Dead Americans

 Yesterday, I wrote about the overt death threats that have started in Trumpistan. There will be people who are killed by political violence. Trump's pardons will exacerbate that.

There are other ways Trump will get Americans killed. The first is related to the pardons. On the one hand, when you remove the consequences for political violence - on behalf of Trump - you incentivize his worst cultists to commit more violence on his behalf. Yes, there are probably a few insurrectionists who don't want any more part of that circus. There are others who are simply violent people. Some of them will come home and commit domestic violence against those who may or may not have talked to the police.

I feel pretty certain that within the next few months, at least one of the people Trump pardoned will be arrested for a crime that is not explicitly political in nature. Democrats need to Willie Horton the shit out of that person.

We also have Trump's bizarre pardon of Ross Ulbricht, who facilitated drug trafficking. Given how Trump leveraged the fentanyl crisis to win votes, pardoning a guy who helped move drugs around seems odd. I doubt Ulbricht recreates Silk Road, but some sort of imitator will crop up, again because Trump has seemingly decided that drug dealers are OK, as long as they are white.

Finally, Paul Krugman notes that what is happening in the broad field of public health is incredibly alarming. Withdrawing from the World Health Organization is "bad" but we are going to see measles come back, notably in Red States, as national guidelines are abandoned. Kids die of measles. And this is before RFK Jr gets his weird assed claws into the national health apparatus.

Trump has clearly hit the ground running with all the Project 2025 horrors. While we have moments like the judge who ridiculed the Executive Order ending birthright citizenship, the "energy" is entirely with Trump's blitzkrieg on American institutions.

I do think that Josh Marshall is correct that these actions are going to backfire politically. I think Pete Hegseth gets confirmed by a tie-breaking vote by Vance. Then, if anything happens to the American military, his manifest incompetence gets the blame. As soon as one of those January Sixers commits a crime, Democrats need to hammer that story. The first kid who dies of measles has to get the Riley Laken Treatment.

Trump is a fucking idiot, and he's surrounded himself by evil men who know how to cater to his bloated ego to advance their own odious agenda. Things will get worse, but TRUMP IS NOT IMMUNE TO THE POLITICAL LAWS OF GRAVITY. When Americans die because he won the election, that will have consequences.