The Discontent of Content

 Let's just recap yesterday's Friday news dump with Richardson. 

- Millions of Epstein files were released, with Trump's name prominent in many of them, and many with his name were the then subsequently scrubbed. Among the allegations were forcible and statutory rape by Trump and beating up a girl. 

- They arrested journalist Don Lemon for recording a protest at a church. They had to venue shop in order to find a grand jury willing to indict, as judges turned them down.

- Massive protests in subzero weather, which barely registered in the media.

- Trump threatened military action against Iran.

- Trump announced his candidate to head the Federal Reserve...and his name was in the Epstein files.

- We have a partial government shutdown, though Republicans and Democrats agreed in funding for everything but DHS, while they try and rein in the abuses there. Because Mike Johnson is a toady, he has the House in recess, but we shall see if they come back and keep the lights on.

- Oh yeah, Catherine O'Hara died, but that's not really relevant to this.

Among the many lenses through which to view Trump and his cronies is the lens of "Content Creator" - itself a vacuous designation of "just some idiot with a camera." Bannon and Trump have seized on the micro-attention spans of America and provided a firehose of "content" that thwarts efforts to grasp and understand (and counter) all of his awfulness. You think shooting a VA nurse in the back is bad? How about we go ahead and arrest a journalist? You like that? No? How about we bomb Iran?

The thing is, it gets old after a while. It gets exhausting. Those of us who are slaves to following the news have been exhausted since this time last year. For most Americans, it's background noise...until you shoot a VA nurse in the back ten times. 

I saw my conservative cousin paste something on Facebook, which is the usual nonsense about Trump. "I wish he didn't tweet so much. I wish he wasn't so verbally mean and crude. But, gosh darn it, he's authentic and I just can't quit him." The thing is, unless you are part of the 27%, you simply get exhausted. This shit ain't OK.

Anyway, we probably are going to war with Iran to distract from the evidence in the Epstein files that Trump may have killed someone.

It's Not Going To Get Better

 While I've argued that we have to celebrate the small victories, like Greg Bovino getting canned, that should not obscure the fact that the authoritarian march of Trump is not abating. They and the Republican Party is more or less committed to his project of turning America in a competitive authoritarian state, like Hungary. They might try and round off some rough edges, like shooting people in the back on the street, and they will seize any opportunity to try and rally their base, but it sure seems like we have reached a tipping point.

Things are not going to get better on their own, and may in fact get worse in the short run.

At this point, I'm back to actively rooting for some sort of massive own goal, like an economic collapse or the leaking of those damned Epstein Files.

The Red, White And Blue Revolution

 Krugman compares the resistance to ICE in Minneapolis to the color revolutions that swept the former Soviet Union - with varying degrees of success - after its collapse. The point of these revolutions was to establish liberal democracy in countries that really never had them. In the United States, there are already robust institutions of liberal democracy that are surviving to varying degrees the onslaught by Trump and Project 2025. The press is free, but compromised. Federalism remains a bulwark to Trumpist overreach. The Courts continue to try and preserve the Constitution and civil liberties. If Democrats can gain control of Congress, we can legitimately see a pathway to preserving American liberty.

However, much of this will actually depend on actions like the incredible disciplined protests from Minnesota. No Kings is a decent start, but it will have to be expanded and continued. While firing Greg Bovino is not the solution to this problem, earning victories - no matter how small - are important to maintaining momentum and gaining converts. The doomerism that pervades many online spaces is simply not the right response. Steely resolve, yes. "This doesn't matter", no.

The rest of the world looks at the US with dismay. It will be up to the majority of Americans who oppose this to restore both our democracy and our reputation. 

Maybe?

 During the Iraq debacle, some idiot claimed that they were seeing "green shoots" of stability in the country racked by civil war. It's the same sort of thing I feel today, when I see the response to the state execution of Alex Pretti. The man was a literal Boy Scout, a literal choirboy. As Krugman notes, he is not being subjected to the same character assassination as Renee Good, who had the audacity to be a queer woman who didn't defer to the Big Strong Man sufficiently. Yglesias, who has developed a real knack for Steelmanning the indefensible, is actually unable to make the case for this bullshit. We are starting to see "unnamed sources close to the President" begin to ask very real questions about what is going on.

The videos of Pretti's murder are disturbing, but that is precisely the point. (I cannot fathom what his parents must thing, having to see the murder of their seemingly extraordinary son plastered across screens around America and the world.) The video makes it impossible for the Trump Administration to lie - or rather it has made it impossible for them to lie in a way that is defensible except by the hardest core of MAGA. 

Josh Marshall made the point about "escalation dominance" that clearly motivates Miller, Noem, Bovino and Lewandowski. They are "content creators" in our descent to fascism. 

They want the video.

Right up until they don't.

As of this moment, the GOP is fracturing over this issue. The public is appalled. They can try and push the narrative of Pretti having a gun on him, but that only infuriates the Second Amendment crowd. 

Trump believes in dominance politics, and his sending in shock troops and Brown Shirts to terrorize Minneapolis is an expression of that. 

He is also fickle and self-centered. If he sees this (if his addled brain is capable of taking in new information) and thinks "This is hurting me", then he will jettison people soon. If I had to guess that Lilliputian Martinet, Greg Bovino, would make an easy sacrifice. I wouldn't feel safe if I were Noem either, but Bovino is even more of an aesthetic embarrassment than Noem, as Trump doesn't like short little guys but like women who have butchered their faces for the male gaze. Seriously, I think that's it.

If Trump DOES throw aside Noem, I would absolutely expect her to go scorched earth, the way Marjorie Traitor Greene did. These are awful people - narcissistic, insecure, cruel - and they will turn on each other in a feral display of their own barbarism.

This is not "the end of Trump" and likely not even the end of Stephen Miller, despite him being the true architect of all this. However, we know Trump will case aside those he feels do not reflect well on him. This could be the moment when we begin to see them turn on each other.

I'm not necessarily optimistic, because after the initial outrage ends, the GOP will fall dutifully in-line. Still, it could be a start. Trump backed down over Greenland; he could back down here.  

Yes, Trump Is A Fascist

 I came about to this after resisting it during his first term, but Jonathan Rauch makes a pretty comprehensive case for the term.

Relatedly, in trying to process the execution of Alex Pretti, I realize that the last time I felt like this was January 6th. I feel that same white-hot rage that this is being done to our country, our ideals, our institutions. Rauch's catalog of Trump's fascism is just the academic framework for my anger. I can remember early on election night, when I realized that, no, the American people would re-elect this felon, this open sewer of human foibles. I drove out to the woods and screamed in pain and anger into the darkness. 

This is why.

Cringey liberals were right all along. 

Law Versus Order

 Paul Campos links to a Gessen piece about the nature of totalitarian and terror regimes. He's among the more alarmist of the writers I read (doesn't make him wrong, just saying), and I don't think we have a totalitarian regime right now. That seems absurd. If we did, there would be no coverage at all of the execution of Alex Pretti. It is clear though that what Trump and his legions want to implement is state terror. 

What ICE is doing in Minneapolis is not remotely "legal" under any earlier understanding of the word. It is not constitutional, certainly, as they routinely engage in illegal searches, they attack people exercising their First Amendment rights and they basically kidnap people without warrants. We can add extrajudicial killings to the litany of illegal actions. Instead, as a commentator note, what they want is not "law" but "order," which is to say compliance. Renee Good and Alex Pretti would be alive, if they simply laid down and did not challenge the state's actions - actions, again, that are constitutionally highly dubious. 

I have argued in the past that Trumpism is not conservative but reactionary, and I stand by that. The reflex to impose order at the expense of liberty is, however, a hallmark of conservatism. The impulse to bow down to hierarchies is at the root of all conservatism. There are times when that makes a certain amount of sense, but it is certainly not universally true. Conservatives hated Martin Luther King with a white hot passion - not because he was violent, but because he challenged the structures that imposed a brutish order.

Watch the lying the sacks of shit who go before cameras and lie to you about what your own eyes can see. They aren't serving the law or the Constitution, they are serving their ideal of an authoritarian order where the strong crush the weak.

ICE Just Executed A Man On The Streets Of Minneapolis

 You can find the video if you want. It's disturbing. If you can stomach it, watch it. Bear witness. ICE tackled a guy to the ground, beat him ruthlessly and then one guy shot him multiple times as he was lying on the ground. 

If I were Walz, I would be faced with an impossible dilemma. My gut would say that I need to mobilize the National Guard and bring them onto the streets of the Twin Cities and interpose themselves between ICE and the populace. My brain would recognize that as soon as I do that, Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act. 

If this act stands, if ICE is not removed from Minnesota, then we are reasonably looking at the end of America as an idea. The idea that consent of the governed matters, that civil liberties matter, that the Constitution matters is on a knife's edge and this event could tip if off. 

We are approaching a place where "Blue" states need to seriously consider whether remaining in a polity with the states that are OK with "comply or be shot" is tenable. If America "pukes up her ancient soul" then it is no longer America.

UPDATE: Good take from Josh Marshall, as always.

Can The Supremes Actually Apply The Text?

 Yglesias summarizes the Trump Administration's war on birthright citizenship. By just about any standard - the text of the XIVth amendment, the existing precedents, basic bureaucratic paperwork, federalism and the issuing of birth certificates - this should be an open and shut case. There is no defensible position to revoke the plain text of the XIVth, besides racist beliefs in the status of non-white people. 

Ideally, this could be an opportunity to the Sycophantic Six to show that they can actually apply the law as it was intended, rather than giving Trump whatever he wants. They seem to be leaning that way when it comes to the Federal Reserve's independence; they could do the same here.

The Court is so degraded right now, that it is hard to take anything for granted. I do wonder if things like yesterday's protests in Minneapolis could signal to the Court just how fragile their legitimacy is right now. The foundations of Constitutional governance are quaking under our feet right now, and the question is whether the Sycophantic Six will be pallbearers or paladins. 

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?

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. 

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.

King Donald The First

 The atrocious murder of Renee Good in Minnesota by masked agents of the state has been likened to the Orwellian line of  "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." This connects - and rightly so - the actions of the Trump administration with 20th century totalitarianism. I don't think they've achieved it, but that is clearly their goal.

However, in describing Trump himself, I think Krugman is correct here and here. Trump clearly sees himself as a monarch, a sovereign. His actions work to blur the lines between the state and his person. He sees the achievements of the state as HIS achievements and the resources of the state as HIS resources. This is why dissent of any kind is "treason," because the king is the sovereign. 

The basic, foundational idea of America - the thing we are celebrating this year's 250th anniversary - is that the people are sovereign. Trump's "L'etat cest moi" bullshit is deeply, deeply Unamerican. The raid to get Maduro was a very impressive bit of work by the extraordinary professionals of Joint Special Operations Command. Trump thinks he did it. He crowed about watching it on TV, like he was playing some sort of video game and the controller was in his hands. His desecration of the East Wing of the White House is reminiscent of some fading potentate building a palace in his own honor to stave off the looming reality of his own mortality. 

I honestly am not going to predict the fallout from Good's murder or Trump's illegal actions in Venezuela. I've been humbled trying to predict things where Trump is involved. Still, shooting a white mom in the face is not likely to increase support for his internal deportation policies. Those policies were never popular, as people wanted more border security, not attacks on their schools and neighborhoods in an effort to deport some roofers, line books and housekeepers. Before these events we had two polls on Trump's job approval. CBS had 41-59 or 18 points "underwater" and Rasmussen (Rasmussen!) had him 45-53 or 8 points down. 

ICE itself has seen support collapse, from +16 to -14 in November. That number is sure to fall further. People want the border "secure" but they don't want raids on apartment buildings, they don't want masked goons provoking confrontations on American streets. Support for abolishing ICE entirely has reached 42%, up from 29% in 2018. Not yet the majority position, but this was before ICE start shooting people in the face and then being held unaccountable for their actions.

I've been learning about pre-Norman Britain, and it is striking how the character of government often depended so completely on the character of the king. Trump is a man of low character, and his administration reflects this. I was reflecting on the fact that "shame" isn't actually a bad thing, if it serves a moral code. Relentless shame is debilitating, but if you wrong someone and feel shame, that's actually good. It allows you to make amends and rectify your behavior.

Trump's superpower is shamelessness, and that extends to his courtiers, who smear Renee Good rather than reflect on their actions that led to her slaughter in the streets of her hometown by agents of the state that are not welcome there. Their king revels in the blood on his hands, he bathes in it.

But hopefully, America remembers that we are not a nation of kings.

The Lying Is The Point

 Yesterday, video clearly showed an ICE officer in Minneapolis shoot and kill a woman who was "in the way" of an ICE raid. He violated many basic rules of law enforcement - don't stand in front of a vehicle; don't discharge your weapon into a moving vehicle - and he basically murdered her for "not complying."

Immediately the Trump administration made false claims about the woman, the incident and the nature of the threat to ICE. There are so many disturbing aspects of this incident that it does remind me of January 6th, in terms of which aspect I should be angriest about.

This happened for one reason only: Trump and Stephen Miller are looking for performative acts of oppression and intimidation in "blue" cities. They aren't finding the hundreds of thousands of "illegals" in these cities, and maybe they are stupid enough to think that this is just a matter of more raids. In fact, these wholesale assaults on civil liberties very much feels like the point of all of this. They've started to focus on Minnesota because of a fraud case surrounding day cares, which is currently being adjudicated. Yes, it was a crime, but it's being dealt with appropriately. The pretext is all that matters.

It is, of course, depressing to go online and see the inevitable toeing of the party line for what amounts to the lynching or extrajudicial killing of Renee Nicole Good. All the Trump sycophants and fascists immediately assumed the GroupThink about radical antifa leftists and the utter bullshit that - apparently in their minds - justifies shooting a mother in the head from point blank range.

It is also incredibly depressing to see the "she should have just complied" crowd place the cause of her death on her as opposed to the ICE agent who was very much NOT in danger of imminent death. That these are the same people who think Ashlii Babbit is a martyr and January 6th was no big deal is not surprising.

It is the ability of Trump and Trumpism to get their followers to believe the lies - even with obvious video evidence showing the opposite - that is truly terrifying. The actual act of violence is appalling, but life can be cruel and capricious. Terrible things do happen. 

It is watching the entire Republican Party bow down before an altar of lies that is so unsettling. How can you recreate civic democracy under those circumstances?

Thanks, SCOTUS

 The Kavanaugh Stops - Brown skin is probable cause - are having exactly the sort of effect that one would imagine. Bovino is one of the full on fascists that Trump has empowered through Stephen Miller. I wish I was sanguine that these blatantly unconstitutional efforts would actually move voters, but maybe it will only be when so many Brown people stop coming work that the country slides further into recession that people will realize that terrorizing people is economically counterproductive. Enough people clearly do not care about the human suffering involved.

Speaking of Brown people, glad to see that there are no negative consequences to letting any asshole own weapons of war.

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. 

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. 

That ICE Shooting In Chicago

 Unsurprisingly, it seems like an excessive use of force.

The Conspiratorial Style

 Richardson's daily cataloguing of the atrocities focuses on recent attempts to destroy various forms of fact gathering and journalism. The Trump administration really seems to believe that if you just suppress bad news that no one will think things are getting bad. We have already seen a steep decline in consumer sentiment, and whether it's hiring freezes or rising prices, people very much aware that the economy is struggling some. Things feel off. 

Some of this is the full frontal assault on expertise seen in the visa scam recently unveiled. There are a lot of smartish people who run or help run important companies. Everything is fucking nuts right now, and not having trustworthy economic data or not being able to know what tariff or immigration policy will be next week (much less next year) makes planning impossible. The very steps that Trump is taking to make it seem like things are going great will only make things get worse.

In this weird attempt to canonize Charlie Kirk, I was struck by the seemingly bizarre way that evangelicals in particular saw him and the world. This nutso idea that Kirk "loved his enemies" is just contrary to fact. They are even saying that he "stopped the bullet that would've killed someone else" because he's literally Superman. This just feels like almost medieval superstition.

But when you think about superstition, how different is it, really, from conspiracy theories? Both are just cognitively flawed ways of looking at cause and effect. Both are not able to understand what evidence is really telling you. Both want to ascribe elements of random chance to some overarching power or plan.

We live in a messy world. The reason we rely on doctors and statisticians and forecasters is that the future is a dark room, and we need to know where to find the light switch.

Trump seems prone to this sort of conspiratorial thinking, not as a way to engage with his base, but because he shares their fascination with it. He rose to political prominence on birtherism. Yeah, it was racist, but it was also a conspiracy theory. Trump is a narcissist who has two failed marriages, numerous bankruptcies and has won the popular vote once. All of those things must be someone else's fault or things that were stolen from him.

Trump is not - in any way - a religious man. Yet his stranglehold on white evangelicals is total. It's not because they share a theological understanding. It's because they share the need for some form of thinking that is conspiratorial. It's based on "faith" in the sense that it is not based on evidence. Jesus' face did not appear in a storm cloud, and gas is not $2.00 a gallon. 

Obviously, the Trumpist war on facts is part of the authoritarian playbook. But the reason they have to do it is not just to make themselves look more popular. I don't think reality will let them get away with that. Hiding the economic data will not change the price of groceries or make it so you don't get laid off. I think that - at least in part - the war on facts is because the crave the certainty of their bizarre beliefs and they want to wall off any information that might disturb that.

Yes, it's Authoritarianism 101, but it's also a desperate attempt to stave off cognitive dissonance. 

The Pantomime Presidency

 Donald Trump is a stupid person. I've said this before, and I stick by it. I saw a video (can't find it) that was Edward Teller talking about John Von Neumann, who might have been the smartest person to ever live. Teller said that what made Von Neumann so smart was that he loved to think because he was good at it, but he became even better at it, precisely because he loved to do it. 

Trump doesn't like to think.

What's more, his feeble brain has been cooked by 70 years of mainlining bad television like a junkie shooting up heroin in 1970s Times Square, a period that Trump himself seems stuck in.

We have seen two instances of his TV presidency, his Pretendency, this week. The farcical, but still dangerous, military takeover of DC and his flop of a summit with Vladimir Putin. 

The DC thing is pure fascist theater. It's ridiculous and most of the law enforcement and military folks know that. It's not actually venturing into high crime areas, but rather patrolling the wealthier streets. It's part ridiculous theater and part authoritarian cowing of the DC class. They aren't patrolling Anacostia Flats, they're patrolling K Street.

Similarly, the summit was bullshit, because it was always going to be bullshit, because Trump can't be bothered with learning what he needs to learn to manage a guy like Putin. Instead, it creates optics - most of which favor Putin - as Trump vainly and in vain seeks the Nobel Peace Prize.

In other words, the main news stories of the week are Trump pretending to be strong and capable on TV, when anyone paying attention knows it's a colossal joke - just not a funny one.