TRUMP'S BASE HATES THE MOVIE TARIFFS BUT WANTS ALCATRAZ, ONLY CRUELER

President Trump's new plan to place a 100% tariff on foreign films came after a right-wing ally in the film industry began looking at a much more sensible plan:

... Trump’s comments follow reports that one of his “special ambassadors” to Hollywood, Jon Voight, was a devising a plan to save the entertainment industry....

Voight has met with various guild officials and studio executives in recent weeks, and there was some expectation of a federal tax incentive. There has long been a push within the industry for a more robust federal tax incentive, as opposed to state tax breaks, as a way to keep more production in the United States. Union representatives have been raising the idea of a federal tax break to further incentivize domestic production for some time, as production crews have seen the loss of work over many years.

But Trump doesn't do carrots, only sticks. He doles out tariffs as punishment, which makes him feel powerful, then he sometimes withholds the punishment, which also makes him feel powerful. You might argue that make me feel powerful is much more of a motive here than make America great again.

(Politico reports that the tariffs were Voight's idea.)

Trump may have been thinking about movie tariffs for a while, but his other weekend brainstorm seems to have been a sudden inspiration he got from the TV:

Or perhaps ...

Trump's base is not particularly fond of the movie tariffs. From the comments in response to Breitbart's story:

Hollywood is 99% communist, LGBT trash. It shouldn't get any help from the government. Let it crash.

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Yes, bailing those preachy leftist zeros out would just be rewarding bad behavior. Maybe make movies people actually want to see rather than preaching leftist nonsense at us?

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Hollywood is brain-poison.
Hollywood is soul-death.
They are Anti-America in their bones.
#TurnThemOff

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I say tax all movies. Patriotic Americans gave up on the cinema a long time ago. Only Diddycrats go now. Let them fund the government they love and adore.

And at the Daily Wire:

The movie industry is nothing more that a child sex ring! They’re all pedophiles. Let it die.

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Not sure on this one. It is almost like providing comfort to the enemy. Hollyweird has been shoving the alphabet BS on us for a long time.

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Trump would do well to remember, "When your enemy is in the process of destroying themselves, get out of the way". Save Hollywood? I for one will celebrate its demise.

But Alcatraz? Many of the MAGAs love the idea. The cruelty really is the point. Some love the idea of reopening Alcatraz because they think it will be cruel. Others would prefer alternatives because they think the alternatives would be less expensive and crueler.

From the Fox News comments:

I agree with President Trump in principle on this, but instead of spending money on renovating antiquated Alcatraz, let’s build a massive ADX level complex on one of the most remote, frozen, wind-swept islands far out on Alaska’s Aleutian Island chain.

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I think this is a great Idea, by the way you would not need guards, let the prisoners self-police themselves, and those who want to leave can help feed the bears. Two birds with one stone as climate change nuts say the polar bears will be starving with climate change.

By the way grizzlies would not mind the diet change either.

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People make decsions based on the incentives. We need to make the punishment for committing crimes much higher, if we want less crime. This would be a good start to make sure crime doesn't pay.

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Free swimming lessons on their birthday with the sharks!

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All for keeping most dangerous people in least desirable condition.

Cost of rebuilding is not feasible as California would sue forever.

New Structure would be less costly and quicker, Red State would not add legal barriers. Everglades would be nice option..especially with increased Python and Croc population.

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That's a good point. Why not set up immigration camps in the everglades. There will be a large quantity of fat Pythons slithering around.

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This is an absolute incredible idea, but we all know a federal district court judge in Oregon will stop it. The 9th Circuit will affirm “it’s” decision & the SC will refuse to grant cert because Roberts is terrified that the Alt Left will pack the court when they resume power if he rules against them now.

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I think the federal judges should be some of the new inhabitants.

The comments responding to Breitbart's story really love the idea of incarcerating politicians and judges in the cruelest manner possible:

Schiff, Pelosi, Obama, Hillary, Schumer and all their fellow corrupt travelers should enjoy it. Since it’s cold and damp…they can warm up in hell for all eternity.

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Love that 47 specifically mentions "Judges" along with the other criminals... They've had their warning.

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From Trump's lips to God's ears, hopefully. I want to see rogue judges in orange jumpsuits, though I won't hold my breath....

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So many deserving characters to be Prisoner #1 at the all new and improved Alcatraz Prison. Who should get the honor?

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There are so many
Any Biden or Clinton
Pelosi
Schumer
Schiff
any number of Judges
AOC

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Clint Eastwood could be the first honorary Warden?
...
“Some men and WOMAN are destined never to leave Alcatraz... alive.” Have a nice day Hildebeast.

But I'm sure this is all just economic anxiety, right?

IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND AMERICA UNDER TRUMP, THAT HANNAH ARENDT QUOTE WON'T HELP YOU

You've probably seen this quotation:

Writing for Bard's Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, Roger Berkowitz notes that this is a fake quote. However, Arendt said something similar in her last public interview in 1973:

"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."

Either way, this observation is not useful if you want to understand what's happening in America now. Perhaps it described what's happened in other countries, but it doesn't describe what's happening here.

There's a story in The New York Times today about Oakdale, California, a city of approximately 20,000 citizens that's become a news desert. In the past,

Nightly news broadcasts played on living room televisions. Copies of local newspapers lined doorsteps on Sunday mornings. The town even had two media outlets dedicated to rodeo and horse roping news.

But that version of Oakdale is a thing of the past.

First the nearby newspapers shrank, and hundreds of local reporters in the region became handfuls. Then came the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, and the pandemic; suddenly cable networks long deemed trustworthy were peddlers of fake news, on the right and the left.

Let's ignore the glib both-sides-do-it statement at the end of that passage. The Times story is describing a recognizable change in how Americans learn what's going on, or don't learn.

Eventually, in 2020, a rumor spread:

As local news outlets shrank throughout the Central Valley in the 2010s, Facebook groups dedicated to local events started popping up in their place. And for years, they were harmless. But that changed in 2020.

... as new members joined by the thousands, conspiracy theories and political debates overtook posts about school board meetings and local elections.

Then, the militia incident happened.

... It was a weekend morning in June, and the downtown farmers’ market had been replaced by a scene resembling a military operation.

Gunmen patrolled the sidewalks dressed head to toe in brown camouflage; store windows were boarded up; some of the men perched from the rooftops in tactical gear, brandishing rifles.

The militia was prepared to defend against an imminent threat: Black Lives Matter protesters, they believed, were plotting to invade the town and would be arriving on buses from the Bay Area at any moment.

They waited and waited. But the protesters never came.

The men were drawn to Oakdale by a false rumor spread in a Facebook group called All Things Oakdale, which over the years had become the town’s primary forum for local news.

People in the community tried to limit the spread of misinformation. But the effort backfired. The woman who started All Things Oakdale

made the Facebook group private and banned political discussions altogether. To help with fact-checking and moderation, she enlisted Kari Conversa, a pet care store owner, and Christopher Smith, an Oakdale City Council member and commercial plumbing distribution manager.

But the new focus on moderation had an unintended effect: Frustrated residents whose comments were removed began to create their own groups in protest, with names like Oakdale Incident Feed First Amendment Approved and Oakdale Incident Feed UNFILTERED. Soon enough, the spinoffs were becoming more popular than the original group.

Of course, right-wingers responded by creating their own groups and censoring those with accurate information that contradicted their priors.

Among the largest of these Facebook groups is Stanislaus News, which has 75,000 members and has become the go-to source of information for crime in the area....

The group was founded by Mark Davis, a former bail bonds salesman in the nearby city of Modesto who was himself banned from a different group dedicated to local news in 2019. Along with his wife, Mr. Davis spends hours a day monitoring local police and emergency services scanners, translating the radio codes into updates that are often posted hours ahead of local news reports.

The group has also become a repository for Mr. Davis’s personal musings about Mr. Trump and Elon Musk’s so called Department of Government Efficiency, to the frustration of many residents who just want to read about local happenings.

“THIS PAGE WAS NOT INTENDED FOR POLITICAL PURPOSES,” one commenter wrote on a recent post about Mr. Musk.

The group is closely aligned with the Modesto Police Department, which uses it to make daily posts of its own. “This is a PRO law enforcement group,” reads one of Mr. Davis’s rules. “If you are not, then this is not the group for you.”

Some residents say Mr. Davis’s rules have hurt their efforts to spread important news, like in December, when surveillance footage posted to the group of a fatal shooting at a convenience store appeared to contradict the sheriff’s report of how the altercation began. Members of the group began to post new details about the case — until Mr. Davis stepped in to ban them.

Blake Coronado, who runs a nonprofit that helps find missing people and relies on Facebook groups for engagement, was one of the members who posted. After visiting the crime scene in person to share his findings, Mr. Coronado said, comments on his post were disabled within minutes. A day later, he was banned.

“I was shocked, because to my knowledge we didn’t even break any rules,” he said in an interview. “If we’re not going to hold our police department accountable, how is that helping our community?”

Let's go back to the Hannah Arendt quote. In Oakdale, California, do you see people who don't believe "anything any longer"? Do you see people who are cynical about everything they're told?

I see right-wingers who fervently believe in the truth -- but the truth, to them, is whatever they're told by people they like. If Donald Trump says it, it's the truth. If Elon Musk says it, it's the truth. If the police say it, it's the truth. (Presumably, they make an exceptoion for the police who worked at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.)

I also see people on the other side who believe that truth exists, but their version of the truth is the actual truth. They think it's knowable and reportable, even if learning what's true and spreading the truth are becoming more and more difficult.

This is our national information environment in microcosm. The majority of us are looking for the truth; right-wingers are looking for their truths.

Right-wing leaders lie, but the lies don't leave their followers unable to make up their minds. The followers fervently believe what they're told by the people they trust, even if it contradicts what the people they trust told them in the past. Twenty or so years ago, right-wingers fervently believed in the Iraq War and saw George W. Bush as God's emissary on earth. Today, under the influence of the man they now believe is God's emissary on earth, Donald Trump, they fervently believe that the Iraq War was a scam sold to us by the enemy ("globalists"), and they believe Bush was so terrible he might as well have been a Democrat. It's not at all true that, on the right, "nobody believes anything any longer." They simply believe the opposite of what they believed a generation ago. But there is a belief that doesn't change: that their enemies are evil and their most-admired Republican heroes are bearers of absolute truth.

Since I first encountered this idea, I've been skeptical. As a rule, authoritarians inspire belief, not cynicism. Most authoritarians have more popular support -- and thus inspire more belief -- than Trump does. But conservatism in the Reagan/Gingrich/Limbaugh/Fox/Trump era has always been a country within a country -- and within that country, belief in right-wing "truth" is unwavering. To the rest of us, the constant lies are apparently meant to send a message: Not There is no truth but Yes, there's truth -- and good luck trying to get anyone to believe the truth with us around.

VICTORY DAY -- WTF?

I wonder if we'll ever hear about this again:

You know you've bombed when even commenters at Gateway Pundit and the Fox News site don't like your idea. From GP:

I am a veteran and a Trump supporter. But I don't think he should mess with Nov 11 being Veterans Day for all veterans.

Not a good idea.

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Much more important matters to attend too like arrests and indictments!

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Yeah most people understand Veteran's Day.
Victory Day is too vague.
DJT needs to leave it as is!
Veteran's Day.

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I agree. Make Aug 15th which is VJ day the official date for the end of WWII for us. I get why the Europeans use May 8th because for them the war really was over but we were still in conflict with Japan and our people were still fighting and dying. VJ day as well as VE day used to be on the calendar just like Flag day and Veterans day are now.

Everyone already knows that Veterans day was also the date of the end of WWI.

This is Gateway Pundit, so not everyone thinks our victory in Europe was a good idea:

We need to get past this narrative of WWII being a victory

It was -- for Communism

Judeo-Bolsheviks killed 20-30 million Christians before WWII broke out

It was Germany that helped stopped the Bolsheviks

Until the United States helped destroy Germany!

The Bolsheviks are now destroying America from within by driving the Communist-Left from the ADL, NAACP, ANTIFA, SPLC, HIAS, Abortion/Child Sacrifice, Frankfurt School, Hollywood, anti-White CRT, anti-Christianity, locking j6ers in the DC Gulag, Gun Control and much more including Third World RepIacement of White Christians.

How is that working out?

The comments at the Fox site are a bit more mainstream:

I am a vet. US Navy retired. We already do honor those who fought for our country. Nothing needs to change.

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NO. I am a disabled Veteran and that day has been for ALL OF US THAT SERVE and come home, regardless of when or where. Memorial Day is for those we lost who did not make it home. I do not agree with Trump on this. Changing Veterans day to victory day for WWI is not acceptable and is an insult to all of us that have served. The only way this stops is by WE VETERANS standing up and saying no.

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Not sure veterans will appreciate Veterans Day being renamed WWI Victory Day. How about you honor all vets instead of only honoring those who fought in wars with a clear winner. It’s not the soldier’s fault leadership went into quagmire situations

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We don't celebrate anything? Well, Veterans Day, July 4, and Memorial Day have been celebrated for quite some time. We also have days of remembrance for 9/11. Did Trump forget?

Why did Trump do this? He's announced a huge military parade for his birthday in June, details of which were reported this week, but he's like a bratty child in the back seat of the car who's been promised ice cream as soon as the family gets home, but even though he knows the house is five minutes away and his favorite flavor is in the freezer, when he sees an ice cream stand on the road he wants the family to stop and get him some NOW! NOW! NOW! It's killing him that there'll be Victory Day parades in Russia and in other former Soviet Bloc countries on May 9, but there won't be one here. I assume he's thinking there should be May 8 parades here next year -- not only will we have one, but we'll have it first! A day early!

The Truth Social post seems to combine a few semi-obscure strains of thinking in the Fox News Comic Universe. One part of this is the belief, widespread on the right and often articulated by the likes of Pete Hegseth, that America hasn't won a war since World War II and it's because our military is "woke." Beyond that, we have the classic Fox News perils-of-the-modern-world formula whereby "nobody" does [fill in traditionalist thing] anymore, whereas everybody did it in some bygone Golden Age, which needs to be brought back. (The classic example is "Nobody say Merry Christmas anymore." In the real world, of course, people say "Merry Christmas" all the time, and celebrate the victories in these wars.)

Trump's names for these new holidays are awful. "Victory Day for World War I" and "Victory Day for World War II"? Too long, too awkward. You might think that this is a sign of Trump's mental decline -- hasn't he always been a great marketer? -- but, in fact, he's not particularly skilled at marketing anything except right-wing grievances and his own personality. Names? He's not so good at those. Remember his tax cut bill eight years ago? He reportedly insisted that it should be called "the Cut Cut Cut Act." He eventually agreed on the dull and clumsy name by which the law is known today: the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a name that always seems to have one s too many.

I wonder if Trump will even remember this pronouncement by May 8, or by November 11. I suspect that he won't be handing out Victory Day hats the way Gulf of America hats were distributed at a recent Cabinet meeting, or suing news organizations that still refer to November 11 as Veterans Day. But who knows?

The president's Truth Social team has moved on to a new provocation (that ridiculous image of Trump as the pope). That could be a sign that Victory Day wasn't a successful provocation and a new one was needed. But at the very least, I assume Fox News will have a Victory Day graphic on the screen all day next Thursday.

I'LL BELIEVE TRUMP HAS DEMENTIA WHEN HE FORGETS HOW TO BE A LYING BULLY

Okay, I guess we're doing this again. At Public Notice, Stephen Robinson writes:

Trump's brain is gone

It really should be a bigger story.

Donald Trump’s recent interviews with Time and The Atlantic revealed a president who is completely unhinged and incoherent. Sadly, that’s not news. But what stood out is that Trump is consistently confused and disconnected from reality even on issues that are supposedly in his wheelhouse.

Trump has always been an ignoramus who masks his intellectual shortcomings with bombast and declarations of his own brilliance, but his rambling nonsensical responses in these latest interviews should set off alarms — especially in light of all the media attention and scrutiny Joe Biden received after his disastrous debate performance or when Special Counsel Robert Hur described him as “a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

I've been pushing back on Trump is in an advanced state of dementia!!1!!!! since 2017. Everything I heard in his first term about his supposedly self-evident dementia strongly implied that by this time he'd need round-the-clock memory care within a few years. But eight years later, here he is, still functioning, still ruining our lives. His 2025 rambling nonsense sounds exactly like his 2017 rambling nonsense. Why hasn't it gotten worse? Why is he able to form sentences at all, however preposterous they are?

I will die on this hill: Trump sounds incoherent not because he has dementia, but because he's an incurious ignoramus who has never willingly read a book, or even a briefing document longer than a page or two. His answers to questions about politics are incoherent because he gets the vast majority of his ideas from Fox News, where the goal is to get Grandpa enraged, not to offer a coherent view of the world. Trump clings to any idea that validates his prejudices and his sense of his own genius. In addition, he loves to lie and get away with it, as he has for his entire adult life. And he insists on describing even his worst failures as smashing successes. All of this is why he sounds addled to those of us who know things. But it's not dementia.

The reason I think Trump's brain is still working is that he still remembers how to bullshit (or bully) his way through every interaction with a reporter. He has a limited repertoire of defensive tactics, but those tactics repeatedly get him out of jams and often put reporters on the defensive. In a culture with a better press, many of these tactics wouldn't work. But they work here. The day Trump forgets how to bullshit and bully is the day I'll agree he has dementia.

Robinson writes:

... in the [Time] interview, after Trump boasted that Biden would have never given an extensive interview “because he was grossly incompetent,” Time reminded him that Biden had in fact done so, just last June....

Notice Trump’s befuddled reaction:

We spoke to [Biden] last year, Mr. President.

Huh?

We spoke to him a year ago.

How did he do?

You can read the interview yourself.

Not too good. I did read the interview. He didn't do well. He didn't do well at all. He didn't do well at anything. And he cut that interview off to being a matter of minutes, and you weren't asking him questions like you're asking me.

Biden’s interview was 35 minutes. Trump was either outright lying, hopelessly confused, or some combination thereof. In any event, it’s not a great look for a sitting president.

Trump isn't "befuddled" or "hopelessly confused." He's doing what he's always done: he's gambling that he can get away with holding forth on a subject he knows nothing about as long as he does it confidently and arrogantly. He has no idea that Biden gave Time an interview, but he appears to be operating on the assumption that Biden probably didn't -- and it's true that Biden was more press-averse than most presidents, so that was a reasonable guess, even if a less reckless person would avoid saying no such interview took place without knowing for sure. When he's corrected, he momentarily loses his grip ("How did he do?"), but when he's told he can read the interview himself, he switches to a different line of bullshit, insisting that he knew that all along and that Biden's interview sucked and was full of softballs, unlike the tough questions directed as his poor besieged self. (Trump assumes that most readers of his interview will not know anything about Biden's. He's probably right about that.)

I'm not saying this is effective bullshit. But the fact that he remembers all his time-tested tactics (attack Biden; feel sorry for himself) tells me his mind is still working. It's never been much of a mind. But it works just about as well as it did in his first term, and it pleases his base.

Like an arrogant high school jock who never does the reading, Trump assumes he can always bullshit his way past a question when he doesn't know the answer:

What he says may cause informed people to roll their eyes, but let's face it, there are millions of Americans who know no more about the Declaration of Independence than he does. Is this answer a major national scandal? No. Did it cost him public support? No. So as far as he's concerned, it worked.

And he remembers how to bully. Obviously, in the now-famous clip of Trump discussing the "MS13" labels added to a photo of Kilmar Abrego Garcia's knuckle tattoos, it's clear that he believes the labels themselves are on Abrego Garcia's fingers, but there are a lot of elderly people who fall for Photoshop and AI slop, and in most cases it has nothing to do with dementia. The thing to watch here is how Trump parcels out the menace: addressing Moran by his first name, accusing him of being "not very nice," insisting he's never heard of Moran, declaring that Moran's journalism is untrustworthy.

Does this work on you? Of course not. It doesn't work on me either. But Trump's base eats it up. If Trump were slipping, he wouldn't be able to deliver a base-pleasing attack on Moran this way. He'd be fumbling for words. Trump has few mental skills, but he knows how to go on offense when his arguments don't hold up -- how to pound the table when the facts aren't on his side. When he forgets how to deliver this kind of menacing attack, I'll agree that he has dementia.

And even if you're skeptical, watch how, later in the Moran interview, he takes the grievance against Moran, which he's clearly been nursing, and injects it into a response to a question about Vladmir Putin:

“hitting me with fake questions” https://t.co/KRx6pd4dzD

— demarkco fleming (@yessuhitslive) April 30, 2025

MORAN: Do you trust him [Putin]?

TRUMP: I don't trust you. I don't trust -- I don't trust a lot of people. I don't trust you. Look at you. You come in all -- shooting for bear, you're so happy to do the interview, and then you start hitting me with fake questions, you start telling me that a guy whose hand is covered with a tattoo doesn't have the tattoo. I mean, you're being dishonest.

MORAN: No, I'm not! No, I am not.

I don't think this is admirable. I don't think it's a sign of intelligence as we normally refer to it. But Trump has intimidation skills, and he successfully deploys them here. His brain is nimble enough to summon up the tattoo exchange, and nimble enough to deploy it as an unexpected weapon. Moran genuinely seems to be put on the defensive. Trump displays an ugly form of intelligence. It's what he knows best: how to be mean and vicious, how to treat every human encounter as a zero-sum battle.

When he forgets how to be this kind of flaming asshole, I'll agree that he has dementia. Not before then.

THE NEW YORK TIMES ED BOARD CALLS FOR ANTI-TRUMP ACTIVISM WHILE TONE-POLICING ANTI-TRUMP ACTIVISTS

I had fairly high hopes for this New York Times editorial, published under the headline "Fight Like Our Democracy Depends on It." The opening paragraphs strike the right notes, more or less:

The first 100 days of President Trump’s second term have done more damage to American democracy than anything else since the demise of Reconstruction. Mr. Trump is attempting to create a presidency unconstrained by Congress or the courts, in which he and his appointees can override written law when they want to. It is precisely the autocratic approach that this nation’s founders sought to prevent when writing the Constitution.

Mr. Trump has the potential to do far more harm in the remainder of his term. If he continues down this path and Congress and the courts fail to stop him, it could fundamentally alter the character of American government. Future presidents, seeking to either continue or undo his policies, will be tempted to pursue a similarly unbound approach, in which they use the powers of the federal government to silence critics and reward allies.

I think the character of American government has already been fundamentally altered, though the changes might still be reversible. I'm not certain that we'll have future presidents elected in the normal manner. Obviously, we need to keep fighting, in order to minimize the damage Trump and his allies are doing.

The Times ed board agrees on the need to fight, but a couple of paragraphs in, we're told that the fighting needs to be done in a very particular way:

The patriotic response to today’s threat is to oppose Mr. Trump. But it is to do so soberly and strategically, not reflexively or performatively.

What does this mean? It means that the house is burning down, but some of us are using the wrong tone to yell "Fire!"

Given the threat that Mr. Trump presents, we understand the urge to speak out in maximalist ways about almost everything he does. It can feel emotionally satisfying, and simply like the right thing to do, during dark times. But the stakes are too high to prioritize emotion over effectiveness. The best way to support American democracy is to build the largest possible coalition to defend it. It is to call out all Mr. Trump’s constitutional violations while diligently avoiding exaggeration about what qualifies as a violation. Liberals who conflate conservative policies with unconstitutional policies risk sending conservatives back into Mr. Trump’s camp.

I agree that Trump should also be opposed by people who aren't on the left. It would be nice to have

a coalition of Americans who disagree about many other subjects — who span conservative and progressive, internationalist and isolationist, religious and secular, business-friendly and labor-friendly, pro-immigration and restrictionist, laissez-faire and pro-government, pro-life and pro-choice — yet who believe that these subjects must be decided through democratic debate and constitutional processes rather than the dictates of a single man.

But that doesn't mean that every person in the coalition has to avoid pronouncements or tactics that some other members of the coalition reject. Everyone doesn't have to agree on everything. If you don't like what one individual or group is doing to oppose Trump, be an adult and simply decline to participate, while continuing to endorse the words and deeds you agree with.

I'll give a real-world example from right now: In March and April, I attended several demonstrations at the Tesla dealership in downtown Manhattan. At two of these demonstrations, some attendees entered the dealership and sat in until they were arrested. The rest of us stayed outside. We marched and chanted and waved signs. We kept it legal.

But we also didn't say, "You arrestees are preventing us from building the broadest possible anti-Elon Musk coalition! We must reject your actions categorically!" Why would we do that?

Most anti-Musk protesters haven't vandalized a car or burned a charging station. Personally I wouldn't, and I think if you do something like that, you should expect legal consequences. (The consequences ought to conform to existing laws, of course -- none of this We don't like you, so we're sending you to an overseas torture prison without a trial brutality that our president and attorney general seem to favor.) But I can't help wondering if the vandals have been the most effective anti-Musk activists.

Whatever is happening, it's clear that we helped turn public opinion against Musk without scrubbing the anti-Musk movement to make it safe for moderates and conservatives. As a result of what we've done, I'm sure many Americans think, I'm against vandalism, but Elon really is an asshole, and what right does he have to all my personal data?

It seems to me that the Times ed board is tone-policing the anti-Trump movement for a couple of reasons.

First, it wants to blame progressives for the establishment's failure to constrain Trump. A year from now, if there are tanks in the streets, the ed board will say it's the fault of those dirty hippies "who conflate conservative policies with unconstitutional policies." No blame will accrue to the establishmentarians themselves.

And second, if Trump's opponents succeed, the ed board doesn't want the next government to be in a position to give Americans truly progressive change. Heaven forbid we should have a successful anti-Trump movement and then demand a reversal of ever-widening economic inequality. Heaven forbid we tax the rich.

The Times ed board wants Trump to be thwarted, but only if he's thwarted in a way that restores the pre-Trump status quo. The ed board wants the broadest possible coalition, but maybe not so broad as to include Trump's fiercest critics, and if they insist on participating, they should have as little power as possible.

WE'RE ALL LOOKING FOR THE GUYS WHO FAILED TO STOP THIS

Against my better judgment, I decided to read this discussion -- Patrick Healy of The New York Times interviewing op-ed columnists Maureen Dowd and Carlos Lozada. At one point, Healy asks about the mood in Washington as large parts of the federal government are being dismantled.

Healy: ... I want to ask: You’ve both worked in Washington for decades; you know the way the bureaucracy resisted and even thwarted Trump at times in his first term, and the way Congress and the courts have slowed down or even stopped presidents before. So I have to ask: Has the fight gone out of Washington? Has the deep state and the Democrats and the courts lost their moxie or their creativity to resist? Because I keep hearing people telling me what a gloomy, depressed place D.C. is now, as if DOGE and Trump have just laid siege in 100 days and the fight has just been leached out of the town. What happened?

Dowd speaks first, and says something that infuriates me:

Dowd: Well, I’m a Washington native and I can sort of understand why everyone is reeling, because nothing like this has ever happened in Washington. Washington was a very stable place, no matter whether it was Republican or Democrat. And then to have this wolf pack of DOGE kids coming in and either muscling their way into agencies or sneaking into agencies and getting hold of sensitive taxpayers’ information was something we couldn’t have conceived of happening. A president letting that happen with no rules about disclosure or what would be private. The Civil Service is gutted now, and all the programs around the world that gave America its reputation for generosity and idealism, and it was done very quickly, and it’s very hard for people to understand how to fight that.

I've added bold at the end for emphasis because I was shouting at my laptop when I read those words. What does Dowd mean, "it’s very hard for people to understand how to fight that"? It's not hard at all. You pass laws preventing the president from doing it. You send a bipartisan congressional delegation to the White House telling the president he's over the line and there will be pushback, up to and including impeachment. You hold hearings. You subpoena records. You fight by fighting.

What I'm describing, of course, is not something that could actually happen in the real world. But it should be obvious to everyone watching this unfold that it could happen if Republicans placed devotion to our country and the rule of law over loyalty to their party. And as a result, every observer should recognize that the Republican Party is rotten to the core, because every Republican in Congress has made a conscious decision to stand by and allow our system to be dismantled, because there's partisan advantage in doing that.

I'm saying something obvious, but apparently it's not obvious to anyone in the conversation. Healy speculates that "the deep state and the Democrats and the courts lost their moxie" (emphasis added again), as if Republicans in Congress have no agency, and Lozada goes on to talk about "Congress" as an undifferentiated mass:

Lozada: ... There was this sense that Washington would endure. Administrations come and go, but civil servants, public servants keep doing their work. And part of that is DOGE. Part of that is also the abdication of Congress’s own powers of oversight. It’s not just that Trump is doing these things that are affecting the livelihoods and the life work and missions of civil servants, of D.O.J. lawyers and of N.I.H. scientists, but it’s also the sense that it seems like nothing can stop it. It seems like no one is doing anything about it. The normal checks and balances aren’t operating.

Emphasis added again. But who has the ability to wield "Congress’s own powers of oversight"? Big hint: Republicans control both houses of Congress. If "the normal checks and balances aren’t operating," it's not a natural phenomenon. It's because the people empowered to check and balance the Executive Branch aren't doing so. Those people are Republicans. Republicans could intervene, but they won't, because they're happy to destroy the American system if their side is winning as it's being destroyed.

Many of you will know the meaning of this image as soon as you see it:

For those who don't, it's from a 2019 sketch on the Netflix comedy series I Think You Should Leave. A hot-dog-shaped car has crashed through the front window of a clothing store, and a man dressed in a hot dog suit talks to everyone in the store as if the identity of the person who drove the car through the window is unclear. The line that's become a meme is "We're all trying to find the guy who did this."



Healy, Dowd, and Lozada are all trying to find the guys who didn't stop Trump, as is most of the Beltway political universe. But it's Republicans in Congress who are wearing the hot dog suit.

EVEN WHEN REPUBLICANS WERE VOTING FOR MAINSTREAM CANDIDATES, TRUMPISM IS WHAT THEY WANTED

Jonathan Chait tries to imagine a normal Trump presidency:

In an alternate reality, Trump’s 2024 victory paved the way for a traditionally successful presidency with broad popularity and concrete policy achievements. After the election, his polling numbers shot up, and numbed Democrats retreated into self-doubt; some of them concluded that their best path forward lay in working with the new president. Congress formed a bipartisan DOGE caucus of members eager to eliminate inefficiencies in government. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, at the time perhaps the Democratic Party’s best-positioned 2028 presidential contender, sent a letter to Trump offering cooperation.

Chait recognizes that Trump had no interest in that sort of presidency:

In the real world, despite the obvious opportunity, Trump never tested the possibilities for constructive engagement....

The available evidence suggests that Trump could never imagine supporting a piece of legislation proposed by a political opponent merely because it advanced some worthwhile policy goal. (That is why passing an infrastructure bill and bolstering domestic manufacturing of silicon chips ranked among Trump’s highest stated priorities, until President Joe Biden passed these ideas into law, at which point they became disasters to be repealed.) ...

Instead of working within the system, he set out to crush the opposition. He ... has used the threat of investigation, prosecution, and punitive defunding to extort media owners, law firms, and universities into compliance. He has attempted to establish, in his immigration-enforcement powers, the ability to disappear people who may or may not have committed crimes, and may or may not even reside in the country illegally, brushing aside court orders to stop.

And Chait knows that Trump has surrounded himself with like-minded people:

Trump’s allies do not recognize any legitimate place for democratic opposition. They have come to see all of progressivism as a false consciousness implanted in an unwitting populace by a handful of puppet masters in academia, philanthropy, media, and Hollywood. Their operating theory is that, by cutting off funds, they can uproot liberal ideology itself.

Chait says that "Trump and his inner circle have consciously patterned themselves after Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary." But Republicans were illiberal -- or at least opposed to treating the Democratic Party as legitimate -- long before they discovered Orbán.

Grover Norquist, the best-known anti-tax activist, said that "bipartisanship is another name for date rape" in 2003. That was during the George W. Bush presidency, which began with the pursuit of a bipartisan education bill but then moved on to highly partisan tax cuts and a post-9/11 national security strategy that relied on torture and legally dubious overseas prisons. Bush fired U.S. attorneys who wouldn't pursue cases invoving nonexistent Democratic electoral fraud (and, of course, he'd won the White House by means of a disputed vote count in the home state of his governor brother, a victory endorsed by the Bushes' party-mates on the Supreme Court).

Rank-and-file Republicans cheered that electoral victory and agreed with the allegations of voter fraud because even then they didn't believe that Democratic votes were legitimate. They believed that Democrats won elections because undocumented immigrants voted for the party or because Democratic voters are brainwashed by, as Chait puts it, "a handful of puppet masters in academia, philanthropy, media, and Hollywood." They've wanted to defund public broadcating since the early 1980s; Andrew Breitbart began quoting the aphorism "Politics is downstream from culture" as a means of explaining that alleged brainwashing during Barack Obama's first term.

In the pre-Trump years, even when Republican voters settled on Mitt Romney and John McCain as party standard-bearers, they craved more, perking up in 2008 only when the charismatic demagogue Sarah Palin joined the ticket and embracing would-be authoritarians Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum in 2012 before Mitt Romney's money sank their campaigns. Trump is the kind of president they've always wanted, the fantasy avenger from the QAnon posts so many of them binge-consumed during the height of the COVID pandemic.

That's why no Republican has had what Chait calls a "traditionally successful presidency" in decades. Playing well with others simply isn't "traditional" in the GOP. What's traditional is a craving for jackbooted thuggery.

WE HAVE TO SAVE OURSELVES FROM TRUMP, BECAUSE AMBITIOUS CAREERISTS WON'T

The Atlantic has a new cover story about the president.

Here's what's most striking about this story: Its authors are remarkably eager to to tell us how they were jerked around by Trump, and how they responded by writing exactly the story he asked them to write. Admitting that doesn't fill them with shame. Hey, they're ambitious careerists, A-list journalists who had to produce a big story for a "Trump's first hundred days" deadline. Wouldn't you have allowed Trump to manipulate you to get that story?

Parker and Scherer begin by telling us that they pitched an interview to the White House.

Trump agreed to see us. We were tentatively promised a meeting and a photo shoot—likely in the Oval Office, though possibly the Lincoln Bedroom.

Already he's messing with their heads -- I won't just give you an interview, I'll give you a photo shoot! Maybe even in the Lincoln Bedroom! At that point, Trump is a cat toying with a caught mouse. Any idiot can guess what happened next:

But then, as is so often the case with this White House, everything went sideways.

The week our interview was supposed to occur, Trump posted a vituperative message on Truth Social, attacking us by name. “Ashley Parker is not capable of doing a fair and unbiased interview. She is a Radical Left Lunatic, and has been as terrible as is possible for as long as I have known her,” he wrote. “To this date, she doesn’t even know that I won the Presidency THREE times.” (That last sentence is true—Ashley Parker does not know that Trump won the presidency three times.) “Likewise, Michael Scherer has never written a fair story about me, only negative, and virtually always LIES.”

Apparently, as word of our meeting spread through Trump’s inner circle, someone had reminded him of some of the things we (specifically Ashley) had said and written that he didn’t like. We still don’t know who it was—but we immediately understood the consequences: no photo shoot, no tour of the newly redecorated Oval Office or the Lincoln Bedroom, and definitely no interview.

They could have retained some self-respect and written the story without his cooperation. But they had a phone number for him and called him. He agreed to talk for a while and went into a boasting monologue, which Parker and Scherer recount at length. But he'd denied them the big get, and he knew it. They'd talked to him, but they still wanted an interview on his home turf. And he toyed with them again:

As ever, Trump was on the hunt for a deal. If he liked the story we wrote, he said, he might even speak with us again.

“Tell the people at The Atlantic, if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,” he said. Perhaps the magazine can risk forgoing hotness, he suggested, because it is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, which buffers it, he implied, from commercial imperatives. But that doesn’t guarantee anything, he warned. “You know at some point, they give up,” he said, referring to media owners generally and—we suspected—[Jeff] Bezos specifically. “At some point they say, No más, no más.” He laughed quietly.

They have interviews with Trump insiders. They have this conversation. But they still want the big get. Near the end of the piece, he calls (or butt-dials) one of them after one in the morning and doesn't leave a message, and instead of finding a way to leverage his apparent craving for another interview, they plead for more, and he tells them what his conditions are:

We made another appeal for an in-person interview. Later that day, an aide told us Trump was denying our request. But the rejection came with a message from the president—a message, Trump specified, only for Michael, not Ashley, with whom he was still annoyed. If the article we were working on really told the remarkable story of how he had come back from the political dead, “maybe The Atlantic will survive after all.”

At this point, we already know that that's exactly the story they've written.

Perhaps no one in American history has had a political resurrection as remarkable as Donald Trump’s.

... he has always been convinced of his own genius, his pure gut instincts. But never more so than today. The past four years have turned him into a Nietzschean cliché. Banishment, multiple indictments, a 34-count felony conviction, repeated brushes with assassins—all have combined to convince him that he is impervious to challenges that would destroy others. Those years also strengthened in him the salesman’s instinct that he can bend reality to his will—turn facts into “fake news,” make the inconceivable not just conceivable but actual, transform the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America, make people believe what he’s selling in defiance of what they see with their own eyes. This is the core lesson that Trump and his acolytes internalized from the 2020 election and January 6.

Trump teased and bullied and cajoled his way to getting what he wanted -- a detailed account of his awesome, unimaginable comeback (I'll spare you the details, though I'll note that I found his comeback all too imaginable even a few days after January 6).

He eventually gave Parker and Scherer an Oval Office interview, and it's ... a big nothing. It's the same spin we get from Trump in every other medium.

He often avoided direct answers in order to recite lists of accomplishments....

We asked about the concern that his administration was pushing the country toward authoritarianism, where politicians use the power of their office to punish their enemies for speaking their minds, as Trump was attempting to do to Chris Krebs, Harvard, law firms, universities, and news outlets. He did not answer the question directly, but instead talked about how he’d been wronged....

Near the end of the interview, we asked Trump why, given that he’s now definitively won a second term, he can’t just let go of the claim that he won the 2020 election.

The president told us it would “be easier” for him to just accept our assertion. But he couldn’t. “I’m a very honest person, and I believe it with all my heart,” he said. “And I believe it with fact—you know, more important than heart. I believe it with fact.”

That's what you did all that groveling for? This rehash?

The press and high-level politicians in both parties won't save us from Trump because they fear that going after him head-on puts their careers at risk. That's why the second-term Trump resistance came from the bottom up. The rest of us have less to lose.

YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE PEOPLE DISCUSS AROUND THEIR KITCHEN TABLES? LIFE-THREATENING ILLNESSES.

President Trump's polling is awful right now, with his job approval coming in at a wretched 39% in new surveys from AP and The Washington Post. Trump's numbers are especially bad on specific issues, as the Post notes:

If establishment Democrats are worried about attacking Trump in his areas of strength, maybe they should stop worrying -- he no longer seems to have areas of strength. But if they want to be cautious, you'd imagine that they'd want to go for the areas where he's weakest.

But that doesn't seem to be the case.

The most timid Democrats are locked into a rigid formula: Talk about nothing except the economy and Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security. Never veer from this path. And so we have this:

Democrats, after weeks of struggling to find a message that resonates with ordinary Americans while President Donald Trump dominates the news, are beginning to settle on one: the allegation that Trump and his allies are crippling Social Security.

Former president Joe Biden used his first public comments since leaving office to criticize Trump’s handling of the popular program. Early Democratic ads are targeting Republican senators on Social Security. Democrats have visited Social Security offices around the country, sometimes getting turned away and going public. Senate Democrats have set up a “war room” to deliver the message.

It's good that they're doing this. But why not look at the list of items above on which Trump is getting absolutely crushed in polling and start talking about those as well?

Look at the last item in the bar graph above. "Reducing federal funding for medical research" is opposed by 77% of The Washington Post's poll respondents. It would be safe even for Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries to talk about that, too.

Medicare and Social Security are a constant presence in older people's lives, so of course we're afraid to lose them. But cancer and stroke and ALS and Alzheimer's and other medical conditions are frequent worries. We'd like to think there are smart people working on cures and treatments for these conditions -- and then we see DOGE, for no reason we can comprehend, cutting grants to medical researchers. We see a U.S.-based Russian scientist with expertise in advanced cancer detection being arrested, detained, and threatened with deportation over a minor customs violation. We see the administration punishing universities for alleged campus wrongthink by cutting off research grants, while handing over control of those grants to a crackpot with no scientific expertise.

People don't just talk about money around their kitchen tables. Older people in particular talk about their health. It's reasonable for us to think that treatments we might need, or family members might need, will never come or will be delayed because of this Trump/Robert Kennedy/Project 2025 vendetta against science.

The young firebrands many of us hope will shake up the party probably won't talk about any of this -- at their age, health isn't a top concern. So the old guard ought to speak up. Come on, Chuck and Hakeem -- 77% disapproval makes this safe enough even for you to talk about.

THE GOP IS A NICHE PARTY

The new New York Times/Siena College poll is very bad for Donald Trump. I'll let Nate Cohn explain:

You would be hard pressed to find a single “good” number for Mr. Trump in the survey.

His job approval rating is just 42 percent, and voters disapproved of his handling of every issue tested in the survey, including longstanding strengths like immigration and the economy.

Only 43 percent view him favorably, down from 48 percent in the final Times/Siena poll before the election and the lowest since his attempted assassination last July.

On question after question, voters say he’s going too far. Sixty-six percent of them say “chaotic” describes Mr. Trump’s second term well; 59 percent say “scary” fits at least somewhat well.

Cohn reminds us of the conventional wisdom of a few months ago, which most elite commentators believed (and many centrist Democrats still seem to believe):

Bring yourself back to the beginning of the year, when Mr. Trump was basking in victory, when there was talk of a rightward cultural “vibe shift” or even an incipient realignment....

While he won only narrowly, the election was still a decisive victory for populist conservative politics over an exhausted liberalism. There were countless opportunities for him to push major initiatives with significant public support, on issues like immigration, crime, energy, “woke” or the economy. Back in January, it seemed possible for Mr. Trump to solidify a coalition behind these issues.

Not anymore.

Remember the widespread belief that young people in particular were now Trumpers for life? That moment appears to be over. I'm looking at the crosstabs, and on issue after issue the 18-29 age group rejects Trump more vigorously than older people.

Question: "Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president?"

* Respondents overall: 42% approve, 54% disapprove.
* 18-29-year-olds: 26% approve, 69% disapprove.


Question: "Please tell me if this describes Donald Trump very well, somewhat well, not too well or not at all well: Understands the problems facing people like you."

* Respondents overall: 44% well, 54% not well.
* 18-29-year-olds: 28% well, 72% not well.


Question: "For each of the following, tell me whether you support or oppose the policy. Deporting immigrants living in the United States illegally back to their home countries."

* Respondents overall: 54% support, 42% oppose.
* 18-29-year-olds: 37% support, 61% oppose.


Question: "The tariffs imposed by President Trump."

* Respondents overall: 39% support, 55% oppose.
* 18-29-year-olds: 20% support, 71% oppose.


Question: "Government spending cuts by DOGE."

* Respondents overall: 42% support, 44% oppose.
* 18-29-year-olds: 17% support, 65% oppose.

It's all like this. As a result, 18-29-year-olds say they'd support a Democrat in the 2026 midterms by a margin of 59% to 30%. (Overall, it's 47% to 44% in Democrats' favor.)

We're regularly told that the Democratic Party has become a niche party -- that the party's core is educated, well-off whites -- but this poll suggests that the Republican Party is a niche party now. College-educated whites, college-educated non-whites, and non-college-educated non-whites all reject what Trump is doing. Only non-college-educated whites offer support.

Question: "Tell me whether you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump has handled each of the following issues as president: The economy."

* White, college: 33% approve, 65% disapprove.
* Non-white, college: 26% approve, 72% disapprove.
* Non-white, no college: 34% approve, 62% disapprove.
* White, no college: 58% approve, 40% disapprove.


Question: "Immigration."

* White, college: 39% approve, 59% disapprove.
* Non-white, college: 39% approve, 60% disapprove.
* Non-white, no college: 32% approve, 65% disapprove.
* White, no college: 60% approve, 38% disapprove.


Question: "Managing the federal government."

* White, college: 35% approve, 64% disapprove.
* Non-white, college: 40% approve, 53% disapprove.
* Non-white, no college: 34% approve, 57% disapprove.
* White, no college: 55% approve, 41% disapprove.


Question: "Trade with other countries."

* White, college: 34% approve, 64% disapprove.
* Non-white, college: 27% approve, 66% disapprove.
* Non-white, no college: 39% approve, 59% disapprove.
* White, no college: 54% approve, 40% disapprove.

The pattern keeps repeating. Trump's alleged new coalition of blue-collar Americans of all races is now a coalition of blue-collar white people only.

The press won't tell you this because the press believes that blue-collar whites are normative, blue-collar non-whites are of interest only when they support Republicans, and college-educated people aren't Americans at all. But that's absurd. We're all Americans. And everyone seems to be abandoning Trump except one demographic group.

YOU'D HAVE ANGRY ENERGY TOO IF YOU'D MADE HATING LIBERALISM YOUR ENTIRE PERSONALITY FOR DECADES

I don't like admitting this, but I understand how David Brooks feels:

I’ve detested at least three-quarters of what the Trump administration has done so far, but it possesses one quality I can’t help admiring: energy. I don’t know which cliché to throw at you, but it is flooding the zone, firing on all cylinders, moving rapidly on all fronts at once. It is operating at a tremendous tempo, taking the initiative in one sphere after another.

A vitality gap has opened up. The Trump administration is like a supercar with 1,000 horsepower, and its opponents have been coasting around on mopeds. You’d have to go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in 1933 to find a presidency that has operated with such verve during its first 100 days.

I've detested 100% of what the Trump administration has done, and I certainly wouldn't say that the administration has verve, but I'll concede that, regrettably, the Trumpers have a hell of a lot of energy.

I don't agree with Brooks that it's primarily Trump's energy. Brooks writes:

Some of this is inherent in President Trump’s nature. He is not a learned man, but he is a spirited man, an assertive man. The ancient Greeks would say he possesses a torrential thumos, a burning core of anger, a lust for recognition. All his life, he has moved forward with new projects and attempted new conquests, despite repeated failures and bankruptcies that would have humbled a nonnarcissist.

Hey, you know what they say: Tiny hands, big thumos. (Actually, no -- nobody says that.) Brooks is right about Trump's "burning core of anger," but Trump spent most of his middle age getting a moderate amount of screen time on a TV show of which he was reportedly the star, even though it largely focused on non-famous contestants. Apart from that, he mostly slapped his name on buildings and other commodities (water, steaks, a fake university) built by others, until he discovered Fox News and almost accidentally became a pundit, and then a politician. He's a lazy guy. He's not a ball of energy.

Brooks is on more solid ground here:

The administration is also driven by its own form of righteous rage. Its members tend to have a clear consuming hatred for the nation’s establishment and a powerful conviction that for the nation to survive, it must be brought down.

The real reason the Trump administration seems energetic is that it's fueled by the pent-up energy of the conservative movement, which has spent decades stewing in eliminationist resentment of everything perceived as liberal. Trump is the angry figurehead, and Elon Musk supplies his own drug-fueled jitteriness (as well as army of boys for hire), but the desperate need to attack everything all at once is what you get after millions of Americans have spent years mass-consuming (and mass-producing) right-wing propaganda. Now that they've undergone this form of brain poisoning, they're consumed with the desire to reverse every form of human progress we've seen in America since 1900. Conveniently, the Heritage Foundation prepared for the Trump presidency by compiling a book longer than Ulysses on how to do just that, and an array of right-wing billionaires have kept the authors of the program well remunerated until they were ready to execute their plan.

Because this is David Brooks, he can't help blaming the old guard for their own demise at the hands of rage-fueled Trumpers. He's right that they partly brought this on themselves, but not in the way he thinks:

Trump’s offensive style takes advantage of the unique weaknesses of America’s existing leadership class....

The people who succeeded in the current meritocracy tend not to be spirited in the way Trump is spirited. The system weeds such people out and rewards those who can compliantly jump through the hoops their elders have put in front of them.

Members of the educated elite (guilty!) tend to operate by analysis, not instinct, which renders them slow-footed in comparison with the Trumps of the world. They tend to believe that if they say something or write something (ahem), they have done something. The system breeds a fear of failure that the more audacious Trump largely lacks. Such elites sometimes assume that if they can persuade themselves that they are morally superior, then that in itself constitutes victory; it’s all they need to do.

That isn't the reason the establishment failed. The establishment failed because it refused to do what people want it to do, which is make a serious dent in economic inequality and precarity. People are working hard and not getting ahead, while the rich get richer and richer. The establishment didn't want to do anything about this except tinker at the margins, and so millions of voters who weren't Trump superfans decided to vote for him because he promised to do something bold, even if they had no idea how destructive it would be.

When Brooks tries to imagine how to fight back, he frequently sounds like one of the weak-willed establishmentarians he describes:

On clarity of purpose: Trump’s opponents have still not produced the kind of one-sentence mission statement that he produces — that the elites have betrayed us, so we must destroy them.... My mission statement would be: America is great, and we will fight for what has made America great.

... Democrats will do the most good if they can stop sounding like Democrats for the time being, with all the tired rhetoric about the oligarchy and trickle-down economics.

Why does the anti-Trump movement need a goddamn "mission statement"? It's not some hipster Brooklyn startup named Sage + Acacia. Just fight the bastards.

And I see that "oligarchy" is the new "Latinx" -- the single word whose evil spell magically makes all Democrats unelectable, for reasons no one can explain. Yesterday Politico published a profile of Michigan senator and wannabe centrist savior Elissa Slotkin, in which we were told this:

Her strategy also focuses on language and tone. She said Democrats should stop using the term “oligarchy,” a phrase she said doesn’t resonate beyond coastal institutions, and just say that the party opposes “kings.”

In fact, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are drawing massive crowds in non-coastal America with a tour called "Fighting Oligarchy." Do Brooks and Slotkin object to the word "oligarchy"? Or do they object to fighting the oligarchy? Because people want that, and I sense that Brooks and Slotkin (and most mainstream Democrats) don't.

Right-wing propaganda tells Americans that elitism is cultural rather than economic, and many fall for that, but it's clear now to many people that Trump's war on propriety isn't solving any of their problems. Simply pointing out the harm done by the Trump administration is good, but harnessing class anger might be the only way to persuade Americans that there's an alternative to Trumpism that's equally vigorous.

TRUMP'S APPROVAL SEEMED TO HAVE A HIGH FLOOR, BUT NOT ANYMORE

I wrote a post yesterday arguing that President Trump's popularity has settled in at a number just below 50-50 approval ... and then three new polls arrived suggesting that he's crashed through that floor and has nowhere to go but down. In a new Economist/YouGov poll, Trump's approval/disapproval numbers are 44%/53%. A Fox News poll puts Trump at 44%/55%. A Pew survey has Trump at 40%/59%.

Surprisingly, Fox polls tend not to have much of a skew one way or the other, so I'd like to focus on that one. Trump was at 49%/51% in a Fox poll conducted in March, which means there's been a big drop in approval (5 points) and a 4-point rise in disapproval. Why?

In this poll, Trump is still getting good numbers on border security and okay numbers on immigration overall, while he's getting clobbered on the economy. But it's starting to seem as if that's not enough to please some former Trump supporters.

Trump regularly said on the campaign trail that he'd fix all of America's problems "quickly." I think many Americans responded to that because, while the Biden administration actually did a lot, it wasn't very good at telling people that it was doing a lot, so many voters didn't believe it was doing much of anything. Millions of Americans weren't happy with the economy in 2024 and came to the conclusion that President Biden didn't care. Republican voters thought Biden didn't care about immigration because they heard about border crossers incessantly on Fox News; some independents probably shared that concern, as did moderates who lived in or near the communities that were dropoff points for immigrants transported by Governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott.

Voters who were concerned about immigration are seeing swift action from the Trump administration -- it's horrible to you and me, but it's happening, and it's happening quickly. Elon Musk's DOGE is moving fast and breaking the government -- again, in a horrible fashion, but it's quick.

Voters who believed Trump's promises undoubtedly imagined that he could lower egg prices as fast as DOGE destroys government agencies and ICE rounds up green card holders. They might have believed that Trump's tariffs would swiftly lead to awesome deals with other countries. Instead, the only thing that's happening quickly is turbulence in the stock and bond markets.

Also, Trump promised to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine swiftly. He's failed on both counts, and now his foreign policy approval is 40%/54%.

In my post yesterday, I said that there appear to be quite a few "trust the plan" voters -- people who think things are bad now, but they'll be better in a year or so, because Trump has such a big, shrewd brain. The Fox poll suggests that the number of people who believe this may be shrinking. Notice that a majority of poll respondents not only believe Trump's policies will hurt America in the short run (54%), but also believe they'll hurt America in the long run (51%).

A majority are discouraged about the next four years:

If they're not buying what I've called "the long con," he could be screwed, because it's not as if he'll actually do anything to improve economic conditions for ordinary Americans. His one Big Economic Idea is bad for everyone. So his only hope is to keep Americans believing that the golden age is coming and everyone should just be patient. If onetime supporters are losing faith in that, he's in trouble. And if he is, it's because they assume that a guy who seems like a Man of Action in other realms ought to be capable of some sort of aggressive action on their economic behalf. They'll never believe us when we tell them he's incapable of that, but they may be slowly learning now.

SADLY, BOTH TRUMP AND MUSK HAVE MADE A SOFT LANDING

The New Republic's story about Tesla's quarterly earnings report carries this headline:

Tesla Earnings Plunge Because Everyone Hates Elon Musk

TNR tells us:

Elon Musk’s far-right turn as the head of the Department of Efficiency has apparently tanked Tesla’s earnings.

In a humiliating first-quarter report published Tuesday, Tesla reported that profits had crashed by a whopping 71 percent, falling to a mere $409 million, compared with $1.39 billion from the same quarter last year.

The company vastly underperformed compared to Wall Street’s expectations for per-share profit, reporting an adjusted earnings-per-share of 27 cents, well below the expectations of 41 cents.

Sales slipped dramatically as well, dropping 13 percent from the same period last year.

But does that mean everyone hates Elon Musk? Apparently not, because as I write this, Tesla stock is up more than 7% in pre-market trading. This is why:

Elon Musk says he will step back next month from his work with the Department of Government Efficiency to focus more time on Tesla, after the electric carmaker's profits plunged 71%.

"Starting next month, I will be allocating far more of my time to Tesla," Musk announced during Tesla's earnings call Tuesday. "My time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly."

"I think I'll continue to spend a day or two per week on government matters for as long as the president would like me to do so and as long as it would be useful," added Musk, as he declared his work with DOGE "mostly done."

Many people don't hate Elon Musk categorically. They hate the fact that he's putting in so many hours working at DOGE, where he's alienating potential customers, rather than doing what they still believe he's good at, which is running his companies -- this despite the utter failure of the Cybertruck and the many missed deadlines on full self-driving, a lower-cost electric vehicle, and robotaxis, not to mention continually plunging revenues at X. Despite all the evidence that he's lost the plot, many people will go right back to regarding him as a genius and a visionary if he dials back his involvement in DOGE. And, of course, many people have never stopped believing in him.

This makes him very similar to Donald Trump, whose poll numbers have dropped since his second inaugural, declining notably after his tariff "Liberation Day," but have now apparently stopped their slide. According to Nate Silver's polling average, Trump's job approval slipped to 45.5% on April 10 -- but now it's a nearly identical 45.4%. At RealClearPolling, Trump's job approval number dropped to 46.7% on April 12 -- exactly where it is now. Markets are selling off U.S. bonds, trade deals aren't happening, Trump is defying the courts on deportations, Trump subordinates are obtaining or seeking access to personal data at an alarming rate, measles is rampant -- but 45% or more of the country either loves everything that's going on or has a few qualms but still trusts the plan. Much of America still can't quite believe that Trump is dangerous and untrustworthy, just as they can't quite accept that Musk is a charlatan, a Nazi, and a brain-poisoned whackjob.

This also seems analogous to the endless "Are we in a constitutional crisis yet?" coverage in the mainstream media. Those whose answer is "Not yet" apparently need to believe that we could return to normality at any moment, with laws prevailing and guardrails holding. They still want to believe this is normal politics, and I can't imagine what it will take to make them realize that we've been in a constitutional crisis since Inauguration Day.

Maybe a recession? Will that do it? I can imagine that Americans might turn against Trump for that most normie of reasons, but will never quite realize that he destroyed much of what was best about America, and did it illegally and unconstitutionally. They'll simply write him off because he didn't lower the price of eggs. And if we can still have elections and vote his party out of office, the GOP will be able to regroup after that and take a second run at destroying everything good about America, with a less ignorant, less idiotic dictator this time. We'll never have the necessary reckoning. We'll just go right back to treating the GOP as a normal politcal party.

LET THE BLAME-SHIFTING BEGIN!

Economically, we're screwed:

Apollo Global Management, Inc‘s chief economist warned on Saturday that the odds of a U.S. recession in 2025 are 90%.

... Torsten Slok predicts the U.S. will fall into what he labelled a "Voluntary Trade Reset Recession.” He attributed the high risk to the economic impact of President Donald Trump's trade and tariff strategies.

... Trump's current plan calls for double-digit tariff rates. Slok calculated that this could subtract nearly 4 percentage points from 2025 GDP. This does not include additional negative effects from uncertainty on consumers and corporate decisions.

Other prominent economists and financial institutions see an elevated risk of recession, but none as high as Slok's 90% call. A recent Wall Street Journal survey indicated that economists have raised their estimated likelihood of a recession in the next 12 months to 45%, a significant increase from 22% in January.

But don't worry, because President Trump has a ready response: It's all the Fed chairman's fault.

President Trump is signaling that he will blame the Federal Reserve for any economic weakness that results from his trade war if the central bank doesn’t cut interest rates soon....

In a social-media post on Monday, Trump repeated last week’s demand that the Fed reduce interest rates now. “There is virtually no inflation,” he said, blasting Fed Chair Jerome Powell as “Mr. Too Late” and “a major loser.”

... Some analysts said the president’s attacks on the Fed simply represent an attempt to scapegoat the central bank for impending economic weakness. “It’s tempting to want somebody else to ride to the rescue, or at least have someone else to blame,” said former Sen. Phil Gramm, a Texas Republican.

Yup. Meanwhile, Republicans are looking to shift the blame for impending Medicaid cuts:

And as we're learning that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared classified information with his wife and brother in a second Signal chat, and also learning that the information included specifics about an ongoing bombing mission, it's beginning to appear as if Hegseth might lose his job soon. But I think this offers the Trump regime and the GOP a new opportunity to shift blame.

Yes, NPR has reported that the White House is looking at potential replacements for Hegseth. But I'll remind you that back in December, after the press had unearthed the first skeletons in Hegseth's closet, it briefly appeared as if Trump might withdraw Hegseth's nomination in favor of another candidate, possibly Ron DeSantis. That never happened. Trump dug in. Hegseth was confirmed.

John Stoehr believes it's categorically impossible for Dictator Trump to suffer a political scandal.

As I said after the first Signalgate story, there are no political scandals under autocratic rulers, because there are no standards to which an autocratic ruler feels he must subordinate himself. The only thing that matters to Trump is whether Hegseth is loyal....

I disagree -- Trump does care about public opinion -- but Stoehr is right about this:

Naturally, the press corps will keep bird-dogging Signalgate. If this were a normal president who respected the constitutional role of the media, as Joe Biden did, Hegseth might be gone by now. But this is Trump we’re talking about. He has united his party against reporters so that virtually anything they say can and will be used against them.

Anything that goes wrong on Hegseth's watch will now be the fault of the people who write critical stories about him, and the fault of the sources for those stories. Thus we have this headline at The Federalist:

New Anti-Hegseth Op Illustrates The Media’s Campaign To Protect The Pentagon Status Quo

Remember, in the eyes of the MAGA base, Trumpers in good standing can do no wrong, while anyone who criticizes a Trumper in good standing is not only wrong but evil. Everything that's not MAGA is part of a vast conspiracy to weaken and ultimately destroy America.

That Federalist piece tells us this:

... the D.C. establishment’s continued campaign to oust Hegseth comes from its fervent opposition to the much-needed change he’s bringing to the Pentagon.

For years, the Defense Department has operated within the best interests of the agency’s higher-ups and D.C.’s notorious defense-industrial complex. While high-ranking officials used their coveted positions of influence to advance neo-Marxist ideologies throughout the Pentagon and defense contractors got rich off of America’s military involvement in nonsensical overseas conflicts, rank-and-file service members’ needs were ignored, the country’s military infrastructure crumbled, and the priority of winning wars went out the window.

Unlike his predecessors, Hegseth is someone who comes from outside this incestuous system that’s responsible for the decay witnessed throughout America’s armed forces. Much like Trump, he’s a disruptor — and by every measure, he’s doing exactly what the president appointed him to do.

... the loudest voices within the D.C. establishment aren’t concerned that Hegseth doesn’t have what it takes to lead the Pentagon. Rather, they’re afraid of the changes he is and will continue to implement that directly disrupt the status quo they’ve spent years protecting.

So I assure you that if there's a major Pentagon failure while Hegseth is in charge -- an actual disaster for America, not just a reckless exposure of classified data that luckily appears to have had no negative consequences -- the Trumpers won't blame it on him. They'll blame it on "deep state" saboteurs who want to preserve the pre-Trump, pre-Hegseth status quo because they hate America. And the majority of Republican voters will accept this assertion uncritically.