Blogfeast

 

Supermercado Batocchio, in Resistencia, Argentina.

 

Batocchio's annual Jon Swift Roundup (the Best Posts of the Year, Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves) is up.

Liberal Fascism Watch: War on Christmas edition

Pulled from the archives, Christmas 2015: 

Reproduction of an Orthodox icon of Saints Sergius and Bacchus (Sergios and Vachos), by Theophanis the Cretan (1545), Monastery of Dionysiou Mount Athos, via Paracletos.

Jay Nordlinger for National Review wrote (in a Christmas-themed post on "Tree-Hugging in High Places"),

I was interested to read an article by Thomas V. DiBacco in the Wall Street Journal. (By the way, it would be interesting if Professor DiBacco disliked wine — as his name means “of Bacchus.”) The article begins...

Sadly, no. I mean, it doesn't mean "of Bacchus" in the sense of the wine god, most likely, as paganism was pretty dead by the time the Italian personal naming system got going, though it could conceivably be after the Saint Bacchus who was martyred at Barbalissos in Syria around the beginning of the 4th century, after being paraded in drag around town with his companion Saint Sergius, who appeared to Sergius after his death, encouraging him to face martyrdom as well so that they could be together for eternity, which Sergius did. Their vita describes them as erastai, which could be translated "lovers", and some scholars have thought of them as Christianity's prototype example same-sex marriage, united in the ritual of adelphopoiesis, though this is of course widely disputed.

Chaos Monkeys

 Relief crew here wishing you the very best holidays, sorry I've been tied up!

One thing I think people are missing is the significance of the scene in the president-elect's box at the Army-Navy football game on December 14, where so many symbolic meetings seemed to be occurring, from Vice President–Elect Vance bringing killer Daniel Penny as his plus-one to the rival secretary of defense candidates Hegseth and DeSantis, but business appeared to be getting done in the deep conversations of Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Senate Majority Leader–Designate John Thune. The world's richest man, Elon Musk, brought a small boy, one of his numerous progeny, but in many of the pictures he looked like a stranger trying to photobomb the event, lonely and wistful, with an oddly large head.

AP photo by Stephanie Scarbrough.

We know what Trump and the congressional leaders were talking about, and it wasn't Musk's many interesting plans for cutting government spending. It was the urgent continuing budget resolution they were planning to vote on in the House on Wednesday the 18th, to prevent a government shutdown on Friday, in fact, and Trump was pushing some new demands in the opposite direction; instead of the resolution they planned, to carry them just to March, forcing them to go through the same thing in a matter of a few months, he wanted them to extend spending out for a full year, until next December, which I think would have been impossible to manage before the deadline, and in addition he wanted them to include a provision suspending the debt ceiling, the thing Democrats usually have to beg Republicans to help them with, because the Republicans are so famously conservative about the national debt.

(The debt ceiling is currently suspended, under the terms of an earlier deal; that's not what would have shut the government down when the deal expired on January 1, but it will shut it down fairly soon, maybe mid-June, at current spending levels, so they most likely will need to re-suspend the debt ceiling, or eliminate it permanently as Trump apparently suggested in his conversation with Johnson and Thune.)

So my theory is Musk didn't enjoy this. His plan to cut two and a half trillion dollars from the national debt was not being taken seriously (he didn't actually have a plan, but everyone should have understood that he was so smart it would happen before you knew it). Trump was going ahead on the assumption that he'd be adding $7.7 trillion over the next ten years. Musk was being slighted.

So, naturally, when the actual text of the bill (without suspension of the debt limit) was posted on Tuesday he turned to Twitter (I still mostly call it Twitter), as one does, for comfort and assistance, essentially inviting followers to do his research for him, on how terrible the bill was

And they obliged with a torrent of misinformation, which he happily reposted all night long, as Brad DeLong writes,

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

Thank you for being here as we slogged through this year. I'll be away until after Christmas, but please drop by while I'm away -- I expect entertaining and edifying posts from our regulars. Thank you, Tom and Yas, for all your great work this year. See you all on December 29.

DID TRUMP WANT TO BE THE NICE GUY JUST WHEN MUSK WANTED TO BE THE BAD GUY?

Yesterday was ... interesting.

Wielding the social media platform he purchased for $44 billion in 2022, Mr. Musk detonated a rhetorical nuclear bomb in the middle of government shutdown negotiations on Capitol Hill.

In more than 150 separate posts on X, Mr. Musk demanded that Republicans back away from a bipartisan spending deal that was meant to avoid a government shutdown over Christmas. He vowed political retribution against anyone voting for the sprawling bill backed by House Speaker Mike Johnson....

By the end of the day, Mr. Trump issued a statement of his own, calling the bill “a betrayal of our country.”

The story I'm quoting, from The New York Times, goes on to say:

But left unclear was whether Mr. Musk is a loose cannon pursuing his own agenda or the tool that Mr. Trump envisioned to rein in an out-of-control bureaucracy....

Would this have happened without Musk? He seemed to be driving the bus yesterday, until Trump remembered that he's supposed to be the alpha dog, at which point he and J.D. Vance suddenly demanded an increase in the debt ceiling now, on President Biden's watch, so a fight over the debt ceiling doesn't interfere with Trump's plans once he's inaugurated.

Trump has two modes: nasty and glad-handing. When he's in glad-handing mode, he acts as if he wants everyone to be happy. Obviously, "everyone" doesn't mean everyone -- when he was just a blowhard real estate guy, people of color weren't included in "everyone," so he and his father discriminated against black would-be tenants, and Trump later demanded the death penalty for the Central Park Five. Later, once Trump became a Fox News addict, "everyone" began to exclude Democrats and most groups associated with Democrats. Trump was mostly in nasty mode during the campaign, but since the election he's occasionally tried to sound conciliatory -- maybe not to ABC or the Des Moines Register, but to some ordinary citizens who might mistrust him for obvious reasons. Notice two excerpts from Time's recent Trump interview, which were flagged by Noah Berlatsky. First, on abortion:

Then on trans people:

Trump is almost being humane here. Don't worry, I'm not giving him credit for human decency -- he just seems to be shifting into salesman mode. He wants everyone to be happy! He's going to give us the greatest presidency ever and eveyone should love it!

Musk also has happy-huckster mode, especially when he's selling his vaporware -- colonizing Mars, full self-driving, Neuralink. But lately he's tended to be in this mode:

There is a large graveyard filled with my enemies.

I do not wish to add to it, but will if given no choice.

Those who pick fights with me do so at their own peril, but maybe this is their lucky day …

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 21, 2023

His transformation of Twitter to X, for both workers and normie tweeters, has been an ongoing story of "The beatings will continue until morale improves." And now this:

YES https://t.co/sOnGmxlHMK

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 18, 2024

Right now, I think Trump is dreaming of a glorious inaugural, followed by a presidency that makes "everyone" happy (obviously not including the undocumented or quite a few other groups). Musk, by contrast, wants to start burning everything to the ground. He wants to be feared, not loved -- or he thinks being feared is why he'll be loved.

Trump and Musk both have dual natures. At any given moment, I assume that whichever one is being more of an asshole will dominate.

DEAR DEMOCRATS: YOU KNOW THAT WHAT YOU DID AFTER TRUMP'S FIRST VICTORY WORKED, RIGHT?

Jamelle Bouie is right:

The Democratic Party lacks the energy of a determined opposition — it is adrift, listless in the wake of defeat. Too many elected Democrats seem ready to concede that Trump is some kind of an avatar for the national spirit — a living embodiment of the American people. They’ve accepted his proposed nominees as legitimate and entertained surrender under the guise of political reconciliation.

To which Democrats reply: Yup, that's right. ABC reports:

Democrats have a plan to take back power in Washington back from Republicans in two years: work with them now.

Democrats, who are already planning their comeback after being swept out of power in Washington last month, have said they'll oppose President-elect Donald Trump and his allies when their values collide but are open to cooperation on a range of issues, including immigration, federal spending and entitlements.

The strategy marks a turnaround from 2017, when "resistance" to Trump was Democrats' rallying cry.

Democrats have decided that the last thing they want to do is replicate their actions after the 2016 election. They're treating resistance as a spectacular failure, even though we all know that resistance worked.

Do Democrats remember the 2018 midterms? In the House, Democrats gained 41 seats and wrested control from the GOP. Democratic governors replaced Republicans in Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, New Mexico, and Nevada.

In 2020, Democrats dealt Trump his only electoral defeat. In 2022, Democrats beat Trumpist election truthers all over the country and prevented a "red wave" by focusing on the abortion rights Trump's hand-picked Supreme Court justices took away.

Democrats lost this year, but the popular vote margin was less than 1.6, in the midst of economic malaise that hurt incumbent parties globally, and with a candidate who got a late start -- and who also pursued this "Republicans are awesome!" strategy, with no positive effect.

According to the ABC story, the Democrats' make-nice approach

marks a challenge to Republicans for bipartisanship at a time when narrow GOP congressional majorities will likely mandate some level of cooperation.

Why do Democrats believe narrow majorities "will likely mandate some level of cooperation"? Trump plans to do many things through executive orders and sheer brazenness. The Leonard Leo federal courts will almost certainly let him operate that way. And where laws need to be passed, narrow GOP majorities won't be a problem, because Republicans are very good at voting in lockstep.

Democrats think voters will understand if they say nice things about Republicans now and oppose them later. But saying nice things about Trump and the GOP reinforces the widespread belief that Trump is all bark and no bite. We know that some voters with undocumented immigrants in their families don't really believe Trump will come for those family members. We know that many voters believe Trump's authoritarian talk is just bluster -- note the "He is exaggerating" numbers here:

Bouie writes:

If Democrats ... want voters to blame Trump for any price hikes during his administration, they need to do everything they can now, in as dramatic a fashion as they can manage, to make Trump the culprit — to give voters a language with which they can express their anger at the status quo.

If Democrats want voters to blame Trump for any potential foreign policy failures, they must work now to highlight and emphasize the extent to which the president-elect wants a more or less inexperienced set of hacks and dilettantes to lead the nation’s national security establishment. Even something as obvious as the connection between Trump’s billionaire allies and his support for large, upper-income tax cuts has to be dramatized and made apparent to the voting electorate.

Right -- because when you're echoing the GOP's message that Republicans are awesome, and you're implicitly echoing the GOP's other message, which is that Democrats are terrible, you make it easy for Trump and the GOP to blame future tariff-driven price hikes or future foreign policy instability on President Biden.

Why are Democrats acting this way -- acting as if, in Bouie's words, "Trump is some kind of an avatar for the national spirit — a living embodiment of the American people"? I'm sure it's because no one expected him to win the popular vote (even though he barely won it), and many assumed it was unthinkable that he could win at all. But now they've whipsawed from "Trump can't possibly win" to "The entire country is Republican and we need to convert or die."

That's nuts. Yes, according to Monmouth, 53% of the country is optimistic about the policies Trump will pursue -- but 50% were optimistic at this point in 2016, and Trump's favorability and job approval fell significantly after that. Only 3 in 10 Americans have confidence in Trump's Cabinet picks, according to an AP-NORC poll, while approximately half are "not at all confident"; just before Barack Obama took office in 2009, a Pew survey said that 66% of Americans approved of his Cabinet picks, and only 17% disapproved.

If any non-incumbent president in this century had a mandate upon entering office, it was Obama -- and yet Republicans and their Astroturf Tea Party movement attacked him mercilessly, starting from early in his term. I see no evidence that Democrats will attack Trump with that level of energy even after he's sworn in.

One last point: Many Democrats routinely say that it's pointless for them to do a vigorous job of messaging because the media environment is wired to amplify Republican messages and suppress Democratic messages. Funny thing, though: These same Democrats seem to believe their message will get through if they're saying nice things about Republicans. Maybe that means messages of vigorous opposition could also get through? How would Democrats know when they rarely test the premise?

IF AOC BECOMES THE OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE'S TOP DEMOCRAT, WHAT DOES PELOSI THINK SHE'LL DO? SAY "LATINX"?

This is bad:

Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is fighting to keep Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) out of a senior position on an important committee.

Despite her absence from the Capitol as she recovers from hip replacement surgery in Luxembourg, Pelosi has been whipping votes to kill Ocasio-Cortez’s bid to become the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee....

The party’s steering committee selected Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), who had the backing of Pelosi, over Ocasio-Cortez during its meeting Monday evening, and the New Democrat Coalition, a center-left group of House Democrats, endorsed Connolly on Friday. Pelosi has been making calls and campaigning on behalf of Connolly, according to Punchbowl News and Axios.

This happened despite the fact that Connolly is 74 years old and has esophageal cancer.

Oliver Willis is right:

In the steering committee vote, Connolly got 34 votes and Ocasio-Cortez got 27, according to NBC. She's hoping to win the final vote. It's possible, but Democrats haven't rejected a steering committee choice in a decade.

I'm sure there's more here than just Pelosi's continuing resentment of AOC, who defeated a top Pelosi lieutenant in 2018. Mainstream Democrats inexplicably see this year's narrow Republican victory as a landslide. They think there's a widespread rejection of their policies and their perceived radicalism, which they think AOC represents.

Meanwhile, Republicans, in victory or defeat, place radicals in charge whenever they please. They don't worry about alienating middle-of-the-road voters when, for instance, they pick Jim Jordan to head the Judiciary Committee -- or James Comer to head this committee. Comer, you'll recall, used the committee to give us a long, failed investigation of the "Biden crime family." Did that hurt Republicans at the polls in 2024? They didn't win big, but they won a trifecta. Mainstream Democrats are terrified when a progressive Democrat makes the news (Be quiet! Centrist voters might hear you!) -- but somehow, the radicalism of congressional Republicans never does the tremendous damage to the GOP that middle-of-the-road Democrats think progressives like AOC will do to their party.

I'm sure AOC's opponents also worry that having her as the top Democrat on the committee, or even the committee chair in the future, will threaten the interests of their rich donors. That may be. But aren't some of these same centrists coming around to the opinion that Democrats need to start rejecting neoliberalism? Well, here's their chance. Picking AOC as the top Democrat on this committee would be a nice f-you to neoliberalism. But they won't do it, will they?

Call your member of Congress if you think they can be swayed. I did.

*****

UPDATE: It's over. Connolly won the final vote, 131-84.

LEARNED HELPLESSNESS IS A HELLUVA DRUG

It's appalling that people still need to be persuaded of this:

Trump’s popular-vote margin has shrunk to about 1.5 percent—one of the tightest in the past half century—and because some votes went to third-party and independent candidates, he’ll fall just short of winning a majority of the vote nationwide. Compared with incumbent governments elsewhere in the world, Democrats’ losses were modest. And in the House, they gained a seat, leaving the GOP with the second-smallest majority in history.

This is good news, but we've known it for weeks! The Cook Political Report's popular vote tally had Trump below 50%, and his margin of victory below 2%, a month ago.

As votes continue to be counted, Trump has fallen below 50%. More Americans voted against him than for him for the 3rd election in a row. #NoMajorityNoMandate

[image or embed]

— Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek.bsky.social) November 16, 2024 at 10:09 AM

Why hasn't this penetrated Democrats' consciousness?

Sure, things looked bad shortly after Election Day:

Five days after last month’s election, Senator Chris Murphy rendered a damning verdict on his party’s performance. “That was a cataclysm,” the Connecticut Democrat wrote on X. “Electoral map wipeout.” Donald Trump had won both the popular vote and the biggest Electoral College victory—312 to 226—for any Republican since 1988; Democrats had lost their Senate majority and appeared unlikely to retake the House. The Democratic Party had lost touch with far too many American voters, Murphy concluded: “We are beyond small fixes.”

But we have updated numbers and Murphy is still talking this way (as are many other Democrats), telling The Atlantic,

“There becomes a real dishonesty and inauthenticity within our party if we look at this last election as too close to call or good spots and bad spots.”

And Rob Flaherty, deputy campaign manager for Kamala Harris, tells Semafor,

“You don’t get a national eight-point shift to the right without losing hold of culture.”

We have no idea what's about to happen, and we can't be at all certain that there'll be contested elections in the future. But if there are, remember: There was a 26-point shift to the Democrats in 1964: after what was effectively a tie in 1960, Lyndon Johnson won in 1964 by a 61.1%-38.5% margin. Had Republicans "lost hold of the culture"? Maybe Goldwater Republicans had (although they'd seize the zeitgeist sixteen years later). But the GOP gained 3 Senate seats and 47 House seats in 1966, then won the presidency back in 1968, then won a 1964-size landslide in 1972.

Did stuff happen between 1964 and 1972 to change the political landscape? Of course -- it was the Sixties (and early Seventies). Lots of stuff happened! Do Murphy and Flaherty think nothing consequential will happen in the next four years? Under Donald Trump? Do they think the 2028 election, if we have one, will be conducted in the same political climate we have now? Why would that happen when Trump intends to change nearly everything about how government functions, in an extreme and corrupt way?

Many Democrats appear to want 2024 to have been "a cataclysm." If it was a cataclysm, then there's no point in making small but insistent gestures of resistance like, y'know, saying it's a bad idea to have a vaccine denialist in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, or a Russian fellow traveler as our intelligence chief. You'd imagine that "cataclysm" thinking would inspire Democrats to be fighting Trump harder right now, but it seems to be inspiring the opposite: the thought that there's no use even trying right now -- everyone hates Democrats. If you say that the party needs a total overhaul, you're saying that the actually existing party shouldn't bother to act as opposition. For a party that often shrinks from a fight, that's awfully convenient.

This is learned helplessness, plain and simple. If you think the party needs a major overhaul before it can get back into the game, and you know not everyone believes that process needs to begin right now, you have a perfect excuse to do nothing. And that's the real problem Democrats have, not a small decline in cultural relevance.

TRUMP WILL MISS HAVING A FREE PRESS WHEN THE LAST REMNANTS ARE GONE

You know about this, of course:

ABC News is set to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Donald J. Trump....

Mr. Trump sued ABC and Mr. Stephanopoulos in March, after the anchor asked Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, who has spoken publicly about being raped as a teenager, why she had continued to support Mr. Trump after he was found “liable for rape” in a 2023 civil case in Manhattan.

In that case, a federal jury found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, but it did not find him liable for rape. Still, the judge who oversaw the proceeding later clarified that because of New York’s narrow legal definition of rape, the jury’s verdict did not mean that Ms. Carroll had “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”

The Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, clearly felt it had a lot to lose by pursuing this case. Last year, Disney floated the idea of selling off ABC, the local TV stations it owns, and other "linear" TV networks. Disney announced that it had decided not to sell late last year, but maybe the company has been assuming that it can sell the assets now because the a new administration is less focused on antitrust issues. Trump, being a Republican, certainly doesn't care about industry consolidation, but he could have prevented a sale out of sheer spite, and he would have. And who knows what else he might have done to Disney and its key players?

Many important media figures are genuflecting before Trump -- the owners of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times blocked publication of Kamala Harris endorsements, the L.A. Times plans to deploy a "bias meter" on its stories, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski kissed the ring, Mark Zuckerberg publicly accused the Biden administration of censorship while suppressing political posts on his social media sites, then donated a million dollars for the inaugural.... You know all the stories. Trump will continue intimidating these people until there's no opposition media left.

But will he like the new information order he seems to be creating, in which, in the future, he'll stop scoring victories against the media because they'll simply stop trying to hold him accountable for his actions?

Look at the benefit he's derived from forcing ABC to kneel. He seems like the powerful alpha male to his base. He sends a (false) message to his traditionalist supporters that he's not a sex criminal -- while also reminding other supporters that he has his way with women whether they like it or not (an idea I'm sure many of them like, although some won't admit it). What happens when there are no media outlets left for Trump to sue because they're all self-censoring? Who'll be left for him to crush if they're all courtiers and sycophants?

Trump thrives on combat. So while it will be terrible for America if the press is afraid to hold Trump to account, it will also leave Trump without one of his most important foils. The Republican base needs enemies to hate, and Trump might be in the process of depriving the base of one of its favorite enemies.

Twenty years ago, in a somewhat less authoritarian time, George W. Bush's Republican Party achievewd unquestioned dominance of American politics. But under those circumstances, who could be the scapegoat when things went wrong? Who had power, apart from the Republicans? When things went wrong in Iraq, Bush and company couldn't blame Dan Rather or the Dixie Chicks.

I'd obviously prefer to have a strong and genuinely independent press (as well as a Democratic Party that's willing to fight back). But if Trump neutralizes all opposition, it will eventually be clear that bad things going on in America are his fault. That won't matter if democracy has been thoroughly gutted. But if it's salvageable, it might make life harder for him.

POLIO? MAYBE IT'S OKAY FOR DEMOCRATS TO SAY POLIO IS BAD?

A story in The New York Times yesterday has the potential to do some damage to Robert Kennedy Jr.'s chances of becoming health and human services secretary:

The lawyer helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration has petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine, which for decades has protected millions of people from a virus that can cause paralysis or death.

That campaign is just one front in the war that the lawyer, Aaron Siri, is waging against vaccines of all kinds.

Mr. Siri has also filed a petition seeking to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines; challenged, and in some cases quashed, Covid vaccine mandates around the country; sued federal agencies for the disclosure of records related to vaccine approvals; and subjected prominent vaccine scientists to grueling videotaped depositions.

Mitch McConnell, a survivor of childhood polio, responded:

Without naming Mr. Kennedy, Mr. McConnell suggested that the petition could jeopardize his confirmation to be health secretary in the incoming Trump administration.

“Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed — they’re dangerous,” said Mr. McConnell, who is stepping down as his party’s Senate leader next month but could remain a pivotal vote in Mr. Kennedy’s confirmation. “Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”

This doesn't mean McConnell will be a no vote. We know that McConnell denounced the January 6 insurrection both privately and publicly, but he voted to acquit Donald Trump in the Senate trial following Trump's impeachment on January 6 charges. It's possible that McConnell hopes other Republicans will turn against Kennedy so he'll withdraw. McConnell doesn't have the spine to oppose Kennedy now, and he won't have the spine to vote no if his no vote could be decisive.

But at least he said something. Where are the Democrats?

I had a conversation with friends last night who are worried about the second Trump presidency but don't believe it makes sense for Democrats to publicly oppose Trump's nominees now. Echoing a widespread belief among Democrats, they think the party should "keep its powder dry" and not get worked up about "everything." (That reference to "everything" might sound familiar. You may recall Democratic senator Brian Schatz telling CNN a week or so ago that “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.")

But this isn't "everything." We're talking about a preventable disease that can lead to death or devastating physical impairments. Is it controversial to support an extraordinarily successful vaccine that has proven its effectiveness and safety for more than half a century?

Democrats have internalized a massive amount of self-hate if they think ordinary Americans will suddenly become pro-Kennedy and pro-polio if Democrats say they're anti-polio. Sure, Republicans might. But Donald Trump didn't win this election because his base voted for him. He won this election because his base was joined by people who aren't hardcore supporters but swung over to him because they thought he might lower prices or end wars. These people are persuadable, and Democrats aren't even trying to persuade them. On polio!

And maybe one reason voters think Democrats only talk about pronouns and words like "Latinx" is that they don't send strong, common-sense messages about GOP extremism at moments like this. They don't speak up even when they'd probably have the support of the vast majority of Americans.

I know, I know: Democrats don't have their own partisan media. Their messages have a hard time being heard. But this is now an excuse for not even trying. Some Democrats are on TV. Some Democrats are interviewed by newspapers and magazines. Some appear on podcasts. If you're a Democrat and there's a microphone in front of you, say polio is bad and polio vaccines are amazing! Who knows? Someone might hear you!

Meanwhile, Republicans do attack Democrats on "everything." Have you seen this innocuous Christmas video posted by Tim Walz?

Remember to share holiday traditions like decorating the tree with your kids even if they’re out of town. pic.twitter.com/SXn9Wh4b8l

— Governor Tim Walz (@GovTimWalz) December 12, 2024

Pretty harmless, right? But on Fox, it's evil and the work of "communists," according to Sean Hannity and his two guests, one of whom is the wife of Trump's choice to head the Department of Transportation:

... Hannity saw it as an opportunity to recycle the GOP’s overblown response to Tim Walz’s support of a bill mandating that Minnesota schools provide free menstrual products to students in grades four through 12.

“I wonder if they put any feminine hygiene products on the tree?” Hannity asked. Moments later he was back at it again. “But I do wonder, I mean, what did they decorate that tree with? I mean, if they believe so much in feminine hygiene products in boys bathrooms in school, why wouldn’t they put it on their Christmas tree?”

There's no mention of tampons in the video, and in any case, Walz is no longer a national political figure. Yet no one on the right worries that attacks like this might seem alienating and mean-spirited. Attacks like this do alienate Democrats, but Republicans don't care. They get their message out, they attack Democrats on "everything," and there doesn't seem to be any downside for them.

THE END OF TRUMP'S CAMPAIGN FELT LIKE A MELTDOWN, BUT WASN'T ONE -- AND THE TRANSITION FEELS THE SAME WAY

Remember the end of Donald Trump's 2024 campaign? The town hall that concluded with Trump dancing onstage for a half-hour? The anecdote about Arnold Palmer's penis? The Madison Square Garden rally -- in a state Trump had no chance of winning -- that turned into a racist, profane grievance-fest? The fry cook and garbageman cosplay?

We thought the wheels were coming off the bus. We thought the public would recognize Trump's obvious unfitness to serve. Instead, he won the election, won the popular vote for the first time, and received more votes and a greater percentage of the popular vote than he had in his first two elections.

So am I saying that the 2024 Trump campaign wasn't a shambolic mess? No. In many ways, it was a shambolic mess. But it appears to have been a shambolic mess in such an aggressive, in-your-face way that millions of voters responded positively to the preposterousness of it all. They liked Trump's arthritic dance moves and granddad music playlist. They decided, somehow, that the unapologetic way Trump would say any WTF thing he felt like saying meant he was just the crazy bastard America needed to take on the bad guys.

It makes no sense to me. But this is what half of America wanted.

It's happening in the transition, too. Here are just some of the current headlines:

* Trump to Discuss Ending Childhood Vaccination Programs with RFK Jr. (paired with Kennedy’s Lawyer Has Asked the F.D.A. to Revoke Approval of the Polio Vaccine)

* Trump Advisers Seek to Shrink or Eliminate Bank Regulators: Advisers Asked Potential Nominees Whether Trump Could Abolish the FDIC

* Massad Boulos, Hailed as a Billionaire Lawyer Advising Trump on Middle East Policy, Probably Isn't a Lawyer or a Billionaire (a story about the father-in-law of Trump's daughter Tiffany, who, far from being a billionaire and Middle East expert, in fact "spent the past two decades selling trucks and heavy machinery in Nigeria for a company his father-in-law controls. He is chief executive of the company, SCOA Nigeria PLC, which made a profit of less than $66,000 last year, corporate filings show")

Trump is putting up one unqualified, dangerous appointee after another -- Robert Kennedy Jr, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard, Kari Lake. Trump may have appointed the ex-fiancée of one of his sons as ambassador to Greece to facilitate the breakup.

And yet a majority of Americans approve of the Trump transition, according to a CNN poll; a Marist poll finds that 47% of respondents approve and 39% disapprove. According to a Morning Consult poll, Trump's favorability is at a seven-year high.

It seems to me that voters don't care what Trump is doing -- they just like the fact that he's doing whatever he's doing vigorously and forcefully. Once again, it appears that a famous 2002 Bill Clinton remark was correct:

"When people are feeling insecure, they'd rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right."

Trump is proving that there's apparently no limit to how wrong you can be and still get the benefit of seeming strong. And meanwhile, the current strategy of Democrats -- say nothing negative about Trump's decision-making no matter how awful it is, while talking up potential areas of agreement with Trump -- seems the epitome of weak. I'm baffled that Democrats think this is their route back to power. They should be making noise, for the simple reason that voters clearly respect politicians who make noise more than they respect politicians who are meek and quiet.

Once he's in office, Trump might get away with decisions that seriously hurt Americans simply because he'll be hurting them noisily. Under those circumstances, we need an opposition party that can make some noise, too.

THE WORKING CLASS CAN'T EAT "MEANING"

The Atlantic's Tyler Austin Harper has some thoughts about how Democrats can win back working-class voters they've lost to the GOP:

The politics of the average American are not well represented by either party right now. On economic issues, large majorities of the electorate support progressive positions: They say that making sure everyone has health-care coverage is the government’s responsibility (62 percent), support raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour (62 percent), strongly or somewhat support free public college (63 percent), and are in favor of federal investment in paid family and medical leave (73 percent). They also support more government regulation of a variety of industries including banking (53 percent), social media (60 percent), pharmaceuticals (68 percent), and artificial intelligence (72 percent).

So I guess we're all economic lefties now? Maybe not, but apparently economic populism is the new hotness -- in both parties, according to Harper.

... lately, more political insiders from both parties have been willing to acknowledge the problem and admit that it’s time to move on from neoliberalism, the political ideology that champions market solutions, deregulation, the privatization of public services, and a general laissez-faire approach to the economy.

Yes, Harper really said that "political insiders from both parties" are economic populists now. He and a Democrat he quotes, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, spend quite a bit of time in this piece considering the possibility that Republicans might beat Democrats to the punch by backing and enacting policies that make the non-rich more economically secure.

Let me say this categorically: That will never happen. The core principle of the Republican Party is that the rich must be made more wealthy and less regulated.

A rejection of economic neoliberalism would need to come from Democrats -- but as Harper discusses this, the whole thing begins to seem awfully complicated. Apparently we can't just stop the endless flow of money from the have-nots to the haves. We have to give people meaning.

The movement’s chief exponents believe that neoliberalism has not only created an economic disaster, but its emphasis on ruthless individualism has also created a crisis of political and social meaning....

For many (though not all) post-neoliberals, the heart of their economic vision is “pre-distribution,” a concept popularized by the political scientist Jacob Hacker. Whereas center-left neoliberals tend to favor redistributive tax-and-transfer policies—allowing an unchained market to generate robust growth, and then blunting resulting economic disparities by taking some of the gains from the system’s winners and redistributing them to the system’s working-class “losers,” reducing inequality after the fact—post-neoliberals generally believe that it is better to avoid generating such inequalities in the first place....

“Most people don’t want a handout,” Chris Murphy recently posted on social media. “They want the rules unrigged so they can succeed on their own.”

The implication here is that working-class voters object to redistribution in the abstract. But do they really? They had no objections to the three rounds of pandemic relief they received in 2020 and 2021. They're not grumbling about New York governor Kathy Hochul's plan to send $500 to every family in the state making less than $300,000 and $300 to every individual making less than $150,000. They seem okay with this kind of redistribution because it goes to everyone under a certain income level -- it seems to be for every ordinary citizen, like Social Security and Medicare, which remain extremely popular, and unlike, in their view, student loan relief or real or imagined handouts to undocumented immigrants.

I'm not saying working-class voters oppose better jobs at better wages. But I'm sure they want those because they seem to offer a more solid economic footing than temporary handouts (which are clearly inadequate). I think they want the whole package -- better pay and the government interventions they clearly approve of, as noted in the polls quoted above. And why shouldn't they want all this? Ordinary people have been screwed by the system for decades.

But senators and Atlantic writers are going to fixate on the moral benefits of The Dignity Of Work and miss the point that these people just want life to be fairer economically, however that can happen.

And then the rich donors who tolerate a tiny bit of Democratic redistribution but don't want it to ever get out of hand won't allow the non-rich to get what they really want, so we'll get the rest of the package -- which, of course, is right-wing culture-war populism:

Many Democratic insiders believe that post-neoliberal economic policies alone are not sufficient to win back American workers. Social issues will also need to be reconsidered. [Joseph] Stiglitz pointed to immigration as one place where Democrats may need to compromise, a view he shares with others in his post-neoliberal cohort. Murphy helped write a defeated bipartisan border-security bill that would have added Border Patrol officers and made asylum standards more stringent.... Last year, a hotly discussed book by the socialist journalist John B. Judis and the liberal political scientist Ruy Teixeira likewise packaged a withering critique of neoliberalism with a call to embrace more conservative positions on immigration.

Gun control is another area where flexibility may be prudent in order to be competitive in certain parts of the country. Democrats will have to accommodate people like Dan Osborn, the independent who, though he lost his bid to represent Nebraska in the Senate, outperformed Kamala Harris while combining a vocal defense of the Second Amendment with proudly pro-union politics....

Teixeira and Judis flagged a third topic, gender identity, where Democrats ought to respond to the public’s concerns. That begins by making room for conversations that don’t involve accusations of bigotry, or insisting that the very act of asking questions about terms such as people with the capacity for pregnancy is tantamount to challenging the right of trans Americans to exist or exposing them to harm.

I can guess where this is going: Many Democrats have already joined Republicans as immigration hawks and trans-bashers, and they'll probably move right on guns, too. And then the other half of the bargain -- more money for ordinary Americans -- will somehow never materialize. Democrats won't win back the working class, but Murphy, Harper, Teixiera, and Judis will get some nice book deals. Those books will talk a lot about "meaning" and "the dignity of work." But the rich will still get richer.

WAIT -- ARE PUNDITS STILL ARGUING THAT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS DYING?

I didn't intend this to be Pick On Jamelle Bouie Week, but in his latest column he argues that the Republican Party is weak and dying -- yes, even now. That's preposterous.

Bouie correctly notes that many of Donald Trump's appointees probably wouldn't have been chosen by another Republican -- Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert Kennedy Jr., Dr. Oz. Trump's appointee list includes many Fox on-air personalities. Bouie writes that Trump has chosen

a team with shockingly little governing experience and almost no connection to the institutional Republican Party.... Trump is not picking from within the broad universe of the Republican Party....

But Fox News is at the center of "the broad universe of the Republican Party" -- it's no surprise that Fox employees and frequent Fox guests will serve in Trump's Cabinet.

It's true that these people aren't lifelong Republican loyalists. And this is undeniably true:

The Republican Party could wither and die, and Donald Trump would not care, provided it did not disrupt his ability to enrich himself and his family.

But that doesn't mean the GOP is weak. Bouie misunderstands what really matters to the party, somehow imagining that governance is what matters, because political scientists say that's what matters to parties:

This dynamic ... underscores one of the most important — and yet under-remarked on — elements of the Republican Party in the age of Trump: its fundamental political impairment.... the Republican Party is, to use a recent term of art, hollow. “At the heart of hollowness lies parties’ incapacity to meet public challenges,” Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld observe in “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.”

But the Republican Party doesn't care about its capacity "to meet public challenges," and hasn't cared since at least the 1980s. Here's what the Republican Party cares about: gaining power often enough to keep making the rich richer and less regulated and taxed, particularly rich people who make their money from fossil fuels, a source of energy for which the GOP is determined to preserve primacy until the end of recorded time. Oil and plutocracy -- that's what the GOP cares about, not meeting "public challenges."

Bouie writes:

The institutions of the Republican Party — the establishment, as it were — have no capacity to influence, shape or discipline any of the actors who operate under the Republican umbrella.

Really? During Trump's first term, "the establishment" handed him a Paul Ryan-style tax cut for the rich, and he dutifully signed it into law. He'll save that tax cut in his second term, and probably add on another one.

Beyond that, Bouie misunderstands what the Republican "establishment" is. Right now it's ideologues who hate DEI and trans people, and they've made Trump care about these issues, too. (Don't forget during the 2016 campaign Trump publicly waved a Pride flag and said that Caitlyn Jenner could use the bathroom of her choice at Trump Tower. Now he plans to reinstate his first-term ban on transgender troops and might discharge all trans troops immediately upon taking office.)

The present-day Republican establishment focuses on issues like these because they keep the rubes voting for the GOP, the party guaranteed to give the rich more money and less regulation.

Bouie continues:

To the extent that there is anything left of a national ideological or programmatic agenda, it is a reflection either of Trump’s idiosyncratic preoccupations or those of the cadres of ideologues who have opportunistically latched on to the incoming president.

State abortion bans aren't part of "a national ideological or programmatic agenda"? Shipping immigrants to blue states, as Republican governors did in recent years, isn't part of "a national ideological or programmatic agenda"? What about bans on trans heathcare for minors? Or school library book bans? Or abstinence-only school sex education curricula?

Yes, these issues are being pushed by "cadres of ideologues," but those ideologues are the Republican Party now, and they would have "latched on to" any Republican presidential nominee. (Go read my post from last December about Nikki Haley's interest in many of the ideas of Project 2025.)

All of this is why Bouie is completely wrong to imagine a dying GOP in Trump's absence:

... consider the very plausible world in which Trump lost his bid for a second term. A two-time loser, he would have been a clear burden on the party’s ability to win. If he leaves or is forced out of the political scene, what happens to the Republican Party? Does it quickly reshape itself? Or does it enter a period of terminal crisis now that it is bereft of a figure who organized its priorities for nearly a decade?

But Fox, Chris Rufo, Leonard Leo, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, and Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok have also been important organizers of the GOP's priorities in the past decade. Of course the party would regroup.

In the absence of Trump, does the Republican Party look like an entity that can build or mobilize anything like a working electoral majority?

Polling during primary season showed Nikki Haley with a bigger lead over Joe Biden than Trump's.

Even now, in this world, it is clear that the president-elect’s appeal is distinct from that of his party; Republicans lost four Senate races in states that he won and the party’s House majority teeters on a knife’s edge.

Republicans lost Senate races in Michigan and Wisconsin by less than a point; they lost the Nevada race by less than two points, and the Arizona race by two and a half -- and, of course, they flipped Democratic Senate seats in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Montana, and West Virginia. At the state level, 27 out of 50 governors are Republican. And at the state legislative level:

Bouie concludes:

The weakness of the institutional Republican Party, the fragility of the Republican majorities, and the volatility of Trump himself are a recipe for political instability and chaos. It all serves as a reminder that whenever Trump does leave the scene, he will likely leave behind a Republican Party that will struggle to find an identity outside of his reach and influence.

Not as long as the right-wing media exists and conservative billionaires still have enough fingers to sign fat checks.

No one should assume that the GOP will be a spent force when Trump is gone. We still have to learn how to beat it -- assuming America remains a legitimate democracy in which beating the GOP is possible.

MEMBERS OF THE LATEST TIMES FOCUS GROUP VOTED FOR A PARALLEL-UNIVERSE TRUMP

The New York Times has just published another focus group roundtable, this one involving fourteen voters "who described Donald Trump as 'extreme' and differed with him on some key issues, including abortion rights, and decided to vote for him anyway." In some ways, these voters will get what they want from Trump: they don't like undocumented immigrants, and, as one participant puts it, they "think we need someone a little arrogant ... to straighten up the world." But in many ways they back an imaginary, parallel-universe Trump -- someone who doesn't exist in the real world.

They all seem dismayed by the state of America today -- with some exceptions:

Mary, 50, Asian, Wyoming, assistant
I was just looking at my retirement accounts, and it looks like the economy is doing pretty well right now.

... Kenneth, 62, Black, California, truck driver
The election went well, but even prior to the new administration coming into office, things were going well. The economy is better.

You folks know who's president right now, don't you?

Trump apparently made populist promises on a frequency only these voters could hear:

Seneca, 28, white, Arizona, charge specialist
I voted for him because I thought he was really smart and really good with money. And then also health care. I think it’s really cool that he’s going to take on fighting the big health care corporations that are charging insane amounts and hopefully get that under control.

Oh yeah, that'll happen. (/s)

On immigration, many of these people seem to expect a level of moderation that absolutely won't happen in an administration where Stephen Miller and Tom Homan have top positions:

Chris, 46, white, Pennsylvania, line technician
I think that there’s probably a very good majority of people that are undocumented that are normal, law-abiding people and could be contributing members of society. So I don’t think that getting rid of all of those is necessarily the answer. There are some that obviously don’t deserve to be here, but to just get rid of all of them — there’s people that are born here every day that — would they have to go start a new life in some other country, through no fault of their own? There could be some common-sense ways to go about doing it, other than just picking up and shipping them all out.

Mary, 50, Asian, Wyoming, assistant
I think I agree with Chris. There needs to be some type of metric or something. You can’t just drive a bus down the road and say, “Hey, show me your papers or get on the bus, and we’re taking you to Mexico,” or whatever. I know that there’s a lot of hard-working immigrants here who deserve a shot. If they’ve been here for 10, 15 years, contributing, I see no problem with that.

You can’t just drive a bus down the road and say, “Hey, show me your papers or get on the bus, and we’re taking you to Mexico,” or whatever. That's literally the Trump administration's policy on immigration, as Trump explained every time he spoke on the subject.

These people voted for Trump, but they don't want him to be, y'know, extreme or anything.

Moderator, Patrick Healy
Is there anything that concerns you about a Trump presidency? Is there anything you don’t want him to do as president?

Chris, 46, white, Pennsylvania, line technician
I just hope that it doesn’t go to his head and he starts to get reckless. I just don’t want him to get some of the wrong people in his corner, that are in his ear, that have their own agenda, maybe. Not that he would necessarily do it on purpose, but I feel like he might —

Direnda, 66, white, Kentucky, house cleaner
Be influenced.

Chris, 46, white, Pennsylvania, line technician
— go with the flow and want to please everybody and it just gets out of hand.

But don't worry!

Kathi, 57, white, Ohio, property management
I’m a little bit with Chris on that, but it does seem like this so-called election, he’s been much better about containing himself.

What was it that persuaded you that Trump has been "better about containing himself," Kathi? Was it the time he talked about Arnold Palmer's penis? Was it when he called Kamala Harris "a shit vice president" at the same rally? Was it his threat to put members of the House January 6 committee in prison? Was it when he accused the news media of treason?

On abortion, they're awfully certain that there won't be any more restrictions emerging from Trump's Washington:

Mary, 50, Asian, Wyoming, assistant
I think that he took it off the federal government and put it on the states. He doesn’t have a say anymore.

... Direnda, 66, white, Kentucky, house cleaner
I think Trump did the right thing. He just washed his hands of the whole situation and said: OK, you guys decide.

Trump will appoint several hundred judges and probably at least two Supreme Court justices, all of them bearing the Federalist Society stamp of approval. They're the ones who heard the message "OK, you guys decide."

The focus group participants aren't very concerned about Trump's appointees.

Moderator, Margie Omero
How do you think the Senate should go about considering Trump’s nominees?

Seneca, 28, white, Arizona, charge specialist
I think they should check on the people, run a background check and make sure that they’re qualified to be in the position, but unless there’s something huge, I think they should be going with Trump’s decision.

Is rape huge? Is being a pro-Putin fifth columnist huge? Is not believing that the polio vaccine is safe and effective huge?

Robert Kennedy Jr. gets a pass because (choose one) (a) he's right about vaccines or (b) he's a Kennedy, and Kennedys are dreamy:

Jason, 38, white, Florida, realtor
I’m glad he got picked. His stance on everything during Covid — I very much agreed with it. Obviously, if you wanted to get jabbed, by all means, get jabbed. Again, your body, your choice.

(If Kennedy had been in office during COVID, I assume the U.S. government would never have funded vaccine development or approved the final product, but yeah, sure, his stance is "choice.")

Noah, 62, Latino, Texas, retired
I don’t know that I have enough insight on him, but I have a mild historical optimism. I hope he gets almost Uncle Bobby-like and takes responsibility for all of the fraud that is committed throughout those departments, because that is one of the biggest sources of our expenditures in the country.

It's not "one of the biggest sources of our expenditures in the country," but most Americans have no clue where tax money goes.

These people aren't worried about the FBI or the Justice Department, either.

Joseph, 55, white, Minnesota, handyman
You have to have people that are able to follow the laws of America, the Constitution, and not have somebody that wants to bend the rules and enforce whatever their mind-set might be at the time....

Erich, 23, white, New Jersey, lacrosse coach
As long as they’re taking the good of the country into consideration, that’s really my main concern.

Yeah, I'm sure Kash Patel and Pam Bondi are selfless public servants whose only loyalty is to the rule of law.

And here's a concluding statement from one of the participants:

Noah, 62, Latino, Texas, retired
I think our country would be better off having a more informed citizenry and where people argue their own ideas, not just their party’s statement, on everything from immigration to the economy.

A more informed citizenry where people aren't just listening to party propaganda? Yeah, that would be nice.

YES, SOMETHING MATTERS, BUT NOTHING SEEMS TO WORK

I generally like Jamelle Bouie, but this is privileged arrogance:

i have plenty of thoughts on why it matters that this is an illegal order but here i’ll just comment that i think liberals who throw their hands up and say “it doesn’t matter” have self lobotomized themselves into thinking that trump is god king of america

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— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) December 8, 2024 at 11:17 AM

main thing i have to say to a lot of you is that if you truly believe that nothing matters then you should delete your account, log off, cancel your voting registration and stop paying attention to anything political at all

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) December 8, 2024 at 11:28 AM

go get a real hobby

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) December 8, 2024 at 11:29 AM

As I told Bouie on Bluesky, in this particular case I don't believe Donald Trump is the god-king of America -- I believe Leonard Leo is the god-king of America. It doesn't matter that courts have ruled for nearly two hundred years that anyone born here is a citizen. It doesn't matter that the Fourteenth Amendment says, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." If Leonard Leo's Supreme Court justices and lower-court judges conclude that "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" is an escape clause from automatic birthright citizenship -- as groups like the Heritage Foundation argue -- and conclude that there's some advantage to the Republican Party in eliminating birthright citizenship, then it'll be gone soon.

When I say that, I'm not saying that "nothing matters." This matters a lot. I'm saying that there probably isn't a damn thing I can do about it. I don't see groups I could potentially join massing to defend birthright citizenship in any way that scares Republicans or effectively challenges their power, and I absolutely don't see Democratic officeholders fighting to defend the principle.

Those of us who remain engaged in politics despite our gloom are looking for rays of hope -- good polls for Kamala Harris a few months ago, pockets of resistance now. We were happy when Matt Gaetz had to fall on his sword, though it appears now that Pete Hegseth, Robert Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and other lowlife scum could win Senate approval, possibly with some votes from the Democratic caucus. At this point, we're rooting for incompetence and infighting in Trump World, or surprises. On birthright citizenship and other migration matters, maybe the Leo courts won't side with the hard-liners because business interests don't.

Bouie is a New York Times columnist. He has a powerful platform and so do many of the people he knows. I don't think he understands that what many of us are feeling isn't "nothing matters" but "nothing I do seems to matter." Here are some responses to Bouie:

It's more fun to watch you yell at people about why they should go do something but never tell anyone what to do or how to help or what things might actually make stuff better. Because seriously, literally nothing we have done so far has done anything so I don't know what the fuck

— mav (@mav.wtf) December 8, 2024 at 10:00 PM

feds: Republican states: half Republican, mostly pointless press: largely responsible for this mess courts: you're kidding, right? protests: we've seen where that goes, in 2020 at this point we're pretty well down to hiding people in crawlspaces and prayer

— mav (@mav.wtf) December 8, 2024 at 10:05 PM

At least when Tim Miller recently wrote a column along similar lines at the Bulwark, he seemed to be criticizing people with some clout -- Republicans first:

In the chapter of Why We Did It in which I sketched out the different phenotypes of Trumpian enablers, I described these Republicans this way:

Then you had the LOL Nothing Matters Republicans. This cadre gained steam over the years, especially among my former peers in the campaign set. It is a comforting ethos if you are professionally obligated to defend the indefensible day in and day out. Their arguments no longer needed to have merit or be consistent because, LOL, nothing matters. . . . The LOLNMRs had decided that if someone like Trump could win, then everything that everyone does in politics is meaningless. So they became nihilists.

Miller then turned his focus on Democratic defenders of President Biden's pardon of his son, favorably quoting his colleague Will Saletan, who wrote, contemptuously:

“America elected a convicted felon in 2024 and I no longer care about ‘norms,” one commenter shrugged. “The voters have spoken and integrity is passé,” said another. A third asked: “Why should he [Biden] sacrifice a single thing more for ideals the populace no longer believe in?”

I have no patience for critics of this pardon. Is it a rejection of the rule of law? Literally every presidential pardon is a rejection of the rule of law, because every pardon overturns the judgment of the legal system. At the same time, every presidential pardon is entirely consistent with the law, even the bad ones, because the president's pardon power is effectively absolute and it's right there in the Constitution.

In this specific case, before you tell me that the pardon is morally indefensible, you need to apply your imagination to what might have happened to the president's son in a Trump presidency. I'm not just referring to additional prosecution. I'm saying the Trump administration could have looked the other way while Hunter Biden was murdered in prison. It could have arranged to have him hooded, flown to Gitmo, and waterboarded, citing "national security" because of his international business dealings. Do you really think there are limits? Even if a court declared it unlawful, couldn't the abduction and torture of Hunter Biden happen before the court ruled? Can you say with absolute certainty that this wouldn't have happened?

Public expressions of despair are not compliance. They're not "obeying in advance." In fact, they're the opposite -- they're attempts to send a message to people like Bouie and Miller: What's happening is very, very bad. It's possible that fighting it the normal way won't work -- and besides, the people with the power to fight it the normal way aren't fighting very hard, or at all. Desperate times call for desperate measures, but you don't appear to believe we're in desperate times. Maybe you're right, but maybe you shouldn't be so complacent. Maybe you and everyone else with real power should be ready to fight dirty and not just assume that fighting fair has a good chance of working.

The realtive lack of alarm among certain pundits (and nearly all office-holding Democrats) seems much more of a threat than ordinary anti-Trumpers' gloom.

THE CRUELTY IS THE POINT. WILL TRUMP BE CRUEL ENOUGH FOR HIS BASE?

NBC News has posted a preview of Kristen Welker's interview with Donald Trump, and I'm not sure MAGA voters will be happy with everything Trump says.

First, on MAGA's enemies list:

... [Trump] delivered something of a mixed message when it comes to political retribution. Trump made clear he believes he’s been wronged, but he also sounded a conciliatory note, saying he will not appoint a special prosecutor to investigate [President] Biden. “I’m not looking to go back into the past,” he said. “Retribution will be through success.”

On the one hand, he

singled out people he believes crossed the line in investigating his actions, calling special counsel Jack Smith “very corrupt.”

Members of the House committee that examined the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol were “political thugs and, you know, creeps,” committing offenses in going about their work, he said.

“For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail,” Trump said.

But on the other hand:

Asked if he would direct the Justice Department and FBI to punish them, Trump said, “No, not at all. I think that they’ll have to look at that, but I’m not going to — I’m going to focus on drill, baby, drill” — a reference to tapping more oil supplies.

If Biden wants to do it, he could pardon the committee members, Trump said, “and maybe he should.”

MAGA voters will be thrilled when Trump pardons the January 6 insurrectionists, which he told Welker he'll do on Day One. (We all should have known that.) However, if he leaves current and former anti-Trump officeholders and investigators of Trump crimes unpunished, MAGA will be very disappointed. Many of those figures will continue to speak out. New senator Adam Schiff will probably challenge some Trump appointees. This won't go over well in Trump country.

On immigration, Trump will mostly please the base.

... he didn’t flinch in saying he will carry out mass deportation of those who are living in the country illegally.

First will be convicted criminals, he said.

(After the first raids, we'll get footage of weapons stockpiles. We'll be told that the immigrants who have been rounded up were terrible criminals. That may be true -- or the cops might just tap into their own weapons stockpiles for the photo ops. It's a common police practice.)

MAGA will love this:

It’s also possible that American citizens will be caught up in the sweep and deported with family members who are here illegally, or could choose to go.

Asked about families with mixed immigration status, where some are in the U.S. legally and some illegally, Trump said, “I don’t want to be breaking up families, so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.”

However:

An exception might be the “Dreamers” — people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children and have lived here for years. He voiced openness toward a legislative solution that would allow them to remain in the country.

“I will work with the Democrats on a plan,” he said, praising “Dreamers” who’ve gotten good jobs, started businesses and become successful residents. “We’re going to have to do something with them,” he said.

He won't really work with Democrats on a plan for the Dreamers. But merely hesitating to deport them will profoundly disappoint his base.

And Greg Sargent thinks he'll face corporate resistance to mass deportations:

Reuters reports that agriculture interests, which are heavily concentrated in GOP areas, are urging the incoming Trump administration to refrain from removing untold numbers of migrants working throughout the food supply chain, including in farming, dairy, and meatpacking....

Now over to Texas. NPR reports that various industries there fear that mass deportations could cripple them, particularly in construction, where nearly 300,000 undocumented immigrants toiled as of 2022.... Local analysts and executives want Trump to refrain from removing all these people or create new ways for them to work here legally....

Meanwhile, back in Georgia, Trump’s threat of mass deportations is awakening new awareness that undocumented immigrants drive industries like construction, landscaping, and agriculture, reports The Wall Street Journal. In Dalton, a town that backed Trump, fear is spreading that removals could “upend its economy and workforce.”

As I've said before, right-wingers like anecdotes and dislike data. No matter how much data you show them demonstrating the fact that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans, they look at individual incidents -- crimes endlessly discussed on Fox News -- as all the evidence they need that "migrant crime" is at epidemic levels. They'll have the same response to Trump's deportation process: If they see a lot of footage of immigrants being rounded up and shipped out, they probably won't notice how many aren't being rounded up and shipped out.

I think Sargent is right about how this will work:

Exactly. Deportation raids in blue areas will allow Trump to boast that he's bringing pacification to urban cesspools with military-style force, complete with footage given to Fox News and other MAGA propagandists. Meanwhile some MAGA-friendly industries and areas will quietly secure forbearance.

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— Greg Sargent (@gregsargent.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 8:47 AM

My response to this:

"Quietly secure forbearance."

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— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 8:49 AM

But what if one of the crimes MAGA voters obsess over happens because a CEO or industry prevailed upon Trump to leave local immigrants alone? Will those crimes simply not be reported in the right-wing media? Or will Trump supporters see them as evidence that Mr. MAGA himself isn't MAGA enough and we need a real immigration hard-liner to clean up America?

In all likelihood, Trump will make his base happy even if he doesn't display maximum cruelty. He'll probably be more than sufficiently cruel as far as the base is concerned. But if they want even more, there's a chance that he might not deliver. And since we know he won't lower the price of eggs, he might not be quite the hero they expect. https://bsky.app/profile/gregsargent.bsky.social/post/3lcsdysh4y22z