WHY DOESN'T TRUMP HAVE A PLAN B AFTER GAETZ? (updated)

Matt Gaetz is out:

Matt Gaetz withdrew Thursday as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general following continued scrutiny over a federal sex trafficking investigation that cast doubt on his ability to be confirmed as the nation’s chief federal law enforcement officer.

Bizarrely, Trump doesn't seem to have a backup plan. CNN's Kaitlan Collins reports:

Trump does not have a new name in mind for attorney general and now returns to the search. He had struggled to find a candidate he liked initially, which is what led him to Gaetz. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and Sullivan & Cromwell attorney Robert Giuffra had been two names he was looking at last week. Trump wasn't sold on either. He has been mainly focused on Treasury and the FBI this week.

How is this possible? There are countless lawyers all over the country who'd happily carry out the Republican agenda of politicizing the Justice Department. There are radical right-wing activists like Texas attorney general Ken Paxton who are eager to turn the DoJ into a tool of GOP vengeance. In fact, when the Gaetz pick was announced, many people speculated that he was offered up as an appointee the Senate could vote down, after which there'd be less pressure to reject other controversial Trump picks, and then Trump could appoint Paxton instead.

But Trump clearly doesn't want a tool of Republican vengeance. Trump wants a tool of Trump vengeance. He doesn't want someone who'll simply do what's in the Project 2025 playbook. He wants someone who'll focus on hurting his enemies and satisfying his whims.

Republican radicals want the government to be remade in a manner that will lead to a durable one-party plutocratic theocracy. Trump just wants his needs catered to at all times. He wants Justice to be a private law firm devoted solely to his wishes and run by a modern Roy Cohn.

This may not be the last time we see a conflict between Trump's agenda and the agenda of Republican radicals. It may be what saves us from the radicals' most frightening plans.

*****

UPDATE: Well, now Trump has chosen former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi. You remember her, right?

In March 2016, CREW discovered that the Trump Foundation had broken the law by giving an illegal $25,000 contribution to a political group supporting Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. Charitable foundations like the Trump Foundation are not allowed to engage in politics. Even more problematic was the fact that the contribution was given as Bondi’s office was deciding whether to take legal action related to Trump University.

Needless to say, Bondi never investigated Trump University. And then....

Not long after Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi decided not to investigate Trump University, Donald Trump hosted a fundraiser for for her, reported The Huffington Post.

The report showed the invitation to the fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, with its minimum donation request of $3,000 per person, and a Bondi staffer told The Huffington Post that about 50 people attended, meaning Bondi picked up at least $150,000 from the March 2014 event.

still surprised he's not going for Paxton or Davis which seems to show me that he really wants a loyalist more than he wants an ideologue who is *also* loyal

[image or embed]

— Sharon Kuruvilla (@sharonk.bsky.social) November 21, 2024 at 6:45 PM

Yup.

HOW REPUBLICANS WOULD RESPOND TO NANCY MACE'S BIGOTED GRANDSTANDING, IF THE PARTIES WERE REVERSED

As I'm sure you know, Nancy Mace got her scalp:

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced Wednesday that transgender women are not permitted to use bathrooms in the Capitol that match their gender identity....

Johnson’s statement — which was made on Transgender Day of Remembrance, recognized annually to memorialize trans people who died due to anti-trans violence — comes days after Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) introduced a bill to bar transgender women from facilities on Capitol Hill that match their gender identity, a response to the election earlier this month of Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D-Del.).

McBride will be the first openly transgender person in Congress.

In a statement following the policy announcement Wednesday, McBride said she disagreed with the new rule but would abide by it.

It has been pointed out that Mace wasn't always an anti-trans bigot -- in fact, she once co-sponsored a (moderately) pro-trans bill:

In 2021, she co-sponsored the Fairness for All Act, a bill seeking to protect LGBTQ+ Americans from discrimination while balancing religious liberty.

At the time, Mace tweeted....

So what happened to Mace? The answer is easy: Redistricting happened. Her district in and around Charleston, South Carolina, had been swingy enough for a Democrat to win it in 2018. A redistricting plan signed into law in 2022 made the district much more Republican, but it was challenged in court. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court approved the plan, making the district solidly Republican.

Democrats should still call out her hypocrisy. They should do what I think Republicans would do if the parties' positions on LGBTQ rights were reversed and a hypocritical Democrat named Nancy Mace had done what the real Nancy Mace has done.

Democrats should take the bill she co-sponsored and introduce it themselves. They shouldn't change a word. The only change they should make is to the title.

Instead of calling it the Fairness for All Act, they should call it the Make America Compassionate for Everyone Act.

Short version: the MACE Act.

Yes, this would be a stunt, and I know: Democrats don't do stunts. Democrats think stunts are beneath them.

But if I were a House Democrat, I'd do the stunt. Stunts can make a point in a vivid way. (I know: Most Democrats don't do vivid, either.)

There are problems with the bill. It was filed as a Republican alternative to the Equality Act, which House Democrats passed in 2021 on a mostly party-line vote. (In the Senate, the Equality Act died in committee.) The Republican bill explicitly permits discrimination by religious groups and in school sports. But even if the bill is flawed, it would have created a better world for trans people than the hellscape Republicans want to create for them now.

It doesn't matter. The bill wouldn't pass now, or even get out of committee. The point of filing it is to inform voters that the great crusader against the transgender menace knew three years ago that trans people aren't a menace. And so did the other co-sponsors, including Donald Trump's pick for UN ambassador, Elise Stefanik. But Democrats won't do it.

NANCY MACE IS HAVING FUN

I know I'm supposed to take House Republicans' expressions of contempt for incoming congresswoman Sarah McBride very, very seriously....

House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled support Tuesday for a Republican effort to ban Democrat Sarah McBride — the first transgender person to be elected to Congress — from using women’s restrooms in the Capitol once she’s sworn into office next year....

A resolution proposed Monday by GOP Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina would prohibit any lawmakers and House employees from “using single-sex facilities other than those corresponding to their biological sex.” Mace said the bill is aimed specifically at McBride, who was elected to the House this month from Delaware.

But it's hard to believe they're actually worried about sexual assault or the downfall of civilization when the leader of this witch hunt is so obviously having the time of her life:

A woman being bullied for **wait for it** protecting women, is the height of gas lighting. I’ll drink your tears in my pinot noir tonight. Cheers! 🍷 pic.twitter.com/431eWCfXGk

— Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) November 20, 2024

I've been working overtime for you, Ron. https://t.co/qNg6ukiCW2

— Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) November 20, 2024

This is fun for her! She's the center of attention now. She'll probably be on every Sunday talk show next weekend. It's fun for Mike Johnson, too -- almost as much fun as turning America into an unrecognizable theocratic authoritarian kleptocracy.

They know there's no urgent civilizational crisis here. As Charlotte Clymer noted on Threads,

... trans women have been using women's restrooms in the Capitol and the House and Senate office buildings and the White House and the Pentagon for many years now, including during all four years of the Trump Administration.

Under Donald Trump's leadership, trans women were permitted to use women's restrooms in federal buildings in D.C. and there was never any issue.

In the four years that Rep. Nancy Mace has been in Congress, she's known that trans women use women's restrooms in federal buildings in D.C. and it's never been an issue for her. Not once. In all this time.

Until the first openly-trans person was elected to Congress. Then it suddenly became an issue.

They like winning. They like punching down. They like rallying their voters with manufactured rage, and they really like the votes and money they get as a result.

And most of their voters aren't really angry either. You can see that at Trump rallies. It was very obvious at the 2020 boat parades, which, by definition, were attended by Trump supporters who were quite well off.

In March of last year, I wrote this about supposedly angry GOP voters:

Deep down, they know that life is pretty sweet for people like them. No one's really coming for their guns -- they have plenty, and it's easy to buy more. No one's really coming for their red meat or their big-ass SUVs. No one's forcing them to be gay or bi or trans. Politically, they run half the states. They run the Supreme Court and will control it for decades. They run the House, and they have an excellent chance of taking the Senate and the White House next year.

And in the meantime, they make liberals squeal in agony any time they please. Hey, let's propose a bill to make being a Democrat illegal! A legislator in Florida actually did that. Let's hand out AR-15 pins on the House floor! Let's find creative new ways to make guns more available and abortions less available! Let's ban books and drag shows, and put up more and more barriers to being trans, until eventually it's illegal at every age! Past a certain point, it's all just sport. It's quite possible that most right-wingers don't even care about the actual policy outcomes -- as the man said, the cruelty is the point....

We want to solve big problems -- bigotry, economic inequality, a rapidly warming planet -- and all those fights are hard. But right-wingers, for all their complaining, mostly like our society just fine. All they want to do is fuck with us -- and they don't have very much trouble getting what they want.

What's the point of the Trump presidency? They're happy. We're miserable. That's the whole point.

NOBODY COULD HAVE FORESEEN!

The New York Times just posted the transcript of Ezra Klein's most recent podcast, under the headline "Trump Kicks Down the Guardrails." Klein begins his opening monologue by asserting that Donald Trump is acting in a way resonable people never believed he'd act:

Think back two months. Imagine it’s September. You’re reading the Substack of some resistance-era liberal. They’re ranting about the dangers of the Orange Man coming back. “Imagine what a second term is going to be like,” they write. “You’re going to have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services secretary. Tulsi Gabbard is going to lead the intelligence services. Matt Gaetz is going to be the attorney general. Maybe Donald Trump is going to make a ‘Fox & Friends’ host secretary of defense.”

I think most people reading that would have said: Oh, come on! Donald Trump might be a menace. He is a menace. But that’s a parody of what a Trump-hating liberal imagines a Trump administration is going to be. Let’s be real about this.

But here we are in the real, and that is not what a Trump-hating liberal imagines a Trump administration is going to be. This is what Donald Trump imagines a Trump administration is going to be. It is what he is trying to make it be.

Seriously?

How could any political observer fail to anticipate that Trump might pick Kennedy for HHS? As I've been telling you, this pick was discussed in August, and Trump told CNN he "probably would" give Kennedy a job in the administration.

How could Klein fail to notice the popularity of Gabbard within the MAGA/Fox News bubble, and the widespread pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine sentiment within that bubble? Haven't we spent eight years debating whether Trump is a Russian agent or merely a pro-Putin useful idiot? Didn't Trump pick J.D. "I don't really care what happens to Ukraine" Vance as his running mate? And remember that Vance was recommended by Donald Trump Jr. -- y'know, this guy:

On the latest episode of Triggered, I spoke with America First rock star @JDVance1 about the weird obsession the political establishment has with Zelensky and the rampant corruption happening in Ukraine funded by American taxpayers. pic.twitter.com/f1An5l7US2

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) May 17, 2024

Why was anyone surprised at the pro-Russia choice of Gabbard?

I admit that the Gaetz pick was a surprise to me -- though we all should have realized that Trump would choose someone who intended to go the the Justice Department and "start cuttin’ fuckin’ heads," which is what a unnamed Trump adviser told Marc Caputo of The Bulwark that Gaetz vowed to do.

And we know Trump likes Hegseth because he considered making him head of the Department of Veterans Affairs in his first term.

I love the way Klein expresses contempt for the "ranting" of "resistance" Trump-bashers even as he admits that we were right. (We were right, but I guess we were right in a gauche way, so Klein and his entire crowd are still smarter and cooler than we are.)

Klein is horrified to discover that Trump doesn't feel constrained by "guardrails." Wow, who could have predicted that? Oh, right -- lots of people.

Washington Post, November 1, 2023:

Trump and his allies have plans to remove the guardrails in a second term

... He wants lawyers like John Eastman, willing to wrench and blowtorch legal language until the will of the electorate becomes secondary to the will of Donald Trump.

The New York Times, December 4, 2023:

Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First

... He has glorified political violence and spoken admiringly of autocrats for decades.

... Forces that somewhat contained his autocratic tendencies in his first term — staff members who saw their job as sometimes restraining him, a few congressional Republicans episodically willing to criticize or oppose him, a partisan balance on the Supreme Court that occasionally ruled against him — would all be weaker.

As a result, Mr. Trump’s and his advisers’ more extreme policy plans and ideas for a second term would have a greater prospect of becoming reality.

CNN, September 26, 2023:

@jaketapper

Hutchinson: In A Second Term, Trump would Not Have Guardrails

♬ original sound - Jake Tapper

We were talking about Trump and "guardrails" a year ago. We knew. But Klein is the kind of person who never experiences any disruption to his very comfortable life and therefore can't imagine this level of disruption happening at all in his world. He knew people were forewarning us about this, but it couldn't really occur, could it? Because if it did, it would be really bad! Nothing really bad ever happens in Ezra Klein's world!

Well, it's happening. The leopards still won't eat Ezra Klein's face, in all likelihood, but he should be prepared to see a lot of faceless people, and a lot of leopards.

WHAT I WANT A SENATOR TO ASK PETE HEGSETH

I don't think Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump's other controversial appointees will ever go through confirmation hearings. I assume that even if the Senate resists allowing Trump to seat them as recess appointments, simpering toady Mike Johnson in the House will put forth a resolution to recess both houses of Congress, as outlined in Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, and get the votes he needs to pass the resolution because most House Republicans will be too afraid of primary challenges and death threats to resist.

But on the off chance that there are Senate hearings on Hegseth's nomination, I hope some Democrat asks him about a passage New York magazine's Sarah Jones found in one of his books:

In American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, he outlined his case for Trump’s reelection in 2020 and drew parallels between contemporary America and the medieval era. “Our present moment is much like the 11th Century. We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must,” he writes. “Arm yourself — metaphorically, intellectually, physically. Our fight is not with guns. Yet.”

This is probably a naive fantasy, but here's what I want a Democratic senator to ask Hegseth about this passage:

As you know, Mr. Hegseth, I'm a Democrat. Many of the people who voted for me are Democrats.

In the shooting war that you say will be necessary at some point in America's future, who exactly do you think you're going to be pointing guns at? Is it me? Is it my voters? Is it everyone in my state? When this conflict starts -- and the conflict sounds a lot to me like a second civil war -- are we the enemy? I'd like a yes or no answer, please.

This passage was just meant to be pro-wrestling-style trash talk dressed up in fancy language so it sounds like a modern version of an eighteenth-century pamphlet. Fox News and the Republican Party have loved this sort of verbal aggression for a long time. But at a certain point, as Kurt Vonnegut said, we are what we pretend to be. This empty bombast has millions of Americans actually looking forward to a shooting war against Democrats. And we have a president-elect who relishes the notion of using the military against domestic enemies. Secretary of Defense-Designate Hegseth clearly likes the idea, too.

Hegseth would talk around the question, which should lead to a follow-up:

Yes or no, Mr. Hegseth: When you and your allies go to war against fellow Americans, perhaps because the president has invoked the Insurrection Act and deployed the military against citizens, will the mark of the enemy be that we voted for the wrong party? Can you say to me right now, sir, "No, we won't target you just because you vote for Democrats"?

Wouldn't Hegseth offend the president, the president's base, and every binge watcher of Fox News if he said, "No, we won't target you just because you vote for Democrats"? I don't think he'd offer that reassurance.

I'd love for that to be the story of his hearings, assuming they ever happen. I'd love for it to slowly dawn on the mainstream media and normie politics-avoiders that Republicans would be happy to hang half the country for treason just because they vote Democratic. I think there are many centrist voters who don't really get that yet, and who would think it's a bit much. Or maybe that's the naive part of this fantasy.

I also wish someone would school Hegseth on this:

Later, in 2024’s The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Hegseth complains that the U.S. military has become too woke, too effeminate, and too vaccinated to be fit for purpose. “At a basic level, do we really want only the woke ‘diverse’ recruits that the Biden administration is curating to be the ones with the guns and the guidons?” he writes in the introduction to The War on Warriors. “But more than that, we want those diverse recruits — pumped full of vaccines and even more poisonous ideologies — to be sharing a basic training bunk with sane Americans.”

I expect all Republicans in good standing to believe the military is woke -- but "pumped full of vaccines"?

Does Hegseth know about this?

George Washington, as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, ordered mandatory inoculation against smallpox for any soldier who had not gained prior immunity against the disease through infection....

As a result of Washington’s orders, the Continental Army was the first in the world with an organized program to prevent smallpox. Some historians have suggested that if smallpox inoculation had been performed earlier, the smallpox outbreak among Continental soldiers in Quebec could have been avoided—speeding up the conclusion of the Revolutionary War....

Does Hegseth know that servicemembers in World War II were "vaccinated for cholera, diphtheria, plague, smallpox, tetanus, typhoid, paratyphoid A and paratyphoid B, epidemic typhus, and yellow fever"? We won that war, dude.

But this is the sociopathy of the right. These people didn't start by opposing vaccines. They saw during 2020 and 2021 that they could use vaccination as a wedge issue, and because all they care about is beating us, they were willing to undermine the health of America (and America's troops) just to own the libs.

And now some of them actually believe what they've been saying. Is Hegseth one of them? Will he change military policy so we no longer vaccinate the troops against diseases like malaria and cholera? Maybe someone should ask him whether precisely which vaccines he no longer wants the troops "pumped full of."

HOW TO GET AN OP-ED PUBLISHED: CHASTISE DEMOCRATS FOR NOT DOING THINGS THEY'RE ACTUALLY DOING

Adam Jentleson, a former top staffer to Senators Harry Reid and John Fetterman, has some theories about the 2024 presidential election, which he's published in a New York Times op-ed:

When Donald Trump held a rally in the Bronx in May, critics scoffed that there was no way he could win New York State. Yet as a strategic matter, asking the question “What would it take for a Republican to win New York?” leads to the answer, “It would take overperforming with Black, Hispanic and working-class voters.”

Mr. Trump didn’t win New York, of course, but his gains with nonwhite voters helped him sweep all seven battleground states.

Unlike Democrats, Mr. Trump engaged in what I call supermajority thinking: envisioning what it would take to achieve an electoral realignment and working from there.

Kamala Harris tried to win this race by doing a great deal of outreach to moderate Republican voters, in an effort to expand her coalition. Harris also held a huge rally in Texas, a state everyone knew she was unlikely to win. So why was Trump's strategy so special?

But go on, Adam.

Supermajority thinking is urgently needed at this moment. We have been conditioned to think of our era of polarization as a stable arrangement of rough parity between the parties that will last indefinitely, but history teaches us that such periods usually give way to electoral realignments. Last week, Mr. Trump showed us what a conservative realignment can look like. Unless Democrats want to be consigned to minority status and be locked out of the Senate for the foreseeable future, they need to counter by building a supermajority of their own.

Okay -- Jentleson has used the word "supermajority" three times in the first four paragraphs of this op-ed. He's clearly angling for a deal to publish a book with the word Supermajority in the title (or maybe Supermajority will be the entire title). As you'll see when I discuss the rest of the op-ed, the subtitle of Jentleson's book will be something like How Democrats Can Build a New Winning Coalition by Embracing the Middle -- and Abandoning the Left.)

And now let's talk about how well Trump's "supermajority" strategy worked, because, well, he didn't win a supermajority. It's not clear that he even won a majority. According to AP and the Times, Trump has 50.1% of the national vote, with nearly 2% of the vote still to be counted, much of it in California, a state Harris won by more than 20 points. The Cook Political Report says he's at 49.96%. His popular-vote victory over Harris was less than 2%. Biden won the popular vote by more than twice that in 2020. Both of Barack Obama's popular-vote wins were by greater margins. Even Hillary Clinon's popular-vote win in 2016 was by a greater margin. So if this was a supermajority strategy, it didn't work.

Continue, Adam.

That starts with picking an ambitious electoral goal — say, the 365 electoral votes Barack Obama won in 2008 — and thinking clearly about what Democrats need to do to achieve it.

Democrats cannot do this as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power. Whereas Mr. Trump has crafted an image as a different kind of Republican by routinely making claims that break with the party line on issues ranging from protecting Social Security and Medicare to mandating insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization, Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party.

Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win.

Democrats didn't make a clean break with interest groups? Really? Harris embraced fracking. She and President Biden expressed support for a right-wing immigration bill. She portrayed herself as tough on crime, and announced that she owns a gun and would use it to defend herself if necessary. She rebuffed opponents of Israeli brutality in Gaza. That's just a partial list of ways she broke with progressive interest groups.

And it's clear that Jentleson has fallen for the myth that Trump is a fearless maverick who follows his inner dictates and doesn't give a damn about party dogma. Really? Does he think the famously libertine Trump gave speech after speech to Christian Right groups out of a deep and abiding personal faith in the Almighty? Does he think Trump announced that he'd vote to uphold Florida's six-week abortion ban a day after criticizing it because he has a profound inner belief that abortion is wrong? Trump got Roe overturned for one reason: coalition management. He signed on with anti-vaxx obsessive Robert Kennedy Jr. for the same reason -- remember when Trump said positive things about COVID vaccines and was booed by his own supporters?

Jentleson goes on to say that Democrats should

stop filling out interest group questionnaires and using their websites to placate them by listing positions on every issue under the sun. This is where opponents go to mine for oppo, as they did for Ms. Harris.

But Donald Trump once said he wanted "some form of punishment" for women who had abortions, and he said it on video. Why was he able to get out from under this past statement and a hundred others, while Harris was held accountable for her past statements?

Or should we just say that if it was a 50%-48% race, as appears to be the case, then both candidates lost votes because they'd previously said and done things the voters didn't like, and it's unreasonable to expect a candidate not to have a record to defend?

Jentleson's point is that previous progressive policy positions (decriminalizing border crossings, offering gender surgery to prisoners) buried Harris. But she wasn't buried. It was a close race. And she tacked to the right on many, many issues, but Trump was more successful at shedding his baggage. I believe that was because people without the means to pay off their credit bills in full every month are still understandably angry about a burst of inflation that wasn't actually Harris's fault, or President Biden's, but they took it out on her. She did a great deal of what Jentleson accuses her of not doing. But in a dissatisfied country, that wasn't enough.

THE LEADER WE NEED NOW: ANYONE BUT HAKEEM JEFFRIES

A couple of days ago, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on Jake Tapper's CNN show to talk about Donald Trump's appointments. It did not go well.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jake Tapper (@jaketapper)

Jeffries appeared shortly after it was announced that Trump had chosen Robert Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Tapper asked Jeffries for his "reaction to this breaking news." Facing a fat pitch right over the plate, Jeffries ... talked about bipartisanship:

REP. HAKEEM JEFFRIES (D-NY): Well, great to be with you, Jake. Since the election we've made clear that we will work to find bipartisan common ground with the incoming administration on any issue whenever and wherever possible in order to make life better for the American people, but, of course, we will push back against far-right extremism whenever necessary.

And what did Jeffries have to say about Kennedy? A lot of empty, meaningless words that told viewers nothing about why Kennedy is a dangerous pick:

Throughout the campaign, the former president promised America the very best, promised the best economy, promised the best border security, promised the best administration possible. The question that we all have to ask with respect to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others, is this America's very best? Is this the best that America has to offer to safeguard the health and well-being of the American people?

Of course, it's not, and that's problematic and it's an unfortunate sign perhaps of what's to come.

Tapper offered Jeffries the opportunity to go into more detail. Jeffries responded with more vague mush.

TAPPER: What are your issues specifically with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as HHS secretary?

JEFFRIES: We understand he's completely and totally unqualified as it relates to protecting the health, the safety, and the well-being of the American people. We have a lot of challenges emerging from the pandemic. We need serious folks with a serious background and serious expertise. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is, of course, none of the above.

In this segment, Jeffries does the two terrible things Democrats invariably do when they get TV time: He embraces a bipartisan approach to governing that Republicans have rejected since the Newt Gingrich era thirty years ago, and he talks to the public as if all of his listeners read three print newspapers a day cover to cover and already know all the relevant facts. It's a terrible approach to public communication.

To be fair, Jeffries came on just after Tapper and other CNN talking heads had gone over some of the appalling things Kennedy has said. Tapper had played a tape of Kennedy uttering crackpottery about the COVID virus:

COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. And -- but we don't know whether it's deliberately targeted that or not.

Kaitlan Collins had said,

All of the clips that you'll see where he's linking autism to vaccines even though that's been completely debunked, where he's linking, you know, mass shootings to prescription drugs, all of these things that are just his conspiracy theories that he has pushed.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta and former congressman Charlie Dent had rejected the idea that vaccines are linked to autism. So you could argue that Jeffries didn't need to go over this ground once again.

But not everyone who was watching CNN on Thursday saw the entire 23-minute segment, which you can watch here. And Jeffries knows that these on-air segments are clipped and excerpted on social media, which is how many people see them. The Instagram clip above consists only of the Jeffries interview. If he'd made news in that interview, or said something memorable, even shorter clips would be appearing on social media.

No chance of that, though. Jeffries had nothing specific to say.

Jeffries might have mentioned the fact that Kennedy has said no vaccines are safe and effective. He made this pronouncement on the Lex Fridman podcast in July 2023:

Fridman, July 6: You’ve talked about that the media slanders you by calling you an anti-vaxxer, and you’ve said that you’re not anti-vaccine, you’re pro-safe vaccine. Difficult question: Can you name any vaccines that you think are good?

Kennedy: I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.

And he specifically cast doubt on the polio vaccine:

So if you say to me, “The polio vaccine, was it effective against polio?” I’m going to say, Yes. And if you say to me, “Did it kill more people ... did it caused more death than averted?” I would say, “I don’t know, because we don’t have the data on that.”

Jeffries might have brought up Kennedy's visit to American Samoa in 2019 during a measles outbrak. Kennedy encouraged vaccine resistance. The outbreak killed 83 people, most of them children.

Jeffries might have mentioned some of Kennedy's other beliefs: Wifi causes cancer. Drinking water is turning kids gay.

You might say that Kennedy was a shocking pick and Jeffries was unprepared to talk about him in detail. But we've known since August that Trump was considering Kennedy for an important position in his administration. And Jeffries is the House Democratic leader. He has Nancy Pelosi's job. He would have been Speaker of the House next year if Democrats had won a few more House seats. He should have first-rate staffers who could have done a better job of preparing him to talk about Kennedy.

Jeffries continued to fail in that Jake Tapper interview after Tapper changed the subject to Trump's attorney general pick, pedophile Matt Gaetz. When Tapper asked about Gaetz, Jeffries once again talked about a fantasy world of bipartisanship:

TAPPER: Do you think the House Ethics Committee should report -- should release the report on Gaetz even though he's no longer a member of Congress, so it's no longer his -- their jurisdiction I suppose?

JEFFRIES: Well, the House Ethics Committee has traditionally operated in a bipartisan fashion. You know, I have great amount of trust and respect in the top Democrat on that committee, Representative Susan Wild. I haven't had an opportunity to have a conversation with her about what's possible.

Certainly, full transparency is always the preferred approach, but the House Ethics Committee has always operated in a straightforward fashion, not as part of a command and control structure connected to leadership from either the House Republican side or the House Democratic side, and I'm just hopeful that consistent with that background, with that history with the integrity of what the House Ethics Committee should represent, that it chooses to do the right thing, consistent with House rules and with the law.

And in response to the next question, Jeffries envisioned a nonexistent universe in which congressional Republicans agree to join with Democrats so both parties in Congress can act as a check on Trump's excesses:

TAPPER: So what are you expecting the Senate to do when it comes to some of these more -- some of the more controversial appointees, whether your former colleague Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Matt Gaetz as attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at HHS, Fox News co-host and decorated veteran Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon.

Do you expect that they're all going to be confirmed?

JEFFRIES: Well, certainly would be surprised if that in fact was the case based on some of the reaction from some of the moderate Republican senators to several of these elections.

But at the end of the day, what's going to be most important is that both the House and the Senate commit to functioning as a separate and coequal branch of government and that we elevate the principle of being a check and balance on a potentially out of control executive branch.

Wait, this gets worse.

That is the vision of James Madison and the framers of the Constitution as to what we should be doing in the House and in the Senate and House Democrats are committed to just solving the problems that the American people want us to solve, which first and foremost relates to lowering costs and making sure that we can help everyday Americans who are struggling to live paycheck to paycheck get ahead and not simply get by. And all of this that we're seeing over the last few days seems to me to be a distraction from the mission that all of us should be focused on in the context of delivering real results for everyday Americans and solving real problems for hardworking American taxpayers.

Trump is very seriously planning to put Democrats in prison and Jeffries is giving us reheated mush that sounds as if it's been kept in cold storage since the days of Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council. Yeah, there might be tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue soon, but my fellow Democrats and I will be over here quietly problem-solving, and gee whiz, we sure hope congressional Republicans will join us.

If we survive the second Trump presidency, it will be in spite of Democratic leaders like Hakeem Jeffries. We're really on our own here.

IT'S FOUR-DIMENSIONAL SCHOOLYARD BULLYING

The Trump era, in two tweets:

A reminder that Trump doesn't play 4D chess. His critics impose 4D chess narratives on his reckless impulsivity in order to reassure themselves that there is method to the madness, when there just isn't.

— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) November 14, 2024

What I’m hearing privately from a few key GOP senators: yes, they’d prefer to not have a messy fight over Gaetz. Not their favorite. But they also don’t have a lot of energy for pushing back. Trump runs the show, they say. If Gaetz can reassure them, they’re open to backing him.

— Robert Costa (@costareports) November 14, 2024

Trump doesn't use elaborate, sophisticated schemes to get his way. He knows one simple thing: When he's in a position of power, he's willing to bully people to get his way, and if the people he's dealing with don't want to fight back, or fight at all, they let him have his way. If he were a genuinely shrewd multi-dimensional chess player, he'd combine this with a sophisticated approach to attaining his long-term goals, but sophistication is beyond him. For instance, a shrewder man would have done the minimum necessary to avoid being indicted, but once he was up on charges and tried in New York, he bullied the court until he and his surrogates were allowed to engage in what amounted to jury tampering, and he intimidated officers of the court. This didn't prevent him from being convicted, but his entire presidential campaign was intended to intimidate the judge who'll preside over his sentencing, and it worked -- the judge delayed his sentencing until after Election Day, and now we know he won't go to prison.

Right now, Trump is appointing people who shouldn't be confirmed, and he's threatening to use a forced adjournment of Congress and recess appointments in lieu of Senate confirmation. The scheme requires the House of Representatives to call for the adjournment of both the House and the Senate, and it appears that House Speaker Mike Johnson is willing to do this for Trump. So now the Senate, which is a very self-regarding institution, wants to avoid being humiliated by a president who says he doesn't need the Senate's consent for his appointees, so senators are likely to rubber-stamp even Trump's worst appointees, holding pro forma hearings with a pre-determined outcome rather than no hearings at all, in order to preserve the tradition of holding hearings. Bullying works.

But what's the point? Maybe Trump was struggling to find easily confirmable appointees who'd be as willing to carry out his agenda as Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth, but what does Trump get out of appointing Robert Kennedy Jr. to be the secretary of health and human services? Trump doesn't care about seed oils or food additives. Trump bragged about the COVID vaccines until long after his base turned against them. Kennedy's agenda is not Trump's agenda.

I think what Trump wants is the sheer joy of bullying. He likes forcing people to bend to his will for its own sake. At times he seems to pursue quick hits of dominance instead of real, enduring power or profit.

During Trump's first term, I was struck by how often his corrupt acts seemed small. In 2019, for instance, Vice President Mike Pence traveled to Ireland and stayed at a Trump resort, along with his Secret Service entourage -- but the resort is on the far west coast of Ireland, and Pence needed to be in Dublin, which is in the east. What did Trump get out of this? It's been reported that the hotel costs for the Secret Service were $15,000. But Trump wanted that relatively tiny amount of money. He wanted the cash, but I think he also wanted the travelers to do what he wanted them to do. He wants to dominate people, even Republican senators who'd happily work with him on ways he can amass power. He wants dominance for its own sake.

GAETZ WILL GET THE JOB ONE WAY OR ANOTHER

Many people believe that Donald Trump picked Matt Gaetz to be attorney general as a ploy:

I worry that Gaetz is the sacrificial lamb and who Trump really wants through is Tulsi and the Fox host.

— Allie A (@alliea.bsky.social) November 13, 2024 at 6:52 PM

Hypothesis: Gaetz is the sacrificial lamb Trump is giving to the Senate to make it more likely Hegseth - who Trump actually wants - gets through.

— Jeff Lazarus wants to live in a democracy (@jlazarus.bsky.social) November 13, 2024 at 8:40 PM

He probably nominated Gaetz as a sacrificial lamb so he can push through Paxton on the second try.

— jeanjeanie.bsky.social (@jeanjeanie.bsky.social) November 13, 2024 at 5:51 PM

But that seems a lot less plausible coming from Trump than this scenario, from a very connected figure in the right-wing legal world:

Hope it's wrong, but I'm hearing through the grapevine about this bonkers plan: Trump would adjourn both Houses of Congress under Article II, section 3, and then recess-appoint his Cabinet.

— Ed Whelan (@EdWhelanEPPC) November 13, 2024

Article II, section 3 says that the president

may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses [of Congress], or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper....

The "extraordinary Occasion" in this case would be adult toddler Trump saying, "WAAAAHHHH! I'm not getting my own way!"

And will the Senate really put up resistance? The Bulwark's Marc Caputo reports that even a senator who had unpleasant interactions with Gaetz is open to voting for him:

... an old clip of Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) quickly resurfaced in which he noted that, in the House, Gaetz would show colleagues videos “of the girls that he had slept with” and “brag about how he would crush ED medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.”

But ... even the once tough-talking Mullins signaled on Wednesday afternoon that he’d be at least open to voting for Gaetz.

“I completely trust President Trump’s decision-making on this one,” Mullins told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “He has to answer those questions. And hopefully, he‘s able to answer the questions right. If he can, then we’ll go through the confirmation process.”

If there's sufficient resistance, I think the Senate will get Gaetz the job via a recess appointment, with the Senate calling the recess or Trump using the Constitution to call it. The Supreme Court didn't ban recess appointments -- it said that if the Senate is effectively in recess but is holding pro forma sessions so it's technically in session, the president can't treat that as a recess and slip in an appointee. Previous presidents had done that, but when Barack Obama did it, the Court ruled against him. Trump will get his way.

I agree with Marc Caputo that this is extremely important to Trump:

In Trump’s mind, there is no more important post than attorney general, both because of the sheer number of federal investigations and indictments he’s weathered since leaving office and his conviction that he was let down by feckless or non-loyal AGs when he served as president.

And I can easily imagine that Trump sees Gaetz, the subject of Justice Department probes himself, as his new Roy Cohn:

[Gaetz's] attitude has won him many enemies on the Hill. But it was also fundamental to Trump’s decision to choose him for the AG slot, according to a Trump adviser familiar with the transition process.

“None of the attorneys had what Trump wants, and they didn’t talk like Gaetz,” the adviser said. “Everyone else looked at AG as if they were applying for a judicial appointment. They talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional bullshit. Gaetz was the only one who said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go over there and start cuttin’ fuckin’ heads.’”

... those familiar with Trump’s thinking say he’s deadly serious about getting Gaetz in at DOJ.

But if Gaetz doesn't get the job one way or another, I'm not sure it will matter much. Slate's Mark Joseph Stern writes:

It is a shocking choice, surely by design, that reflects an obvious desire to corrupt the agency from the top down. If Gaetz is confirmed, it’s no exaggeration to say that the Justice Department will be permanently damaged, as civil servants flee (or face termination), partisan loyalists take their place, and the entire agency reorients around settling old scores against Trump’s perceived enemies. If Senate Republicans do not draw the line here, then a line does not exist.

But if Gaetz doesn't get the job, anyone Trump appoints in his place will be there to do exactly the same thing. Trump ran for office to do precisely this. It was the main goal of the campaign. Trump just thinks Gaetz will do it harder than anyone else will do it.

TRUMP LIKES TO WATCH, SO HE PICKED HEGSETH

I think Emptywheel is half-right about this:

Yesterday, Donald Trump picked a Fox News pundit, Pete Hegseth, to lead the largest military in the world.

... Trump skipped over people like former Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, longtime Trump national security aide Keith Kellogg, and Representative Mike Rogers, who were considered candidates. And tellingly, we know that Miller was willing to check the litmus test in place when he was picked in 2020: a willingness to invoke the Insurrection Act.

There’s something else that Hegseth is happy to do that the others are not. The possible choices are gutting the military of women, people of color, LGBTQ soldiers, launching nuclear first strikes, committing war crimes, and treating leftists as terrorists — all are things he has espoused before.

I agree that Trump wants a defense secretary who's willing to keep women out of combat, exclude trans people from service, use the military against domestic enemies, and tolerate war crimes (Hegseth was the top media defender of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher and two other servicemembers charged with war crimes during Trump's first term, and he persuaded Trump to show leniency to all of them). Hegseth will do everything Trump asks him to do. But I'm far from certain that Trump went through a list of qualified people, discovered that each of them resisted one or more of his litmus tests, and concluded, with a regretful sigh, that his only remaining choice was the TV guy.

Trump loves TV. Trump loves people who defend him on TV, particularly on Fox. What's more, Hegseth has a jawline that conveys a cartoon kind of manliness. I'm sure Trump told people around him that Hegseth looks as if he's straight from "Central Casting."

Hegseth lacks traditional qualifications, but does that matter? Right-wing dogma will decide much of what he does in office. If he's ever confused, he can just watch Fox and learn what the conservatively correct course of action is. And while his inevitable confirmation will coincide with a purge of allegedly "woke" generals, I'm sure those generals will be replaced by officers who are crazy ultra-rightists but who, unlike Hegseth, have some detailed knowledge of warfighting and strategy. Will China, North Korea, and Russia take advantage of the brain drain? Or will they restrain themselves, on the assumption that Trump is unafraid to start World War III? Who knows!

I've seen it argued that the inexperienced Hegseth will be putty in the hands of defense contractors. But he used to the CEO of Concerned Veterans for America, a Koch network front organization that's largely focused on efforts to privatize military health care. Hegseth, I assume, believes large corporations can do no wrong (as long as they're not "woke"), so he'll give contractors whatever they want knowingly and willingly, not because they're taking advantage of his inexperience.

This appointment seems alarming now, but I think it will rank fortieth or fiftieth on the list of appalling things Trump will do in the next few months. The results won't be very different from what they'd be if Trump had chosen someone with actual qualifications.

MY UNPOPULAR OPINION: ELON MUSK ISN'T GOING ANYWHERE SOON

In The New York Times yesterday, David Nasaw confidently told us that Elon Musk's fifteen minutes as Donald Trump's bestie were almost over:

So sorry, Elon Musk, but the bromance is not going to last. I know the president-elect put you on the phone with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine the night after the election. And I know that in Donald Trump’s victory speech ... he celebrated your super-genius as only he could, in a disjointed, discombobulated, wildly overextended paean and declaration of love. “Oh, let me tell you, we have a new star,” he said. “A star is born, Elon.”

Yet therein lies your problem, Mr. Musk. There’s room for only one star, one genius in the Trump White House.... He is not going to share his victory and center stage with anyone.

We know this will happen, Nasaw told us, because it's happened in the past when rich men have tried to cozy up to presidents. For instance, William Randolph Hearst tried to become an FDR insider, but that didn't work:

Hearst’s contributions to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential campaign were ... extensive and varied. In addition to huge financial assistance, Hearst used his media empire to conduct virulent and near-daily assaults on the incumbent, Herbert Hoover.

The day after the election, Hearst’s wife, Millicent, sent a telegram to say that she “had seen Roosevelt last night. He said he was going to telephone you. You are getting all the credit for this victory from everybody I meet.” Hearst responded by forwarding his recommendations for cabinet appointments and an 11-point recovery plan, only to be ghosted by the president-elect: no letters, no telegrams, no phone calls. Almost two months later, Roosevelt finally issued an invitation to Hearst to visit him for private talks. The publisher declined....

But Trump isn't snubbing Musk that way. Just the opposite:

Multiple sources have told CNN that amid the post-victory buzz around Mar-a-Lago, the Tesla CEO has been at Donald Trump’s Florida resort almost every single day over the past week, with Instagram posts under the location tag showing him dining with the president-elect and his wife on Sunday, as well as spending time on the grounds with his son over the weekend.

“Dining with him on the patio at times, today they were seen on the golf course together,” network anchor Katilan Collins said in a broadcast on Sunday. “Musk has been in the room when world leaders have called, and tonight we have learned he’s also weighing in on staffing decisions, making clear his preference for certain roles even.”

Trump's granddaughter Kai tweeted this from Mar-a-Lago:

Elon achieving uncle status 😂 pic.twitter.com/vufSffziZN

— Kai Trump (@KaiTrump) November 10, 2024

Tech commentator Kara Swisher has the conventional wisdom:

“He definitely inserts himself all the time, that’s his style,” tech journalist Kara Swisher told CNN on Monday morning. “I’ve heard from Trump people, calling me saying, ‘Oh, wow. This is odd’. And it is.”

Swisher goes further to speculate that Trump and Musk’s bromance likely won’t survive the pressure of two planetary-sized egos vying for space in the halls of power.

“They’re both narcissists, and there can be only one narcissist as head of the country, and that’s Donald Trump,” Swisher said. “Trump goes through people like tissues, essentially. And even if it’s Musk, they’re going to clash at some point.”

But for whatever reason, Musk isn't acting like a narcissist around Trump. He's acting like Wayne and Garth in the presence of Alice Cooper.



He's not leaking anything that suggests a belief that he could do Trump's job better than Trump is doing it, unlike other Trump courtiers, past and present.

Per source RFK Jr. did not want Rubio for SoS - we’re seeing a potential bucking of his preference by Trump early on

— Hanna Trudo (@HCTrudo) November 12, 2024

As I said in a post last month, in that famous rally photo, Musk was clearly acting deferential to Trump. He was the hype man supporting Trump as lead vocalist (or maybe he was the head cheerleader and Trump was the football hero):

And it's hard to imagine William Randolph Hearst (or Nasaw's other examples, Andrew Carnegie and Joseph Kennedy) publicly acknowledging their sense of vulnerability and need for a president who'll protect them:



Swisher says that "Trump goes through people like tissues," but there are quite a few people he hasn't discarded -- Lindsey Graham (who's always a deferential admirer), Stephen Miller, Roger Stone, Susie Wiles (aides who never try to steal the spotlight from him), and a wide range of tycoons, many of them based in the New York area, whom he's known for years, and whose advice he solicits on issues they know nothing about. To some extent, Trump probably sees Musk as a Robert Kraft or Steve Wynn, a guy with a business empire, and therefore, in Trump's view, a smart person to consult. (Tryump also likes using Musk's money, obviously.) Beyond that, Musk seems to be acting more like Lindsey Graham than like a fellow egomaniac who wants Trump's throne.

I'm not sure why. It could all be an act -- but I think it's noteworthy that Trump is the same age as Musk's father. If Musk is an alpha male, he's a weirdly wounded one -- before he went full Nazi on X, he seemed to be using it to get love, in a quest to become the world's most famous shitposter. Now Trump seems to be giving him the love he needs.

Trump might dump him, but I'm not sure why. I don't think their interests are likely to conflict. If the bromance ends, I think it's more likely to end because other Trump insiders plant stories about him, accurate or not, that make Trump mad. For now, I assume Musk is taking great pains not to offend Trump, cynically or genuinely.

TRUMP MIGHT GET A THIRD TERM, BUT NOT THIS WAY

This is effective ragebait, but I'm not taking it seriously:



Transcript:

HARRIS FAULKNER (ANCHOR): I had forgotten how much they had thrown at him until just this moment, I mean I hadn't been focused on that in the last 10 days or so. But when you look at it stacked like that, and add onto that Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, who said just this week she plans to go after him. She campaigned on trying to get Trump, what do you make of all of it?

TREY GOWDY (FOX HOST): Keep talking, keep doing it. That's exactly why you got hammered on Tuesday night. Keep doing that. Keep using our justice system as a political weapon and he may, who knows, they may amend the constitution and let him serve a third term. We may get a super majority in the House and the Senate if these coastal elite liberals continue their thought process when it comes to our justice system.

Trump might get a third term, assuming he wants one, but it won't happen through the normal process of holding elections and then amending the Constitution.

A constitutional amendment would need to win the votes of two-thirds of the House (290 members) and two-thirds of the Senate (67 members). In the next Congress, Republicans will have 53 senators and (if all the current leaders win) 223 members of the House.

After that, an amendment would need to be ratified by three-quarters of the states -- 38 states, in other words. After this election, Republicans will have full control of 27 state legislatures. In this election, Trump won 31 states.

(A constitutional convention could also pass amendments, but two-thirds of the states -- a total of 34 -- would need to call for a convention, and any amendments would still have to be ratified by 38 state legislatures.)

Gowdy is imagining a Trump administration so popular and a populace so outraged by attacks on Trump that the party in the White House will massively increase its congressional representation in the midterms. That never happens. Usually the opposite happens. And even if literally every Senate Democrat were to lose in 2026, that would add only 13 new Republicans to the Senate, for a total of 66, one short of the number Republicans would need for this. That would mean Democratic losses in blue Massachusetts, Illinois, Rhode Island, Colorado, New Mexico, Delaware, and Oregon, among other states.

Now, Republicans might find Orbanesque ways to prevent Democrats from ever winning another election. But then we're through the looking glass, and Trump will have other ways to obtain the right to serve a third term. I've always assumed he might argue that he was under investigation throughout his first term, so it shouldn't really count, and I can imagine a Trumpist Supreme Court accepting that argument. I think "SCOTUS pulls a rationalization out of its ass" is more likely than a process that uses legitimate means like the constitutional amendment process. So is "Trump sees a few scattered left-wing protests and suspends elections in 2028."

But does Trump really want to be president for life? Sure, he wants to be out of prison for life. Does the rest of it matter to him? It's likely that he ran again this time primarily to end his legal woes, and also in order not to go out a loser. We might rid ourselves of Trump if the opposition is so neutered that it can't pursue him again, or if the system is more or less intact but we agree not to pursue him. Or he might die or slip into dementia. But I don't think he wants to stay in office if he can have a sweet life as a retiree.

NO, THE ELECTION WASN'T RIGGED

I'm seeing some Democratic election trutherism out there.

The only thing I'll say about the election results, is that at the very least, I believe the American people deserve a #SwingStateHandRecount.

— John Pavlovitz (@johnpavlovitz) November 8, 2024

Isn’t it curious that no one is discussing the statistical improbability of 7 swing States, all dead even and within the polling margin for error, all going to Trump? I’m not a mathematician but I’m pretty sure the odds of that are astronomically against.

— Shoq (@shoq.bsky.social) November 8, 2024 at 10:01 PM

That last argument is absurd. Nate Silver has said for years that presidential polling is always somewhat inaccurate, and when it's inaccurate, it's generally inaccurate the same way in much of the country. In a race that polls said was neck-and-neck, that's why he consistently said the most likely scenario was a sweep of the swing states by either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. In late September, he thought a Harris sweep was somewhat more likely, with a Trump sweep as the second most likely outcome. Various splits of the swing states were, in his opinion, less likely. By late October, Silver was saying the same thing, but his model said a Trump sweep was a slightly more likely outcome, followed by a Harris sweep. A Trump sweep is what we got.

But the biggest reason I don't believe there was cheating is the New York Times "Shift from 2020" map:

Each arrow represents a county. Red arrows indicate a county where Trump's victory margin increased or margin of defeat decreased (or a county that Trump flipped). The blue arrows indicate the opposite for Harris. (There are very few arrows in California and some other Western states because the vote totals aren't final or close to final.)

Notice that there are very few blue arrows. Trump did better all over the country. This is consistent with Nate Silver's theory that voting shifts tend to be national. But on the subject of possible fraud, does it make sense that Republicans would cheat in nearly every county in America? Does it make sense that they'd be able to?

There are red arrows in extremely blue states such as Massachusetts and Maryland. Did Republicans cheat there? Why? Why bother?

In Massachusetts, Joe Biden beat Trump 66%-32% in 2020. Harris is leading there 61%-37%. In Suffolk County, which includes Boston, Biden won in 2020 by an 81%-17% margin. This year, Harris is leading 74%-23%. That's a rightward shift. But why would Republicans bother to rig -- or slightly skew -- any part of Massachusetts? They were always going to be trounced there. They lost every county in 2020 and they lost every county this year. And how would Republicans rig Massachusetts? Who are the officials who would have allowed it to happen? Massachusetts, Suffolk County, and Boston are all run by Democrats.

(But, of course, Trumpers seriously argue that Democrats rigged the 2020 election in a Republican-run country, and even in Republican-run states like Georgia. So I suppose it's no surprise that a few Democrats think Republicans could rig an election in a Democratic-run country, and in states like Arizona and Michigan that are currently run by Democrats.)

Yes, downballot Democrats won in states where Harris lost. But some of them didn't win by much: Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin and Elissa Slotkin in Michigan won by less than a point. Jacky Rosen in Nevada and Ruben Gallego in Arizona won by less than 2.

If there's a discrepancy, it's likely because voters want to punish the president when they're unhappy with the economy, and Harris is seen as a stand-in for Biden, in a way that even incumbent senators aren't. (And three incumbent Democratic senators lost, of course: Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Jon Tester in Montana.)

This election wasn't rigged. Democratic voters and voters who were gettable for Democrats just didn't feel as much urgency to defeat Trump as they did when they were experiencing his rule in real time. The Democratic presidential candidate wasn't white or male, in a country where there's still a great deal of racism and sexism. (I think many voters, including some women, will vote for a female senator but not a female president because they think there's some level of testosterone toughness needed for the presidency, even though women have led countries through tough situations all over the world.) And voters generally weren't happy. That's what the numbers are showing us.

"ELITE" IS NOT A SYNONYM FOR "DEMOCRATIC VOTER"

The opinion section of The New York Times is full of op-eds directly or indirectly blaming "elites" for Kamala Harris's defeat -- here's one by Thomas Frank, here's another by Maureen Dowd:

Democratic candidates have often been avatars of elitism — Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and second-term Barack Obama. The party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like “Latinx,” and “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).

We all know about "Latinx" because pundits -- most of them "elite" -- never tire of denouncing it. But "BIPOC"? Does any non-elite Trump voter even know that word exists?

The best of these columns is by Ben Rhodes, who now travels the world getting a firsthand look at the global rise of illiberalism, and who believes economic elitism deserves a great deal of the blame:

In the West, neoliberalism — that blend of free trade, deregulation and deference to financial markets — hollowed out communities while enriching a global oligarchy.... The financial crisis came through like a hurricane, wrecking the lives of people already struggling to get by while the rich profited on the back end.

His analysis goes beyond economic matters, but his critique of elitism focuses on those at the very top, the ones with real power:

We should merge our commitment to the moral, social and demographic necessity of an inclusive America with a populist critique of the system that Mr. Trump now runs; a focus more on reform than just redistribution. We must reform the corruption endemic to American capitalism, corporate malfeasance, profiteering in politics, unregulated technologies transforming our lives, an immigration system broken by Washington, the cabal of autocrats pushing the world to the brink of war and climate catastrophe.

The column by David Brooks is the worst because it implies that every Democratic voter is a privileged, powerful elitist dripping with contempt for the have-nots:

For the past 40 years or so, we lived in the information age. Those of us in the educated class decided, with some justification, that the postindustrial economy would be built by people like ourselves, so we tailored social policies to meet our needs.

Our education policy pushed people toward the course we followed — four-year colleges so that they would be qualified for the “jobs of the future.” Meanwhile, vocational training withered.

Did you vote to eliminate vocational training? I didn't, or if I did, I didn't know it. I'm an Ivy grad, so I'm "in the educated class," but I'm in favor of vocational training. Maybe it's because I grew up blue-collar, but even liberals I know who didn't grow up that way want non-college grads to have opportunities.

We embraced a free trade policy that moved industrial jobs to low-cost countries overseas so that we could focus our energies on knowledge economy enterprises run by people with advanced degrees....

We shifted toward green technologies favored by people who work in pixels, and we disfavored people in manufacturing and transportation whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuels.

I've always thought that the shift to renewable energy could find ways to transition manufacturing and transportation away from fossil fuels, but what do I know? I'm just a dumb elitist.

That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect. People who climbed the academic ladder were feted with accolades, while those who didn’t were rendered invisible. The situation was particularly hard on boys. By high school two-thirds of the students in the top 10 percent of the class are girls, while about two-thirds of the students in the bottom decile are boys. Schools are not set up for male success; that has lifelong personal, and now national, consequences.

I started screaming at my laptop when I read this. Why is "the situation ... particularly hard on boys"? They go to exactly the same schools their sisters attend. They have the same parents and home lives. If girls do better, whose fault is that?

Oh, I forgot: Boys are naturally restless and rambunctious. Girls aren't. Schools suppress boys' essential nature while rewarding girls. Why is this demand for special treatment of boys -- a sort of affirmative action -- a conservative idea?

You know who didn't believe this codswallop? The nuns at my mid-1960s working-class Catholic school. They believed that if girls could sit still in class, so could boys. I suppose David Brooks would now say they were being "woke." (I was there. They absolutely weren't "woke.")

A recent American Enterprise Institute study found that 24 percent of people who graduated from high school at most have no close friends. They are less likely than college grads to visit public spaces or join community groups and sports leagues. They don’t speak in the right social justice jargon or hold the sort of luxury beliefs that are markers of public virtue.

What? You can't join the company softball team unless you say "Latinx" or "BIPOC"?

I could continue quoting this and tell you how Brooks gets from here to Trump's victory, but I'd rather quote you some of the comments in response to it, especially the "Reader Picks." Here's the most recommended comment:

Just stop with the argument that a billionaire from NYC whose campaign was largely funded by the world’s richest man is not part of the “elite.” It’s even more risible to contend that Trump will actually help working class Americans.

The top commenters know who the real elites are:

Elon Musk isn't an elite?
RFK, Jr, isn't an elite?
Trump and Vance aren't, themselves, elite?
Jeff Bezos isn't elite?
The Koch brothers aren't elite?
The Supreme Court justices in Trump's pocket aren't elite?

****

We didn’t move industry jobs in order to focus on anything- and certainly not to focus on “a knowledge economy.”
Manufacturing jobs were moved so that the captains of industry didn’t have to pay American workers a living wage, or have to abide by regulations intended to protect human beings....

****

And what policies are Trump and his Grand Oligarch Party going to deliver to make working class lives better ?

The Republican Party is one of the most anti-worker, anti-union, wage suppressing parties in history....

And they're justifiably sick and tired of being called elitists themselves, because they aren't elitists:

Enough already with the talk of 'elites'. I do not have a college degree and my husband did not graduate from high school....we are small business owners and work with our hands. We believe in working towards the American Dream of self determination and the promise of equal opportunity for all. We understand that we are not there yet and anyone who believes that DT is the guy to move the dial in that direction is not paying attention....

****

I am tired of being called an elite just because I have a college degree. I work every day in an office, more than 40 hours a week my husband just retired after working decades as a teacher. We do not see ourselves as elites but regular middle-class. If somebody is elite, I would think that it is Donald Trump, who never had to work in his life. Also elite is Vance who was able through education to move up on the ladder and now is a lawyer, his wife is one too, and they are wealthy. To vote for them is voting for rich, elitist people who have no connection to the regular working class. It makes no sense.

****

If I hear “elites” one more time, I’m going to scream.

If my non-college-educated parents can maintain an openness to science and progress, and the humility to admit that they may not be experts on every subject, so can Trump voters....

****

There are millions of us out here who are not "elites," who didn't go to an Ivy League college or perhaps any college at all, who grew up in rural towns in western PA or the midwest, who were raised on so-called "family values," and who reject Donald Trump, Trumpism, and at this point the entire Republican Party with its kowtowing to a wannabe dictator. However, the elite Republicans, or, as you now try to label yourselves, "Conservative" voices always put the onus of something like this at the feet of anyone who is not a "Conservative." Meanwhile, you yourselves are "elites." I am not. And I'm tired of being lectured to by the moneyed classes, which by the way, include Donald Freaking Trump and a significant portion of the Republican Party.... Take the elite talk and turn it on yourselves and your own party for once.

Most of the people reading this post are liberals or progressives who don't have elite power. Most of you don't even live in the places where powerful people live. I'm on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, so I live in proximity to power, but my neighbors wielded power in this election by writing postcards to Pennsylvania voters, and sending relatively small donations to Democratic candidates. They don't steer American industrial policy. They're just people who took advantage of opportunities this society provided and managed to make comfortable lives for themselves, and they want that for other people, including Trump voters.

We're not monsters, and we're not the people who made the conscious choices that got us into this mess.