Dignity Wraiths

 In Trump's first term, Josh Marshall coined the term "dignity wraiths" to describe those creatures who debased themselves to get into Trump's good graces, only to be further humbled and laid low by Trump's essential depravity and cruelty. Lindsay Graham was a good example. I think Bill Cassidy, who was the deciding vote to put that charlatan RFK, Jr. in charge of America's health, is another example. For his trouble, he has earned a primary challenger, boosted by Trump. 

Krugman makes a similar point with regards to the business leaders who have flattered and bribed Trump in order to avoid his wrath and cultivate his support. History has shown that this rarely works out well. Take Maria Corina Machado, who gave away her Nobel Prize, thinking it would move Trump into actually taking over Venezuela. He took it, she looked the fool and Trump is content to commit more piracy in seizing Venezuelan oil tankers.

On this MLK Day, Richardson reminds us that heroes are not perfect people. King himself was a serial philanderer. Heroism is not the same as saintliness. Heroism is meeting a challenge with courage and resolve. America needs more heroes right now. We need people who are in comfortable positions and enjoy great privilege to show half the resolve and courage as the Minnesotans protesting the military occupation of their cities. We need people like Lisa Murkowski to leave the Republican Party instead of knitting her brow and expressing her concern. 

You cannot placate this man. I have a hunch that NATO sending tripwire troops to Greenland will have the needed effect and Trump will not invade that country. They will negotiate some watered down, bullshit deal for minerals or basing rights, Trump will slink away, and his cultists will extol the Art of the Deal.

You cannot negotiate with the howling void at the center of this man's soul, and doing so will only lead to your own living damnation.

Europe's Next Steps

 The EU and NATO leadership is aghast at Trump's latest fetish for annexing Greenland. They should be. It's appalling. 

What should they do? They've sent tripwire forces to Greenland with the clear message that any military action would risk war with European countries. While Rep. Don Bacon has said that this would lead to impeachment, does anyone believe that Republicans would advance articles of impeachment? Or that enough Republicans in the Senate would vote to remove? "These men are coward, Donny."

If Europe cannot rely on Republicans to have a backbone, what should they do? I would say exactly what they are doing and more. Send NATO warships to Nuuk. Be crystal clear what would happen if Trump thinks he can send in some Rangers and Marines and seize Greenland. There are two reasons why this should work and one reason it won't.

The first is that Trump tends to bluster and bully, but then back down in the face of real opposition. TACO or Trump Always Chickens Out was about tariffs, but it's true across different events. He's a bully and bullies tend to back down from a show of strength. I'm sure the sycophants around him and his own preconceptions are telling him that Europe is weak and decadent, effeminate. Demonstrating that you won't be pushed around would garner Trump's respect, not a lethal response.

The second is that Trump is so damned thirsty to get peace prizes and sell himself as a peacemaker, that it seems you could leverage that. He's not going to start a shooting war and credibly claim to be the Peace President. Even he can't tolerate that much cognitive dissonance. Look at Venezuela; he okayed a lightning raid, verbally asserted control of the country, but does not seem to be eager for boots on the ground. This is where the bluster and threats break down. He has competing agendas in being Mr. Peace Prize and Mr. Imperialist and it seems unlikely he would do anything that might lead to American soldiers coming home dead.

The reason why it might not work is that Trump is fucking insane. As in detached from reality. He is surrounded by repellant sociopaths like Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth who are capable of any manner of atrocities. Do you want to wager lives on the predictability of Trump's response?

You see the same dynamic, I think, in Minnesota. Walz has called the National Guard on standby to keep the peace. Trump, I think would back down, but Miller is salivating over an opportunity to escalate things in Minneapolis, and Walz calling out the Guard could be the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act.

It is chaos. It is dangerous. The person most responsible for this is chaotic and dangerous - a doddering old maniac with delusions of grandeur. He is quite unpopular. 

But Kamala Harris had a weird laugh so what are you gonna do?

Misogyny

 I read this article in The Atlantic, and I was struck by this definition of misogyny:

If sexism is based on the belief that men are inherently superior to women, misogyny, Manne writes, especially targets “unbecoming women—traitors to the cause of gender—bad women, and ‘wayward’ ones.”

What do you do with a disrespectful woman, a wayward one? Punish her, dehumanize her as an example everyone can learn from. What do you do with a woman who seeks authority for herself? Remind her of her place. 

The author never mentions Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris, but that's the immediate example I thought of. I hesitated to use the word misogyny, because I doubt that the white women or many of the men who voted for Trump, then Biden, then Trump would have defined themselves that way.

Donald Trump is the personification of sexism and misogyny. He won his two races against women who "sought authority for herself" and in fact authority over the country. Their unforgivable sin was the ambition to lead, in a country where many people - including some women - don't believe that women should do that.

Donald Trump is unpopular. He was unpopular in 2018, too. I am convinced that if the Democrats had run a man, Trump would have lost. This is an articulation of why.

Rules And Norms

 My Comp Gov textbook defines a "regime" as the rules and norms that govern political behavior and structures. In the US, the Constitution is the regime, but there are other norms that have governed our political system.

Trump is bulldozing them like the East Wing of the White House.

The partisan gerrymandering is one example of simply making up things as you go along and kudos to Democrats for realizing that unilateral disarmament in this environment is folly. When it comes to something like the presidential pardon power, it was assumed that the President would be bound by public virtue and a sense of the majesty of the office and his obligation to serve the law. Trump's selling of pardons is, it seems, within the scope of the letter of the law. He can be impeached for this behavior, but not prosecuted. He will, of course, pardon the thugs like Greg Bovino and the grifters like his entire family on his way out the door. 

The norms, on other words, aren't working.

We need new rules. 

Trump Is Making New Democrats

 One of the really important and underrated metrics in politics is partisan self-identification. Not which party "registers" more voters, but which party actual voters say they support. This is especially important among "independents" who are really just partisans without the label. A "Republican-leaning Independent" is a Republican.

Elliott Morris notes a massive shift in partisan identification since this time last year. Right before he was inaugurated last year, self-identification was R+4. Some of this was bandwagoning behind the winning candidate. By June it was D+3. The most recent sample was D+8.  This is a bigger gap than in 2017-18, which led to the first Blue Wave. No doubt this was behind the mid-decade re-gerrymandering that Republicans threw all their weight behind. 

However, this level of Democratic self-identification is what creates a dummymander, where they actually make some of their own districts competitive by diluting GOP districts to erode Democratic ones.  At the end, Morris notes that this is not a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Democrats do have to actually turn out their voters, but the trend since Trump arrived on the scene has been that high frequency voters are now disproportionately Democratic, in ways that simply wasn't true before.

The DHS-created chaos in Minneapolis is not reflected in these numbers. Much like Trump's destruction of the East Wing, this is one of those visually compelling stories that tend to break through to low information voters. When Joe Rogan calls ICE a Gestapo type force, that's a really big deal in how the Ariana Grande voter will evaluate Trump.

If the economy drops into recession in the next 9 months, the GOP could lose their Senate seats in places like Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Montana. That's how profound this drop could be. 

Greenland, Red Light

 Trump's obsession with Greenland is just so monumentally stupid, even depraved, that it's a struggle to make sense of it. Of course, it's a struggle to make sense of gutting moneys to research cancer, but here we are. It seems the push to annex Greenland might be a product of some of the following factors:

- Trump sees both the size of Greenland on a Mercator projection and heard that it has a bunch of rare earths, so his smooth brain thinks it will make him a great president.

- Trump is actively trying to blow up NATO, and this is an easy way to do so.

- Trump doesn't care about NATO one way or another, he just wants to bully another country and express his contempt for Europe as a whole. This would be part of his Donroe Doctrine.

We also have to consider that the various creatures around Trump have varying agendas and that they can easily manipulate him, using some combination of the above. That seems to be sort of what happened with Venezuela, where Miller's rabid racism, Rubio's anti-socialism and Hegseth's bloodthirstiness all allow for different levers to be pulls in pursuit of the same end. Whether it's "Kill Brown People", "Topple a Dictator" or "Thing Go Boom" they could all agree to push this mission. There is considerably less consensus among Republicans about actively taking over Venezuela.

With Greenland, we are once again at the fickle mercies of Republicans finding their spine and principles. There are quite a few Republicans that still believe in NATO and might oppose this, but it's essential that they be on the record NOW, before Mango Mussolini commits another war crime.

There is just TOO MUCH NEWS right now, but this is a big one.

Can Americans Reclaim Their Revolutionary Heritage?

 As we enter the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, the Trump Administration has decided to behave like a monarchy. Trump assumes the air of a king when he builds his knock-off Versailles, when he conflates opposition to him with treason, when he uses the language of force rather than consensus.

In Richardson's dispatch, she notes that Joe Rogan has likened the militarized ICE presence in Minnesota to the Gestapo. I know most people to his left consider Rogan a meathead, whose embrace of vaccine quackery and general rightward tilt make him suspect. If you're going to persuade America that Trump is acting, in fact, like a despot, then it's Rogan that you have to flip. It's Theo Von. 

The state's "monopoly of violence" is actually a monopoly of legitimate violence, and the citizens of Minneapolis have made very clear what they think of ICE's good squad intimidation tactics. So have Chicago, LA and Portland. All policing requires the consent of the community, or else it ceases to be policing and becomes tyranny.

Americans have historically been a difficult lot to govern. Our institutions with their veto points and separated powers reflect this. Hopefully more and more Americans will become ungovernable in the face of Trump's emerging police state.

The Politics Of Renee Good's Murder

 Josh Marshall asked (sarcastically) "Is it good politics to defend a harmless woman getting shot in the face?" He was rebutting the idea that Trump has some mastermind media strategy that allows him to shape reality. In fact, that's clearly not the case - or not exactly the case.

The initial polling is pretty clear on two things: Democrats are outraged at this, Independents are pretty much opposed and Republicans are mostly OK with it. This polling will likely change, especially as there is a continuous stream of video from Minneapolis of people being harassed or beaten by ICE goons. Given both the pushback from the residents of Minnesota, the besieged psyche of ICE/BP, the belligerent nature if ICE/BP folks and the clear message that acts of violence will be met with official impunity, I suspect we shall see another shooting sooner rather than later.

What's more: It's Minnesota. Yeah, the Twin Cities are lefty-coded, but Minnesota could not be more centrally in the actual "Heartland." This isn't Portland or San Francisco or LA. It's white people being shot. There is a certain sociopathic segment of the Right that will cheer this on, but if this sort of state violence continues, I think it's going to make more and more segments of our society REALLY uncomfortable.

The Fed Is The Bright Red Line

 Trump's spurious prosecution of Jerome Powell is both deeply chilling and unlikely to work. The Federal Reserve was specifically constructed to avoid political pressure. They have to make the hard choices that presidents and congressional members cannot. Paul Volcker purposefully forced the country into a brutal recession from 1979-1983 in order to kill the inflation that had curdled the American economy. Powell has skillfully navigated the post-Covid inflationary period to quell inflation without forcing us into a deflationary recession.

As Krugman notes, this is part of Trump's overall assault on anyone with the temerity to not kiss his ass. He is so ensconced in sycophants that he cannot be contradicted, cannot be defied, and Powell wouldn't cut interest rates. (By the way, why now? Why launch a prosecution now? I have to wonder if they are seeing some flashing red lights on the economy and are that desperate for a rate cut.)

Last year, the Sycophantic Six on the SCOTUS basically allowed the president to fire anyone at any agency, even if it had been set up to be beyond the reach of presidential firings. They specifically said that this does not apply to the Federal Reserve. The reason is that the Court ultimately works for the Money. Yeah, they may secretly thrill to Trump's attacks on Democrats or minorities, but their real purpose was to overturn Chevron and gut the regulatory state. 

The broadest trends in macroeconomics are fuzzy at the moment. The tariffs have not really been universal and the effects have not been as profound as the published rates. There is still some hope that the Court will overturn them, for the same reason that they might protect Powell. The economy is soft, but not receding, and that softness has largely come from Trump's erratic policy making. No one knows what he might do with tariffs or punishing a specific industry from one day to the next. No one wants to go into Venezuela because he might simply walk away from it and stare out the window at his construction project in the old East Wing. 

The economy is frozen in uncertainty, even as Trump guts regulatory oversight and funnels money to the rich. Attacking the Federal Reserves' independence is unlikely to sooth markets and allay the concerns of business.

The Policy Incoherence Of Morons

 I'm teaching Progressivism this week, and we are looking at how there are two aspects of Progressivism that were in direct tension with each other: the desire to have experts direct policy and the desire to have more democracy to represent the "people" and not the "interests." Both were and are laudable goals, but they can work at cross purposes.

Under Trump we have the dual incompatibility of the attack on experts and the destruction of democratic norms. Part of me thinks that someone read something about Progressivism, and then decided to undo anything that smacked of it. This would certainly be consistent, for instance, with Trump's war on Jerome Powell. In fact, the new year has brought such a torrent of terrible news that it seems to have slipped the banks of a coherent narrative. But the attacks on Powell, on Minnesota, on science, and the literal attacks on Venezuela, Syria and maybe Iran or freaking Greenland are all part of the "logic" of authoritarianism.

The reason why authoritarianism is historically unpopular is because authoritarianism - with some exceptions, like maybe Singapore - typically has to business for technocrats. This gives us the darkly comical moment of Trump waging a war for oil in Venezuela and the oil companies saying, "Nah, we're good, dude."

Trump promised an economic utopia when he ran in 2024, and gullible people conflated the circumstances of 2019 with Trump's alleged business acumen. In fact, he's given is a noticeably weak and sluggish economy that Krugman argues is sluggish because of the incoherence and chaotic nature of an autocrat making shit up on the fly. It's all very noisy, but the combination of chaotic tariffs, the prospects of AI taking white collar jobs and general overall problems like firing 300,000 government workers has all led to a period of instability.

Simon Rosenberg notes that Republicans are beginning to break with Trump over issues of clear policy malfeasance. Hopefully, this becomes contagious, and they pass veto proof resolutions denying Trump the ability to invade Greenland or to protect Jerome Powell and the independence of the Federal Reserve. If Trump gets his tiny little paws on the Fed, we are well and truly cooked, and I think even most Republicans know this to be true.

Of course, on one level, the policies pursued by Trump are not incoherent. They are completely coherent with his curdled worldview. They are coherent to his own ignorance and impulses.

Famously some Bush 43 lackey said of Iraq: "We are an empire. We make our own reality." 

How did THAT work out?

RFK, Jr's Reign Of Error

 The Atlantic published a series of thumbnail bios of people who have been fired or accepted retirement or quit on principle over the last year. It's a sobering example of the gutting of the Federal bureaucracy of it's institutional ballast.

What becomes clear is that the devastation wrought by RFK to public health and public science is brutal, far reaching and soon to be lethal. 

That gasoline, gargling creature with a face like a dried apricot is among the many sins of the swing voters who thought, "Eggs are pricey, what's the worst that can happen."

Maybe?

 Simon Rosenberg is an optimist - his place is called the Hopium Chronicles. He ponders that for everyone who is doomcasting about the end of democracy in America and the end of the postwar liberal order, what if it wasn't? He points to the protests in Iran, Ukrainian resiliency on the battlefield (something Philip Bump mentions in this conversation) and even a possible democratic or at least not kleptocratic Venezuela. What if Orban finally loses in Hungary?

Imagine if there are far more people like this Iranian woman?

I think history suggests that there are. And maybe the US engulfed in democratic backsliding means that Europe and other places are going to have to step up and maintain the world order until we get our shit together? What if Iranians are protesting not only their awful government, but because they know no one else is coming to help them?

Maybe America remembers its antifa past. 

It's pretty to think so. 

DHS

 The Abolish ICE mantra has been embraced by people as diverse as Bill Kristol. I think Josh Marshall is right though that we need to think more generally about basically eliminating Homeland Security. DHS was a weird reaction to 9/11, as Democrats were looking for a way to "get tough" on terrorism without countenancing pogroms against Muslims in America. It was very much of the Liberal Organizational Flowchart school of technocracy. 

The idea was to take a host of disparate agencies and house them in one place. There was always a slight fascist aesthetic to a lot of DHS, right down to the words "homeland security." The Boys gave the name Homelander to their fascist Superman. There has to be some form of border patrol, for instance. Democrats would be insane to embrace the Open Borders lunacy that some spouted in 2020. Housing Border Patrol in a different department would be the first step towards accountability and oversight. As we have seen with Trump, Miller and Noem, DHS was just ripe for the sort of abuses that they are visiting on American cities and citizens.

"Terrorist Agents"

 I was reading this Times piece about the mass protests in Iran. The language the regime is using to describe the pro-democracy protests is pretty much the identical language that Trumpists are using to describe protests in America. 

If - hopefully, hopefully - the Iranians finally throw off their awful government, Trump will no doubt take credit for it, but make no mistake, he wants to be Supreme Leader himself.

Alexandra Petri Is A National Treasure

 This is a brilliant, funny and even poignant piece of writing.