On To Something

 Yglesias is very much the "Manhattan Private School/Yale Philosophy Major" type of Smart Guy. However, I keep reading him because he does occasionally have some nice nuggets and I don't want to silo my reading too much.

He has a Six Point Plan for Democrats to run on in 2026:

• Ban congressional stock trading (+34)

• Expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing (+31)

• Raise the minimum wage to $12 (+22)

• Crack down on tax evasion (+18)

• Spend on reducing lead pollution (+14)

• Guarantee abortion rights nationally before 12 weeks (+13)

You’ve got some economic populism in there, some progressive social policy, some environmental policy, some good government reform, and a link to Trump’s corruption and abuses of power via tax evasion.

That's a good plan. He goes on to say that other planks are less popular and therefore you shouldn't include them. Climate actually polls poorly - don't touch it. Even background checks, which poll well, don't poll well enough, though a few mass shootings could nudge that into plank seven. 

He notes that a 12 week right to abortion isn't popular with abortion rights groups, but that it needs to be understood as a floor rather than a ceiling. Raising the minimum wage to $15 isn't quite as popular, but again: floor. 

I think you have to throw in some stuff about protecting democracy, just on principle and checking Trump's unbridled power and corruption, because I think that's going to poll well by next autumn.

Still, picking a few things to win a majority sounds like a really solid plan. Once you have the majority, then you can do more.

Speedbump On The Road To Fascism

 Central to the Ghouls surrounding Trump and intent on devouring the brains of American democracy is their plan to militarize police functions. Central to this is utilizing or threatening to utilize the Insurrection Act. That might actually have run into a legal problem that even the Scotus Six might notice. The Insurrection Act was always bullshit, but this might give the Republicans on the bench a chance to save democracy, a prospect I'm not willing to completely cede.

As Richardson notes, and others have noted, the GOP is increasingly in an untenable situation with the shutdown. People are going to lose SNAP tomorrow at exactly the time that they are getting letters about their ACA premium increases. People going hungry when the Agriculture Department is sitting in $6B and we are sending at least $20B to Argentina (a direct competitor in agriculture output) is not a great look! Especially with Trump behaving more and more like the Central Asian despot he so clearly aspires to be. The destruction of the White House to put up a gilded ballroom is just...I dunno man, seems pretty easy to understand, even for the dipshittiest of dipshit voters.

Democratic backsliding and emerging autocracy requires that that the would-be dictator be popular. Trump really isn't, and if anything his policies are less popular than he is. 

Krugman is right when he says that the Republicans were wise to push off many of the worst impacts of their terrible agenda until after the 2026 midterms. What Democrats have done with this shutdown is accelerate the timeline of when the inevitable pain will be felt. All the Very Online Experts who decried the feckless Dem strategy last spring and even this fall ("They will cave, because Schumer sucks.") were wrong. This is really sound strategy that puts the Democrats on their strongest ground.

At some point, too, the House will have to reconvene and Adelita Grijalva will be sworn in, which should prompt the release of House files related to Epstein. Trump's team's preference for "Move Fast, Break Things" is a shitty governance strategy and not much better politics. It works best as a media-dominance ploy, but that dominance isn't always good, when your positions are inherently bad. 

Harbingers

 Richardson's Catalog of Atrocities is longer than usual, but one thing stood out. It's the layoffs.

Amazon laid off 14,000. UPS has laid off 48,000 this year. Target laid off 1,800 corporate jobs. Molson Coors is also laying off corporate workers. General Motors and Rivian are laying of workers in their EV sections. 

The loss of white collar jobs might be a harbinger of the coming AI assault on corporate jobs. It may also be a combination of AI displacement AND a weakening overall economy. The Federal Reserve is cutting interest rates in the face of still high inflation, which can only mean their estimation of the job market is pretty bad. 

Now, we are about to get apocalyptic news for SNAP and ACA recipients in the face of these strong "headwinds" in the economy. 

Usually, we should see a market crash about now in the calendar year. For whatever reason, the fall is when the markets collapse. So far it hasn't happened, but the overall signs are pretty dire.

Given Republican efforts to gerrymander themselves out of electoral consequences, a massive economic collapse might be the Republic's only hope.

Time Waiteth for No man

 The operating assumption of Trump during the shutdown has been that the longer it goes on, the more people suffer, the more likely Democrats are to cave.

However, SNAP benefits expiring doesn't "hurt" Democrats, in the sense that everyone "knows" that Democrats support SNAP and Republicans don't. 

Now, we have the ACA subsidies expiring and the letters going out informing people of what they are going to have to pay next year. This is happening while Democrats are refusing to vote for a CR until those subsidies are restored. In other words, these two news stories are going to flow into each other. 

Again everyone "knows" that Democrats want you to have health insurance and Republicans want you to earn health insurance. The GOP doesn't understand that both ACA and SNAP help working families. They are so wedded to the idea that all "welfare" is a scam that they are about to face the coming train head first.

I don't think that an up-or-down vote on extending the ACA subsidies would fail in a vacuum. Trump has decided that Democrats can't "win" this showdown, so people are going to suffer rather than have both parties work to solve the issue. All for the whims of the Mad King.

About Those Tests

 Trump has been bragging about how he's acing his "IQ Test" at Walter Reed.

It's a dementia test.

It's not "hard".

Let's Check In On Karl Marx

 Marx argued for heightening the contradictions. What he meant was that efforts like labor unions actually hurt the proletariat by improving their living and working conditions. What was needed, he argued, was the full cruelty of bourgeoise capitalism to be felt by the working masses. This was "heightening the contradictions." Things had to be terrible for "the revolution" to happen.

Well, we are about to heighten the hell out of those contradictions. 

The coming devastation of SNAP is the first thing that will be felt all over the country. Then, the exploding health care premiums will devastate the middle class. 

Which brings me to the Democrats endgame on the shut down. Lot of Republicans seem almost gleefully eager to immiserate their own voters. If they ram through a CR by eliminating the filibuster for it, and the health care increases kick in - does that matter? If all these rural voters lose SNAP benefits - does that matter?

I've always been skeptical of this argument, because it seems to me that people have picked their parties based on things besides tangible policy positions. I wager we will see a lot of "I'm really disappointed Trump has increased the price of groceries, killed my SNAP benefits and made my insurance unaffordable, but at least he's not a Democrat."

What's more, do you even want to win? Like on tariffs - which are all clearly illegal - do you want the Court to rule that they are illegal? Or does it serve to benefit you electorally when the economy finally sputters and dies?

Painful

 In a few days, SNAP benefits will expire. The level of pain this will cause Americans - rural and urban, young and old - is going to be profound. People are going to go hungry. People are going to miss debt payments to pay for food, which will accelerate the usual debt crises among the working poor. 

A "normal" government - even a Republican one - would not want to see Americans suffer. There were competing visions on how to help the poor and the near-poor, with the GOP offering up bullshit "bootstraps" ideas, but at least they cared in the abstract.

Trump is a sadist or at least a narcissist for whom other people's pain is not "understandable." The cuts to USAID have led directly to the deaths of children. We're murdering people in the Caribbean. Those are foreigners. These are Americans, and he's showing the same callous disregard for their well being as he would for people on the other side of the world. Both are bad, but the latter is literally his fucking job. 

The Very Online Doomerism has a point when they look at things like the destruction/desecration of the East Wing of the White House and say that Trump has no intention of leaving office. Democracy is doomed, because he's behaving as if democratic checks on presidential power no longer exist. 

I don't think that's right, because it buys into the same idea that Trump is pushing: that he can create a reality with the stroke of his pen. However, the needless and immediate pain that he is foisting upon the people that he is supposed to be serving (not that he has the slightest idea what "service" means) is pretty strong evidence that he is not planning to have elections ever again.

If he keeps this up, even gerrymandering won't protect him or his acolytes in the House.

Have Renewables Escaped Containtment?

 Krugman looks at the economic reasons why renewables have exploded in the last 15 years. It's obviously clear that the Trump Administration is waging a mostly pointless, pique-filled war against solar and wind, for reasons that aren't entirely clear. Sure, there are the arguments that this is just naked corruption by making coal mines more profitable for the next few years. That's normally a strong argument with these mooks. The other argument is that this is just Cleek's Law at work. Democrats support renewables, so Republicans must oppose them. There's also the argument that Trump has a stick up his diapered ass because he doesn't like the way windmills look from his Scottish golf course.

It still doesn't add up.

Renewables are an absolute economic positive in multiple ways. There's the obvious climate change mitigation, but renewables are cheaper in the long run than hydrocarbons. Once you build a renewable facility, that cost is largely "it."  You don't have to pay fuel costs.

Trump and Republicans have stripped out tax credits for solar, even on residential buildings. We are currently building our retirement home, and we want to get solar on the roof, but we won't be able to before January 1st, when the tax credits expire because of the OBBB.

At the same time, the cost of electricity is spiking, almost entirely from AI data centers. Yes, it will be more expensive to put PV panels on our roof in 2026 than it would have been in 2025, but we can budget around that, especially since otherwise our long term electrical bills would be a real burden.  I'm even looking into residential wind - it's not supposed to be great, but it's really cheap, about $3000 for a 5000 watt turbine. We will need a battery, and those credit, too, are expiring. 

This is among the thousands of outrages committed by the Trump administration against American citizens and their economic interest. 

I do wonder, though, how much renewables will continue to grow simply because they are so economically efficient now. It made sense and was necessary to subsidize renewables a decade ago or even five years ago. While it still makes sense to do so today, I wonder if it's economically necessary.

In the long run, the real issue is climate change, and it's heartening that other countries are picking up some of the slack. If Americans aren't going to be buying solar and wind and batteries, other countries will. It will make us poorer, it's stupid and it's shortsighted, but I don't think it's reversible. 

Resist

 Josh Marshall looks at the failure of civic elites to stand up to Trump. He references the concept of "civic virtue" that was central to the earliest vision of republican rule immediately after the Revolution. The assumption was that - in a Republic - citizens, especially elite citizens, would subsume their personal ambitions into the national project. This largely failed under the Confederation and was why the Constitution was written: to replace voluntary virtue with a government strong enough to enforce laws. Ironically, the Framers still thought some civic virtue would remain, which is why they didn't think political parties and the attendant partisanship would exist. How can their be an "opposition" party in a Republic?

Back to Marshall, I heard Obama speak at the CT Forum, where he said that elites need to risk a little comfort to preserve democracy. The results since then have been mixed. Universities are finally fighting back against efforts to destroy academic freedom, but corporate media seems more and more supine in their coverage of Trump. The Times currently has a piece about the changing architectural plans for the East Wing, rather than screaming about the fact that every bit of what he's doing is a violation of the red letter of the law. He's breaking the law in plain sight and they want to discuss his aesthetic vision?

Krugman has one of his weekend talks with Erica Chenoweth, where they discuss the relative success of both protests and civil resistance (which Chenoweth argues are not synonymous). Chenoweth famously noted that if 3.5% of the population joins protest movements, the regime usually falls. 

While that is actually optimistic - No Kings mobilized about 2.3% of the population already - my concern is about one aspect that we are truly deficient in, if we are going to use mass movements to defeat fascism in America: civil society. When Chenoweth looked at the most successful mass movement, she was especially taken with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Those happened despite crackdowns on civil society, but those crackdowns actually made civil society important. When you repress something, you get a counterreaction. 

Our problem is not that civil society has been repressed, but that we have largely let it atrophy and perish. 

The Big Event that has yet to happen is Trumpist shock troops shooting protestors. What made No Kings so impressive was how peaceful it was. Chenoweth and Krugman talk about how important that is. Still, Trump has hired a bunch of unqualified goombahs to staff his Deportation Force. It's only a matter of time before one of them fires at and kills a protestors. I know I kept a wary eye towards every pickup truck that drove by our protest. 

If - or more likely when - Trumpists draw first blood, the response of the American people will be critical. I have no idea what that response will be.

Tawdry

 As Krugman notes, Trump's desecration of the White House is not just sad, but it's a direct assault on republican (not Republican) aesthetics. Washington DC is supposed to represent classical virtues, but Trump's aesthetics run to Tin Pot Dictator. His obsession with gilded shit is an expression of the howling void in his soul that needs to be propped up by vanity design.

It all feels part of the complete collapse of American morality under Trump. He trades pardons for cash and all the other things we could list forever. It does not end with Trump though. We have the NBA gambling scandal, which was as predictable as the sunrise. We have the crushing of creativity under an assault of AI "slop".

Everything just feels worse and it starts from the man millions of Americans felt was worthy of the public trust, despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary.

A Farm-Labor Party

 Krugman notes the wide disparity between what rural Americans need and what they vote for. It's not just the crude dynamic of how tax money moves around the Federal Republic, but that's an easy way to look at it. Krugman's larger point is how much Trump hates his voters, and that's largely true. The problem is that rural voters are in an abusive relationship with the Republican Party, where they plead to be a good if Daddy just stops hitting them.

Even has Trump spends tens of millions to destroy the East Wing of the People's House; even as he sends tens of billions to bail out Argentina; even has he talks about buying Argentine beef; even as he guts the ACA tax credits; even has his Medicaid cuts imperil rural hospitals...they STILL SEEM TO FUCKING WANT HIM TO BE PRESIDENT.

At the heart of this is the epistemological bubble that much of the country lives in, courtesy of Faux News. I had an interaction on Facebook over a local election that hinges on Republican complete mismanagement of our water supply that now leaves the community on the hook for a $34M settlement. My counterpart said it was still better than the "radical Marxist demoncrats who have destroyed the country." It was like he was playing Fox News Mad Libs. 

These bubbles are really problematic, and we see that in how people - especially rural people - see our cities. Chicago is one of the absolute coolest cities in the world. It does have a gang problem that showed up for years in very localized murders. Many Americans, however, think of it as a blood soaked hellscape. 

There IS a problem that Democrats absent mindedly promulgated, which is the overly censorious character of a lot of what Carville calls "Academic Break Room Politics."  The basic thing is "You can't say that." Now a lot of things you probably shouldn't say! And apparently if you point out that Charlie Kirk was a racist, sexist demagogue, you should lose your job. Still, the culture war priorities were often counterproductive.

I would argue that Republican culture war priorities are arguably MORE counterproductive for them.

Still, the media landscape makes every Democrat Rashida Talib or Ayanna Pressley.

I'm not sure how you counteract an entire media ecosystem created to stir outrage over small things. That's what conservatives and some leftists have learned from the Age of the Algorithm. Anger drives engagement.

For Democrats to save democracy next November, I almost think that they have to allow for the creation of a regional party - a Farm-Labor Party like the one in Minnesota, but with the word "Democratic" excised. You can't fight against preconceptions, you just can't. Trump won Nebraska with almost 60% of the vote (and now he's killing their agriculture). Deb Fischer won the Senate seat with 53.3% against Dan Osborn who ran as an independent. I almost have to think that Osborn wins that today if there were a special election. 

The "Democratic Brand" is toxic in large parts of the country. Creating a regional party that appeals to working class voters without being associated with the cultural liberalism of the national party seems a way out. Democrats chose to not run a candidate in the Nebraska senate race to clear the field for Osborn. Some tacit agreement could work here. (It would have to be guarded against someone like Platner running as a third party candidate in Maine.)

In my town, Republicans routinely get 66% of the vote. However, the anger of that water issue I mentioned earlier is leading many normally Republican voters to switch their votes. They are not, however, switching their votes to the Democrats, but to a local Independent Party. Hopefully it works, but we shall see.

Platner

 I was intrigued by Graham Platner when he started showing up on my social media feed.  I was worried that he was giving off subtle Fetterman vibes. Unlike a lot of people who run for higher office, Platner has not been exposed to the microscope of a campaign. 

Well, the microscope wasn't necessary. You don't even need a magnifying glass. It's visible to the naked eye. Nazi tattoos are a bright red line.

The worst part of this is not that it cedes the seat to Collins, because Mills is a strong candidate. The worst part is that the Very Online, Very Pod-based Bros are all decrying the fact that they were supporting this burly, bearded dude and now people with political instincts are basically saying, "It's over."

The typical whining leftist isn't simply arguing that their positions are right. They are arguing that any questioning of them or their agenda is class treason.

Platner seems to be an idiot. That should be that.

The Red White And Blue Revolution

 The No Kings Protests were remarkably successful (far more successful than the relatively much smaller Tea Party protests of 2009-10). The next question though is: So what? A bunch of middle aged and retired Old White People showed up to rallies.

The team at TPM draws attention to a loose "3.5% Rule." This was postulated by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan by looking at protest movements from 1900-2006. 

The first rule was that non-violent protests were more successful than violent protests. When protests use violence they unleash the far greater violent capacity of the state. This is why Trump kept harping about the No Kings movement being full of Antifa or terrorists or whatever. It's also why it's so important that it was, in fact, a bunch of Old White People.

Once a nonviolent protest movement was able to mobilize 3.5% of the population, it almost always leads to a collapse in the regime. A lot of these recently have been the so-called Color Revolutions that swept through former Soviet Republics and several Middle Eastern countries. There are 340 million Americans. Let's say that the larger estimates of the rallies was right at 8 million. That's about 2.3% of the population. To get to the magic number, you'd need about 12 million protestors.

The economy is soft as hell, but has not yet collapsed. If that in fact happens, Trump's unpopularity will explode, especially since he's currently building himself a ballroom, bailing out Argentina and extorting his own Justice Department for more money. 

Could America be headed to its own color revolution?

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.

Resist Smarter, Not Harder

 I just saw the excellent film, One Battle After Another, and one of the themes is the bumbling incompetence and self-importance of both the anarchistic far left and the fascist far right. There's precious little that's admirable about either side, but what IS admirable is the human connections that exist outside political ideologies.

When Yglesias writes about the need for a "smart protest movement" against Trump's authoritarianism, he makes a few points about 2020 and the George Floyd protests as being basically counterproductive. I think there's some merit about that, in that widespread street disorder usually helps authoritarians. I also think that the nature of the Floyd protests was amplified by Covid and having lived with four years of Trump. Yes, the basic idea of state violence against Black people was central to the protests, but this was also just a broad based protest against Trump and the forces of reaction that he represents. 

What I also believe is that the Floyd protests were absolutely hurt by agent provocateurs. These came from both directions. Anarchists saw the protests as a vehicle to smash Starbucks and rightists saw the protests as a vehicle to smash Starbucks so that people would think there were more anarchists than there really are.

At the moment, Portland may be giving us an important lesson in how to protest Trump and Miller's fascist power grab: mockery. Trump's delusional ramblings about Portland being a war zone are because Fox is playing clips from the worst moments of 2020, and this addled old bastard thinks that's current footage. Instead, protesters are dressed in inflatable costumes, playing music and basically created imagery that directly contradicts "Portland is a war zone!" 

Trump's outrages are, well, outrageous, and it's natural to respond to outrages with rage. What the inflatable costumes do is both mock the power that Trump and Miller wish to project and mock the assertions that these cities are hellscapes. 

Don't Get Lost In The Moment

 Given the overwhelming awfulness of everything, it can be soul crushing to follow the news with any regularity. Trump and MAGA's assault on the fabric of American democracy is non-stop. However, maybe take a breath and separate what they are actually doing and what they are just yammering about.

As Marshall notes, all of Russell Vought's threats about permanently firing Federal workers during the shutdown or denying them back pay have not been backed up with actual action. This is very Trumpist: talk shit but don't actually do what you're talking about.  Have we annexed Greenland yet?

As Richardson notes, Trump's detachment from actually doing the job of president is similar to Warren Harding, another idiot Republican who didn't know shit about shit, who turned his administration over to the corrupt Ohio Gang. Trivia alert: Harding is one of three presidents to die in office of natural causes.  Just saying. These people - Vought, Miller, Bondi, RFK, Jr, Patel - are doing unpopular shit, because they are a terrifying combination of blithering idiots and deeply committed ideologues. 

So as we navigate the Kakistocracy, it can be overwhelming listening to the fascist ravings of Stephen Miller or the mush mouthed inanities of Trump himself. 

That's the point. 

They want to overwhelm you and they are pretty good at it. Who's talking about Charlie Kirk right now? The "This Changes Everything" crowd has moved on, because we simply skip from outrage to outrage. This works for and against them.

However, Democrats are winning the shutdown fight. Republicans are laying the groundwork for the capitulation by falsely claiming that no one cares more about health care access than they do. Eric Swalwell was on Twitter saying that the Epstein stuff is close to breaking. 

Doomerism is what they need. Will we have free and fair elections in 2026? I have no idea! It's a long, long way off. Despairing about that now is both psychologically unhealthy and strategically counterproductive.

Trump and Company aren't popular. If the economy weakens any further, they will collapse in public support. That's why they are likely spinning so fast to commit as many outrages as possible. Time may be running out on them. Or maybe not. But we can't tell from our perspective today.

The Dog That Caught The Car

 Richardson dives into Russell Vought, the second worst person in the Trump Administration after Stephen Miller. If Miller personifies Adam Serwer's dictum that "The cruelty is the point," then Vought is the voice of the Christian Nationalist attack on the state's ability to do things for people. From his perch at OMB, Vought is the one who wants to take Grover Norquist's old line about wanting to "shrink government to the size where you can drown it in a bathtub" and making that a reality.

Yglesias has a piece where he argues that politicians aren't ever "authentic", they are all performers, and some are better than others. I don't like the framing of that, because he points to actors who aren't REALLY what they portray, but it "feels" authentic, because they are good actors. The thing a good actor does is create authenticity. Good politicians do that, too. 

What this has meant in the past is that we elect people - especially to the presidency - who come across as authentic, even though on many levels, that's just an act. For Republicans, this has meant railing against "government" even as you provide benefits for your constituents. It has meant decrying abortion without REALLY doing things to make it illegal. Now, some Republicans are authentically and deeply opposed to abortions, but the party as a whole would rather run on the issue than ban the procedure.

Coming back to Vought, we have someone who really is fundamentally opposed to the constitutional order. He's said as much. Here's Richardson's summary:

In 2022, Vought argued that the United States is in a “post constitutional moment” that “pays only lip service to the old Constitution.” He attributes that crisis to “the Left,” which he says “quietly adopted a strategy of institutional change,” by which he appears to mean the growth of the federal government to protect the rights of all Americans. He attributes that change to the presidency of President Woodrow Wilson beginning in 1913. Vought advocates what he calls “radical constitutionalism” to destroy the power of the modern administrative state and instead elevate the president to supreme authority.

Vought is not as performatively cruel as Miller, but he swims in the same authoritarian swamp. He does not believe in the Madisonian system of checks and balances as a bulwark against tyranny; he wants tyranny. This is how so many other evangelical Christians have come to love a thrice married vulgarian who has likely never been to church except as a photo op.

The problem that both Miller and Vought face is that they have mistaken far right rhetoric with what the American public really wants. Americans don't want Latin American gangs on their streets, but they don't want to see the guy they work with and like deported; they don't want to see families sundered and children separated from their families. In Vought's case, Americans don't like "waste and fraud" but as DOGE discovered, there really isn't that much waste and fraud at the national level.

The result is that the Trump administration says it's cutting fat, but really it's cutting muscle and bone. 

This is unpopular.

There are basically three pillars left to defend American democracy. The lower courts continue to deny Trump executive fiat powers. Some states are trying to deny Trump agency within their states. But the most important one is that people really don't like what Trump is doing. In his piece on authenticity, Yglesias made the good point that Biden was unable to do the performative part of being president, but increasingly, Trump isn't able to either. His speeches are rambling nonsense, his energy is flagging and his appearances rarer. 

Trump can still dominate the news cycle, but doing so requires greater and greater outrages, which makes him less and less popular. As he - and Vought and Miller - try and consolidate autocratic rule, they will come into conflict with the wishes of the American people more and more. If and when the economy crashes, that will be the final nail.

Stephen Miller Must Be Stopped

 As much as Donald Trump is a seething cesspool of resentment and authoritarianism, it's becoming clearer that Stephen Miller is behind much of the admininistration's lawless assault on the constitutional order. Richardson doesn't come out and say it (because it's not her style), but the implication is that Miller was pushing for the 82nd Airborne to be dropped into Portland and it was Pete Hegseth, of all people, who pushed back on him. As Krugman catalogs, what ICE has been doing in Chicago is just rampant lawless assaults on the 4th Amendment. 

The implication is that this is not, in fact, coming from Trump. It's coming from Miller. As Trump seemingly recedes from his public schedule, likely to hide his cognitive and physical decline, Miller has basically been running the cruelty machine at DHS. If we believe Schumer's statement that Trump had no idea that there were massive cuts to ACA subsidies, the probably reason is that Trump gets all of his news from a combination of Fox and Stephen Miller. 

Trump was never a policy savant. He is barely interested in the best of times in how the government actually works. Miller also is not interested in HOW it works, but in how he can use the levers of power to make it work in his own twisted image. Trump is an autocrat, who wants praise and gold trimmed offices. Miller is a full on fascist who has basically taken over the policy decisions in the White House. He's a deeply damaged human being, who exports that damage with hate and a will to violence. Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize, but Miller wants to slaughter Venezuelan fishermen.

Trump was an ignorant slob at the height of his abilities. He is now clearly diminished. Miller is the one running the show and running the country into possible civil war. There is no compromise with him, as he's a zealot in his hatred. I wonder if people like JD Vance are looking at Trump's declining state, Miller's performative cruelty and violence and hoping for the day when Trump dies and Vance can "save the country" from Miller. 

I don't know how else he can be stopped. I know he wants violence and will seize any opportunity to destroy the Constitution. He is as pure evil as anyone who has ever emerged to a prominent place in American public life.

More Illegality

 Trump was banned from using Oregon National Guardsmen in Portland. So he grabbed some from California. Given how we've seen ICE behave in recent days - behavior that should upset anyone in favor of professional conduct by law enforcement - the best we can hope for is that the California Guard keeps these ICE thugs from beating up the citizenry. There are rumors - only rumors - that the worst violators of public safety in Portland are MAGAts looking for a fight. It would be grimly amusing if the the California Guard beats up a punch of Proud Boys and 3%ers.

None of that obscures the increasing lawlessness and fascist actions from the Trump administration. I think 90% of this is coming from Stephen Miller's warped brain, but until someone tells him to go back to the hole from whence he crawled and as long as Trump's pudding brain is technically in charge but actually ceding power to Miller, that's where we are.

Content Creators

 I was reading this collection of stuff about the Comey Kangaroo Court and it ended with a Kash Patel tweet about MSNBC being "an ass clown factory of disinformation." 

OK, we could spend some time wondering what "an ass clown factory of disinformation" is (Is it an actual factory? Do clowns work there? Are they wearing assless chaps?) However, let's instead pause to consider that the director of the FBI wrote this down and tweeted it out.

I have been arguing that this Trump Administration is simply repackaged Fox News with the imprimatur of the Executive Branch. It occurs to me now, that if this was simply a "Made for TV" government we might expect at least a little standards.

No, this is a "content creator" administration. Trump plays entirely to the cameras, because the cameras created him. He's a creature of "reality" TV. The goombahs staffing his agencies are content creators - mindlessly combing the world for clicks. Kristi Noem filmed herself being denied entrance to a government building in Illinois. Why? For clicks. Patel besmirches the dignity of his office. Why? For clicks. Pete Hegseth wages war on facial hair. Why? OK, that one's racism. (But also clicks.)

The democratization of video might have led to more and better content, but of course, that's not really what democratization means. Instead we get something called Skibidy Toilet. Because there are no more media gatekeepers, no more shared culture, everyone is competing for attention like post-apocalyptic survivors battling over the last can of Dinty Moore. 

This leads to a race to the bottom in many corners of the internet. And those corners are where Trump found the people to run his government. 

We live in the stupidest of times.

The Media Is Culpable

 There are multiple fingerprints on the knife plunged into the heart of American democracy. Some of them belong to the news media. This is one of the greatest failures of the media in my lifetime, and I'm old.

Project 2025 was always going to be the GOP blueprint, because Trump is both the captain and a passenger on this fucking shit-filled cruise liner. Because he's such a stupid, evil bastard, he's empowered other stupid, evil bastards, and stupid, evil bastards wrote Project 2025. That this inveterate liar's claim that he did not know anything about it was swallowed by the press corpse as if it were actually true.

In his conversation with Jonathan Cohn over the coming health care crisis, Krugman and Cohn agree that what seems to have happened is that the worst, most ideological Republican acolytes were allowed to make health care policy without anyone who knows anything about health care policy being able to weigh in. Schumer's statement that Trump had no idea about the coming evisceration of subsidies is probably true. The little bubble that Trump lives in admits no defeat or bad news.

This was always readily apparent to those with eyes to see, but our fucking legacy media was blind to it.

War Powers

 The blessing and curse of being a history and government teachers these days is that you are never short of current events to illustrate what you are talking about in class. In my International Relations course, we are talking about the concept of war. What differentiates a "war" from other forms of political violence? This is all more than academic as Trump has basically declared that we are at literally (not metaphorically) at war with drugs. This is taking the form of slaughtering Venezuelans on the high seas without due process.

Now, drug cartels are obviously not sympathetic figures! That no doubt feeds into the Trump/Miller administration's choice to declare war on cartels: make Democrats defend the rule of law by defending the least popular targets. Of course, if you really wanted to punish those who have killed so many Americans, you should probably launch a drone strike on the Sacklers.  

There are a host of analyses today about the fact that it's very much an open question as to whether we are still a democratic republic. Freedom House still lists us as one, but I think that might be a lagging indicator. To the degree that we are still hanging on to our democratic institutions, it's largely because while lower Courts have routinely ruled against Trump, the SCOTUS seems to be using a combination of shadow docket rulings and generally kicking some of these issues down the road until a later hearing. The Republican Congress is supine and worthless. 

However, I can't say that we are no longer a republic. I can say that we are in absolute peril of losing our democratic government if things don't change direction.

This brings me back to the declaration of war against cartels. Governments routinely impinge on civil liberties during wartime. Even acolytes of democratic principles like Lincoln and FDR curtailed rights and liberties during wars. It feels very much like Miller's plan to drag us into war with "the cartels" is a way to aggregate even more power in the White House.

Once "cartels" are the enemy and the enemy is roughly speaking Latin American, you can easily justify the horror show visited upon a Chicago apartment building the other day. Dragging people from their homes in the middle of the night is straight up Gestapo shit and it's unclear if the Courts can stop them, but it's incredibly clear that Congressional Republicans will not. There is no one left to "stand up to Nixon" the way Republicans did in 1974. 

There are a handful of elections left in 2025. Hopefully, Democrats sweep the two gubernatorial races that they are favored in and offer some hope to a beleaguered resistance. The earthquake would be a Democrat winning the special election in TN-7. It's an R+10 district, but that is roughly the margin that Democrats have been overperforming in special elections.

We still have the states, but as Trump decides that he has "war powers" the ability to hold onto some autonomy there will erode.

In the long run, I don't think Trump can govern Blue America. I am not sure we won't face disunion if this continues. 

An Autocracy Of Dunces

Paul Krugman is a Nobel winning economist, but the man can turn a phrase. 

Clowns

 The unprecedented gathering of America's top military officers in one place to listen to Fox News Personality Pete Hegseth engendered legitimate fears about either an impending stupid war or some sort of military coup or purge. Aspiring authoritarians - and Hegseth and Trump are cut from that same cloth - need loyalty in the national security apparatus, and the worry was that this would be the first step in creating those conditions.

Didn't quite turn out that way.

As Richardson notes, Trump in particular was lost when speaking to a room full of people who do not respond the way his rally goers or even protestors respond. While Hegseth's vile and stupid remarks are worthy of their own post, the focus really needs to be on Trump. Hegseth is a clown. All those generals and admirals know This Guy. He's the reservist who thinks he's Rambo. Pretty sure Hegseth does not have his Combat Infantry Badge. Generals and Admirals are pretty smart people; most if not all have graduate degrees. Their job is to study actual war, not war movies - which is apparently what Hegseth does.

Trump, however, is the Commander in Chief. Hegseth's primary danger is the sort of incompetence that we saw with the Signal Chat fiasco last spring. Trump's danger is to the constitutional order that every soldier takes an oath to defend. It feels close to inevitable that at some point, they will be asked to forswear that oath in favor of one for Trump.

I think yesterday actually worked against that. Trump had prepared remarks that were likely written or molded by Stephen Miller: the typical American Carnage and the need to destroy domestic enemies. In case you need access to Richardson's post and don't have it, let me cut and paste some of Trump's remarks:

“They looked at (Biden) falling downstairs every day. Every day, the guy is falling downstairs. He said, It’s not our President. We can’t have it. I’m very careful. You know, when I walk downstairs for, like, a month, stairs, like these stairs, I’m very—I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just try not to fall, because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy. We don’t want that. You walk nice and easy. You’re not having—you don’t have to set any record. Be cool. Be cool when you walk down, but don’t—don’t pop down the stairs. So one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a President, but he would bop down those stairs. I’ve never seen it. Da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop. He’d go down the stairs. Wouldn’t hold on. I said, It’s great. I don’t want to do it. I guess I could do it. But eventually, bad things are going to happen, and it only takes once. But he did a lousy job as president. A year ago, we were a dead country. We were dead. This country was going to hell.”

What the actual fuck?

The thing is, he looks and sounds like shit, especially since he disappeared for a few days around Labor Day. So, let's say you might be a senior military leader who is torn between his oath to defend the Constitution and the chain of command. Do you really want to bet it all on this idiot who is decaying in front of your eyes? Similar to his rambling weird speech to the United Nations, these aren't rallies; these are very smart, observant people. Forced to stay in their seats for this verbal diarrhea do you really think they came out of that ridiculous, unnecessary confab thinking; "This guy's got it on lockdown"?

As we head into a government shutdown, the whole thing rests on the fragile ego of a demented old fool. Sadly, I think the best hope we have is that he is, in fact, a demented old fool. This is why the cretinous fascists like Miller are rushing to destroy what they can of America. The clock seems to be ticking. 

UPDATE: Tom Nichols makes roughly the same point.

UPDATE 2: This is a telling line from Hegseth: “It all starts with physical fitness and appearance,” Hegseth said. “I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape or in combat units with females who can’t meet the same combat-arms physical standards as men.” Sure, yeah, the sexism. But the focus on superficial appearance is befitting an administration that just wants to look good on Fox rather than do the actual job.

What The Hell Is In Those Files?

 The decision by Closeted Gay Leprechaun Mike Johnson to NOT swear in Adelita Grivalja to the House seat that she just won is just another striking example of the GOP flop sweat over the Epstein Files. Once she is sworn in, the discharge petition will have 218 votes and whatever is in there is SO bad that Johnson won't even swear in a duly elected member.

The New Mutually Assured Destruction

 In the midst of Trump and Hegseth's ridiculous hectoring of America's senior military command, we get this column from Thomas Friedman about how Trump's Gaza peace plan is a great peace plan except for the fact that it's Gaza and the people in charge are awful. Really, "It's a great plan as long as the world were different." He also notes how drones have transformed future warfare. At the bottom of this post is a tweet about how Hegseth's made-for-TV leadership and doing pushup and warrior ethos is all bullshit, when you look at Ukraine who is punching way about their weight with a bunch of middle aged drone pilots and female coders.

As military planners consider the next few decades, they have to consider that disproportionate impact that drones are going to have on future wars. They are cheap - both in dollars and the risk to human life - and they are ubiquitous. For decades, America has ruled the world with the Predator drone - expensive but able to reach around the globe without imperiling American lives. Pretty soon everyone will have that capability.

With the advent of nuclear arsenals, wars between super and great powers became unthinkable. Drones might be the next step in making wars too punishing to contemplate.

Unless you are a dumbass dumbfuck like Donald Trump or Pete Hegseth.

Electricity

 Yglesias makes one of his arguments that I actually agree with: We should focus on building MORE clean energy, not on making LESS hydrocarbon-based energy. Basically, there is a strong degrowth element to a lot of environmental activism. This is fundamentally a moral or ethical choice from people who want to rollback capitalism, consumer consumption and the impact that has on the planet. Yglesias is right that is so politically toxic, it's not even worth considering. Yet that is a big part of climate and environmental activism. 

A great example of this is nuclear power. Since Three Mile Island, environmentalists have advocated for shuttering nuclear power plants. Germany - for some damned reason - did exactly this and became dependent on Russian natural gas. Nuclear power, however, is carbon neutral and can produce a TON of electricity. There is a ceiling on renewables like solar and wind and batteries. Nuclear can punch through that ceiling. 

What's more, Yglesias is also right that we should not be trying to get "enough" energy for 2030. We should be trying to have so much electrical generation power that we can do things like create hydrogen to make cement and steel - two processes that are big carbon polluters but have no feasible way to decarbonize until we become awash in electricity.

Of course, this is one of those columns that makes a lot of us go "Really dude?" Trump has actively been trying to kill even basic renewables. He has a pathological hatred of wind power and doesn't seem to like solar either. A lot of this is that he is trying to actively resurrect the fortunes of coal mine owners and fossil fuel companies. Killing the tax credit for rooftop solar is just terrible policy.

The reality is that we are increasingly electrifying our economy. Add in the massive demands from data centers and AI and we saw electrical costs go from roughly $0.13 a KwH in August of 2020 to $0.19 five years later. That's an almost 50% increase. If you further constrain supply, that price will continue to rise, which is really bad! Unless you're a fossil fuel company, I guess.

And isn't that the point?

Not Friends

 Josh Marshall makes an important point about how the GOP has been acting like thugs but now expect Democrats to "come to the table" as adults. Yes, Democrats are overly reliant on "norms" and worry about how they will look to Very Serious People, and that makes them predisposed to treat this very aberrant moment as just the usual shit.

Trump posted a racist AI video of Jeffries standing next to Schumer that includes Schumer using vulgarities and Jeffries has a sombrero and mustache in a crude caricature of a Mexican. This is supposed to be the GOP talking point that the Dems are shutting down the government to give health care to illegal aliens. (I don't think that's going to work, especially if ACA subsidies DO collapse, which will impact Americans directly.)

If that's where we are - Trump posting juvenile videos of the minority leaders in Congress - then I don't think we have to expect Dems to "come to the table" with a compromise.

The Very Online, by the way, are lambasting Schumer and Jeffries for using the typical language of the minority party. "We hope Republicans do the right thing." "We are hopeful we can find common ground and compromise for the American people." I get that people are hungry for performative combat like we see from Newsom's communications team. When you say "We hope that Republicans do the right thing" you are not expecting that they will. You are making sure that the sundry ignoramuses that make up both the electorate and the media will see your side as wanting to make government work and the other side as petulant toddlers.

Schumer and Jeffries do not have illusions about who Trump is or what the GOP has become. They are, however, trying to win over the mushy middle. That doesn't require them to behave like assholes and trolls. In fact, the more serious and normal they look, the more Trump and his childish minions look like the assholes they are.