Donald Trump is the president-elect, and Donald Trump committed crimes:
Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted President-elect Donald J. Trump on charges of illegally seeking to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, said in a final report released early Tuesday that the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Mr. Trump in a trial, had his 2024 election victory not made it impossible for the prosecution to continue....
In his report, Mr. Smith took Mr. Trump to task not only for his efforts to reverse the results of a free and fair election, but also for consistently encouraging “violence against his perceived opponents” throughout the chaotic weeks between Election Day and Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, injuring more than 140 police officers.
Mr. Smith laid the attack on the Capitol squarely at Mr. Trump’s feet, quoting from the evidence in several criminal cases of people charged with taking part in the riot who made clear that they believed they were acting on Mr. Trump’s behalf.
It happened. We all saw it. And four years later, Trump was elected president again. Why didn't January 6 matter?
I think it's because it was an attack on the government, and the feelings many Americans have about the government are similar to the feelings they have about murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Americans want a government that makes their lives better, one that works for them and not the rich and powerful. That's also how they feel about health insurance -- they want it to ease the financial burden of healthcare, not to make CEOs and stockholders rich.
From the response to Brian Thompson's murder, we know that millions of Americans believe health insurance in America is a scam. They're sick of having claims rejected and paying huge out-of-pocket costs. Many of them know that the murder of Thompson was wrong, but they don't think it was very wrong.
I think millions of Americans feel that way about the attack on the Capitol. I'm not talking about Republican voters, who mostly believe that any Democratic electoral victory is illegitimate. I'm talking about the swing voters and occasional voters who chose Trump or stayed home in November despite knowing that the January 6 insurrectionists were criminals and Trump was the instigator of their attack. I think most of them believe January 6 was wrong, but they don't think it was very wrong.
On January 6, 2021, 62.3% of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track, according to the Real Clear Politics average. Only 28.6% thought it was on the right track.
By 54% to 32%, those surveyed said the country was on the wrong track, not headed in the right direction.
So they're not terribly upset at an attack on institutions of government that they feel have failed them, under Republicans and under Democrats, for as long as they can remember.
I'm not endorsing this view. I'm just telling you what I think is going on. The January 6 insurrectionists attacked the government, and much of Ametrica shrugged, because the government isn't a sympathetic victim.
A Gallup poll suggests that President Joe Biden will be viewed as the worst commander in chief since Richard Nixon....
Respondents were asked how they thought presidents would go down in history—"as an outstanding president, above average, average, below average, or poor?"
The poll found that among U.S. adults Biden received a net score of -35—the percentage Outstanding/Above Average minus the percentage Below Average/Poor.
The only president to receive a lower score was Nixon, with -42.
Biden has made his share of mistakes, and I suspect that a period of high inflation piled on top of forty years of increasing economic inequality left a lot of Americans with deep credit-card debt at high interest rates. Based on that record alone, his unpopularity was probably inevitable. But is he the worst president since Nixon? Why?
You probably know my thinking on this: Voters believe Biden is a terrible president because he's the worst public communicator in the modern history of the presidency. His public speaking deficits and physical presence prevent him from being a reassuring voice at moments of uncertainty. He's done a fine job on many fronts, but he doesn't seem competent.
Is that what people want from leaders? Do they really believe that seeming like a leader is what's most important? Amy Chozick certainly feels that way, by her own admission.
You might remember Amy Chozick. She was a terrible Wall Street Journal political reporter who in 2008 wrote a story suggesting that Barack Obama might not win the presidential election because he wasn't fat enough.
"I won't vote for any beanpole guy," [a] Clinton supporter wrote last week on a Yahoo politics message board.
The story strongly implied that this was a spontaneous outpouring of contempt, but it was later determined that Chozick had started a Yahoo thread with the express purpose of eliciting this opinion, and that exactly one commenter said what she wanted to hear. The Journal later issued a clarification. Undaunted, Chozick went on to a job at The New York Times, wrote a bestselling book about her time covering the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, and is now a writer and producer in Hollywood.
The Times just published an op-ed in which Chozick laments the fact that none of the politicians dealing with California's wildfires seem like leaders she admired in the past -- many of whom were incompetent:
I can’t keep up with Rudy Giuliani’s criminal indictments, but after Sept. 11, America’s mayor stood at Ground Zero and assured a broken city that the terrorist attacks would only make us stronger. Will someone — anyone? — stand in the detritus of the Pacific Palisades or Pasadena and say the same about Los Angeles?
In 2005, after widespread criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina, Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré took charge in New Orleans. Then-Mayor C. Ray Nagin called Honoré, “a John Wayne dude,” who “came off the doggone chopper and started cussing and people started moving.”
In those dark early Covid months, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York didn’t deliver niceties. (I’m not sure he’d know how.) But his daily briefings became essential. That is, before Mr. Cuomo resigned, amid allegations he downplayed Covid deaths at nursing homes and engaged in sexual misconduct, which he denied.
Chozick knows Cuomo resigned in disgrace, and knows he didn't really do a good job during COVID. She's aware that Giuliani has disgraced himself, though she may not recall that he stupidly ordered New York City's emergency command center to be placed in the World Trade Center after it was bombed in 1993, and hadn't replaced the radios that had failed first responders in 1993 by the time of the 2001 attack. Also, she seems to recall the response to Katrina as a success because one of the key figures had swagger.
"When people are feeling insecure, they'd rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right."
Donald Trump isn't doing it for her.
President-elect Donald Trump, meanwhile, instigated a schoolyard squabble, calling the California governor “Gavin Newscum” and blaming the devastation in Los Angeles on Democratic policies.
But, of course, neither is President Biden, as far as she's concerned, despite the guarantee of federal assistance that Biden has provided (and Trump threatens to withhold):
Our city is being reduced to ash and we’re being governed by puerile social media posts and presumably by President Biden, but honestly, who knows?
She doesn't care if everything that can possibly be done is being done in a situation of unprecedented awfulness -- she wants to be told it's being done right:
We’re willing to make sacrifices and overlook mistakes as long as we feel like someone is giving it to us straight. But we are getting neither poetry nor prose....
I’ve watched all of this enraged, but also beside myself. Why is it that the town that gave us Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and Will Smith (OK, there was The Slap but he still saved the world) cannot find a lead character to try to save us from this catastrophe? This state loves a charismatic action hero so much that it birthed The Terminator’s political career.
You know all those actors were playing fictional characters, don't you, Amy?
Chozick wants stirring words and manly bearing. I think that's what millions of Americans wanted from Joe Biden the last four years, and they never got it. That's why he's one of the most despised presidents of our time. After a while, it didn't matter what he did or didn't do. All that mattered is how he seemed.
Mayor Karen Bass certainly isn't doing it for Chozick, and Chozick is sure many people agree with her:
On Sunday, a petition to recall Ms. Bass “due to her failure to lead during this unprecedented crisis” had over 100,000 signatures.
Of course, anyone in the world can sign a Change.org petition -- I signed it from here in New York using a fake email address and the fake name "Dick Hertz."
But I think what Chozick from politicians is what a lot of Americans want. Some of them think they're getting stirring words and manly bearing from Donald Trump, and that's why he won. Very few Americans think they can get these things from Joe Biden, and that's why Democrats lost.
It was taken in Boston in 2016. Here's a close-up shot of a slogan that appears on the truck's body:
I remember seeing this slogan on an ice cream truck in Boston forty years earlier, though I'm sure it wasn't the same vehicle.
Because American political life has been dominated for the past decade by an infantile whiner named Donald Trump, I think about this slogan a lot. The implication is that resistance is futile: when Baby cries, Mama doesn't have a choice -- she has to buy or Baby simply won't shut up. That's certainly how Trump operates.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has invited President-elect Donald Trump to visit the Golden State to see the devastation of the Los Angeles fires firsthand.
Trump has been critical of Newsom’s handling of the wildfires, and of California’s overall wildfire prevention efforts, calling on the governor to resign and blaming the natural disaster on him. Newsom ... sent a letter to Trump inviting him to visit the state as he returns to the White House....
“In this spirit of this great country, we must not politicize human tragedy or spread disinformation from the sidelines. Hundreds of thousands of Americans — displaced from their homes and fearful for the future — deserve to see all of us working in their best interests to ensure a fast recovery and rebuild,” he added.
Maybe Trump won't take Newsom up on the invitation. I think he will, and he'll be reasonably polite while he's in California -- and then immediately resume sniping at Newsom as soon as he leaves, now pretending to be an expert with firsthand knowledge. Newsom will have given him what he wants: attention and credibility. Maybe he'll concede some point to Trump, on water usage or forestry, in an attempt at cooperation. Trump will pocket that win and continue attacking Newsom.
Denmark sent private messages in recent days to President-elect Trump's team expressing willingness to discuss boosting security in Greenland or increasing the U.S. military presence on the island, two sources with knowledge of the issue tell Axios....
The Danish government wants to convince Trump, including through the messages passed to his advisers this week, that his security concerns can be addressed without claiming Greenland for the U.S.
In a way, you can't blame Trump fans for seeing this as a good approach to governing, a real-life "art of the deal." Trump picks an enemy and goes on the attack. He makes a lot of noise. The enemy tries to mollify him by giving him part of what he wants. Everyone in MAGA: Trump wins! Baby cries, mama buys.
But on the other hand, what does the MAGA base get out of all this? We were told that Trump won the election because voters were upset about the price of eggs. Right-wing voters were upset about immigration. Ads attacking trans people reportedly had a major impact.
How does strong-arming Gavin Newsom until he agrees that maybe California should clear more underbrush address any of those issues? How does a thuggish attitude toward Greenland and Denmark strengthen the U.S.-Mexico border or lower grocery bills?
The truth is that Trump's base might be concerned about certain policy goals, but they'll be very happy if Trump just beats up someone they hate. Fox News, talk radio, and Republican politicians trained the GOP base to despise California long before Trump entered politics -- and the same is true for the godless socialists of Denmark and other Western European countries.
The conventional wisdom is that these fights are attempts to distract us from the real Trump agenda: cutting taxes and regulations on the rich and big companies, pursuing a full-blown Heritage Foundation culture war. Maybe there's some truth in that, but I think the fights might be efforts to distract us from Trump's inevitable policy failures. He's admitted that it's "hard" to lower grocery prices. His Department of Government Efficiency concedes that it won't find $2 trillion in budget cuts. His border czar is lowering expectations on the scope of the immigrant crackdown.
Trump is picking gratuitous fights to reassure voters that he still has the right stuff -- and I think he's also doing it to reassure himself. He has a desperate need to believe he's the greatest president ever, even though he knows deep down that he can't solve the problems he faces. But hey, he can beat up Greenland!
We're being told again that it would be bad for Democrats to oppose "everything" Donald Trump is doing. In a Rolling Stone story about Democrats' supine response to Trump this time around, Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng quote a Democratic operative:
“I think it’s important to distinguish between capitulation to Trump in a way that betrays Democratic values, versus constructive pragmatism,” says Jesse Lehrich, a former 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman. “Because I actually worry about both ends of the spectrum — weak-kneed Dems letting Trump steamroll them on one end, and the party just reflexively opposing anything Trump supports (i.e., 2017-style ‘resistance’) on the other.”
This echoes a December quote I've posted here several times, from Senator Brian Schatz:
“The mood is slightly different than the last time and there is a sense that if you are freaking out about everything, it becomes really hard for people to sort out what is worth worrying about,” Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, told CNN.
I question whether Democrats were "just reflexively opposing anything Trump supports" and "freaking out about everything" in 2017. Fifteen members of the Democratic Senate caucus voted for a majority of Trump's 22 initial Cabinet appointees, while nine more voted for at least ten of them and every senator, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, voted for at least three. And have we all forgotten how eager Democrats were to work with Trump on infrastructure? From December 2016:
But let's accept the premise that Democrats were "just reflexively opposing anything Trump supports" and "freaking out about everything" in Trump's first term. What were the negative consequences of that?
During Trump's term, he and his party failed to overturn the Affordable Care Act. They faced pushback on separation of immigrant families. Very little of the wall was built. Trump and the GOP passed a standard-issue pro-plutocrat tax cut, but that was Trump's only major legislative accomplishment.
But now I guess Democrats think all that was bad. Winning a few fights with Trump? Can't have that!
So I learned from The New York Times today that the lack of water in California fire hydrants is perfectly understandable:
Officials now say the storage tanks that hold water for high-elevation areas like the [Palisades] Highlands, and the pumping systems that feed them, could not keep pace with the demand as the fire raced from one neighborhood to another. That was in part because those who designed the system did not account for the stunning speeds at which multiple fires would race through the Los Angeles area this week.
“We are looking at a situation that is just completely not part of any domestic water system design,” said Marty Adams, a former general manager and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which is responsible for delivering water to nearly four million residents of Los Angeles.
Municipal water systems are designed for firefighters to tap into multiple hydrants at once, allowing them to maintain a steady flow of water for crews who may be trying to protect a large structure or a handful of homes. But these systems can buckle when wildfires, such as those fueled by the dry brush that surrounds Los Angeles’s hillside communities, rage through entire neighborhoods.
In fact, this has happened in other states, including a red one:
As urban growth spreads into wilderness areas around the country and climate change brings more challenging fire conditions, an increasing number of cities have confronted a sudden loss of water available for firefighting, most recently in Talent, Ore.; Gatlinburg, Tenn.; and Ventura County, Calif.
Rick Caruso, a real estate developer who lost to Ms. Bass in the mayoral race in 2022, said that he had a team of private firefighters in Pacific Palisades on Tuesday night helping to protect a major outdoor retail space he owns, as well as some nearby homes. All night, he said, they were telling him that water was in short supply....
“The lack of water in the hydrants, I don’t think there’s an excuse,” Mr. Caruso said. “This was very predictable,” he said, referring to the forecasts that predicted the devastating windstorm.
Mr. Caruso, who served two stints as president of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said that it will take time to account for why firefighters struggled to get enough water to fight the fires.
Apparently it won't take time to account for why the water wasn't there, because we already know that our systems aren't built for this, and remedying that would be very, very costly, and possibly ill-advised:
Greg Pierce, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies water resources and urban planning, echoed the concerns over water systems that are designed for urban fires, not fast-moving wildfires. But redesigning water systems to allow firefighters to take on a broad wildfire would be enormously expensive, he said.
A more fundamental question, he said, is whether it’s a good idea to rebuild neighborhoods adjacent to wildlands, an issue that has been broadly debated across the West as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of fires on what is known as the wildland-urban interface.
If Caruso proposed a crash program to upgrade the water infrastructure of Los Angeles at great expense when he ran for mayor, I'm not aware of it.
The lie that the lack of water is all liberals' fault has gotten halfway around the world -- but hey, at least the truth belated knows where its boots are.
*****
That saying about lies and the truth could also apply to Donald Trump's Cabinet nominees. Remember how Democrats reacted late last year, when Trump announced that his Cabinet would include a motley crew of lunatics, sleazebags, and incompetents? We were told that Democrats didn't want to raise a fuss right away:
“The mood is slightly different than the last time and there is a sense that if you are freaking out about everything, it becomes really hard for people to sort out what is worth worrying about,” Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, told CNN.
Democrats wanted to keep their powder dry because there'd be plenty of time to object:
“Until these folks are scheduled to face the Senate, Democrats are going to let the Republicans do the knifing,” one senior congressional Democratic aide told The Post.
But Republicans didn't actually do any "knifing" after they'd dispatched with Matt Gaetz. And now that hearings on the nominees are about to start, Democrats are discovering that -- having squandered a great deal of time by keeping their powder dry -- they might not have the opportunity to challenge the worst nominees properly because the hearings will be rushed:
A quiet but bitter partisan clash is underway on Capitol Hill over President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choices for key cabinet posts, as Republicans face immense pressure to fast-track confirmations and Democrats charge that they are cutting corners on vetting for critical administration jobs.
... Democrats on the committee have begun raising objections about a potential lack of access to background materials such as an F.B.I. report on [defense secretary nominee Pete] Hegseth....
“Republicans choosing to rush nominees is quickly becoming a pattern,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said on the Senate floor on Thursday. “It’s hard not to wonder what are the Republicans trying to hide about these nominees from the American people.”
So when these people were first appointed, you said nothing (or nothing apart from "I want to seem cooperative with this president, even though he calls me and everyone else in my party evil and treasonous, so I'll give all his nominees a fair hearing"). And now the big chance you claimed you'd have to confront the nominees will come and go in an eyeblink, because Republicans plan to rush the process -- which is something you could have foreseen.
The lie that got halfway around the world is that Robert Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and other extraordinarily unfit nominees are reasonable choices to help run America. While this was happening, Democrats ensured that the truth wouldn't put its boots on. They could have been making a lot of noise for weeks. But now all of these people will probably be approved, and most Americans won't even know why that's a problem.
It's possible that Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass deserves all the criticism she's getting, but if you're The New York Times, this is not how you should be reporting on that criticism -- with a story that includes direct quotes from only two people apart from the mayor: a homeowner who doesn't really have any way of knowing what the mayor did or didn't do while traveling at the request of the president of the United States, and her opponent in the last mayoral election, a rich ex-Republican who probably wants to run again in 2026:
When a series of dangerous, wind-driven fires broke out on Tuesday in the Los Angeles area, Mayor Karen Bass was on the other side of the globe, part of a delegation sent by President Biden to Ghana for the inauguration of its new president....
The mayor’s absence has drawn criticism from some Angelenos....
“There was zero preparation. There was zero thought here,” said Michael Gonzales, 47, whose home burned down in Pacific Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood that overlooks the Pacific Ocean. His family of five was camped out in a hotel in Santa Monica on Wednesday as they began figuring out where they will live.
Mr. Gonzales, a lawyer, said he believed Mayor Bass made a poor decision to remain overseas despite forecasters warning of the most dangerous fire conditions in more than a decade.
“It was an utter breakdown in leadership and it starts with the mayor’s office,” he said in an interview....
Rick Caruso, a real estate developer who lost to Ms. Bass in the mayoral race in 2022, said that he had a team of private firefighters in Pacific Palisades on Tuesday night helping to protect a major outdoor retail space he owns, as well as some nearby homes. All night, he said, they were telling him that water was in short supply.
City officials confirmed that water tanks ran dry during the intense firefight early Wednesday in Pacific Palisades because demand surged to four times the normal rate for 15 hours. The system, they suggested, was not designed to supply so much water in such a short period.
“The lack of water in the hydrants, I don’t think there’s an excuse,” Mr. Caruso said. “This was very predictable,” he said, referring to the forecasts that predicted the devastating windstorm.
Mr. Caruso, who served two stints as president of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said that it will take to time to account for why firefighters struggled to get enough water to fight the fires.
“This is a massive failure of epic proportions,” he said. “To know the storm was coming and then to leave, and not rush back. Leadership matters and the first thing is to be present.”
But this is how the mainstream media operates. Because right-wingers have been attacking mainstream news organizations as liberal for sixty years or so, they reflexively assume that any criticism of a liberal is justified, while assuming that there must be a valid reason for nearly everything conservatives do, even when they're proposing batshit crazy ideas like annexing Greenland.
As a rule, Democratic officeholders spend the majority of their terms on the back foot because when they're viciously attacked by the right, the mainstream press inevitably piles on. The right is attacking Bass for reducing fire department funding, and it's true that her 2024-25 budget cut the fire department's budget by $17.6 million. However, as Politico reports, there was supplementary funding that actually increased the fire department's budget:
The city was in the process of negotiating a new contract with the fire department at the time the budget was being crafted, so additional funding for the department was set aside in a separate fund until that deal was finalized in November. In fact, the city’s fire budget increased more than $50 million year-over-year compared to the last budget cycle....
And who was the big winner in Bass's initial budget? The police department. Fox 11 Los Angeles reported in April:
... the proposal — described by Bass a "reset" — includes ... an increase of more than $138 million for the Los Angeles Police Department; and a decrease of about $23 million for the L.A. Fire Department.
The right-wing media always says that police budgets should be increased, and raises hell if there's even the slightest indication that a city plans to trim the money that goes to cops. So Bass was doing what the right wanted.
In fact, when Bass and Caruso ran against each other and against other mayoral candidates, they battled one another over how many new cops they should add to the LAPD.
... real estate developer Rick Caruso revealed details of his platform Tuesday, including a plan to add 1,500 officers to the LAPD's force if elected mayor.
The Los Angeles Police Department's current personnel number stands at 9,521 sworn members, 185 fewer than its authorized deployment for the fiscal year, Chief Michel Moore said Tuesday.
An additional 1,500 officers would put the department just over 11,000 officers, the number called for by mayoral candidate and LA City Council member Joe Buscaino. City Attorney Mike Feuer has said as part of his campaign for mayor that the department should expand to at least 10,000 officers, and Rep. Karen Bass said that if elected mayor she would bring the department to its authorized levels of 9,700 officers by hiring civilian personnel to move desk officers to patrol.
There's also a Fox Business story with this headline:
Los Angeles Mayor Slashed Fire Budget Last Year, Prioritized Homeless Population
Really? Has there been a Fox story about California in the past five years that doesn't describe homelessness there as a massive problem? So why is Fox objecting to the fact that there's more money in the budget for dealing with homelessness than for dealing with fires? Isn't that what the right wants?
And as this story concedes:
The budget for homelessness was also reduced in the 2024-2025 budget....
So you can't win. The right sets the terms of every debate and changes those terms 2when circumstances change. The mainstream media frequently echoes right-wing critiques -- and so every Democratic officeholder is perpetually operating in enemy territory.
Yeah, that was a weird press conference yesterday.
There was talk of the rising number of beached whales in Massachusetts, the victim, the president-elect said, of those windmills that have been erected off the coast. They “are driving the whales crazy, obviously.”
There was a vow to rename the Gulf of Mexico, by presidential decree, to the “Gulf of America.” And then there was Donald J. Trump’s refusal to rule out using military force to seize the 51-mile Panama Canal on national security grounds, along with the 836,000 square miles of Greenland, the world’s largest island....
He waxed on about a favorite complaint during his first term: Shower heads and sink faucets that don’t deliver water, a symbol of a regulatory state gone mad. “It goes drip, drip, drip,” he said. “People just take longer showers, or run their dishwasher again,” and “they end up using more water.”
Is it dementia? Is it a brilliant scheme to dangle shiny objects before reporters so they won't pay attention to Trump's corruption or his degradation of the rule of law?
Regular readers know that I think Trump has mild cognitive impairment at worst. He's still sharp enough to approach a press conference like this with an intuitive sense of what works for him.
What works for him is impropriety. Usually, as in this case, it's aggressive impropriety. Sometimes it's just Trump doing weird shit, like dancing to one of his mix tapes for more than a half hour at an event that was supposed to be a town hall.
The point of it -- and I don't believe Trump has analyzed this as much as intuited it, because he has a lifelong instinct for how publicity works -- is that the critics respond by saying, in effect, This is unseemly! It's preposterous behavior and it's unbefitting of a national leader!
That reaction is why it works.
My grand unified theory of why right-wing populist parties are on the rise globally is as follows: The super-rich want more and more, and it's a zero-sum game because ordinary people are hurting as inequality rises. Mainstream right-wing parties don't even want to help the non-rich, while mainstream liberal parties help the non-rich only in small, incremental ways, because the super-rich won't permit real progressive change (as genuine leftists learn when they gain power in some countries).
So no one is going to improve the lives of the non-rich -- but right-wing populists will at least make a great show of scapegoating and hurting immigrants, LGBT people, racial and religious minorities, and other groups they've taught the working classes, in particular, to despise. Ordinary people's lives never get better, but right-wing populists at least give them focused hate.
Some of that hate is focused on "elitists." Elitists, of course, aren't actual elitists -- for instance, Elon Musk, according to this worldview, is a swashbuckling iconoclast who's the richest man in the world because he deserves to be. The real elitist is the college professor with a low-six-figure salary who hates Musk and watches MSNBC at night.
If you're reading this, you're an elitist, as Trump's base sees it. You're an elitist because, among other things, the impropriety of Trump's public appearances bothers you. You think it's buffoonish and reckless to call for annexing Canada or Greenland or the Panama Canal. You say, logically, I thought people voted for Trump because they were upset about the price of eggs. How does this lower the price of eggs?
You represent propriety, and Trump's base is delighted that, as they see it, you're "triggered," that you have "Trump Derangement Syndrome." You are -- and I'm really dating myself with this reference -- Margaret Dumont.
Margaret Dumont played an upper-crust woman in seven Marx Brothers movies between 1929 and 1941. The brothers, Groucho in particular, uttered impolite quips and did inappropriate things while she looked on, aghast.
Marx Brothers movies had a vogue in the late 1960s and early 1970s, around the time when the Yippies and other groups were trying to use violations of propriety to help start a left-wing revolution. When the Yippies introduced a pig as their candidate for president in 1968, it seemed Marxian in the sense of Harpo, Groucho, and Chico.
I don't know if Donald Trump has ever sat through a Marx Brothers movie. I'm sure he found the Yippies repulsive. But he's intuited that millions of voters think the system sucks, and that defenders of the system, and of propriety in general, are enemies.
That's us. When Trump does crazy shit and we recoil, we're Margaret Dumont. He uses us as his foil.
But that's absurd. We're not actually defending propriety -- we're defending sanity. I think there are millions of other voters who understand that.
By coincidence, yesterday on Bluesky I saw this paragraph from a July 2024 profile of John Fetterman:
I could point out that the Fetterman aide who's quoted here, Adam Jentleson, is a Columbia graduate. I could also point out that the winning presidential ticket in November included a Yale Law graduate.
But there's something to this. Maybe a little scruffiness would help the Democratic Party.
On the other hand, the 2024 Democratic ticket had some scruffiness, or at least non-"elitism." Tim Walz was a Midwestern guy with no elitism in his pedigree. He called Republicans "weird" until consultants, presumably, told him to stop.
Walz shouldn't have stopped -- and maybe John Fetterman should pick up the slack. Maybe the message Trump wants to buy Greenland? What a weirdo! should be coming from a guy in a hoodie and cargo shorts.
Instead:
This is not the senator Pennsylvanians elected...
themindshield.com/fetterman-bu...
Here's a passage from that July profile of Fetterman:
Igor Bobic, a senior politics reporter for HuffPost, told me that Fetterman first caught his eye that fall, during then Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ill-fated effort to impeach President Joe Biden. “The words he was pulling out were just totally words that you wouldn’t normally hear in the Senate,” Bobic said. “You know, like ‘jagoff’ and ‘circle jerk,’ and calling Republicans ‘dicks.’”
Maybe Fetterman's response to Trump's Greenland talk should be "He's a dick. People can't afford groceries and this is what he's talking about? That's a dick move." Maybe he should have said this in cargo shorts on Fox News. He would have pissed some people off and he wouldn't be invited back, but he'd be framing this in a way that Margaret Dumont never would.
