Autocratic Sycophancy

 Krugman continues to lay out a theme he started talking about yesterday: Trump's break with reality. The crux of the argument:

Does Trump actually believe that (the protests were small)? I suspect that he does. In the grip of delusion, a powerful person will dismiss and destroy anything that challenges their self-aggrandizing alternate reality. This explains why there is no one in Trump’s inner circle who dares to tell him that his poll numbers are, indeed, very bad; or that it’s a bad look to commute George Santos’ prison sentence for fraud and identity theft. When people try to tell him things he doesn’t want to hear, he gets angry.

I would even take this a step further. The reason why democracies succeed in the long run is that you cannot remain in an autocratic bubble when you have to face the voters. You have to adjust and explain your actions. Trump feels no such compunction. He continues to do things that are self-evidently damaging to the United States because he thinks that eventually - or even right now - he will be proven right. It's one thing to believe that tariffs will make us richer by 2028, but Trump may very well believe that they are making is richer today. Who, exactly, is going to tell him differently?

I still believe that the great mass of Americans do not want to slide into Trump's form of authoritarianism. I am up in the air as to whether we have the tools to prevent it, but I think we generally prize our democracy. If Trump retreats further into his narcissistic delusions and he has no one around him to correct those delusions, I would guess that this will further erode him standing even with some of the people who voted for him.

Why "No Kings" Matters

 The protests were large and peaceful, despite assertions by Republicans that they were going to be lawless and small. Trump even said on Saturday that they were pathetic and small, despite obvious photographic evidence to the contrary.

What's more, as Richardson shows, the GOP actually leaned into the monarchical aspects of Trump's rule. They posted some of their AI slop videos of Trump placing a crown on his head and flying a jet over American cities and dropping literal shit on people. This is simply crazy behavior from a party that has to contend in elections (raising the prospect that they have no intention of allowing elections to proceed fairly).

Krugman makes a good point about all this by referencing the concept of "flattery inflation" that builds up around autocrats. Here's the quote from Henry Farrell:

How do you show your loyalty? By paying the costs of humiliation. The more grotesquely over the top your praise, the more credible it is as a signal of support for Dear Leader.

Apparatchiks’ willingness to degrade themselves will hurt their reputation with other people. But for exactly that reason, it serves as proof of loyalty to the one man who counts, Donald Trump. The more appalling the self-abasement, the more effectively it will serve this purpose.

That dynamic explains a lot of the behavior around Trump. The bigger the lie you are willing to tell in his service, the more loyal you are. Since loyalty overrides competence, we get a messaging team that shows Trump literally shitting on Americans. That is not - or at least should not be - a very good message. Democrats get slagged for saying things like "Why don't rural Americans vote for their economic self-interest?" and then Fox runs a million hours of content about how Democrats are calling rural voters dumb. Trump depicts himself shitting on people and...shrugs.

However, this is exactly why these protests might actually matter. Trump and his voters exist in what Krugman calls "bubble autocracy" in which almost every Republican and much of the media extol his power and greatness. Mockery - especially the mockery by millions of Americans - helps puncture that myth. Trump is not all powerful - not yet. Arresting the slide into autocracy has to begin with eroding the lies that infect our Republic and that are coming from the White House. The visuals of protest are the way to start.

Personalist Foreign Policy

 Trump is an 80 year old man who spent his whole life running a closely held company where he made personal relationships the key to his branding exercises that made him his money. As President, he has basically extended that worldview to his foreign policy. "Are you my 'friend' and can we work together in a way that will ultimately benefit me?" He is not capable of learning a new trick.

This led him to negotiate the temporary cease fire in Gaza that has - unsurprisingly - already broken down. His relationship with the Gulf States allowed him to pressure Hamas to give up the hostages, but Hamas is not ready to cede Israel's right to exist or certainly to rule Gaza and Israel still wants to kill every last member of Hamas. Since Trump has no personalist relationship with Hamas, there is no way to keep them in line and Israel won't let Hamas sneeze without bombing a refugee camp. 

The credulity with which the news media treated this "peace deal" was disgusting.

Now, we have Martin Longman laying out the same dynamic in the Caribbean. As he notes, Trump seems to be inching us towards war with Venezuela based on trumped up (ahem) charges that Maduro is in league with Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan narco-gang. At the same time, it seems pretty clear that Trump is fine with the actual close relationship that his friend Bukele has with the Salvadoran narco-gang MS13. 

It doesn't matter which gang is more deadly or more responsible for drug trafficking. All of that is noise. What matters is that Bukele has cultivated Trump and Maduro hasn't (or more likely can't). You can also see this dynamic with the bailout for Javier Milei. 

Put another way: The United States no longer conducts foreign policy on the basis of principles or long term strategic needs; it conducts foreign policy based on how well a foreign head of state kisses Trump's diapered ass. This presents real problems for global stability. We have seen this for quite some time with Trump's treatment of Ukraine. Zelensky has finally learned to kiss Trump's ass, and that has led to Trump softening his hardline towards Kyiv, but we should be supporting Ukraine because it is a fledgling democracy under assault by an imperial autocratic regime.

Principles matter, because they are fixed and predictable. Trump has no principles beyond personal aggrandizement, so America has no principles beyond what he requires from any given moment or circumstance.

The protests yesterday were great. There was a lot of sentiment about how it was only about 9 months of this shit. The list of degradations by Trump is very, very long. We are already seeing some of his policies create real problems - killing renewable and higher electricity prices; tariffs and deportations leading to inflation; trade wars leading to a collapse in American agricultural exports; personal vindictiveness weaponizing the Justice department against his critics; rampant corruption - both within his family and his administration; forcing media and other conglomerates to kiss the ring or suffer the consequences. The list seems endless.

The reason 7,000,000 Americans took to the streets yesterday (and judging by the reaction of passing cars, many millions more supported them) is that we are seeing the real time effects of having a fucking moron make economic policy. We are seeing what happens when a petty little tyrant has unconstrained access to power.

We haven't yet seen how this personalist foreign policy will play out. There's always a lag with these things as old systems slowly change.

I'm willing to bet that before long, we will blunder into a shooting war.

Cohesiveness

 One of the aspects of Trump's presidencies is the scattershot nature of them. There are a few policies that create the appearance of a throughline, but because there were still adults in the room, his first administration was incoherent. The second one, sadly, is far more coherent.

Still, who exactly is the constituency for pardoning George Santos? 

The constituency for going to war with Venezuela is Florida Republicans - Cuban and Venezuelan - who hate communism and Maduro. It's a bad idea and we shouldn't do it, but I can at least see the point from an ideological and political point of view.

But Santos? As Josh Marshall has noted, the peace deal - whatever it's actually worth in the long run - was possible, because Trump is the same sort of corrupt oligarch as the Gulf monarchies. They just occupy the same wave length.

I guess the reason to pardon Santos is to let all Republicans know that their corruption and lawlessness will be pardoned. Do whatever you like, Trump will pardon you, as long as you're loyal to him.

That's the overriding point of Trump 2.0. The policy cohesiveness from tariffs to Gaza to selective prosecutions is loyalty to Hair Furor.

Off To Protest

 If you can, too, you should.

The only thing we have on our side is growing numbers. In a democracy, that should mean something. We shall see if it does.

Competitive Authoritarianism

 Steady State, a group of former US intelligence and defense officials, has stated that America is moving towards "competitive authoritarianism." In this system, there are elections, but important democratic checks don't exist and power resides almost exclusively in the Executive. Hungary and Türkiye are prime examples of this. 

Perhaps the most important paragraph:

Among the key indicators of democratic decline identified in the report: the expansion of executive power through unilateral decrees and emergency authorities; the politicization of the civil service and federal law enforcement; attempts to erode judicial independence through strategic appointments and “noncompliance” with court rulings or investigations; a weakened and increasingly ineffective Congress; partisan manipulation of electoral systems and administration; and the deliberate undermining of civil society, the press and public trust.

Tell me what's inaccurate about that statement. 

For those of us who care about democracy and America, we have all looked towards the 2026 midterms as the critical moment for discovering (as opposed to deciding) whether of not we still live in a democracy. If elections return a Democratic Congress, then we can still claim to be a democracy. If voters prefer a Democratic Congress, but gerrymandering and the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act returns a Republican House, I can't help but wonder if that's just the end of the line for "America."

In her "Letter" today, Richardson talks about the sentiments of the Revolutionary generation regarding where true power should lie, and they placed it, very consciously, in the Legislative branch. Republicans in Congress have abandoned legislative prerogatives to placate the dictator in the White House. The Supreme Court - not the lower courts - have abandoned all principles to rule randomly in favor of Trump whenever possible. The American "Revolution" is more accurately understood as a secession movement within an imperial system that denied them representative government.

In the decade before the Civil War, Daniel Webster argued that - unlike in 1776 - secession made no geographic sense. The Atlantic separated the colonies from Britain, but as Webster put it, the mountains and rivers all run the wrong direction. Indeed, looking at the electoral map from 2020, trying to map out a country where Biden won more than 50% of the vote creates a very odd map.

From Maine to Virginia would be part of the new country, but we would have to merge with Canada, because Minnesota and Illinois would want in. What to do with the former Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin is a big conundrum. Colorado and New Mexico are Blue, but Arizona is Purple, and that's the bridge to the Pacific Coast.

Drawing those lines would be hard, but I'm not sure why we should persist in the fiction of living in an America that is no longer recognizably American. We do however need to be having these discussions. The SCOTUS and Congressional Republicans cannot think there are no consequences to abandoning democracy.

Orwell

 I've seen Orwell's writing being cited a lot, especially among those intellectual elites over at Lawyers, Guns and Money. His warnings about totalitarianism and authoritarianism feel like they could have been written at a Starbucks in Chicago or Portland. 1984 is not intended as a handbook.

I'm reminded though that Orwell's prophecies about the end of liberal democracy proved inaccurate. To quote another Englishman, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." 

I guess I struggle to reconcile my basic faith in democracy with the seeming acquiescence of so many in the Republican Party to Trump and Miller's absolute contempt for American principles. I still want to believe that we will survive this as a country, but if the SCOTUS really does gut the Voting Rights Act and locks in an extreme form of minority rule, I think we have to consider disunion. 

What's more, I wonder if maybe that's a message that Barrett, Kavanaugh and maybe Gorsuch need to hear. I think they want to be handmaidens at the wedding of plutocracy and Christianity, not pall bearers of the American Republic.

It's Not Just Trump

 As Richardson explains, the Supreme Court - or rather the Republican judges on the Supreme Court - seems about to basically rule the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. Their reason? Basically, the VRA allows for Democrats to win seats in the House from majority Black districts. The science of gerrymandering has become so accurate that Republicans can likely redistrict away most Democratic seats in the South.

We need to keep this in mind, as we watch the destruction of American democracy, that as bad as Trump is, the entire GOP is guilty. The supposedly non-partisan Justices  - including Mr. Balls-And-Strikes himself, John Roberts - are making decisions based solely on what serves the immediate needs of the GOP.

Now, there is the possibility that - if the economy craters or Trump becomes even less popular - Democrats overwhelm these new efforts to gerrymander them out of power. Diluting Democratic districts can often mean reducing the margins of GOP-leaning districts. However, I'm guessing we are going to see some ridiculous gerrymanders if they go ahead with this plan.

Trump is old and looks to be in terrible physical and mental condition. I'm not THAT worried about him trying to violate the Constitution and run again in 2028. The problem is that he has demonstrated the political expediency of destroying our shared democratic values. The VRA extensions were routinely passed unanimously and signed by Republican presidents. 

We are already seeing the craven capitulation of the Republicans in Congress to Trump. But is it capitulation if they already agree with him? Trump has no power over the judges of the Supreme Court, but they are going to willingly degrade American democracy - not because they love Trump, but because his authoritarianism appeals to them. 

Much of Trump's fascism is aesthetic and performative. The brutality of an ICE raid is all captured for videos for Fox. What the SCOTUS is doing is deeply structural, and therefore potentially almost permanent.

The Peace President

 Trump's daily assault on the Constitution is...a lot. It can be hard to keep up with. Let's not let all the domestic stuff distract us from the fact that Trump is committing war crimes in the Caribbean. As Campos notes, even if these people were drug runners, you cannot simply vaporize people who are not an active threat to life and limb. This is extrajudicial murder even if there was evidence of criminality. As of now, Trump has produced exactly zero evidence to corroborate his claims.

The odds are that Stephen Miller is behind this to try and scare the shit out of anyone from South America to come anywhere near the US. Or maybe Trump is pissed that a Venezuelan got his precious Nobel Peace Prize. Hey, Donnie. Killing people without due process isn't going to get you a Nobel Prize.

Meanwhile, his signal achievement - the one every Fox News and Congressional fluffer has gotten on their knees to polish his tiny knob - seems to already be falling apart. The Gaza peace deal was basically the deal Biden had on the table last fall. Trump and Netanyahu scuttled it, so that the IDF could kill more Palestinians, Iranians and maybe a few Qataris. The hostage deal is good, the ceasefire will hopefully alleviate suffering in Gaza. But this is not "solved" because Likud will not let a Palestinian state exist and Palestinians will not stop fighting to get one.

One of the things that drives me craziest is how Trump says something, and the press corpse reports it as somehow being true. "Trump announces peace deal" or "Trump strikes trade deal". 

No.

Stop it.

He's a liar and an idiot. He's likely senile.

Trump And Crypto

 Krugman looks at why Bitcoin fell with the announcement of Trump's transitory tariffs on China. His argument - and of course it's a good one - is that Trump is so crypto friendly that it's tied to his political fortunes.  If you think Trump will go from triumph to triumph, then crypto friendly policies will continue. If he punches himself in the dick with terrible tariffs, then crypto will suffer.

It's worth reiterating that crypto is not a currency, it's a wildly speculative security. 

Because its primary functions are for drug trade, money laundering and bribes, it makes sense that Trump would support it. Those last two are huge for him. 

It also feels to me like the crypto and AI bubbles are linked. If one bursts, the other will, too.

I just don't have enough confidence to short the damned stuff, because in a basically fraudulent system, this could teeter along for another year.

"Happy" Columbus Day

 Richardson examines Trump's inevitable decision to laud Christopher Columbus. Venerating Columbus arose from a set of circumstances in the late 19th and mid 20th century that Richardson lays out clearly (as she always does). Columbus himself has been subject to actual rigorous historical examination in the last few decades and his reputation has been divorced from the myths that were largely woven by Italian immigrants wanting to cement their place in American society.

Trump - or the fascist minion who wrote the proclamation - calls Columbus "an American hero." That's odd. Columbus was an Italian, sailing for Spain, who never set foot in what is now the United States. Sure, there's the extolling of Columbus' faith, which leaves out the atrocities Columbus visited upon the Taino people in the name of his faith. Going further, Spanish priests sent to the New World on Columbus' later voyages decried his brutal treatment of Natives and Spaniards alike. The guy was just a brutal tyrant who was convinced of his own rightness and righteousness regardless of empirical evidence.

I wonder why Trump loves him.

Columbus persisted in the delusion that Cuba was Japan and Mexico was China until his death. His arrogance and cruelty made him persona non grata in the Spanish court and he was stripped of his titles, dying in anonymity in Spain. That's not revisionism. That's what his contemporaries thought of him.

The mythology of Columbus came about for political reasons, not historical ones. Most of those reasons were good actually! Italian immigrants DO belong in America. The Klan IS bad! However, those two positions are no longer really in contention the way they were from the 1870s through the 1960s. 

It's is ironic that Trump is lauding a symbol of immigration, but since those immigrants are now considered White I guess that's OK(Italians were not always considered White in the 19th century. We nearly went to war with Italy over the lynching in New Orleans of Italian immigrants.).

The assault on the historical record is very consistent with Trump and Trumpism and fascism though. You had the Pope quote Hannah Arendt recently: 

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist."

That's at the root of Trumpism. An all out attack on the nature of truth, because the actual truth reflects very poorly on him and his rotten project. 

As Maine Goes...

 The Senate campaign in Maine for the 2026 year is a critical one. Maine is a Blue state - though somewhat moderate for New England, in the sense that there are very liberal places and some very conservative places, but the Blue wins out.  Except in the Senate, where Susan Collins has somehow held on to her office, despite being rhetorically out of touch with the national GOP. Collins, like Lisa Murkowski, knows better than to support Trump fully, but also knows the criticisms of him have to be muted.

Collins is up for reelection next fall, and it represents arguably the best chance to flip a Red seat Blue. North Carolina is another opportunity, because Democrats were able to recruit Roy Cooper, the popular former governor. Cooper is 68, but that's practically a spring chicken by Senate standards. Six years of Roy Cooper is an objectively good thing. 

The "Roy Cooper" of Maine would seem to be Janet Mills, the combative governor who famously told Trump, "I'll see you in court." 

Mills is 77. That's five years older than Collins. 

Meanwhile, there's Graham Platner. 

Platner is a 41 year old oyster fisherman and veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. He took some classes at GWU, while bartending at the Tune Inn. If you know the Tune Inn, and you know he volunteered for the Marine Corps, and now he works as an oyster fisherman...I think you get a sense of who this guy is. He's a manly man! Bernie Sanders loves him and he loves Bernie!

Platner is the left wing populist that online leftists in a Brooklyn loft wished they were. He's a legitimate working class guy, whose attacks on oligarchy are heartfelt and personal. He was treated for PTSD from the war and hates the idea of needless military adventurism. 

Here's the thing, though. Fetterman.

Now Fetterman's "heel turn" may have been caused by his stroke. His saying that he would support a Nobel Fucking Peace Prize for Trump at the same time Trump is militarizing the National Guard to occupy American cities is sort of a baseline violation of everything we need from Senate Democrats. The thing is, Fetterman's whole schtick was being the big, oafish-looking guy in a hoodie. Senator Shrek. 

I think Platner's populism is a little more genuine, but I'm not 100% convinced that genuine populism is a good thing. Bernie Sanders knows when to shut up and vote for an imperfect bill, would Platner? If the guy is so wedded to an "us versus them" version of populism, how is he going to interact with Chris Murphy, when they are very far apart on guns? Can he compartmentalize, the way skilled politicians can? Maybe. 

In the end, it will be up to the Democratic primary voters, whether they want the elderly career politician who has shown she can win a statewide race or the uber-outsider who might better capture the anti-establishment fervor so many Americans feel right now. In some ways, I think Platner might be the better candidate, but I also feel like he's exactly the sort of candidate where some social media post  from 2009 surfaces where he drops a racial slur. Of course, there was something similar with Fetterman, and that didn't stop him.

I suppose on one level all that matters is replacing Collins, and if Platner offers the better chance to do that, then we can live with him being a little weird.

Polarization

 It is beyond banal at this point to note that we live in a polarized country in a polarized world. This tends to work both ways, as when one group or issue becomes allied with one side, the other side moves against it. As an example, Netanyahu has tied his political future to Donald Trump, and he has done so at precisely the time when his actions have outraged many liberals. This makes support for Israel a more partisan issue than it has ever been in the past. If/when Democrats regain control of the levers of government, it would not surprise me if military support for a Likud-led Israel evaporates. 

What has been a long standing tradition of cross-party unity foundered on Netanyahu picking a side, and then acting in a way that reinforced that divide. 

Domestically, I think we are beginning to see the same thing with the billionaire class. This story about a tech billionaire who went from being a standard Silicon Valley Democrat to a Trumpist fascist does not seem to be THAT unusual. Because Trump operates under a penumbra of corruption, the idea that the rules are for the little people who can't pay their way out of them is growing. This culture of corruption is highly appealing to Gulf Sheiks and Tech Bros.

What this SHOULD mean is that Democrats need to learn this lesson, too. They have catered to Silicon Valley in order to get large checks for their campaign coffers. Yes, small donors are great, but when a billionaire writes you PAC a massive check, you can relax for a few days before you beat the hustings again. 

For all the talk of the "populist moment" the idea that Donald Trump and Republicans are on the side of the working class is just laughably perverse. The reason they could position themselves there is because Democrats were the party of cultural elites and the power of economic elites seemed less pervasive. Yes, there was the Occupy moment, but that passed. 

Now we have farmers who are going to have to file for bankruptcy because of Trump's trade wars. Now we are paying 50% more for electricity because data centers are sprouting up like spring dandelions. Now we have rural hospitals closing to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.

Democrats have done a great job messaging around the shutdown. Many are linking "tax cuts for billionaires" to the cuts in health insurance benefits. However, for Democrats to really become a majority party in both Houses in 2026, they need to be well-positioned to leverage popular outrage at the very rich. 

Those tech billionaires aren't coming back. They've tasted the honey of corruption and they like it. 

Eat the rich. Break up tech monopolies. Regulate social media. Win fabulous prizes.

Peace Or Pause?

 Did Trump and the various entities around him finally bring the Gaza war to a close? We have to concede he might have, even if the durability of this peace seems doubtful. As Marshall laid out, Trump's uniquely close relationships with both the Gulf State emirs and Netanyahu mean he probably had the right levers to work. Marshall:

“Credit” is a funny word. Do I give Trump credit for this? I’d say this. Because of those relationships, Trump is in a unique position to do this. Only he can force the hands of both groups, to the extent they need to be forced. He can do it. He is doing it. And I’m glad he’s doing it.

That doesn't mean the conflict is over, really. The culminating solution is that there is a Palestinian state. It's actually in the plan, but while Netanyahu might agree to this in Washington, I struggle to see him agreeing in Tel Aviv.

This is a great first step, and it at least ends this episode of the cycle of violence that is self-reinforcing. 

But get back to me in a year.

UPDATE: This also feels important from Robert Farley: The reason we have a peace deal today and not in 2024 or even January of this year is that Israel has largely accomplished its goals. Yes, Trump had latitude that Biden did not, given the above-referenced closeness between Trump and Netanyahu. But Trump also greenlit even great barbarism by the IDF that created the close to total victory for Israel. This agreement is a real capitulation by Hamas, because Gaza has been flattened completely. There is no "Gaza" left. 

Still Winning

 Democrats are winning the messaging and the war for public opinion over the shutdown. People don't trust Republicans on health care, which is why Dems focused on that issue. That, and it's a genuine catastrophe for tens of millions of people of they don't fix this problem.

Victory can lead to victory, which is the entire mindset of Trumpism. It doesn't matter if your policies are actually good, so long as you're perceived as "winning." I think in the long run this is bullshit, but puncturing the perceptions of victory is important. (See the previous post about mocking ICE with inflatable costumes.)

There are some other axes that Democrats can win on, because they gibe with how people already think about the two parties. One is the closeness of billionaires to the GOP. 

There are clips of farmers, especially soy bean farmers, talking with real despair about the current market for their crops. Most of them accurately note that Trump's trade wars are the reason why they can't sell their crop to China. I've been waiting for the Trump bailout of farmers, but so far it's only been hinted at.

We are, however, bailing out Argentine, more specifically techno-libertarian darling Javier Milei. Even worse, it seems pretty obvious that we are doing so primarily to bail out hedge funds that bet on Milei.

As kids starve in Africa, as American farmers file for bankruptcy, Trump and Bessant are bailing out hedge fund guys to the tune of $20,000,000,000. 

I wouldn't run that ad everywhere, but I would smother the farm belt with this. "You can't sell your crops, the local hospital is closing, but we are spending $20 billion to bail out hedge funds." It's not only true, but it's the sort of attack that people are already primed to believe is true.