Surrender

 Richardson lays out - in her usual concise and clear way - the ways in which Donald Trump is surrendering America's ideal to the Kremlin. As I've said here before, the firing of Black people and women, the corruption, the degradation of public service and public services: all of these are fixable with time. We've had a Gilded Age government before, and we changed it. The damage done to America's standing in the world is largely irreversible. The repercussions of "but muh eggs" will echo for decades through global affairs. The world is less safe, because American bypassed a strong woman for a Strong Man.

All of this gibes with Rauch's description of Trump as a patrimonialist. He hates Ukraine, because Zelensky won't bend the knee, because his first impeachment was over his shakedown of Ukraine in defiance of Congress. He loves Putin, because Putin is a fellow patrimonial leader. Game recognizes game.

What is fascinating is that almost every single measure that Trump is taking makes us weaker as a country. Abandoning or alienating alliances; embracing fraud as a governing practice; selling out our government to the Musk Melon. This is the great irony of Strongman politics: it makes a country weaker. 

I have high hopes that Democrats win the House in 2026. Hell, I have slim hopes they win a few special elections and win control before then. It would be the beginning of checking Trump's depredations in domestic policy. However, even if Democrats win control of both houses in 2026, there are far fewer ways to influence foreign policy from Capitol Hill.

I will never forgive the cruel, the callous and the indifferent who foisted the very worst American on us. Twice. 

A Million Times This

 I've been saying that Trumpistan is patrimonialism since 2017. Now the Cool Kids are catching on. 

Read it, it's spot on. Plus, you got some Max Weber love.

Here's a taste: 

In its governmental guise, patrimonialism is distinguished by running the state as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business. It can be found in many countries, but its main contemporary exponent—at least until January 20, 2025—has been Vladimir Putin. In the first portion of his rule, he ran the Russian state as a personal racket. State bureaucracies and private companies continued to operate, but the real governing principle was Stay on Vladimir Vladimirovich’s good side … or else.

And Rauch makes an important point:

Patrimonialism’s antithesis is not democracy; it is bureaucracy, or, more precisely, bureaucratic proceduralism. Classic authoritarianism—the sort of system seen in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—is often heavily bureaucratized. When authoritarians take power, they consolidate their rule by creating structures such as secret police, propaganda agencies, special military units, and politburos. They legitimate their power with legal codes and constitutions. Orwell understood the bureaucratic aspect of classic authoritarianism; in 1984, Oceania’s ministries of Truth (propaganda), Peace (war), and Love (state security) are the regime’s most characteristic (and terrifying) features.

Ballast

 There has been - predictably and understandably - a lot of screams of "DO SOMETHING" since Trump took office and began to take Musk's chainsaw to governance and trying to recreate Jim Crow racial norms. Some of this, naturally, is directed at Democrats whom people expect to oppose as an opposition party. Several Democrats - including high ranking ones - are uncomfortable being an opposition party; they want to be a governing party. 

As we are seeing from townhalls and phone calls, voters are also directing their ire at Republicans. Since Republicans control the White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, that seems like a decent place to focus one's anger. 

At the moment, the only group to really successfully oppose Trump have been the Courts, and there is some question as to how tenable that is, if Trump directs the Executive Branch to ignore court rulings.

Ideally, we get to a place where public sentiment turns so strongly against Trump and Musk that GOP members of Congress remember that they swore an oath to the Constitution and not Trump. OK, stop laughing.

Still, the complaints about our institutions moving to slowly to counteract Trump misses the point. They are supposed to move slowly. The whole point of Project 2025 was that by 2026 the institutions would catch up and elections would be held. They had to "move fast and break things" because eventually those institutions swing around, like a massive container ship. 

Institutions are supposed to be sclerotic. It's their superpower. Musk's desire to turn the Federal government into a lean, tech company is fundamentally misguided as to what government actually is. Our institutions are designed to thwart tyranny and they do that by being immovable. That's really frustrating when you are trying to create a new health care program, but these are the moments when the sheer mass of the government works in your favor.

On The Other Hand...

 My continued take is "things are really bad, we have bad and stupid people running the government and things will remain stupid and bad for at least the next couple of years, but we are not actually undergoing a fascist revolution."

Then Trump goes and purges the military of its top leadership.

Richardson frames this as a Friday night news dump, and it is, but there was more news on Friday. Quite a few court orders and rulings came out against Musk and Trump's actions. These were probably not consciously paired, but they present an interesting contrast. The courts will, I believe, hold. The reason is that Musk and Trump's actions are just so nakedly illegal and unconstitutional that you simply can't squint your way to ruling for him. His actions cartoonishly assault the fabric of the Constitution.

The military has also been a place where Trump has said he wants more loyalty. Trump - who never served - wanted soldiers to follow illegal orders. Now Musk - who never served - and Hegseth - who barely served - want to create some sort of Praetorian Guard to enforce the Emperor's will.

I'm skeptical that this will work. However, it can do enormous damage to America as they try it. 

Yup

 I don't agree with Erik Loomis on much, but I agree with him here. Trump himself is not a fascist, though I do think quite a few of the people around him are. He pines for the Gilded Age. He fetishizes William McKinley for some absurd reason. McKinley was the capstone of the long string of anonymous Ohioans to pass through the Oval Office (OK, Harding, but still). 

And here why this is an important distinction: the Gilded Age ended. It ended with two decades of reform that began the process of turning America into a more just place. That process is not linear, these four years will suck.

But they will end, just like the Gilded Age did.

The Worm Is Turning

 GOP members are being confronted at Town Halls even in deeply Red districts.

The operative question is whether they will listen or just stop holding town halls.

One of the reason so many of us were despondent after the election was that 2016 was a fluke of the Electoral College, but 2024 he somehow won a plurality of the vote. For people who pay attention to the news, who can tell you what Project 2025 is, who understand the 34 felony convictions, Trump's election  was a betrayal of American ideals by the American voter. Our fellow citizens decided to hand power to That Guy. 

My feeling has always been that the combination of low information voter, general anti-incumbent mood globally, and the latent, unexamined misogyny of the American voter led to Trump's victory. What we are seeing in a lot of very Red districts is that Federal programs are actually pretty popular - in fact, especially in Red districts. This is why Republicans have always run on antigovernment grievance but never actually cut the size of the government in radical ways. If you're one of these Congresscritters from a rural district you've been fulminating about "foreign aid giveaways" for decades, but you haven't actually cut USAID, because USAID buys food from your constituents.

If you want a nice summary of Trump's falling approval ratings and Musk's toxic personality, check out Richardson.

Big Bad Gubmint is a handy boogeyman to stand in for racial prejudice. Farm subsidies are fine, but SNAP and school lunches are not, despite the fact that they are literally two sides of the same coin, and despite the fact that those benefits flow to poorer, redder districts and states.

As Josh Marshall noted, Elon Musk is both unpopular and unhinged. He's a ketamine-addled billionaire at a time when literally no one likes billionaires. He's slashing indiscriminately and recklessly through important programs.  However, he's not Trump. His mad antics have created an avenue for soft Trump supporters to move away from Trump and the GOP. "I'm angry at Musk but disappointed in Trump" is the first step towards "I am voting for Democrats in 2026 to rein this madness in."

Let The Good Times Toll

 Both Krugman and HCR establish a philosophical premise that this space has made before: We don't know how good we've got it - historically speaking. Nostalgia is a lazy intellectual practice; it lacks rigorous examination of actual evidence. My youth was spent in a time of ubiquitous cigarette smoke, leaded gasoline, acid rain, stagflation followed by the misery of Reaganomics. The world was undeniably less kind, a fact that has enraged MAGAts.

The other night I was re-watching Broadcast News and it was fascinating to see the same criticisms of new media being made in 1987 as were being made by Network in 1976 as are being made today. We imagine some past where things were better because we naturally forget the mundane and tedious problems that filled our waking day.

Krugman and Richardson note that we forget the hard lessons of the past. Krugman talks about the Minksy Cycle of "irrational exuberance" that leads to financial crises. Basically, we emerged from 2008 sobered by the vulnerability and recklessness of Wall Street and so we put in place reforms and Wall Street itself sobered up. As the memory of that moment fades, a new generation of reckless finance bros will push the envelope of what is prudent or even ethical. You then get a bubble and institutional FOMO. 

I was watching Dumb Money, the movie about the GameStop stock bubble, and what struck me was that the movie had a broad populist message about how hedge fund guys suck. That is true. They do suck, especially the vulture capitalists who come in a destroy companies for profit. At the same time, GameStop was a bad company, and some of those who speculated on it got burned for reasons that were incredibly preventable.

Richardson applies this lesson to the "postwar liberal order" and even vaccines that MAGA appears hellbent on destroying. We have benefitted for so long from being the guarantor of Pax Americana that we don't even have living memories of the belligerent chaos that preceded it. We take herd immunity for granted because we don't remember measles or, Dog forbid, polio.

Essentially comfortable times - but times we perceive as "bad" - means that we can elect a reality TV star and then re-elect him after his 34 felony convictions. We become an unserious people. We invest in GameStop "stonks". We throw tantrums over public health measures. We spit and sputter over putting pronouns in our email signatures. 

Reality, however, gets the last word. Jamelle Bouie said something along the lines of "Our public health decisions appear to be being made by sentient salmonella and measles viruses." Bird flu doesn't care if you hide the true data on its spread. Bird flu doesn't care about anything. It's a virus; it just wants to replicate.  Markets will not ignore the crazed worthlessness of crypto forever. 

In the end, hollowing out our governing institutions will come with a reckoning, and perhaps then a few generations will learn the lessons of hard times.

Broken

 Despite the farrago of dreadful headlines of Musk's micro-bros slashing and burning the administrative state in an orgy of incompetence and vindictiveness, I think that history suggests that we will see a backlash. If - as I suspect - Musk and Trump's corruption renders an economic reckoning inevitable, then Democrats will return to power and be able to undo some of the worst excesses of Project 2025. That is the cycle of history.

What Trump will break beyond the ability of a change in government to repair is America's standing in the world. HCR lays out the extraordinary ways that Trump is breaking the US-led postwar order. He is actively and enthusiastically siding with those, like Putin, who want to destroy America's place in the world. 

After World War II, America was incredibly powerful. It possessed nuclear weapons, it had a two-ocean navy and the world's premier air forces. It's economy was booming while other countries' lay in ruin. At that moment, America engineered a global order based on what are known as liberal values (not to be confused with domestic liberal values). The United Nations, NATO, the Marshall Plan...America invested in creating a safer world - or at least a safer Europe. Since 1945, interstate wars have fallen (albeit they were replaced by intrastate wars that were equally horrific). A rough peace between Great Powers has held, in large part because the US has proven to be - believe it or not - a largely benign hegemon. This, by the way, is why the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was so damaging to the global order. 

Trump tried to unravel 80 years of peace during his first term, but was largely checked by people like Kelly, Mattis and others. Those constraints are gone and now we have Trump's most idiotic and selfish instincts infusing our foreign policy.

And he won a plurality of the vote.

Europe cannot rely on America ever again. Yes, I think a Democrat gets elected in 2028, because I do think we will have elections. Europe, however, can never look at America the same way. They'd be fools to.

America has been the most powerful country on earth since 1945, at least in part because other countries found it acceptable to acquiesce to that pre-eminence. 

Trump has killed that presumption forever. 

Morons

 HCR notes some of the ongoing if disorganized pushback against DOGE and catalogs some of their many abuses. She has described her writing as an attempt to create a primary source for future historians, which often makes it a nice resource. 

Anyway, there's a lot of evidence out there of DOGE just randomly gutting agencies without the legal authority to do so. As in, what they are doing are crimes. We know, however, that Trump's DOJ won't prosecute these crimes, and the tricky part if how to enforce civil decisions against the will of an illegal, unaccountable executive. 

Josh Marshall pushed a theory that I thought was interesting. The Muskenjugend or "microbros" who are at the heart of Musk's assault on a functioning government and are hoovering up data illegally are all quite young. Marshall posits that the reason Musk is relying on a bunch of zygotes is that older, more experienced people are very reticent to engage in rank lawlessness. He suggests that more experienced people are probably engaging in the following calculus:

But back in the real world those are still laws. And if you’ve got a career and a family and a mortgage, maybe you say you believe those theories but that’s still not the same as being perfectly happy to just walk into these places and just do absolutely whatever Elon tells you to do. Because sure Trump has your back today. But tomorrow is a long time. And there are state courts and prosecutors too and bar associations and civil suits. Even if you assume a future administration that is laggard in pressing legal consequences like the last one, those things still create headaches. Lawyers cost money. These are bad acts you’d probably prefer someone else do, especially if they’re willing.

I think that's right. Or to put it another way: Fascists are always idiots. Not drool on yourself, don't know what 2+2 type of idiots, but idiots nonetheless. They simply don't know what they don't know. Democratic liberalism is a process of engaging with the messiness of the world. It's malleable; it's means  different things at different times; it's receptive to feedback. Fascism is adult toddlerhood: a perpetual tantrum masquerading as strength. 

In the end, I do think this is what saves us. They can't even file a proper court motion, and as career prosecutors and civil servants quit, to be replaced by Trump loyalists, those loyalists will be unable to adapt to changing conditions. I mean, it will suck, but it won't be permanent.

This Could Be The Fulcrum

 Der Muskenjugend have infiltrated the Social Security Administration. That could be the weak spot in their plans to radically downsize the government. The existing downsizing could take months or even years to be felt by the public at large -  though the number of air traffic incidents could claim their attention - but if seniors miss a Social Security check, that could be huge.

Yglesias's big blind spot when writing about Trump is that he assumes that policy is the reason why Democrats lost. It seems possible to me that the reason Democrats lost is that America isn't ready for a female president, and that includes quite a lot of female voters. However, his point that Trump moved away from the economic platform of Paul Ryan is probably sound. Part of that was not touching Senior Entitlements. Elon Musk, being in many ways an idiot, has no such compunctions. 

I'd hate to see the misery that would be caused by people missing crucial checks, but as I've said repeatedly, America has fucked around and they are going to have to find out.

"The Arrogance Is Staggering"

 HCR takes on JD Vance's bomb throwing speech in Munich, where the US basically walked away from 80 years of support for global liberal institutions. She provided the following quote:

Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas posted: “There is now total clarity, no matter how unimaginable things might seem. And they amount to this: The U.S. government has been taken over by a clique of extremists who have embarked on a process of regime change in the world’s oldest democracy…. The arrogance on display is staggering. They think their actions will increase U.S. power, but they are in fact wrecking their own country and, in the process everyone else.”

He continued: “The only hope lies in the sheer enormity of the threat: it might awake us out of our slumber before it is too late.”

This is the conundrum faced by our putative allies. Trump is constitutionally barred from re-election, and he's old and will die one day. The movement that has emerged around him has embraced a truly awful set of policies both domestically and internationally. I was texting with friends last night about whether this was Nazi Germany in 1933. I thought it wasn't. I think MAGA wants to drag us back to 1900. They want a tiny government that serves only the wealthy; they want Jim Crow and the suppression of minority rights; they want an America that bullies its neighbors.

A lot of that can be undone by subsequent governments - with the obvious caveat that the most extreme elements around Trump have no intention of letting democracy thwart their plans. Will we have elections of real consequence? I think so, but I cannot say for certain.

The damage done to America's international standing, however, might never be undone. Europe and our allies in Asia should rightly call into question the sanity of American electoral politics. Trump 1.0 was a fluke; Trump 2.0 was not. A plurality of Americans elected a felon, a gibbering moron, a man incapable of growing into the importance of the office. 

I don't think, despite his sweaty neediness, that JD Vance can harness that same cultish following that Trump has. I don't know if anyone can.

But if I'm Europe, I can't take that chance. Not with the Russian bear being aggressive as it has turned out to be. 

Heightening The Contradictions

 Invaluable chronicler of Trumpistan, Heather Cox Richardson, has a post about what might be called the FDR Consensus. The basic idea was a fundamental shift in the role of the government in people's lives. Prior to FDR, the prevailing philosophy of government was expressed by Grover Cleveland, when he said that while the people should support the government, the government should not support the people. This headed off calls for a robust safety net and government regulations to improve the lives of normal Americans.

The Reagan Revolution was a backlash against "Big Government" that had its roots in racial resentment over the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of the 1960s. Broad macroeconomic trends created by welfare spending, the Vietnam war and rising energy costs meant that the '70s saw inflation that was far, far worse than what we have recently experienced. This - combined with the foreign policy embarrassments in Vietnam, Iran and elsewhere - led to a palpable sense of American decline, one might even say American Carnage. It often feels like Donald Trump wee lizard brain is stuck in the dystopia of 1970s New York.

The point being that Reagan's election was caused by a lot of things, but mostly a reaction to the perceived failures of the New Deal/Great Society state. In fact, only a modest portion of the problem was caused by the expansive welfare state, the Reagan forces interpreted his victories as mandate to crush that New Deal state. However, once in Washington, the New Deal/Great Society state proved more popular than they had presumed. 

Destroying it via legislation has always been a non-starter.

Which brings us to President Elon Musk and King Donald. Trump has always understood that the fanaticism present in the Paul Ryan budgets was politically toxic. As raving liberal Dwight Eisenhower once said, the political party that destroys Social Security would cease to exist.

What Musk is doing via his coup is destroying that state via illegal executive actions, illegal firings and illegal impounding of funds. 

The eventual outcome of this will be a backlash to the backlash, as Red Staters realize that Big Government actually helps them quite a bit. In the meanwhile, people will die from preventable diseases, perhaps from breaches in national security. A recession seems inevitable if Trump and Musk continue down the road they are on. People die from recessions.

Maybe then Americans will realize that the presidency is not fit for a reality TV show and his billionaire puppet master.

Blowing Up NATO

 JD Vance, sycophant to the unholy union of Opus Dei and the Broligarchy, went to Europe and shit all over the concept of the NATO alliance. Especially rich is lecturing Europe on a retreat from liberal values, as his party destroys the fabric of liberal governance at home and abroad.

The destruction or even weakening of NATO was always one of the real perils of returning Trump to the White House. He has contempt for the very concept of partnership. The idea of mutually beneficial arrangements are simply foreign to his tiny little lizard brain.

NATO is a treaty obligation. That gives it the full force and power of the Constitution. However, I think we have seen how much the current GOP values the Constitution.

Making Cancer Great Again

 It is difficult to plumb the depth of the MAGAt mind, but can anyone explain why they are trying to wipe out cancer research?

I suppose this is the logical endpoint of Grover Norquist's lifelong quest to "shrink government down to the size where you can drown it in a bathtub." Still, the idea that we can return to a 19th century government is just manifestly dumb and self-defeating, it beggars belief.

Remove Eric Adams

 Josh Marshall is, as usual, spot on with his analysis of the Eric Adams Saga. Adams deserved his date in court to fight the copious evidence of his wrongdoing. Trump's quid pro quo deal to subvert justice in return for compliance makes that argument moot. He should be removed from office.

The problem is that the New York Democratic Party in general and Kathy Hochul in specific are the lowest replacement level Democratic Party in the country. That is to say, that if you were to void every single elected Democrat at the state and local level and replace them with a random assortment of Democratic officials from anywhere else, you would see a major improvement. Hell, Adams himself is a great example of the rot at the heart of the New York Dems. As for Hochul, the only reason she's governor is because Cuomo had to resign in disgrace. She has since done nothing to suggest she is equal to the moment - from botching a Dem gerrymander that would have Democrats in control of the House right now to her handling of the Adams situation.

There are a few exceptions - Gillibrand, Nadler and AOC spring to mind. Which is why I'd like to see AOC, in particular, run for governor and clean house in Albany. If she really is the rising star of the party, she needs to prove she's more than just one of its best messengers, but that she can also do hard governance.

New York needs it.