolis to the color revolutions that swept the former Soviet Union - with varying degrees of success - after its collapse. The point of these revolutions was to establish liberal democracy in countries that really never had them. In the United States, there are already robust institutions of liberal democracy that are surviving to varying degrees the onslaught by Trump and Project 2025. The press is free, but compromised. Federalism remains a bulwark to Trumpist overreach. The Courts continue to try and preserve the Constitution and civil liberties. If Democrats can gain control of Congress, we can legitimately see a pathway to preserving American liberty.

However, much of this will actually depend on actions like the incredible disciplined protests from Minnesota. No Kings is a decent start, but it will have to be expanded and continued. While firing Greg Bovino is not the solution to this problem, earning victories - no matter how small - are important to maintaining momentum and gaining converts. The doomerism that pervades many online spaces is simply not the right response. Steely resolve, yes. "This doesn't matter", no.

The rest of the world looks at the US with dismay. It will be up to the majority of Americans who oppose this to restore both our democracy and our reputation. 

Woof

 Adam Serwer is the indispensable sage of Trumpistan. His axiom, "the cruelty is the point", remains the most cogent summary of Trump's curdled worldview. 

He just published on the situation in Minneapolis. He ends with this:

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

No matter how many more armed men Trump sends to impose his will on the people of Minnesota, all he can do is accentuate their valor. No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors. These agents, and the president who sent them, are no one’s heroes, no one’s saviors—just men with guns who have to hide their faces to shoot a mom in the face, and a nurse in the back.

Taking The W

 Yesterday, I predicted that Bovino would make an easy scapegoat for the catastrophic invasion of Minneapolis. Guess what? 

So, yeah, I take this as a personal win, but I think the Very Online Left needs to understand that you have to take your wins and celebrate them. Twitter was full of people saying "This is not enough. Miller and Noem have to go, too." 

Sure! I would LOVE that. But in a long campaign, you have to celebrate the wins you have. That's what allows you to build momentum. It's not enough just to record the win, you have to celebrate it. At the same time, you actually don't want to go overboard, because that could make Trump react in the opposite direction. Just don't crap all over the victory. 

Maybe?

 During the Iraq debacle, some idiot claimed that they were seeing "green shoots" of stability in the country racked by civil war. It's the same sort of thing I feel today, when I see the response to the state execution of Alex Pretti. The man was a literal Boy Scout, a literal choirboy. As Krugman notes, he is not being subjected to the same character assassination as Renee Good, who had the audacity to be a queer woman who didn't defer to the Big Strong Man sufficiently. Yglesias, who has developed a real knack for Steelmanning the indefensible, is actually unable to make the case for this bullshit. We are starting to see "unnamed sources close to the President" begin to ask very real questions about what is going on.

The videos of Pretti's murder are disturbing, but that is precisely the point. (I cannot fathom what his parents must thing, having to see the murder of their seemingly extraordinary son plastered across screens around America and the world.) The video makes it impossible for the Trump Administration to lie - or rather it has made it impossible for them to lie in a way that is defensible except by the hardest core of MAGA. 

Josh Marshall made the point about "escalation dominance" that clearly motivates Miller, Noem, Bovino and Lewandowski. They are "content creators" in our descent to fascism. 

They want the video.

Right up until they don't.

As of this moment, the GOP is fracturing over this issue. The public is appalled. They can try and push the narrative of Pretti having a gun on him, but that only infuriates the Second Amendment crowd. 

Trump believes in dominance politics, and his sending in shock troops and Brown Shirts to terrorize Minneapolis is an expression of that. 

He is also fickle and self-centered. If he sees this (if his addled brain is capable of taking in new information) and thinks "This is hurting me", then he will jettison people soon. If I had to guess that Lilliputian Martinet, Greg Bovino, would make an easy sacrifice. I wouldn't feel safe if I were Noem either, but Bovino is even more of an aesthetic embarrassment than Noem, as Trump doesn't like short little guys but like women who have butchered their faces for the male gaze. Seriously, I think that's it.

If Trump DOES throw aside Noem, I would absolutely expect her to go scorched earth, the way Marjorie Traitor Greene did. These are awful people - narcissistic, insecure, cruel - and they will turn on each other in a feral display of their own barbarism.

This is not "the end of Trump" and likely not even the end of Stephen Miller, despite him being the true architect of all this. However, we know Trump will case aside those he feels do not reflect well on him. This could be the moment when we begin to see them turn on each other.

I'm not necessarily optimistic, because after the initial outrage ends, the GOP will fall dutifully in-line. Still, it could be a start. Trump backed down over Greenland; he could back down here.  

Yes, Trump Is A Fascist

 I came about to this after resisting it during his first term, but Jonathan Rauch makes a pretty comprehensive case for the term.

Relatedly, in trying to process the execution of Alex Pretti, I realize that the last time I felt like this was January 6th. I feel that same white-hot rage that this is being done to our country, our ideals, our institutions. Rauch's catalog of Trump's fascism is just the academic framework for my anger. I can remember early on election night, when I realized that, no, the American people would re-elect this felon, this open sewer of human foibles. I drove out to the woods and screamed in pain and anger into the darkness. 

This is why.

Cringey liberals were right all along. 

Law Versus Order

 Paul Campos links to a Gessen piece about the nature of totalitarian and terror regimes. He's among the more alarmist of the writers I read (doesn't make him wrong, just saying), and I don't think we have a totalitarian regime right now. That seems absurd. If we did, there would be no coverage at all of the execution of Alex Pretti. It is clear though that what Trump and his legions want to implement is state terror. 

What ICE is doing in Minneapolis is not remotely "legal" under any earlier understanding of the word. It is not constitutional, certainly, as they routinely engage in illegal searches, they attack people exercising their First Amendment rights and they basically kidnap people without warrants. We can add extrajudicial killings to the litany of illegal actions. Instead, as a commentator note, what they want is not "law" but "order," which is to say compliance. Renee Good and Alex Pretti would be alive, if they simply laid down and did not challenge the state's actions - actions, again, that are constitutionally highly dubious. 

I have argued in the past that Trumpism is not conservative but reactionary, and I stand by that. The reflex to impose order at the expense of liberty is, however, a hallmark of conservatism. The impulse to bow down to hierarchies is at the root of all conservatism. There are times when that makes a certain amount of sense, but it is certainly not universally true. Conservatives hated Martin Luther King with a white hot passion - not because he was violent, but because he challenged the structures that imposed a brutish order.

Watch the lying the sacks of shit who go before cameras and lie to you about what your own eyes can see. They aren't serving the law or the Constitution, they are serving their ideal of an authoritarian order where the strong crush the weak.

ICE Just Executed A Man On The Streets Of Minneapolis

 You can find the video if you want. It's disturbing. If you can stomach it, watch it. Bear witness. ICE tackled a guy to the ground, beat him ruthlessly and then one guy shot him multiple times as he was lying on the ground. 

If I were Walz, I would be faced with an impossible dilemma. My gut would say that I need to mobilize the National Guard and bring them onto the streets of the Twin Cities and interpose themselves between ICE and the populace. My brain would recognize that as soon as I do that, Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act. 

If this act stands, if ICE is not removed from Minnesota, then we are reasonably looking at the end of America as an idea. The idea that consent of the governed matters, that civil liberties matter, that the Constitution matters is on a knife's edge and this event could tip if off. 

We are approaching a place where "Blue" states need to seriously consider whether remaining in a polity with the states that are OK with "comply or be shot" is tenable. If America "pukes up her ancient soul" then it is no longer America.

UPDATE: Good take from Josh Marshall, as always.

Can The Supremes Actually Apply The Text?

 Yglesias summarizes the Trump Administration's war on birthright citizenship. By just about any standard - the text of the XIVth amendment, the existing precedents, basic bureaucratic paperwork, federalism and the issuing of birth certificates - this should be an open and shut case. There is no defensible position to revoke the plain text of the XIVth, besides racist beliefs in the status of non-white people. 

Ideally, this could be an opportunity to the Sycophantic Six to show that they can actually apply the law as it was intended, rather than giving Trump whatever he wants. They seem to be leaning that way when it comes to the Federal Reserve's independence; they could do the same here.

The Court is so degraded right now, that it is hard to take anything for granted. I do wonder if things like yesterday's protests in Minneapolis could signal to the Court just how fragile their legitimacy is right now. The foundations of Constitutional governance are quaking under our feet right now, and the question is whether the Sycophantic Six will be pallbearers or paladins. 

Irreparable Damage

 This piece on the degradation of the FBI under that Klown Kash Patel is sobering reading. You should just read all the ways that they have warped the premier investigation agency in America into a perverse extension of Trump and Miller's bizarre fixation on immigration. 

The thing is, it's a disaster waiting to happen. The monomaniacal focus on immigration is going to leave gaps that "bad actors" can exploit. What's more, the institutional knowledge and experience is going to be lost. The ripples of this one action are going to be felt for years and there are myriad other examples of precisely this sort of fuckery.

The FBI is arguably the most conservative part of the federal bureaucracy, and they are at wit's end with this shit.

UPDATE: The more you read, the more Chuck Grassley - or more likely the staffers who prop up that desiccated husk of a man - is really fucking awful.

To Secure These Rights

 The Declaration of Independence's ringing words of "All mean are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are well known. The next phrase is important, too. "That to secure these rights, governments are instituted amongst men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

As Morris notes, Trump has lost the consent of the governed. Most notably, in places like Minneapolis, the populace's protest, the broad uproar, is an example of the governed withdrawing their consent. That was true with George Floyd and the protests surrounding his death. Large numbers of Americans rejected the idea of an unaccountable police presence. 

Conservatives often believe that the consent of the governed is limited to a few elections, and then people should submit to authority. If you take something like the civil rights movement, that was an example of a population that could NOT express their consent through elections, so they protested until they could. We are faced with a broadly similar dynamic today. We have to wait until November to express our consent, and until then, protest is our only venue to express that we do not consent to warrantless searches, wholesale corruption and the wanton disregard for laws and treaties.

The 250th anniversary of that declaration is coming soon. We should reinvigorate that document.