Make It Make Sense

 Yesterday, RFK Jr's brain worm forced out the head of vaccine regulations, Dr. Peter Marks, in favor of someone who was is not a doctor and was in fact cited for practicing medicine without a license. David Geier is, of course, a vaccine "skeptic" who thinks vaccines cause autism. 

Vaccines do not cause autism.

Meanwhile, Trump is rolling back regulations with regards to mercury pollution. Mercury - like most heavy metals - is a neurotoxin. It absolutely causes birth defects and brain damage. 

So...fuck I can't believe this is real life...Trump is firing a doctor to put in place a charlatan to push the lie that vaccines hurt your kids, while simultaneously allowing industry to pump an extremely poisonous chemical into the air and water.

Again, if his sole purpose was destroy America, what would he be doing differently?

Government By Cable News Host

 Trump has appointed something like 23 Fox News personalities to his government. I did not know that there were 23 Fox News personalities in total.

However, when you think it about, this all makes sense. The egregious incompetence of a Pete Hegseth makes perfect sense, if your main job qualification is to go in the TeeVee and rant about the libtards so that the senile old fool watching from the Oval Office can get the slightest tingle in his withered loins.

The whole cruelty is the point schtick is about what plays on Fox. Fox is about punching down, about "no war but the culture war." The performative nature of so many of these illegal acts is partly about Project 2025's "move fast, break things" tactics, but it's also about playing well on Fox. Picking fights with Canada and Denmark/Greenland is about the bullying climate of NewsCorp. 

If you can shitpost or play "right wing grievance MadLibs" then you, too, could be the Undersecretary of State for South Asia or something similar.

Why are they stupid? Why are they cruel? Because it's all about how it plays on a network dedicated to stupid cruelty. 

(Somewhat off topic, this Atlantic piece on the Murdochs is just...woof. What a moral sewer. Still, hopefully Rupert dies soon.)

The Breaking Point For The Deep State

 The reckless abandonment of America's allies and global role in promoting peace and security has got to have people within America's national security apparatus freaking right the hell out. As I said this morning, we are in the grips of a culture war jihad that is taking a scorched earth approach to all of our institutions. The idea being that they can recreate America along their largely theological lines - with theology mixed in with oligarchy and white supremacy. It's all one big stew.

If Hollywood was writing this script, there would be a cabal of CIA, FBI and military figures plotting to overthrow Trump. The precedent would be the middle to late Roman Empire, when the Praetorian Guards would periodically kill the empire and replace him with someone else (who they might later kill). The fundamental check on the emperor's power were the swords of his personal bodyguards.

I should stop to say that this is really, really unhealthy for a Republic (not that Rome was a republic at that point).

However, Elon Musk is not elected to anything, and as Josh Marshall has been explaining, Musk has historical parallels with the "overmighty subjects" of the late medieval, early modern period in Europe. These were nobles whose power and wealth rivaled the monarchs, the sovereign. The rise of the modern state in Europe was partly the eradication of these overly powerful challenges to the sovereign. 

Musk's control of Starlink, of SpaceX, of Twitter and his attempts to buy elections outright have put him beyond the reach of laws. Trump, too, has largely exceeded the reach of laws at this point, but Trump - inexplicably - is still in the mid to high 40s in job approval. Musk, however, is increasingly unpopular, and he lacks the cultish hold over tens of millions of Americans. 

What's more, we have a situation where Musk (apparently) went to the Pentagon for a briefing on US war plans for China - all while having meetings with people like Putin and Xi. 

The Signal scandal would pale in comparison to the revelation that Musk is trading American secrets for access to Chinese goods and markets. The Signal scandal also makes clear that normal means of holding people accountable are defunct for the moment. At what point would the so-called Deep State feel compelled to move against this "overmighty subject?"

No War But The Culture War

 Early in Trump 1.0, Adam Serwer offered a pithy line that still encapsulates a lot of Trumpism: The cruelty is the point. Now, as we find ourselves between the hammer and anvil of Trump 2.0, Jon Chait offers a new maxim: There is no war but the culture war.

Ostensibly keen observers of American politics are baffled by the chaos of Trump's tariff zig zags, the lawlessness of his Executive Orders and his contempt for the global order that America has established and preserved for almost a century.

Richardson today offers a nice summary of WHY the priority of Trump - and especially the Brown Shirts that surround him - is to dismantle everything good that America does. She returns, as one should, to Project 2025. (The news media's failure to adequately cover this was perhaps its biggest failure of the last election.)

It's actually JD Vance who offers up the rationale for this assault on basic decency.

In place of those structures, today’s MAGA leaders intend to create their own new institutions, shaped by their own people, whose ideological purity trumps their abilities. As Vice President J.D. Vance explained in a 2021 interview, he and his ilk believe that American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.

This is the crux of the matter. These are not "conservatives"; they are counterrevolutionary extremists. The point of Project 2025 and everything they have done so far is to overwhelm opposition and create so many targets for this outrage that they overwhelm everyone and everything.

This is not popular. Not even with Trump voters. There's a sense that they might be getting just how unpopular they are. They've withdrawn Elise Stefanik's nomination to be UN Ambassador. They did so because they legitimately fear losing the special election in Florida to replace Mike "Wanna Join My Secret Group Chat" Waltz. Trump won that district by 30 points. That would mean Stefanik's district is up for grabs. 

Losing the House this early would be extremely damaging to their plans. However, as Josh Marshall has often noted, the federal government is only one locus of power. The states are another, the people a third. There is no guarantee that the American people will continue to let the republic end to placate a handful of religious extremists. 

My dad and I would argue politics all the time. He was a Southern Democrat who moved right, and he would complain about why the Democrats were so focused on culture war stuff like abortion and gay rights. That sort of person isn't going to like the same dynamic from Republicans.

Yes, the Signal Scandal is bad and has legs. However, the markets are freaking out and Americans are waking to the fact that Trump lied to them again. Trump is not an engine of American Greatness; he is a chaos agent acting to destroy everything that is even close to something that might be considered "the other side" of the culture war.

Who's In Charge?

 Woven through some of the commentary about the Signal Scandal are questions about what the hell Trump was up to during all this. This was a principals discussion about using military force. People were going to and did die. Maybe Trump should get off the golf course and social media and be present for this. Instead, we have Pee Wee German (Stephen Miller) saying that "As I heard it, the president was clear: green light." 

When he's been asked about the whole thing, his responses are the usual meandering Trump bullshit word salad. It feels almost like this has been baked into coverage: Trump will say some stupid shit and the press will interpret it like Roman Augers looking at bird entrails. Meanwhile, four US soldiers on a training mission in Lithuania have gone missing, and Trump was apparently not even briefed on it.

Concerns about Joe Biden's age were not meritless. In particular, Biden's preexisting difficulty with a speech impediment was clearly worsening as he aged. Trump's preexisting difficulty with being a dumb stupid fucking donkey has also clearly worsened as he's aged.

Luckily, the hamfisted ways that these absolute bandbags have handled this scandal has allowed the press to keep the story alive. A fundamental hack that Trump has enjoyed over the media is that they are always hungry for new "content" and he could be relied upon for a new scandalous act every 24 hours. A tough thing to do for Trump's opponents have been to focus on just one thing and hammer that. Now, we have the original scandal, the lying about it before Congress and now legitimate questions about who is actually running things at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

Right on cue, Trump has resurrect his tariff two-step and also decided to fire a a bunch of people at HHS and, oh, what the hell, let's gut FEMA. That's the Trump churn we knew was coming. However, the stupidity and obvious venality of the scandal and the cover-up has insured that it's staying at the worst "meme-worthy."  (Oh, the memes. The glorious memes.)

A competent administration run by competent people and helmed by a competent president would've handled the original story this way: "This is obviously of great concern to the president, and we will get to the bottom of it." Then you fire a few people and convene a Blue Ribbon panel on communications security that largely confirms existing protocols (that Waltz and Hegseth violated). 

Instead, the fact is that authoritarianism is brittle means that they cannot allow ANY weakness to be shown. If they were to throw Waltz overboard, that would just mean that Dear Leader made a mistake and that can't even be conceived of. So, we get the recurring Feats of Strength that dig deeper and deeper into obvious lying that even some people on Faux (some) can't stomach. 

Meanwhile, Democrats need to amplify the aspect of this scandal that calls into question who is actually in charge at the White House. Trump is a doddering old fool, but he's also extremely prickly. I confess, I thought he would have a falling out with Musk already, because they are both show boating narcissists. It is in the national interest that Pete Hegseth not be Defense Secretary. Getting Trump to fire him should be a priority and suggesting that Hegseth is doing dumb shit behind his back could be the lever to get Trump to actually fire the guy. 

Attack Trump's pride.

It does very much seem like Trump is completely checked out. He won and avoided prison, but he's never had any real appetite for doing the hard work of governing and, especially, understanding stuff that you need to understand to govern. 

They basically prop him at a desk with a bunch of poorly crafted Executive Orders to sign in much the same way you give a toddler and iPad to play with so they will be quiet and let you finish your work destroying the American State.

"Trump is a senile old man who doesn't know that his Cabinet is off planning wars on private apps, because he's a senile old man who is old and senile." His reaction will, of course, to be to overreact. 

Change the game. We aren't winning the current one. 

Rumblings

 It's a small thing, but might oaks from small acorns grow. Yesterday, a Democrat won a state Senate seat in Pennsylvania. Trump won that district by 15%.

We have some special elections coming up. These are mostly in deep Red districts, but not so deep red that they can necessarily cover up a 15% swing. Winning either or ideally both of the special elections will wake up quite a few Republicans in the House and maybe even the Senate that while they have been worried about keeping their jobs safe from primary challenges, they should also worry about losing the general.

Stupid AND Evil

 Krugman lays out how both the Signal Scandal and Musk's War on Social Security demonstrate how the Trump Administration is both stupid AND evil.

I would take it one step further. Stupid people with a will to power almost always ARE evil. It's not that they're both, it's that one is mutually dependent on the other. Yes, inviting a journalist into your secret war text group is unfathomably dumb. Yes, this was done to evade Federal law regarding government records, which they clearly do so often that no one questions it, even when discussing military planning. Yes, they were contemptuous of Europe, which is both stupid and evil.

Fascism and most forms of authoritarianism require idiocy. One marker for something that you know will be both stupid and evil is if some Republican starts talking about "common sense." What common sense means is that there is a complicated issue that they really don't understand, so they dumb it down for themselves and their constituents and then come up with a dumb "solution" that will likely make things worse. Take tariffs as just one example.

Hopefully in the long run, the stupid is more powerful than the evil.

UPDATE: So, the Evil Idiots decided on the "who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes" crisis management strategy, basically going to Capitol Hill and to Faux News and lying their asses off about whether there was classified information in the Signal chat.

Goldberg, of course, had receipts. Coming back to the Stupid or Evil idea, they had to know that Goldberg had these screenshots. Or maybe they didn't think it through that far? Or maybe they know that this evil, corrupted regime will not hold any loyalists accountable.

Do Not Blow This

 The inclusion of journalist Jeffrey Goldberg in the illegal use of Signal to plan attacks on Yemen is a really big deal, both politically and substantively. Going to the front page of the Times, and it's not the lead story. Same with the Post. That doesn't mean the story doesn't have legs, as I imagine lots of people are trying to figure out what the fuck happened.

Here's the thing. This is the most important moment of the Trump presidency for Democrats so far. Bigger than the Continuing Resolution disaster. 

The lead story at the Times is the impact of Trump's lawless immigration program on colleges. At the Post, it's the breakdown in Social Security. Those are legit stories.

The Yemen group chat, though, is about national security. It's about the combination of lawlessness and just rank incompetence of the Trump team. It's pretty easy to understand; it's immediate. 

Democrats need to focus. They can't chase every Trump scandal. He's going to say outrageous shit over the next week, like a squid squirting ink to cover his distress. Focus on these facts:

- Pete Hegseth is out of his depth,
- Trump is out of the loop.
- These are criminal acts.
- National security is serious business.

Authoritarians have to constantly project strength. This makes them look foolish. What's more, look at the lead story in the Post, about DOGE's attack on basic Social Security services. 

This is the moment Democrats can define Trumpism as basically buffoonish and dangerous incompetence. On some level, the Democrats have to convince Americans that expert governance is important. Events like this - combined with the coming economic dislocations - are able to create a narrative that will be reinforced by event after event.

But Democrats can't blow this. They have to keep this story alive. Republicans are really good at hammering a nontroversy until it becomes an actual controversy. People are comparing this to Hillary's email server, but Democrats need to think about Benghazi, a regrettable incident that Republicans kept hammering until it became a scandal simply by repetition. This scandal is real, and yes there are many more happening all around us, but make this everything. Get Waltz or Hegseth fired. 

Democratic voters are desperate for Democratic politicians to fight back. This is that moment.

Morons

 This story by Jeffrey Goldberg has to be read to be believed. Basically, he got invited by accident to be part of the planning of strike on Houthi militias. The chat group included the National Security Advisor, the Vice President, Secretaries of Defense and State and prominent members of the White House staff. Somehow no one noticed that a journalist was in that virtual space with them.

Look, the Houthis do not have the capacity to hack these systems. Russia, China and possibly Iran do. You simply cannot carry on classified discussions on cell phones, even on an encrypted app.

What's more there are a staggering number of crimes committed by doing this. Multiple crimes along multiple avenues of wrong doing.

It goes without saying that there will be no legal accountability.

Not Really A Plan

 Paul Krugman lays out the central conundrum facing Democrats, specifically with regards to how to fight back against Trump's predation of the social safety net, notably Social Security. The "tear-your-hair-out" moment for Democrats is that this plutocratic, failson slumlord has managed to position himself as the champion of working Americans. 

The "Progressive" wing of the Democratic Party has claimed this is because Democrats abandoned the working class for siren song of neoliberal economics (mostly this criticism is applied to Bill Clinton). This argument founders on the reality that Clinton expanded healthcare to children (CHIPS) and then Obama created the largest expansion in wealth redistribution since LBJ. Then, Trump tried to kill ACA, but everyone seems to have forgotten that this is who he is. 

The reality seems, to me, to be that Democrats embrace of LGBTQ rights and immigration reform (rather than immigration demagoguery) has made them seem like the party of, as James Carville put it, faculty lounge politics. Then again, LGBTQ rights are, in fact, important. "Elites" - at least culturally - have indeed become part of the base of the Democratic party; college educated professionals are a huge part of their voting bloc. 

This has not led to Democratic abandonment of income redistribution. What you have on the Republican side is a weird wave of support, with people making between $50,000 and $100,000 seeming to support Trump and billionaires bankrolling him and staffing his administration. The result is that the "working people's champion" has people like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick saying that his mom wouldn't miss her Social Security check. Yes, that's probably true, since her son is a literal billionaire.

Both Krugman and Richardson note that Republicans used to believe in some form of social safety net - though I think Teddy Roosevelt's embrace of universal health care probably came AFTER his presidency when he ran as the Progressive Party candidate in 1912. Eisenhower and Nixon's support for some redistribution and government oversight of the economy was a nod to political reality. Reagan overturned all that, even if even Reagan wasn't going to go after Social Security. It was the rise of the Gingrich Republican who wanted to overturn the New Deal that led to Bush trying to privatize Social Security and Trump trying to end the ACA.

All of this is a long way of saying the Republican Party is still the party of Newt Gingrich's extremism; they still want to gut the social safety net. However, precisely because they have tried and failed to do so has created in tens of millions of voters the idea that nothing bad will happen to MY government programs, just those that go to the "undeserving". 

This is how you get the incredibly frustrating dynamic of this past election. Trumpists write Project 2025 which is as radical a document as I can remember in 125 years of American history, maybe all the way back to the Civil War. Project 2025 - when explained to voters - is really, really unpopular, so Trump says he has no idea what Project 2025 is and the press seems to believe him. (No, I don't know why Democrats stopped hammering him on the contents of Project 2025; that was the biggest tactical misstep, arguably even bigger than Biden not stepping aside.)

Donald Trump is a compulsive liar. He has absolutely zero regard for the truth. Yet, somehow, his agenda - which was right there in black and white - was not scrutinized by voters. It was precisely those low information voters who returned him to the White House.

The post-election postmortems all seem to avoid this point. Trump's agenda was unpopular, yet voters were more or less not exposed to it or they simply believed his lies about Project 2025 and his promise to be a "dictator on day one." There is not a suite of policy papers that will undo this dynamic. People aren't flocking to Bernie and AOC's rallies because they believe in the Green New Deal, they are going because those two are actually "fighting" in visible ways. 

This is why right now the central tentpole of Democratic strategy seems to be to get out of the way of Trump's mistakes. Let him and Musk gut the government. Especially if it's Social Security being gutted, that could have a major impact on actual voters. 

The reality is that the only lever Democrats have right now is that what Trump is doing is illegal and - as Jamelle Bouie so concisely puts it - anti-constitutional and the courts largely agree. They can do nothing in the Senate and less than nothing in the House.  In fundamental ways, they are waiting for Trump and Musk to crash the government in ways that even those low information voters can't ignore. Trump thinks he can re-write reality, but he can't. The worry has to be that Trump somehow makes things bad but not so bad that you get a massive revolt from the electorate in 2026. 

That, unfortunately, is not a proactive plan. The Bernie/AOC rallies and the empty chair townhalls are a nice performative step, but they don't yet reach the level of a plan.

As Maine Goes

 Richardson makes the connection between Maine governor, Janet Mills, and the Senator from Maine, Margaret Chase Smith, who stood up to Joe McCarthy.  New England women are not prone to taking much shit, a tradition that stretches back to Anne Hutchinson. Mills refuses to abandon civil rights protections for transgender students in the face of Trump's bullying. She famously said to his face, "See you in court."

Trump's track record in court isn't good, and Mills is an attorney whereas Trump is a reality TV star turned wannabe dictator. The real significance is that Mills called Trump on his bullshit to his face. Of course, Trump has threatened and started to anti-constitutionally withhold federal monies from Maine. That question - whether a president can withhold money - should probably be fast-tracked to Supreme Court. If the Assembly of Religious Experts decides that his Highness Donald Trump can target states that have disagreements with him, then the experiment in federalism is over and we should just go ahead and break up the country. It would be that serious.

Trump, as we well know by now, is a bully. Bullies cannot survive defeats. Dominance is their primary currency, and when they lose that, they lose their hold over people. Maine - in fact I would hope the rest of New England would follow suit - needs to take the lead in determining whether we have a federal republic or a monarchy. 

Reality Bites

 Richardson references something that has been kicking around my brain a lot since the initiation of Project 2025 on January 20th. Back around 2004, there was a famous article interviewing a Bush Administration figure talking about the "reality based community" whereas they were "creating their own reality" through their actions.

I don't think we need a primer on how that ended in Iraq and Afghanistan. How that ended in the housing market.

The obvious parallel is the speed and mania of the assault on the basic functions of government. Beginning from a place of deep misunderstanding - namely that you can run government "like a business" - the Muskenjugend have been taking Milei's chainsaw to really important government agencies without first coming to understand what the do or how they do it. 

"Efficiency gains" is corporate-speak for laying people off, but that only works if you are providing a consumer good and automation has reached a point where it can replace workers. The problem is that government is not providing consumer goods, they are providing public goods. There might be, ideally, a moment if we survive all this where some of the technological efficiencies allow for smoother operations. However, government agencies have access to all sorts of sensitive information, and information can be hacked, especially if you are "moving fast and breaking things".

Trump and Musk - two megalomaniacs - believe that they can create their own reality. Ironically, Trump himself is a captive of the reality beamed into his tiny little brain by Faux and NewsMax. Trump believes that because he says something, usually something stupid like the Canada or Greenland bullshit, and then it gets repeated by the craven courtiers on the TeeVee, then suddenly "people are saying" and it becomes real. The feedback loop is insane here.

Reality, though, tends to get the last word. The Bush Administration was unable to create its own reality. In fact, early in 2005, Bush - with his mandate - attempted a privatization scheme with Social Security. His popularity plummeted. That August, Katrina hit New Orleans and his popularity never recovered. In 2006, Democrats won the House. In 2008, Obama won the highest share of the popular votes since 1988 (52.9%).

Someone on the Socials asked what it would take for Trumpists to abandon him. Most commenters said nothing could shake his grip on them, and for the true members of Cult 45, that's true. The people who cross state lines to go to one of his rallies are never abandoning him. But there are tens of millions of Americans who voted for him, because they were Republicans or because they wanted to "run America like a business" or they hated whatever woke is. 

If - or rather when - reality has its say, that contract could shatter. If Social Security checks don't come out (and some Trump officials seem to be laying the groundwork for that eventuality) that will be a huge event in the lives of a lot of people who voted for Trump, because they wanted a business man in charge. When school districts run out of money because the Department of Education is dysfunctional, that will have an impact on people.

Hubris is the sin of excessive pride, arrogant belief in one's equality with the gods. I can't think of a better word to describe those running our government right now. 

Today In Non-Malign Developments

 Paul Krugman has been in Brussels and suggests that Europe might be awakening as a Superpower. The basic dynamic for decades has been that the US was a Hyperpower, while China and the EU were "poles" around which global dynamics revolved. Russia, India and to a lesser degree countries like Australia, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Turkey and Nigeria all put themselves forward as regional powers. 

Trump's foreign policy is an abdication of 80 years of American leadership on global security. His "thinking" is that America is getting ripped off by insuring global security, whereas every other president since FDR has seen this as both an American value and something that accrues to the long term benefit of the US.

From 1945-1993, the world was seen as a bipolar world in international relations. The two poles were Washington and Moscow. For a while, theorists spoke of a unipolar world after the fall of the Soviet Union. After the US shit the bed in Iraq combined with the rise of China led many to suggest a new pole was emerging in Beijing. If, indeed, Europe rises as a pole, that has ramifications for the world. Hopefully, after Trump, the US and EU can go back to being allies, though they will be understandably wary of relying on us.

A unified Europe capable of sticking up for itself might actually be a good and healthy development in the near term, as a counterweight to Trump and Putin's malevolence.

Popcorn Time

 Wyoming Congresswoman and George Santos Cosplay Enthusiast, Harriet Hageman, managed to beat Liz Cheney, a scion of Wyoming's most important politician, Torture Maven, Dick Cheney. She held a townhall - which is really not a thing Republicans are doing anymore - and was basically booed off stage.

I continue to vacillate over Democratic capitulation on the shutdown vote. I still can't quite see how shutting down the government stops Elon Musk from shutting down the government.

However, it really does seem that Musk and DOGE are increasingly becoming a millstone around the necks of the GOP. A state like Wyoming prides itself on its rugged frontier individualism, but the reality is their economy is propped up by all sorts of Federal spending, including agricultural subsidies, national parks and mineral exploitation of federal lands. The budgetary slasher film that Musk is filming in DC is going to gut places like Wyoming, if it's allowed to continue.

In 2009, the Obama folks thought they had a handle on the recovery from the 2008 crash, but they spent too little and focused too much on aiding institutions and not individuals. The resulting anger was the Tea Party that swamped the elections of 2010. At the time, I think I was dismissive of the protests and anger that showed up at townhalls from 2009-2010. Like Republicans today, I assumed it was people already hostile to Democrats.

We can't forget that the Trumpenreich is full of both terrible and incompetent people. Both of which should come and bite them in the ass, if we can have free and fair elections in 2026.

Full Of Sound And Fury And Signifying Nothing

 There's an interesting idea embedded in this post that a lot of what the Trumpists are doing is just creating the illusion of doing. Apparently Trump signed another one of his Executive Orders to close the Department of Education, but it stands almost zero chance of passing even the most cursory of judicial scrutiny, and even most Republicans in Congress are going to be reluctant to tank that much spending in their home states and districts. The point is not that they are playing twelve-dimensional chess, but that they are basically "playing government on the TeeVee."

These are malevolent people, and the bloated orange carcass at the head of the organizational chart is as malevolent as any of them, but they have energy and he is old and feeble. The minions know though that Trump gets 99% of his information from the TeeVee, because he can't or won't read. He's monumentally uncurious about being accurate, he just wants his prejudices to be comforted. His lack of interest in actual facts makes Dubya Bush look like Archimedes by comparison. His economic "policies" - for instance - are supported by arguments that should not be taken serious as economic arguments. 

If you want to stay in the good graces of the Mad King, then you do stuff on the TeeVee that will look good to him. If NewsMax and Faux say we are eliminating the Department of Education via Executive Order, that THAT'S what important - even more so than actually closing it down. In fact, when the Courts rule that, no, the President cannot eliminate a Congressionally created department, that just gives Trump someone else to fulminate against. 

Richardson lays out the newest babbling nonsense on Faux News about impeaching judges that disagree with Trump. Her point is that Trump's lawyers at the DOJ are basically arguing that Trump is a King who can determine who to deport without a hearing. This contradicts the law. Again, as Bouie described it, this is not unconstitutional, it is anti-constitutional. This is obviously incredibly disturbing on its face, but it's also, ya know, bullshit. Even John Roberts is pushing back in the press, which is a very rare thing for a Chief Justice to do.

However, the argument that Trump is a King is not really intended to be legally correct; it obviously isn't. It will, however, play very well with on Trump's TeeVee, as he gobble down hamburdlers and falls asleep in the blue light of Faux and NewsMax's endless stream of gibbering rage monkeys.

Here's the catch: If this is all for the TeeVee, then we actually aren't in as much danger as we think. Trump's anti-constitutional power grab will fail, because it has all the heft and intellectual power of a 4Chan post. We cannot, however, assume that it will fail. We have to act as if these really are serious people making serious arguments, because if we are wrong about it being just MacBeth's "sound and fury" then we are talking about the end of the United States as we know it.