ONE MORE TRUMP VICTORY IN THE BATTLE TO MAKE OFFENDING REPUBLICANS ILLEGAL

I know this looks like one of those Trumpian "distractions" that establishment Democrats believe they should ignore, but the regime and its allies are hitting this one hard, and they've already successfully bullied an ex-FBI director into submission, with no pushback from Democrats:

U.S. law enforcement officials said on May 15 that they were looking into a social media post by former FBI Director James Comey depicting an image of "8647," which some Trump supporters interpreted as a threat against President Donald Trump.

Comey, who was fired by Trump in 2017, later took down the post, according to Reuters, saying he was unaware the apparent political message could have been associated with violence....

A federal law enforcement official told USA TODAY that the Secret Service was sending agents to question Comey about his post....

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose agency oversees the Secret Service, said on X that DHS and the Secret Service were "investigating this threat and will respond appropriately."

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard went further, saying she believes Comey should be put behind bars for the post. Asked by Fox News anchor Jesse Watters if she believed the former FBI director "should be in jail," Gabbard said, "I do.” ...

Current FBI Director Kash Patel said on X that his agency was in communication with the Secret Service about the post and "will provide all necessary support."

Others were more explicit in assigning a malign meaning to Comey's post, with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino saying it was a call to assassinate Trump.

More:

“This is deeply concerning to all of us and is being taken seriously,” Taylor Budowich, White House deputy chief of staff, said in a post on X.

“American leadership has been restored and peace is on the horizon,” Budowich added in another post. “This has left the Deep State desperate and dangerous—Comey is only the latest and most disturbing example of them lashing out through threats of violence.”

That's a lot of firepower directed at an innocent social media post.

This is now the lead story on the USA Today site. It was the lead story at 9:00 A.M. on Fox. And now a Fox interviewer in Abu Dhabi has asked the president about this.

Trump on Comey: "He knew exactly what that meant ... it meant assassination. It says it loud and clear ... he's calling for the assassination of the president ... it's gonna be up to Pam ... he's a dirty cop."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 16, 2025 at 9:13 AM

Trump says, "A child knows what that meant" -- yes, because if there's one thing the average child knows well, it's twentieth-century restaurant slang.

That's what "86" is. Merriam-Webster tells us:

Eighty-six is slang meaning "to throw out," "to get rid of," or "to refuse service to." It comes from 1930s soda-counter slang meaning that an item was sold out. There is varying anecdotal evidence about why the term eighty-six was used, but the most common theory is that it is rhyming slang for nix.

Merriam-Webster offers many examples of these two meanings:

When a soda popper says the tuna fish salad is eighty-six, he means there isn’t any more.
— Will Cuppy, The New York Herald Tribune, 21 Dec. 1941...

I have all I can handle eighty-sixing the drunks.
— Independent (Long Beach, CA), 12 Sept 1960

There's one quote from a soldier using "eighty-sixed" to mean "killed in action," but that's not the common understanding of the term.

The only pushback I see is from anti-Trumpers on social media, who point out that there's a great deal of "86 46" merchandise on sale, even with President Biden out of office:

How about all the people who bought and sold 8646 merch? They should all be in prison, right? pic.twitter.com/1aQNZhtSzA

— Jeff Ralston 🥧🥧🍻💉 (@JeffR914) May 16, 2025

A Google Shopping page is here. No one ever threatened these T-shirt and decal sellers with potential prosecution because no one ever saw them as death threats.

And, of course, a prominent Trump supporter who's denounced Comey posted "86 46" a couple of years ago:

Oops….MAGAs will say that when they went around posting "8646" and wearing the shirts that it was completely different from what Comey posted pic.twitter.com/Gg4EtmxLl7

— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) May 16, 2025

This isn't just a shiny object. It's serious for a lot of reasons.

I've seen "86 47" signs at a number of anti-Trump rallies. If the notion that this is a death threat becomes credible, maybe the administration won't dare to indict Comey, but it might indict ordinary protesters. Or Republican law enforcement personnel at the state and local level might decide the signs are a crime. And once that's a crime, what's next? I see many posts on social media with messages like this:

[image or embed]

— The Icarian (@The-Icarian.federated.press.ap.brid.gy) April 22, 2025 at 4:46 PM

If "86 47" can be redefined as a threat, is some variation on I can't wait for Trump to die also a threat? Is there a limit?

All this comes at a time when the weaponization of the law by the Trump administration and the Republican Party might just be getting into gear. Punchbowl reports:

House conservatives are urging Attorney General Pam Bondi to be more aggressive against President Donald Trump’s political enemies.

These Republicans want Dr. Anthony Fauci and New York Attorney General Letitia James arrested for what they view as politically targeted efforts to go after Trump.

They also want federal criminal charges filed against Democratic mayors who offered sanctuary to undocumented immigrants.

Another target — Biden administration bureaucrats that Republicans argue wasted federal taxpayer money by pushing DEI, climate change and other progressive goals. It’s unclear what laws were allegedly broken here, or if any were.

Pursuing diversity, equity, and inclusion in ways that were not only lawfully but encouraged by the previous administration might be a crime now? That's chilling.

And this is happening when rignht-wingers are urging President Trump to pardon George Floyd's murderer, Derek Chauvin, and one right-wing troll, Jack Cashill -- yes, the guy who thinks Bill Ayers ghostwrote Barack Obama's first book -- is urging Tim Walz to pardon Chauvin on state charges.

They're trying to build an America in which anything a Fox viewer would like is legal and anything a Fox viewer would find distasteful is against the law. At the very least, they're trying to build an America in which anything that offends the famous Fox viewer in The White House is illegal. If we don't call them on this now, they'll keep trying to remake the country in this way. And they might get us at least partway there.

IS THE SUPREME COURT GUNNING FOR BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP? NATIONWIDE INJUNCTIONS? DUE PROCESS? ALL THREE?

I said back in January that I believe the Supreme Court will throw out birthright citizenship. The Supremes might not rule that way in the case of births to green card holders or other non-citizens who are here legally, but I strongly suspect that they'll say the U.S.-born children of immigrants who are here without legal certification aren't citizens. I don't think it matters that the arguments against birthright citizenship used to be seen as part of the right-wing fringe, as The New York Times noted yesterday -- the desire to restrict citizenship is utterly mainstream among the Republican rank-and-file, and it's not an important issue to swing voters, so I think the Court will, as usual, choose ideology over the Constitution.

But we don't know whether the birthright citizenship case currently before the Court will lead to a ruling on birthright citizenship itself. Politico reports:

It’s perhaps the most high-profile case of the year, but it’s not clear what exactly the court will be deciding.

Will the justices wade into the constitutionality of Trump’s effort to deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. whose parents are undocumented immigrants or here on temporary visas? Or will the justices sidestep that legal lightning rod for now and focus solely on a more procedural, yet still momentous, issue: whether lower-court judges will retain the authority to block federal policies nationwide.

“It’s the question that’s on everyone’s minds,” said Columbia Law professor Elora Mukherjee, an expert on immigration law. “I anticipate we’ll see some discussion of the underlying merits, but I am not clear on how much.”

... the administration, notably, is not asking the court at this stage to overturn the district judges’ legal reasoning and declare Trump’s policy constitutional. Rather, the administration says the judges simply lacked the power to issue any nationwide injunctions in the first place.

... If the justices invalidate the injunctions, Trump may be able to enact his citizenship policy in vast areas of the country — even though every court to squarely weigh the policy’s legality has ruled against it.

So for now we might just get a ruling on whether district judges can issue nationwide injunctions. If so, I assume that the Court will hand even more power to Trump by saying that nationwide injunctions are bad -- or are bad only in certain policy areas. The ruling will be crafted so it hands power to Trump while leaving open the possibility that executive power can be taken away if there's ever a Democratic president again.

In the current case, we may be left with a situation in which the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants are citizens in some parts of America and not citizens in other parts. That seems like a recipe for chaos -- are these kids still citizens if their parents take them from a pro-citizenship federal district to an anti-citizenship federal district? -- but it could be sort of an out-of-town tryout for the idea of overturning birthright citizenship altogether: the country will live with a two-tiered system for a while, and get used to that, which sets the table for a full abandonment of the principle that no longer seems radical to most Americans.

And I think it's possible that the Supremes will rule on birthright citizenship itself, in a way that has an impact far beyond what happens to immigrants' babies.

The argument in favor of universal birthright citizenship is that the Fourteenth Amendment is unambiguous:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means that U.S. law applies to them (as it doesn't fully apply to, say, foreign diplomats who live here).

If, as I suspect, the Supreme Court says (now or in the future) that undocumented immigrants' babies aren't "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, that will not only mean that these babies aren't citizens, it will also mean that no one living here illegally is entitled to due process rights. The Fifth Amendment says, "No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" -- note that it's "No person" rather than "No citizen." I think the Supremes are likely to rule that the Fifth Amendment wasn't really intended to extend due process to people here unlawfully (or, in Trump's America, people who were here lawfully until the administration declared that they weren't), and that the Fourteenth Amendment didn't really mean that people here unlawfully are "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States.

At that point, birthright citizenship will be a thing of the past and Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Tom Homan will have the unchallengeable right to do anything they please to anyone deemed "illegal" by the Executive Branch.

It's disturbing that the Supremes pushed this case to the front of the line. The New York Times reports that today's arguments in the case

will take place after the justices have heard all of their scheduled cases this term, and in the weeks before they begin issuing their most consequential decisions of the year — an unusual move that signals that the justices regard the dispute as significant enough to consider immediately.

They want to legislate from the bench right now. That tells me they want tro do something nasty and ideological right away.

WE HAVE NO WAY OF KNOWING WHETHER A BIDEN WITHDRAWAL WOULD HAVE SAVED THE DEMOCRATS IN 2024

Next Tuesday is the publication date for the new book by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios's Alex Thompson. The book tells us that the Democratic loss in 2024 was all President Biden's fault.

Joe Biden “totally fucked us” by leaving it too late to drop out of the 2024 US presidential election, a former top campaign aide to Kamala Harris has told the authors of a new book.

David Plouffe, who was manager of Barack Obama’s winning 2008 campaign and a senior adviser in his White House, was drafted in to help Harris’s bid for president after the declining Biden withdrew from the race last summer.

Harris’s 107-day sprint against Donald Trump was “a fucking nightmare”, Plouffe is quoted as saying by authors Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson in Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. A copy was obtained by the Guardian.

“And it’s all Biden,” Plouffe adds, reflecting on the former US president’s decisions to run for re-election and then to cling on for more than three weeks after a catastrophic debate performance against Trump raised questions about his mental acuity and age. “He totally fucked us.”

... In the wake of Harris’s loss [Plouffe] posted a message on X – formerly known as Twitter – that the Harris campaign had begun in a “deep hole”.

Plouffe's argument is that the lateness of Biden's departure from the race left him and other campaign professionals with inadequate time to work their magic. But the substitution of Kamala Harris for Biden in July 2024 led to a surge in the polls for the Democratic ticket and a massive wave of donations. Although the wave of enthusiasm was widely dismissed as a "sugar high," Harris seemed to have a decent chance of winning before the consultant bros came on board. Maybe they were the problem.

In an excerpt from the book published in The New Yorker, Tapper and Thompson quote George Clooney:

Democrats deceived the country about Biden’s abilities and, Clooney said, “that’s how Trump won.”

But was the country really deceived? Clips of Biden "senior moments," both real and manufactured, were all over the internet throughout Biden's term. This wasn't like the cover-up of Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's in his second term. Voters knew that Biden was past his prime.

Would an earlier Biden withdrawal have saved America from a second Trump term? We have no way of knowing. I'll remind you that every contested Democratic primary since 2004 has been a battle between the Establishment and insurgents that left a significant number of voters bitter. In 2008, everything worked out, despite the lingering anger of Hillary Clinton supporters; in 2020, when Establishment candidates banded together to prevent a Bernie Sanders nomination, everything worked out again, but barely. (Biden received a record number of votes and won the popular vote decisively, but the swing states were extremely close.) On the other hand, in 2004, the Howard Dean insurgency was seen as a problem to be solved, and the Establishment's consensus candidate -- an uncharismatic John Kerry -- couldn't bring home a win. And in 2016, many voters were furious when Clinton beat Bernie Sanders, and some of those voters have continued to blow off the Democratic Party.

When Tapper and Thompson tell us that “The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for re-election — followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment,” and when the subtitle of their book calls Biden's decision to run in 2024 "disastrous," what they're saying is that an earlier withdrawal would have guaranteed a Democratic victory. I'm not sure what else they could be saying, because the actual election couldn't have been much closer without tipping to Harris: Trump won the three states that gave him a victory, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, by less than 1.75% each. Tapper and Thompson don't challenge this anonymous quote that appears in the New Yorker excerpt:

“It was an abomination,” one prominent Democratic strategist—who publicly defended Biden—told us. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party. He stole it from the American people.”

But we don't know that.

If there's an "original sin" here, it's not Biden's choices with regard to the 2024 election and it's not the way Biden's team managed his diminished state, which wasn't a particularly effective cover-up. The "original sin" is how Biden managed his presidency. He did many good things, but he was a godawful public communicator, and he didn't delegate public communication to Harris or any other subordinates. He wasn't able to offer his side of the story every day in an effective way, which meant that the Republican smear machine operated without genuine opposition for four years.

In addition, I think age left Biden -- as it's left other old people I've known -- wanting to focus on what he wanted to focus on, which meant he was less capable of pivoting to other subjects. He wanted to manage the global coalition against Russia, and he did that effectively. He took pride in the Inflation Reduction Act, which included many provisions that would have improved Americans' lives and would have helped the planet deal with climate change. But he wasn't nimble enough to pivot to inflation, which damaged a lot of voters and continued to have a significant impact even after it cooled, probably because of record-high interest rates on credit cards. He also never found an effective strategy or message as Trump and the rest of the GOP noise machine ginned up a panic about immigration.

Excepts and reviews of the Tapper/Thompson book have persuaded me that Biden at his worst was somewhat more impaired than I realized. The New Yorker excerpt focuses on a fund-raiser at which -- after a grueling amount of travel -- Biden doesn't recognize George Clooney, and other observers see Biden struggling.

Clooney was certainly not the only one concerned. Other high-dollar attendees who posed for photographs with [Barack] Obama and Biden described Biden as slow and almost catatonic. Though they saw pockets of clarity while watching him on television, and onstage later that night, there were obvious brain freezes and clear signs of a mental slide. It was, to some of them, terrifying.

Obama didn’t know what to make of how his former running mate was acting. At one point, in a small group of a few dozen top donors, Biden began speaking—barely audibly—and trailed off incoherently. Obama had to jump in and preside. At other moments, during photos, Obama would hop in and finish sentences for him.

It's obviously a problem that, as the New York Times review notes, Biden staffers had to develop a habit of "restricting urgent business to the hours between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m." The Times review tells us that "By late 2023, [Biden's] staff was pushing as much of his schedule as they could to midday."

But midday Biden appears to have been a knowledgeable, thoughtful president with good judgment -- and his replacement is none of these things at any hour of the day. Biden and his smart, capable, decent aides ran the country better -- and, I believe, would have continued to run the country better -- than the current motley crew of know-nothings, flatterers, bigots, scoundrels, and psychopaths.

For the good of the country, we deserved to have a third option. Eventually we got one, and it's probably the one we would have had if there'd been a full slate of contested primaries. (The source material is gone, but in 2023 and the first half of 2024, as I noted last summer, Kamala Harris won every national Democratic primary poll listed at FiveThirtyEight that didn't include Biden.) Regrettably, America rejected the capable alternative the Democrats offered -- and that might very well have happened even if Biden had announced he wasn't running a couple of years earlier.

DONALD TRUMP, AN ELITIST TAKING HANDOUTS

Most of the time, Donald Trump seems good at messaging, and at creating bamboozlements that distract us from news stories that are bad for him. I generally resist the argument that he's doing X specifically to distract us from Y -- I think his strategy is to throw everything at the wall all the time, on the assumption that whatever lands poorly for him will be forgotten as soon as he generates the next cycle of people-pleasing (or at least base-pleasing) headlines.

But the plane from Qatar seems to be a messaging disaster for him. He can't seem to drive it from the headlines, and it buried the story of his China tariff deal, which wasn't much of a win but could have been spun as one. Stock markets rallied yesterday, today he has a decent inflation number -- yet he still can't get past the damn plane story.

I think Trump misread the way poor and middle-class voters respond to his wealth. Many Americans enjoy rich people's wealth vicariously. Many actually believe they'll get wealthy themselves someday. Trump has successfully sold millions of Americans on an idea connected to this: I'm rich because I'm a business genius. Now I'm applying my business genius on your behalf.

That's more or less the message he tried to convey on Truth Social when the first reports appeared:

But the Trump of his voters' fantasies shouldn't need a gift from the Middle East. Trump's voters think he's so brilliant that he should be able to get a new Air Force One built ahead of schedule and under budget. Why get one from foreigners? Why should America -- Trump's America! -- need a handout like this from overseas?

And the foreigners who gave us this handout are Muslims who don't wear Western clothes! Islamophobia isn't as visible in America as it was two decades ago -- we've swept the unpopular Iraq and Afghanistan wars under the rug (Trump has helped make them almost as unpopular among Republicans as they've been among Democrats), and we don't talk about the "war on terror" very much anymore -- but people on the right still regard Muslims with deep hostility, and everyone thinks the Middle East's petro-states are sleazy and suspect.

Much of Trump's corruption -- the crypto cash grab, for instance -- seems too complicated for most Americans to follow. But the plane is different. It's a big, expensive gift. Why would these rich Muslims in funny clothes give Trump something for nothing? They must be expecting something in return.

Trump misread this because he now thinks the entire country is on board with everything about his presidency, including the corruption. This is Trump as an out-of-touch elitist -- which is ironic, because our entire political culture believes that Democrats are the out-of-touch elitists and Trump is a true Man of the People leading a party rooted in common American soil. At the same time, he also looks as if he's accepting charity in our name -- which is in character for Trump, who's spent much of his life scrounging for financing. All in all, it's a bad look. I hope the story stays in the news for weeks.

THE PRESS NEEDS TO ACKNOWLEDGE SECOND-TERM TRUMP'S CORRUPTION THE WAY IT (MORE OR LESS) LEARNED TO ACKNOWLEDGE FIRST-TERM TRUMP'S DISHONESTY (updated)

In Donald Trump's first campaign and first term, the mainstream media resisted describing his falsehoods as lies. The press did point out dishonest statements -- The Washington Post, for instance, began tracking Trump's "false and misleading claims" at the beginning of his term and then catalogued 30,573 such claims by January 2021. But the Post didn't use the word lie in reference to a Trump assertion until the summer of 2018, when he'd been in office for a year and a half.

Nevertheless, the press got somewhat better at categorizing Trump's claims, and doing so in the opening paragraphs of stories. After he began insisting that he won the 2020 election, it became common for the press to describe this as a "false" claim. And the press also used forms of the word lie: Here's a campaign fact-check from CNN's Daniel Dale in October 2024 that appeared under the headline "Trump, on a Lying Spree, Made at Least 40 Separate False Claims in Two Pennsylvania Speeches."

In Trump's second term, the press needs to improve its coverage of Trump's corruption the way some news outlets improved their coverage of his honesty. The corruption needs to be made clear in headlines and in the opening paragraphs of stories.

Here's the headline of a New York Times story datelined today:

Trump Heads to the Middle East With a Single Goal: Deals, Deals, Deals

President Trump has always viewed the presidency as a worldwide hunt for deals. And there is no better place for that than the Gulf, where a few men wield absolute authority over vast wealth.

Apart from the fact that any use of the word "deal" in a headline about Trump is using his own branding, this tells us nothing about how shady Trump's plans are. Nor does the lede:

When American presidents visit the Middle East, they usually arrive with a strategic vision for the region, even if it seems a far reach.

Jimmy Carter pushed Egypt and Israel to a historic peace accord. Bill Clinton tried and failed with Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader. George W. Bush imagined his war on terrorism would ultimately lead to democratization in the region. Barack Obama went to Cairo “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.”

President Trump will tour the Gulf this week in search of one thing above all else: business deals. Planes. Nuclear power. Artificial intelligence investments. Arms. Anything that puts a signature on the bottom of a page.

The point of the story is that this trip is oddly disengaged from American foreign policy. And sure, that's worth noting.

... as a strategic exercise, the trip’s purpose remains foggy. During his 2017 journey to the region, Mr. Trump made waves by rallying dozens of leaders from majority-Muslim countries to confront and denounce extremism. It is unclear what foreign policy goals, if any, will be advanced on this visit.

It's only in paragraph 12 that readers begin to get a glimmer of how corrupt this all is:

In place of grand strategy will be a series of financial transactions that Mr. Trump will promote as producing jobs for American workers.

The agenda conveniently aligns with Mr. Trump’s expanding business plans. His family has six pending deals with a majority Saudi-owned real estate firm, a cryptocurrency deal with an affiliate of the government of the United Arab Emirates and a new golf and luxury villa project backed by the government of Qatar.

The Qataris are going to great lengths to court Mr. Trump. The Trump administration is poised to accept a luxury Boeing 747-8 plane as a donation from the Qatari royal family that will be upgraded to serve as Air Force One, in possibly the biggest foreign gift ever received by the U.S. government, several American officials with knowledge of the matter said.

The plan under discussion raises substantial ethical issues....

So "ethical issues" get mentioned, but only in paragraph 15. It's only in paragraph 26 that we're told, "No part of the world has been more important to the rising financial well-being of the Trump family than the Middle East." Jared Kushner's ties to the Saudis are mentioned in paragraph 27. Some of Trump's business dealings are cited in subsequent paragraphs. So if you read this all the way to the end, you understand that Trump is using the office of the president for self-dealing, and that this isn't normal. But it's all reported subtly. This needs to be stated much more overtly.

There's a similar problem with the headline of a Times story about Trump's memecoin:

Auction to Dine With Trump Creates Foreign Influence Opportunity

(Imagine a similar headline: "Piles of White Powder and Rolled Hundred-Dollar Bills Create Drug Abuse Opportunity.")

The subhead is similarly bland:

When the bidding stops Monday, the top buyers of a Trump family crypto coin will win a tour of the White House.

But the lede at least conveys some sense of Trump's ethical bankruptcy, although it absurdly implies that the corruption might just happen:

The sale of face-to-face access to President Trump using the Trump family’s own cryptocurrency has done more than benefit him financially, though it has certainly done that.

Mr. Trump announced last month that leading buyers of a digital coin his family is marketing would be rewarded with a private dinner with him at one of his golf courses and that the very top bidders would win a tour of the White House.

The auction, which ends Monday, has set off a spectacle that has drawn bipartisan criticism, triggered a suspicious trading pattern, and left a sitting United States president wide open to attempts to corruptly influence him.

Trump isn't "wide open to attempts to corruptly influence him." He's actively encouraging coin buyers to corruptly influence him.

The Times story about the Qatari plane is better:

Trump Is Poised to Accept a Luxury 747 From Qatar for Use as Air Force One

The plan raises substantial ethical issues, given the immense value of the lavishly appointed plane and that Mr. Trump intends to take ownership of it after he leaves office.

All of these stories describe presidential acts that raise "substantial ethical issues," but at least we're told that right away in this story.

The third paragraph of the story refers to "a day of controversy in which even some Republicans privately questioned the wisdom of the plan." Then we get this in paragraphs 5 and 6:

While a Qatari official described the proposal as still under discussion and the White House said that gifts it accepted would be done in full compliance with the law, Democratic lawmakers and good government groups expressed outrage over the substantial ethical issues the plan presented. They cited the intersection of Mr. Trump’s official duties with his business interests in the Middle East, the immense value of the lavishly appointed plane and the assumption that Mr. Trump would have use of it after leaving office. Sold new, a commercial Boeing 747-8 costs in the range of $400 million.

“Even in a presidency defined by grift, this move is shocking,” said Robert Weissman, a co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization. “It makes clear that U.S. foreign policy under Donald Trump is up for sale.”

That's much better. Trump is off-the-charts corrupt, and every story about his self-dealing should make that clear.

It's part of a larger media failing in Trump's second term: although nearly everything he's doing is in violation of the law, much of it is not described as illegal and potentially impeachable -- he's just doing stuff this way, and the law says it's supposed to be done that way, and the conclusion is often left unstated: What he's doing is illegal. But I don't expect the press to change.

*****

UPDATE: OMG.

Corruption requires explict quid pro quo. It is not corrupt to take an action that aligns with the interest of a person who gives you a gift, unless the official action was in direct response to that gift--a bribe. Terms matter. Accuracy and fairness matters. Regardless of what social media wants.

— Eric Lipton NYT (@ericlipton.nytimes.com) May 12, 2025 at 9:02 AM

Lipton is the lead author of the crypto story cited above. If this view of corruption is common among our elite journalists, no wonder Trump thinks he can get away with pretty much anything he wants to do.

TRUMPWORLD AUGMENTS REAL FASCISM WITH FAKE FASCISM

You might be aware of this story:

President Donald Trump's acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia was spat on by an irate woman while on air giving an interview to Newsmax....

In the altercation, the woman, walking a small dog, can be seen coming up to him, proclaiming, "You are Ed Martin!" She then spat on him and strode away, gesturing furiously back at him.

Right-wingers are now reporting that the woman has been arrested -- or is there an arrest warrant out for her? Either way, she could face a massive fine and eight years in prison. Or is it twenty?

JUST IN: The Leftist who spit on Ed Martin during a interview has been ARRESTED!

U.S. Marshals, arrested and she will be charged under 18 U.S. Code § 111. She is facing 20 years in federal prison for knowingly assaulting a federal official and potentially millions in legal… pic.twitter.com/nRM7DdEcJy

— Steve Gruber (@stevegrubershow) May 9, 2025

WITH “Ai” INSTANTLY SEARCHING DATABASES OF PHOTOS ALREADY ON FILE…

IT’S SO MUCH EASIER TO CATCH CRIMINALS!

THINK BEFORE YOU SPIT! HA!

THE SCUM THAT SPIT ON ED MARTIN HAS BEEN CAUGHT & FACES 20 YEARS IN FEDERAL PRISON & MILLIONS IN LEGAL FINES!

(see LINKS & COMMENTS below) https://t.co/PkQwTIaPys pic.twitter.com/15pqrJ9NIT

— Cordell Baker (@CordellBaker12) May 9, 2025

18 U.S. Code § 111 exists and does concern assaults on government workers. But I can't find an actual news story reporting the arrest of this woman, or even a story mentioning the arrest warrant. There's nothing in the mainstream press, and nothing at Newsmax (where you'd expect the story to appear), Breitbart, or any other right-wing site.

So was there an arrest? Or do the Trump administration and its allies merely want the base to believe that this woman has been hunted down (or is being hunted down) and will face a draconian sentence?

A bigger story right now is, of course, the arrest of Newark mayor Ras Baraka at a Homeland Security detention facility in his city. (Baraka has since been released.)

Three members of Congress were also at the facility. They weren't arrested, and the reason they weren't seems clear. CNN reports:

Under the annual appropriations act, which allocates funds for federal agencies, lawmakers are permitted to enter “any facility operated by or for the Department of Homeland Security used to detain or otherwise house aliens.”

The law is also clear that members of Congress are not required “to provide prior notice of the intent to enter a facility” in their oversight capacity....

Baraka, to whom the appropriations law doesn’t apply, was held for a few hours before being released.

The Trumpers are deeply authoritarian, but for some reason they're still observing some limits. They knew that it was unquestionably legal for these members of Congress to be at the facility, so the agents didn't arrest them.

But the Trumpers think that's a bad look. They appear weak. There's no worse sin in Trumpland than weakness.

So here's a Fox News headline:

DHS Says ‘Arrests Are Still on the Table’ After New Jersey House Dems Caught on Camera ‘Storming’ ICE Facility."

RedState:

Arrests Very Much 'On the Table' for Dems Who Stormed ICE Facility to Stump for Criminal Illegal Aliens

Gateway Pundit:

“Definitely on the Table” – DHS Spox Says Members of Congress May Soon Be Arrested For BODYSLAMMING Female ICE Agent

Here's the "bodyslam":

🚨WATCH: US Congresswoman, LaMonica McIver (wearing a red blazer), storms the gate of Delaney Hall Detention Center ASSAULTING an ICE agent. pic.twitter.com/4Q1deds1tl

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) May 10, 2025

It's obviously upsetting the Trumpers that no member of Congress was arrested at the scene, so they need to talk tough right now. I don't know if the regime will actually go through with the arrests -- my guess is no -- or will simply wait for this story to drop out of the news cycle. But right now it's clear that the Trumpers are worried that they dont appear authoritarian enough.

THE RISE OF FASCISM AND THE TABLOIDIZATION OF GOVERNMENT

Now they're talking about suspending habeas corpus.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who orchestrated President Trump’s crackdown on immigration, said on Friday that the administration was considering suspending immigrants’ right to challenge their detention in court before being deported.

“The Constitution is clear,” he told reporters outside the White House, arguing that the right, known as a writ of habeas corpus, “could be suspended in time of invasion.”

“That’s an option we’re actively looking at,” he said....

Actually, there is no "clear" constitutional mandate for a suspension of habeas corpus. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution says:

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

As an analysis of this clause from the Constitution Center notes, previous U.S. governments have invoked this clause only on rare occasions:

The writ of habeas corpus has been suspended four times since the Constitution was ratified: throughout the entire country during the Civil War; in eleven South Carolina counties overrun by the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction; in two provinces of the Philippines during a 1905 insurrection; and in Hawaii after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

That analysis also tells us:

The Clause does not specify which branch of government has the authority to suspend the privilege of the writ, but most agree that only Congress can do it.

Congress ratified Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas during the Civil War, and

On every other occasion, the executive has proceeded only after first securing congressional authorization.

I'd like to point out that this analysis was written by Amy Coney Barrett when she was an appeals court judge, in collaboration with Neal Katyal. I hope this means she'll be a vote against granting Trump the unilateral power to suspend habeas if that question reaches the Supreme Court, though I wouldn't bet the rent money on it.

Barrett and Katyal note that habeas has been suspended nationwide only once, during the Civil War, and locally only under extreme circumstances. The administration appears to be arguing that we're in a public safety emergency so dire that it justifies another habeas suspension, even as the administration is also arguing that it has effectively sealed the border and stopped the "invasion."

But at least 40% of the public will probably accept the notion that we're experiencing an invasion so dire that it justifies the suspension of a fundamental civil liberty. I think I know why.

The dumbing down of America, on this and many other subjects, is a consequence of the politicized tabloidization of the news by Fox and other outlets. Let's look at what news ought to be and what it is now, thanks to Rupert Murdoch and other weaponizers of tabloidization.

We know what the news should ideally be: stories that tell us what we need to know about significant events in our communities and in the world at large. Tabloidization changes this formula: Instead of telling us what we need to know to understand our world, tabloid news tells us whatever makes our pulse race, and presents it all in the most emotion-inducing way possible. An editor of The Sun in Britain said that the paper should "shock and amaze on every page."

The evil genius of Murdochism is that it's politicized tabloidization. Fox doesn't present the news. It presents news (and pseudo-news) stories crafted as narratives of good and evil, with evil always represented either by liberals or by groups associated with liberals (people of color, sexual minorities, college professors, and so on). The top stories are whichever stories are most successful at getting viewers' blood to boil.

To the target audience for Fox and Fox-style tabloid news, the presence of undocumented immigrants in America really is a crisis at the level of the Civil War or Pearl Harbor, because over the years the audience has consumed hundreds of emotion-stirring stories demonizing immigrants. The Trump administration is shutting down or crippling parts of the government that do non-glamorous but critically important things Americans depend on -- but none of that stirs the blood of the Fox audience the way the presence of border crossers does. So we'll get extreme "emergency" immigration measures even as disease prevention and VA services and medical research falter.

Fox was intended to mislead ordinary Americans about what's really important, but it wasn't intended to mislead the people who run our government. Now, however, our government is run by people who also have Fox brain. They don't think they need to focus on issues Fox ignores, and they don't think they need to understand anything at a deeper level than what you get from Fox content.

So here's the president of the United States:

Since President Donald Trump was sworn into office in January, he has sat for just 12 presentations from intelligence officials of the President’s Daily Brief.

... with Trump, there is added concern as he is known not to read the accompanying briefing document, referred to as “the book,” that is put together by intelligence analysts in a highly labor-intensive process. This document is delivered in hard copy or on a tablet device to the president and his key advisers five days a week.

In imitation of the master, here's the FBI director:

FBI Director Kash Patel has alarmed some members of the bureau by taking what they say is an overly casual approach to the role....

For decades, the FBI chief has received an 8:30 a.m. daily “director’s brief” with the most important information gathered from thousands of agents and analysts. Patel reportedly had trouble making the morning briefing, so it was dropped from five days a week to two.

“Even that has been a struggle,” an unnamed official told NBC....

Patel also ended a long-standing practice of holding secure weekly video conferences with field office leaders across the country, according to NBC. The meetings were considered a crucial way to share information and priorities across the bureau....

There’s a “growing sense among the ranks that there’s a leadership void, and that the highest echelons of the bureau are more concerned about currying favor with the president, retribution and leaks than the actual work,” Stacey Young, a former DOJ lawyer who co-founded Justice Connection, a group dedicated to supporting current and former DOJ employees, told NBC.

Patel has recently bragged about arresting a state judge presiding over an immigration case and was dressed down by a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing for failing to put together a budget request.

Trump, Patel, and others in the administration -- Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem -- have such severe cases of Fox brain that they don't even seem to believe it's their job to do the tedious, non-headline-grabbing grunt work that their predecessors prioritized. They think their job is to provide blood-stirring content, whether it's Noem posing in front of shirtless caged men with tattoos in El Salvador or Hegseth doing push-ups with troops while boasting that the troops are "tough, disciplined, ready to fight." If you watch Fox, you think its emotion-stirring content is the news; in the same way, these top government officials thinks revving up emotions is their job.

Sometimes this thinking leads to empty photo ops. Other times it leads to brutality. But it's all driven by a tabloid sense of what's important and what isn't. And the stirring of blood could continue until we have no civil liberties and no functioning government at all.

NEW U.S. ATTORNEY JEANINE PIRRO SIGNED THE FRAUDULENT TAX FORMS THAT GOT HER HUSBAND A FELONY CONVICTION -- WHEN SHE WAS A D.A.

The new interim U.S. attorney for D.C. is Jeanine Pirro, one of President Trump's favorite Fox News stars. You probably know about her Trump sycophancy, which is extreme even by Fox standards:



You probably know that Fox pulled her off the air in late 2020 because she was spreading bizarre (and actionable) conspiracy theories about the election. You probably know that she was previously suspended by Fox for Islamophobic comments about Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Maybe you know that she once referred to immigrant children as "a lower level of human being."

But I want to get into the gutter and talk about her marriage.

Jeanine Pirro was married to Al Pirro from 1975 to 2013. She was a judge of the Westchester County Court from 1991 to 1993 and the county's DA from 1994 to 2005. Which meant that she was DA -- and, later, a candidate for New York state attorney general -- long after her husband's 2000 conviction on felony tax fraud charges. The returns in question were joint returns, which she co-signed, as New York magazine noted in a 2006 story:

Of course, Al and Jeanine’s tax forms (they co-signed the returns) were fraudulent. Al’s businesses—he had 32 single-purpose entities, one for each real-estate deal—took about $20 million in deductions. The government alleged that about 5 percent of those really were personal. Some of the personal expenses charged to businesses were tantalizing. There was an anniversary stay at the Plaza, $1,800 grillwork for the pet pigs’ pen, a $4,450 portrait of their two children, Al’s $123,000 Ferrari 348 Spider convertible, even $70,000 to fight Al’s paternity suit. (Al claimed he had to fight. The mother is a convicted embezzler who’d listed another father on the birth certificate.)

Did I mention that Al Pirro fathered a child out of wedlock during the marriage?)

The government also discovered a complicated lease structure that allowed Jeanine to claim a Mercedes as hers, though one of Al’s companies paid for it. (One of Al’s companies also picked up the tab for Jeanine’s mother’s Mercedes, which pissed off his own mother.)

The indictment of the sitting D.A.’s husband was extremely embarrassing to Jeanine. That she had co-signed fraudulent personal tax returns was worse. She wasn’t, as critics pointed out, a naïve homemaker. How could she have known nothing? Remember as you're reading all this that the GOP is -- or at least was at the time -- regarded as the party of traditional moral values.

During that run for DA in 2006, the Pirros' values were so embarrassing that even the New York Post wallowed in the story, which also involved adultery and wiretapping. This is from a Post report published in September of that year:

In a devastating blow to her campaign, Republican attorney-general candidate Jeanine Pirro admitted yesterday she is under federal investigation for discussing with former city Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik how to secretly record her bad-boy husband to see if he was cheating.

Bombshell transcripts of conversations between Pirro and Kerik reveal that an angry Pirro even offered to plant the bug herself on her husband’s boat, where she believed he was having sex with another woman.

“What am I supposed to do, Bernie? Watch him f- – – her every night?” Pirro is quoted as saying on the transcripts, obtained by WNBC-TV. “What am I supposed to do? . . . I can go on the boat, I’ll put the f- – -ing thing on myself.”

U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia ... is looking into whether Pirro engaged in illegal wiretapping, which carries a five-year maximum prison sentence....

Thinking that her husband was again cheating on her – he fathered a love child more than two decades ago when the two were married – Pirro admitted she had him followed “to see if what I suspected was true.” ...

Pirro ... belittled the AG’s office she is now seeking, calling it a “been-there-done-that kind of thing.” She said she would have been in the governor’s mansion if it weren’t for her husband....

It was 20 years ago that Pirro abandoned her campaign as the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor because of her then-virtually unknown husband Al’s alleged ties to mob-connected companies. And it was almost a year ago that Pirro abandoned her campaign for U.S. Senate – deciding instead to run for attorney general – after her husband secretly worked behind the scenes to undermine her candidacy....

In 2003, [Al Pirro] denied allegations from a suspended Mamaroneck police officer that the department covered up an incident in which Al was stopped while driving drunk. His wife, who was in the car, allegedly demanded special treatment.

In 2004, Al Pirro was alleged by a FBI informant to have bragged to a local Westchester mobster that he was leaking confidential information involving an investigation being conducted by his wife’s DA’s Office.

But -- but -- Hunter Biden!

It will not surprise you to learn that Al Pirro was pardoned by Trump on his last day in office in January 2021. The Pirros had separated in 2007 and divorced in 2013.

IS J.B. PRITZKER THE ONLY DEMOCRAT WHO UNDERSTANDS POLITICS IN 2025?

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker is really good at this.

Gov. JB Pritzker on Wednesday signed an executive order that formally restricts the unauthorized collection of autism-related data by state agencies.

Pritzker’s order responds to federal efforts under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to create databases of personal information for those with autism “without clear legal safeguards or accountability,” according to a news release from Pritzker’s office.

“Every Illinoisan deserves dignity, privacy, and the freedom to live without fear of surveillance or discrimination,” Pritzker said. “As Donald Trump and (the Department of Government Efficiency) threaten these freedoms, we are taking steps to ensure that our state remains a leader in protecting the rights of individuals with autism and all people with disabilities.”

This is both an act of basic human decency and a well-deserved punch in the mouth for the most dangerous and arrogant member of Donald Trump's cabinet. I'm not sure how much this will inhibit Kennedy's mad plans, but it's a reminder to all of us that Kennedy's determination to use personal health data unethically in order to arrive at an erroneous and predetermined conclusions about vaccines is reprehensible.

Maybe what Pritzker is doing is showoffy, but it's 2025 and that's how politics works now. Pritzker seems to be the only Democrat who fully understands that and knows how to play on the court Fox News and Donald Trump have built.

And he does it while seeming like a happy warrior. We saw that a couple of days ago when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was about to make an appearance in Illinois:

A press release from Governor J.B. Pritzker's office advised pet owners in the region to "make sure all of your beloved animals are under watchful protection while the Secretary is in the region."

This statement appears to reference a controversial story from Noem's autobiography, where she recounted taking her family dog, Cricket, to a gravel pit and shooting it because it was not a good hunting dog.

There are fighters in the party who are doing good work -- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Chris Murphy, Pete Buttigieg, Tim Walz, Jasmine Crockett -- but they all convey the sense that Trump and other Republicans are getting under their skin. AOC and Murphy in particular, and Buttigieg and Walz to a lesser extent, seem to be pained by what's going on. You can't blame them -- what the bastards are doing is hurting people -- but American voters prefer politicians who buck them up. Even after Trump rattles off one of his endless lists of grievances, he invariably transforms himself into a power-of-positive-thinking con man who promises that he'll make everything awesome. Democrats don't need a liar like Trump, but they need someone who can really go upbeat.

You'll argue that "the politics of joy" didn't lead to a win for Kamala Harris, and all I can say to that is that she's a Black woman and this is a sexist and racist country. Pritzker has the advantage of being a white man. I don't want to believe that it's impossible to elect a female president, or, post-Obama, to elect a president of color, but our electoral record says what it says. Two women have recently lost. We elected a racist twice in the post-Obama era. Draw your own conclusions.

I know that Pritzker is rich, but so was Franklin Roosevelt. I suspect that the way wealth operated on Pritzker was to give him less fear than other Democrats, and more confidence that people will pay attention to him. These are bad traits to have if you're a rich person with no moral compass, like ... well, pretty much everyone in power right now. But in American politics today, they're good traits if you have a conscience.

Pritzker might be too far to the left at this moment -- Noem was in his state because he's a proud defender of its sanctuary-state status. Maybe swing voters would find the New Hampshire speech he delivered last month a bit much:

“It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once,” he told the group of Democratic activists, officials and donors, who jumped to their feet with hoots and applause. “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace.”

But even if he's not the leader we need, I think Democrats need to be more Pritzer-ish in this fight. They need a politics of not just joy, but aggressive joy. In a more emotionally mature country, that wouldn't be necessary. But it seems to be necessary here.

PUNISHMENT IS ALL THEY WANT

This tweet from a little-known Illinois congresswoman has 21,000 likes and counting:

The first person to be sent to Alcatraz should be Anthony Fauci. pic.twitter.com/7UanlfiVE2

— Rep. Mary Miller (@RepMaryMiller) May 5, 2025

We're told that Americans care primarily about issues that affect their wallets, but many Americans seem unconcerned about economic uncertainty because they're more focused on President Trump's ability to punish the people they despise.

Harry Enten notes that Trump has good polling numbers on crime:

CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten on Tuesday argued that President Donald Trump’s proposal to reopen the notorious former federal prison at Alcatraz is tied to his favorable polling when it comes to tackling crime.

“Yes, I know it’s late-night fodder for a lot of different folks. But what it actually speaks to is Donald Trump focusing the American people’s attention on an issue in which they actually do like what he’s doing,” Enten told CNN’s Kate Bolduan.

... Enten ... turned to Ipsos numbers showing Trump with a net approval rating of two percentage points when registered voters were asked about his handling of crime last month.

This figure, Enten noted, is “far better” than one from Joe Biden, who had a net approval rating of - 26 percentage points with registered voters on the same issue last year.

... Trump’s net approval rating on handling crime also rose by 15 percentage points between March 2024 to April of this year, according to Ipsos polling.

There's no evidence that crime is actually dropping. But Trump is talking tough on crime, and claiming that the immigrants he's deporting and renditioning without due process are all vicious gangbangers. It's true that half the country believes that Kilmar Abrego Garcia should be returned to America according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll, while only 28% believe he should remain in a Salvadoran prison. But Senator Chris Van Hollen and Americans protesting on his behalf have humanized Abrego Garcia in the eyes of Americans. The other men who have been expelled are apparently seen exactly the way Trump wants us to see them, as cartoon thugs.

(I assume that much of Trump's base believes that undocumented immigrants commit the majority of violent crimes in America. I'm certain that they commit the majority of violent crimes that are mentioned on Fox News.)

To Trump's base, and probably to quite a few swing voters, the idea of punishment is emotionally satisfying. It won't bother them that the vice president regards cruel and unusual punishment as a big joke. Here's J.D. Vance talking about the 2026 soccer World Cup, which will take place largely in the United States:

VANCE: We'll have visitors from close to 100 countries. We want them to come, we want them to celebrate, we want them to watch the games. But when the time is up, they'll have to go home, otherwise they'll have to talk to Secretary Noem AUDIENCE: 🦗😳🦗😳

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 6, 2025 at 4:26 PM

Trump followed up on this:

Asked whether people who have taken part in pro-Palestinian protests should be concerned about attending the World Cup in the United States, Trump said: “I think people are allowed to protest. You have to do it in a reasonable manner, not necessarily friendly, but reasonable. Otherwise, [Attorney General] Pam [Bondi] will come after you, and you’re going to have a big problem.”

I'm surprised that he even recognizes the possibility of a peaceful pro-Palestine protest, but the cold-bloodedness with which he and Vance invoke the specter of renditioning foreign tourists to an escape-proof torture prison is shocking. Or apparently, if you're a Republican or a swing voter, amusing.

MARIE GLUESENKAMP PEREZ'S CONTEMPT FOR DEMOCRATS IS HOW WE GOT TRUMP

In the latest episode of Ezra Klein's podcast, he interviews Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat who was running a bicycle repair shop in a rural part of Washington State when she was elected to Congress in 2022. She was reelected last year, even though her district voted for Donald Trump.

Gluesenkamp Perez is seen as an expert on Democrats' difficulties with blue-collar and rural voters -- but what I notice in this interview, and what even Klein himself notices, is the undisguised contempt she has for her own party. There are many reasons to criticize the Democratic Party, but I believe that persistent unfair stereotypes of Democrats are, to a great extent, responsible for the party's low approval ratings, and for many of their electoral losses. In tight races like the 2024 presidential election, Democratic Democrat-bashing of the kind Gluesenkamp Perez regularly indulges in seriously hurts the party's candidates.

Klein begins the conversation with some questions about Trump's tariff plans. It doesn't take Gluesenkamp Perez long before she's bashing her party. She says:

One thing that’s weird is watching the Democratic Party suddenly become the defenders of the stock market and Nasdaq. That’s a weird thing to me.

I share her contempt for Democrats who are too cozy with Wall Street, but that's not what's happening here. Wall Street sometimes does well when ordinary Americans are struggling, but at this moment Wall Street is shaky because it believes the tariffs will kill jobs and be rocket fuel for inflation. At this moment, the concerns of Wall Street and Main Street roughly coincide. And while I'll sure that many of Gluesenkamp Perez's constituents don't have any retirement savings, millions of non-"elite" Americans do, and those savings are in retirement accounts that have been hammered since Trump's tariff "Liberation Day." Democrats who point all this out are not expressing contempt for ordinary people.

Later in the interview, Gluesenkamp Perez says,

I’ve talked to folks from home who used to be a part of the Democratic Party and left. They were like: Yes, we can never be correct enough for you, and the Republicans are having a kegger.

Is this something these voters have experienced firsthand? Or is it something they're told over and over again by the media -- both right-wing and mainstream -- and by centrist Democratic politicians as well as Republican politicians? It's a poisonous stereotype, and it doesn't reflect the way Democrats, up to and including the party's presidential candidates, actually run. But Gluesenkamp Perez piles on.

Much of her bashing doesn't cite the Democratic Party specifically, but tracks perfectly with current stereotypes of Democrats and Republicans. Here she expresses contempt for a former employee:

I used to run this bike shop, and I will never forget teaching a physics major how to hold a wrench — like: Move your hand back.

She says this while talking about older appliances that lasted longer, condemning "overspecialization that has deprived the underlying value itself," which, I guess, is a garbled way of saying that somehow this poor kid represents a world in which corporate America built a business model around planned obsolence. The kid, presumably, just wanted a summer job or temporary job while looking forward to gainful employment in a position that required the skills and knowledge connected to that study of physics. And what's wrong with that? Sure, we should probably all know how to use a wrench, but this kid is being turned into a symbol of elitist contempt for blue-collar America, and that doesn't seem fair.

Eventually we get a fusillade of Democratic/liberal stereotypes, although the party name isn't mentioned. Gluesenkamp Perez says:

Political activism can feel really glamorous and correct. And it’s like: How could you worry about these small things when the world is on fire?

But I would argue the way you put the fire out is by actually going and building community.... It is your relationships with your neighbor and knowing the name of your mail carrier. And talking to folks at day care drop-off and having the time to do that.

... I was talking to somebody who was saying they’re going to protest Tesla every day. A lot of their family are Trump voters, but they don’t want to talk to their family. They’re like: That’s not the forum for that. But man, it feels good to get flipped off by guys driving F-350s.

... I think that when you have all of your wants and needs met, it’s easier to empathize with someone somewhere else — or a fuzzy animal — than it is to have compassion for your neighbor who has got a fentanyl addiction or your neighbor who is rolling coal or who has the wrong lawn sign up.

So liberal protestors are protesting in order to be "glamorous and correct," and because "it feels good to get flipped off by" someone who's Republican-coded -- and these self-indulgent libs care more about "a fuzzy animal" than fentanyl addicts.

All of which is fascinating, because when right-leaners become worked up about an issue involving the outside world, Gluesenkamp Perez recodes their anger as a kitchen-table concern:

For a while I was getting a [expletive] ton of letters about Hunter Biden’s laptop from people who are mad he wasn’t being investigated. And I think it’s easy to dismiss that as silly. But if you lift up the hood on that, what a lot of those folks are saying is that they feel like there’s a legal system that works better for you if you have a different last name or you have the right lawyer.

Or maybe, for right-wingers, it feels good to get flipped off by a person driving a Prius.

To his credit, Klein pushes back when Gluesenkamp Perez attacks liberal protesters:

Sometimes I hear you say things, and you seem really frustrated with Democrats specifically. I take the point that sometimes it can be easier to empathize with a panda a world away than the person right next to you — or at least that’s what I think you’re saying.

But we’re disappearing people to Salvadoran terrorist prisons with no due process. The tariffs will hurt a lot of these people — the same people you’re talking about.

I would not say the Trump administration has been amazing on fentanyl or even strategic about it.

And there is a lot of fear. When I’ve heard the argument: Look, we should be worrying about the people next door, not people being shipped off to Salvadoran prisons, the way I often respond is — I’m Jewish, and I think I bring my own kind of assumptions to this conversation. But I look at history, and I look at other countries, and I feel like when the disappearance machine begins running, if people don’t stop it, it can start going really far. If regimes begin to realize they can use disappearance as a tool, who that eventually comes for is not clear.

Klein doesn't quote Pastor Niemoller here, but he shouldn't have to. Gluesenkamp Perez is looking at protest by liberals about subjects that don't directly affect them and describing those protests as indulgent, but what's the lesson of history? That if first they came for a group to which you don't belong and you don't speak up, they just keep coming for other groups, and eventually those groups will include you.

Maybe liberals didn't apply this logic to an economy that came for blue-collar workers. Maybe we should imagine that the fentanyl dealers came for rural America. But I don't know any rank-and-file liberal who wants these workers underemployed and drug-addicted. Maybe we don't know what they need, but we were hoping Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act would put blue-collar people to work. We want drug treatment to be widely available and fully funded.

But it's just too easy to stereotype us all as self-indulgent elitists. The spread of that stereotype -- and the apparent unwillingness of the party's leaders to challenge it -- is, in large part, why we got Trump. Voters who don't even hear contempt from Democratic candidates think they're hearing it, because both Fox News and Democrat-bashing Democrats like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez tell them they're hearing it.

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:

I may have context for this! Last night WPBT in Palm Beach broadcast the 1979 Clint Eastwood film "Escape from Alcatraz."

— Robert Andrew Powell (@robertandrewp.bsky.social) May 4, 2025 at 7:12 PM

Trump spent Saturday night in Palm Beach

— Robert Andrew Powell (@robertandrewp.bsky.social) May 4, 2025 at 7:15 PM

*correction: The film aired on WLRN TV, another public station that serves all of South Florida including Palm Beach

— Robert Andrew Powell (@robertandrewp.bsky.social) May 5, 2025 at 6:28 AM

Or perhaps ...

This timeline sucks

[image or embed]

— zedster.bsky.social (@zedster.bsky.social) May 4, 2025 at 8:15 PM

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.

****

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?

****

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

****

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.

****

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.

****

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.

****

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.

****

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.

****

Free swimming lessons on their birthday with the sharks!

****

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.

****

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.

****

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.

****

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.

****

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

****

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....

****

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

****

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

****

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:

From The Origins of Totalitarian, essential reading in a post truth world.

[image or embed]

— hoverFrog (@hoverfrog.bsky.social) November 24, 2024 at 3:18 PM

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.