Why should we believe this is just meant as a distraction? DEI and its precursor as a hate-object in the Fox/GOP universe, critical race theory, haven't been distractions -- the war on diversity efforts and on institutional acknowledgments of racism has been a central crusade of the right since 2020, when Christopher Rufo first started appearing on Fox. Right-wing propagandists have been talking about equity efforts non-stop since then. The topic didn't just come up in Trump's news conference this week out of nowhere. He was talking about DEI all through the campaign.
If this is merely a distraction floated by Trump because he knows we pay attention to every word he says, why is DEI also coming up in public messages that aren't meant to be seen by normie voters -- this, for instance, from new transportation secretary Sean Duffy?
DEI is central to the plans hatched by Project 2025 henchman Russell Vought to create a government -- and, ultimately, a country -- in which which only right-wing ideologues have political power. The Trump/Vought administration is using DEI (and other crimes against conservatism, such as believing that climate change exists) the way cops use busted taillights.
Let me explain.
If you're running a typically racist American police force, you operate on the assumption that most young black men are guilty of some crime or other. So when you see a black man driving with a busted taillight, that's an opportunity to the pull the driver over, search the car, check for warrants, and subject the driver to intimidation and violence. Sure, the busted taillight is a problem for fellow drivers, but it's also a pretext you can use to put black men in their place.
As the memo cited above makes clear, DEI can be used more or less the same way. If you want to fire career government employees who aren't right-wing zealots, or if you want to withhold aid to Democratic-run cities and states, you just say, "Whoops! You're doing DEI. As of January 20, that's illegal according to federal law." After that, your targets either comply with your ideological edict or they lose their jobs or are starved of funds. Either way, it's a win.
DEI isn't the only the busted taillight these ideologues can get you for. They can also get you for policies favoring renewable energy, for policies that treat trans people as human, or even for nonexistent policies that don't use the water the way Donald Trump would like it used.
None of this is merely rhetorical. The ultimate goal is to make every public and private institution in America conform to extreme right-wing ideology. Vought and his fellow hatchetmen mean this very literally:
Take these attacks on DEI seriously. This is part of an all-out war on liberals and moderates. It's not just angry talk.
A group of six Democratic governors pressed Senator Chuck Schumer of New York during a tense call on Wednesday night to be more aggressive in fighting back against President Trump’s nominees and agenda, all but begging the minority leader to persuade Senate Democrats to block whatever they could....
Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gov. Maura Healey of Massachusetts each told Mr. Schumer that Senate Democrats should not vote for Mr. Trump’s nominees after the administration issued a memo freezing the funding.
Ms. Healey urged Mr. Schumer to slow down Senate votes and create more public opposition than Democrats in the chamber have generated so far....
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota ... said Democrats needed to be more visible on television presenting an alternate vision of governing — not just complaining about what Mr. Trump is doing. Mr. Walz argued that Democrats must occupy just as much media space as Mr. Trump and Republicans have been doing.
These are governors from blue states, as is Kathy Hochul of New York, who was also on the call. But the two other governors -- Laura Kelly of Kansas, who organized the call with Pritzker, and Andy Beshear of Kentucky -- are from red states. Nevertheless, they all had a similar message.
As I've said a couple of times, I think Schumer's response to the funding freeze was good. Here's the clip again:
He was more forthright than the hapless Hakeem Jeffries in the House, who's nearly invisible.
What Governor Healey said seems to echo the action plan recommended by Indivisible when the funding freeze was first announced:
* Committing to oppose all of Trump’s nominees unless OMB reverses their guidance and releases the funds
* Denying any GOP requests for Unanimous Consent that would speed up floor proceedings
*Opposing all cloture votes to further stall floor proceedings
* Requesting a Quorum Call at every possible opportunity to force Senators to physically be on the floor for business to proceed
(Now that the freeze has been temporarily suspended and partially walked back by the White House, that list of actions is no longer posted at Indivisible.)
I'm not sure that a Democratic response to Trump has to be maximal in order to be effective. Right now, there's a slim but non-zero chance that there might be enough votes to sink the nominations of Robert Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. If Democrats shut down the Senate, do they inspire Republicans to rally around the worst of the worst?
I think what's most important is that Democrats make noise, all the time, and do it in a way that seems straight from the gut. Watch Tim Walz's reaction to the funding freeze. This isn't jokey Tim Walz telling you how to fix your car or explaining the delights of state fair corndogs. He's righteously angry.
Here's a transcript of the first few moments:
Donald Trump's reckless action cut off funding to law enforcement, farmers, schools, child care, verterans, and health care. While he was out golfing, he threw the country into crisis. This is not bold. It's not leadership. It's stupid, buffoonish, childish, exactly what they did.
And he's just getting started. He points out (more than once) that his state pays more to the federal government than it gets back, so Trump is impounding Minnesotans' own money.
Do you see what he's doing here? He's expressing genuine emotions. He's attacking Trump using what he knows about Trump's actions based on his experience as an elected official. He knows what he owes his constituents as a governor. As an ex-congressman, he knows this is unconstitutional -- Congress has the power to appropriate money. He says all this, in plain, direct language that clearly wasn't crafted by a highly paid Beltway consultant.
This shouldn't be hard. Every elected Democrat should be able to do this.
When the freeze was announced, Hakeem Jeffries wasn't out on the Capitol steps making a statement like Walz's or Schumer's. Instead, he called an "emergency" meeting, after which the messaging was still weak:
“I don’t want to speak for the leader,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said afterward, “but it was a broad call for action — and a vigorous one.”
“I don’t want to speak for the leader”? Seriously? The moment called for immediate outrage, and instead you had a meeting -- and then came out still worrying about whether you had your messaging perfectly tied up with a neat bow?
“House Democrats are now fully engaged. The bell has rung. I think we see this for the constitutional test that it is, and we’re going to be aggressively pushing back,” echoed Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.).
You came out of this emergency meeting and said you're going to be aggressively pushing back? You should have come out fighting. Every time a reporter sticks a microphone in your face, you have an opportunity to give Trump hell. Use every one of those opportunities.
I gave Chuck Schumer credit for a good response to the freeze, but this, from the Times story, is sad:
Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas ... said their party needed to do a better job with its digital outreach in response to Mr. Trump. She called for Democrats’ online strategy to become “down and dirty.”
Mr. Schumer responded that Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey was in charge of Senate Democrats’ social media and praised the job he was doing.
Last week, Mr. Booker delivered a PowerPoint presentation to fellow Democrats about how to deliver their message online. In the slides, which were obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Booker offered his colleagues guidance on how often to post on each platform. Instagram: once or twice a day. Facebook: once a day. LinkedIn: three to five times a week. X: two to five times a day. TikTok: one to four times a day.
On the one hand, many Democrats need to be reminded that social media exists and is an important tool for them to use. On the other hand, these precise post quotas aren't the point. The point is to get a genuine, gut-instinct message out there, one that connects to Americans' concerns.
Democrats didn't offer their side of the story in a compelling way during Joe Biden's four years in the White House. After the November election, they "kept their powder dry" and mostly chose not to denounce Trump's godawful appointees. That was exactly the wrong strategy. As soon as Trump announced that a vaccine conspiracy theorist was his pick for health and human services secretary, Democrats should have raised hell. As soon as a Putin puppet was chosen as director of national intelligence, they should have raised hell. When you say nothing at the moment a dangerous decision is made, you imply that it's acceptable, and that your later opposition is just politics. That's the wrong approach. Get mad -- right away.
Yesterday, the political mood in America began to change. Donald Trump's presidency is still extraordinarily dangerous, but he's starting to get pushback, and it no longer seems reasonable to argue that he's precisely in tune with the mood of the country, which just wants to do the two-fist Trump dance to "YMCA" and would like all his critics to shut up.
It's not just that a federal judge has blocked Trump's freeze on federal aid spending until Monday. It's the deep skepticism demonstrated by some in the media as it became clear that programs such as Head Start, Meals on Wheels, and suicide prevention programs for veterans were being frozen. The Trump surrogates in the clips below are arrogant, but they're on the defensive. It's a start.
There has also been pushback by Democrats -- more is needed, but this week already looks very different from last week, not to mention the two months following the election. In my update to yesterday's post, I showed you Chuck Schumer's response to the spending freeze. That was good, and so is Tim Kaine's response to Trump's offer of a buyout to all federal workers, by means of which the president and his allies hope to create a government free of everyone except right-wing zealots (I don't think the buyout is intended to make the government non-functional, although it's likely to have that effect if it succeeds):
Can any of this stop or slow Trump? That's not clear yet -- but until yesterday, Democrats and the mainstream media seemed cowed, and the conventional wisdom was that Trump critics were sad throwbacks who needed to understand that the times had passed them by. A cover story in New York magazine depicted young Trump fans as society's new trendsetters:
And this seemed to be the conventional wisdom about Trump and his opponents:
You might regard all this as trivial. But I think it contributed to Democrats' belief that the public didn't want them to attack Trump forcefully (or at all).
Now it feels as if some Democrats are willing to fight, and some journalists are willing to ask whether Trump's actions are beyond the pale. That has the potential to send a message to apolitical normies that Trump is controversial, just the way he was in his first term.
Or perhaps the people who needed to see opposition to Trump as thinkable were those Democrats and journalists. They appeared ready to let Trump roll them, but the outrageousness of his latest moves overcame their fears, and their preference for meekly going along. This Reuters/Ipsos poll suggests that the public really hasn't embraced second-term Trumpism:
There's a lot of work to do. But suddenly it's harder to sell Trumpism as a gregarious podcast-ready insult comic leading a merry band of bros and Mar-a-Lago plastic surgery cases in a hilarious war against humorless woke scolds. It's now clear that if Trump has his way, many ordinary people will be hurt. If that becomes the new conventional wisdom, we have a chance to limit the damage he does.
The White House budget office on Wednesday rescinded an order freezing federal grants....
In a memo dated Wednesday and distributed to federal agencies, Matthew J. Vaeth, acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, states that OMB memorandum M-25-13 “is rescinded.” That order, issued Monday, instructed federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligations or disbursement of all federal financial assistance.”
Is this the most radical thing a president of the United States has ever done?
The White House budget office is ordering a pause to all grants and loans disbursed by the federal government, according to an internal memo sent to agencies Monday....
The memo ... also calls for each agency to perform a “comprehensive analysis” to ensure its grant and loan programs are consistent with President Donald Trump’s executive orders, which aimed to ban federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and limit clean energy spending, among other measures.
Parts of the memo are written in untranslated Fox-speak:
... the consequences are potentially cataclysmic—for virtually all foreign aid (including the distribution of HIV drugs in poor countries); for medical and other scientific research in the United States; for tons of different pools of support for educational institutions; and for virtually every other entity that receives federal financial assistance. (The memo excludes funds paid directly to individuals, like Social Security or other benefits....)
The freeze purports to be temporary... But there is no guarantee that the spigot will be turned back on in two weeks; and in the interim, the withholding of so much money will almost certainly cause irreparable harm to at least some of the affected parties even if it’s fully restored at the end of the “pause.”
I think the Trumpers will resume funding relatively soon -- but on their terms. I disagree with Elizabeth Spiers, who writes:
They’re not trying to reform government; they’re trying to grind it to a halt.
I think what they're trying to do, with this and other initiatives (such as the effort to fire "disloyal" career civil servants), is make 2025 a Year Zero.
We have a government with laws, policies, and programs that were established over the years by conservatives, moderates, and liberals: Social Security and Medicare, but also right-wing gun and tax policies; subsidies for fossil fuels, but also subsidies for green energy. And so on. Previous presidents have lived with this hodgepodge and tried to change some aspects of it in their preferred direction. The Trump administration is trying to change all of it. Trump and the Project 2025 theorists who are really running the country want a 100% right-wing/Heritage Foundation government, with a Fox News enemies list.
This is blatantly illegal, as Vladeck explains: It violates the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which requires the president to make a request to Congress in order to rescind appropriated funds. There's also a Ronald Reagan-era Justice Department memo noting that the Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse and requires the president to see that laws, including laws that appropriate money, are "faithfully executed." By any reasonable reading of the Constitution and the law, Trump can't do this (although, of course, corrupt GOP partisans on the federal bench might rule that he can).
Many lawsuits will be filed. But Democrats should raise hell -- if not now, then once it's clear exactly what is being suspended. Politico notes:
... given the sweeping scale of the order, it seems unlikely these will all be glowingly liberal, woke-tastic DEI projects in coastal America. This order is going to affect communities the length and breadth of the country. Be careful what you wish for, Mr. President.
Surprisingly, Chuck Schumer is trying, on X and elsewhere:
I know that the message Democrats have largely settled on is "Hey, what about egg prices?" But when they choose not to talk about Trump's extremism in other areas, they strongly imply that the extremist acts are no big deal. This demoralizes Democratic voters and squanders an opportunity to send a message to people in the middle: that this is not normal, that it's bad for America, and that it's completely unlawful. So I'm glad Schumer is responding. More Democrats should.
In the last Trump administration, The Washington Post set out to enumerate all of his lies. In this administration, someone needs to enumerate all of his illegal acts. And just to send the message that someone in D.C. knows how bad things are, I'd like to see a Democratic member of Congress file articles of impeachment every month, or even every week, with a growing list of his violations of the law. Lists of those violations should be produced and turned into social media posts, TikTok videos, even physical billboards. Make the Trump 47 Presidential Crime List like the National Debt Clock: How many crimes now? What else has the bastard done?
The previous Trump presidency was full of aberrant (and abhorrent) acts, but this one is worse. Democrats need to make more noise, or risk making the crazier of the two Trump presidencies seem like the more acceptable one.
The president’s first week showed a stark contrast with his predecessor.
Joe Biden promised Americans a four-year break from thinking about the presidency every day. That hiatus ended at 12:01 p.m. Monday, when Donald J. Trump took the oath of office....
The former reality TV star followed his inaugural address in the Capitol rotunda with an off-the-cuff speech to his supporters, a 47-minute gaggle with reporters in the Oval Office and remarks at three formal galas. By week’s end, he had tweeted multiple policy announcements, weaved his way through a two-part prime-time interview with Sean Hannity and made speeches at recovery and disaster zones in Asheville, North Carolina, and Los Angeles.
Yes, Trump was eager to sign all those executive orders reversing Biden’s policies. But the bigger flex for Trump, 78, was to contrast his accessibility, aptitude and activity with his predecessor, who was so often shielded from public view by aides wary of showcasing the 82-year-old’s growing limitations....
Although Biden did take questions from reporters here and there, his more informal exchanges with the press were sporadic and rarely lasted more than a few minutes. More often than not, he was out of view.
How did we get here, with Trump running rampant and more popular than ever (though still not genuinely popular), and with Democrats seemingly as out of fashion as they appeared to be after Ronald Reagan's 49-state landslide in 1984, even though the election they just lost was close? Why do so many political observers believe that Democrats are in deep trouble? Why do so many Democrats seem to believe that?
Here's a parable.
Imagine you're Coca-Cola. After a year with record-breaking sales, you decide on an unusual course of action: You intend to stop advertising your products entirely for four years. No TV ads. No billboards. No online ads. You even take down the Coca-Cola logos that are part of diner signs.
During these four years, Pepsi advertises relentlessly. Pepsi reaches out to new media and finds inventive ways of getting attention. And not only that: Pepsi also promotes every negative story and bad rumor about Coke through all its messaging routes. Did they really find rat poison in a batch of Coke? Are Coke cans radioactive?
Coca-Cola is aware of all these negative stories, but it doesn't respond to them. Its executives conclude that responding to the stories will just draw attention to them. Coke says nothing. It doesn't even find a way to say that Coke is working hard to maintain high standards of quality control. The rumors spread and spread.
At the end of these four years, Coke sales have declined approximately 8%. That's not a lot -- but as a result, Pepsi is now outselling Coke by a small margin.
What conclusion do Coke executives draw?
"People hate Coke."
And that's the wrong conclusion. People don't hate Coke. Coke was the #1 carbonated drink, and now it's slightly less popular, after four years when the public heard almost nothing positive about Coke and a great deal that was negative.
This is where Democrats are now.
Democrats won the popular vote in 7 of the 8 presidential elections between 1992 and 2020. They were Coke -- unquestionably the more popular party, at least at the presidential level.
But the president they elected in 2020 struggled to speak publicly, and so Democrats decided that they'd have to go four years without a party leader who could talk. The vice president and Cabinet officials weren't asked to be the voices of the party. The party's congressional leaders weren't very good at public speaking either.
Democrats effectively went silent. They didn't respond to attacks. They never mastered podcasts or TikTok.
And still, largely because they belatedly turned the leadership of the party over to someone who could talk last summer, they came close to winning the 2024 election.
But Donald Trump seems hip and popular now. His poll numbers will probably go up after his standoff with Colombia over immigrant flights, which is widely seen as a victory for him.
Most Democrats are still largely silent. They want to continue the failed experiment of the past four years.
The party's policies aren't why there seems to have been a pro-Trump "vibe shift." The shift is happening because, over the past four years, Trump and the GOP marketed themselves and Democrats didn't. Trump and the GOP have attacked Democrats and Democrats have neither responded nor done any effective attacking of their own. For far too long, they behaved as if there was no point responding to attacks on inflation and immigration. To be fair, they did attack Trump as a threat to democracy. But democracy is an abstraction. The attacks weren't effective, and they didn't find new ones that worked better. (Tim Walz's "weird" was an attack that actually did work, but they abandoned it.)
Americans might not want the firehose of attention-seeking behavior they're getting from Trump now, but when things seemed to be going wrong they wanted at least some sense that the president and his party were aware of the discontent and were taking action. Too much noise might be exhausting after a while, but the public prefers it to silence.
That's a real tweet, and Ingrassia really does have the job of Justice Department liaison to the White House. Ingrassia's tweet goes on to say this about Tate:
He is the embodiment of the ancient ideal of excellence: to seek perfection of mind, body, and spirit – an ideal that is radically at odds with our grotesquely decadent society, which values security and mediocrity over human excellence among men.
It is for this reason that he and his brother have become public enemies number one and two in the eyes of the Matrix, the deep state, and the satanic elite that attempt to systematically program and oppress all men from womb-to-tomb – a form of communism that not even Karl Marx, in his wildest dreams, could have imagined.
Andrew Tate and his brother, Tristan, have been indicted in Romania on charges including rape and human trafficking, although some of the charges have been withdrawn. The Tates are also under investigation in Britain for sex crimes. Andrew Tate is a massively influential media personality who bears a great deal of responsibility for the rise of virulent misogyny among young men and boys worldwide.
It is necessary to invoke ancient tropes when discussing Donald Trump’s political achievement, because he has rewritten the rules of modernity, and the expectations of politics at the End of History. He has demonstrated in his many achievements that sheer personality – fueled by a relentless willpower – can overcome history’s deterministic bent, or fate, if powerful enough. But the Trump phenomenon goes beyond simple will-to-power: there is genius, born of deliberation and meticulous planning, to his grand strategy....
Donald Trump thus stands as the architect of a new cultural and political hegemony that, if successful, will offer a robust alternative to the deeply enervated liberal order of the twentieth century that has left Europe in shambles – embattled by Third World migrants, many of Islamic background, as well as a deeper loss of identity, born out of the rapacious secularism that has filled Christendom’s void. The Trump Order, by sharp contrast, presents itself as a form of renewal: one optimistically staked to progress, though not of the same ideology, steeped in the principles of liberal democracy that was the bulwark of the previous one.
On Twitter, Ingrassia has expressly linked Trump to Tate, writing:
Andrew Tate is a real dissident of authoritarianism. So too is Donald Trump.
By contrast, State-department approved aliens from third world countries who infiltrate our country, weaken our economy, and destroy our values and culture do not qualify as “dissidents.”
It’s no coincidence that America has become far more authoritarian ever since we began importing hordes of people from authoritarian countries.
I have no idea what that means. Republicans used to like taking in refugees from places like Cuba and the Soviet bloc, but I guess those days are over.
Ingrassia also has a Substack, where he can be seen defending Hitler fan Nick Fuentes:
Ingrassia's job is not one that requires Senate approval, and this isn't the first time Trump has parked someone in the job who doesn't belong there. From 2020:
The official serving as President Donald Trump’s eyes and ears at the Justice Department has been banned from the building after trying to pressure staffers to give up sensitive information about election fraud and other matters she could relay to the White House, three people familiar with the matter tell The Associated Press.
Heidi Stirrup, an ally of top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, was quietly installed at the Justice Department as a White House liaison a few months ago. She was told within the last two weeks to vacate the building after top Justice officials learned of her efforts to collect insider information about ongoing cases and the department’s work on election fraud, the people said.
Stirrup is accused of approaching staffers in the department demanding they give her information about investigations, including election fraud matters, the people said.
I suppose it's good that three Republicans (Mitch McConnell in addition to Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins) joined every Democrat (yes, including John Fetterman) in voting against Pete Hegseth's nomination to be secretary of defense. But Hegseth won the vote, 51-50, with J.D. Vance breaking the tie. I assume McConnell would have voted yes if Hegseth didn't have the votes otherwise. Or maybe Collins would have. She doesn't want a primary challenge in 2026.
There were many reasons to reject Hegseth -- his lack of qualifications, his drinking, the fact that he wants America to be a Christian nationalist theocracy. And then there's the way he treated women. We learned this week that his payout to a woman who accused him of sexual assault was $50,000. We learned about an affidavit from Danielle Hegseth, his former sister-in-law:
Danielle describes in the affidavit allegations of volatile and threatening conduct by Hegseth that made his second wife, Samantha Hegseth, fear for her safety. Among the allegations are that Samantha hid in a closet once from Hegseth, that she developed escape plans for use “if she felt she needed to get away from Hegseth” that would be activated with a code word and that she did once put the escape plans into action....
In the affidavit, Danielle Hegseth also says that one time, “sometime in 2015-2016,” Samantha did text her one of the words and activated the escape plan....
Danielle also alleges that she personally heard him make multiple misogynistic comments.
According to the affidavit, she heard Hegseth “say that women should not have the right to vote and that they should not work.”
She also recounts a night in 2013 in which Hegseth “got very drunk” at a bar.... Leaving the bar with Hegseth, she says, he “repeatedly shouted ‘No means yes!’”
This was not a problem for 50 U.S. senators.
And not a problem for voters in New York City, apparently: the sexual misconduct allegations against former governor Andrew Cuomo.
A new January 2025 poll released by national opinion research firm Bold Decision ... finds ... that if the election were held today likely voters would overwhelmingly choose former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo if he were to enter the race....
When presented the eight currently declared candidates, plus Cuomo, 33% select the former governor as their first choice candidate. On first ballot, Cuomo stands several rungs ahead of other candidates including incumbent Mayor Eric Adams (10%)....
Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed 13 women who worked for the state over the course of an eight-year period, the Department of Justice announced....
Cuomo and his staff engaged in “a pattern or practice of discrimination against female employees based on sex” and found they retaliated against the women, Justice Department officials found.
The justice department found Cuomo “repeatedly subjected” women in his office to non-consensual sexual contact, ogling and gender-based nicknames. Top Cuomo staff “were aware of the conduct and retaliated against four of the women he harassed,” the DOJ concluded.
That was President Biden's Justice Department reporting early last year, nearly three years after reports of Cuomo's behavior led to his resignation.
There was a moment in our political and cultural life when stories like this mattered. Then the backlash hit. It's starting to seem as if #MeToo was a fluke.
It began in the fall of 2017 with allegations against Harvey Weinstein. I think some of the feminist, progressive, and liberal anger against Weinstein was partly anger that had originally been directed at Donald Trump, who'd clearly gotten away with sexual misconduct of his own. That moment wasn't like now -- prominent people on our side weren't afraid to speak out. However, I think the Weinstein story gained traction for other reasons.
The right-wing media was gunning for Weinstein because he was a prominent Democratic donor and he was from Hollywood, which the right despises. Fox, Breitbart, and other right-wing media outlets joined the pile-on. In addition, Weinstein was extraordinarily ugly and grotesque -- he looked like a fairytale ogre. He was Jewish, which made him seem foreign to much of Middle America. And his importance in Hollywood was waning -- his Weinstein Coimpany was noticeably less successful by the mid-2010s than his earlier studio, Miramax, had been in previous decades -- so he didn't have the clout to stop the story.
We got him. And we got a few other people. Some of the men brought down by the #MeToo movement were Democratic politicians like an earlier New York governor, Eliot Spitzer. Senator Al Franken was pressured to resign his seat. Cultural heroes the right didn't much care for -- Garrison Keillor, Woody Allen -- were also targeted. The right was happy to let this happen as long as it seemed as if liberal culture was eating its own.
But all this lasted only a few years. The backlash was inevitable, because much of America doesn't really believe that white male entertainers like Louis C.K., whose fans base includes non-feminist and anti-feminist bros, could possibly have done anything terrible, especially when you know what liars those women are. And the pendulum was tugged hard in the other direction by online figures like Andrew Tate, who became famous by seeming treating reports of #MeToo misconduct as an instruction manual.
Trump is president, Hegseth is secretary of defense, and Cuomo will probably soon be the mayor a supposedly progressive city that has never had a female mayor. In retrospect, it's amazing that this culture held any sexual predator to account for even that brief window of time after the Weinstein allegations broke.
Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would allow President Trump to serve a third term in the White House....
Ogles proposed an amendment Thursday that says, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than three times, nor be elected to any additional term after being elected to two consecutive terms, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”
(This would allow a president to run for a third term after winning two non-consecutive terms, but not allow a president to run for a third term who won two consecutive terms, a provision clearly added in order to prevent Barack Obama from taking advantage of it.)
Molly Jong-Fast is alarmed:
I'm not alarmed. I think Democrats should troll Ogles and the GOP right back, by demanding a floor vote on the bill.
It would need a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress and be ratified by 38 states to be added to the Constitution.
That's 290 votes in the House. There are 218 Republicans in the House right now. So it will fail miserably. And if it somehow went to the Senate, it would need 67 votes. There are only 53 Republicans in the Senate. Not even a defection by John Fetterman could put this over the top.
And if it were somehow to pass both houses of Congress, the number of states whose legislatures would reject it is much greater than 12. Democrats control the legislatures of 18 states: five of the six New England states (not New Hampshire), as well as New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, Illinois, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, the three West Coast states, and Hawaii.
The Ogles bill was referred to the House Judiciary Committee. I propose that Democrats start planning now to circulate a discharge petition to force a floor vote:
After a bill has been introduced and referred to a standing committee for 30 days, a member of the House can file a motion to have the bill discharged, or released, from consideration by the committee. In order to do this, a majority of the House (218 voting members, not delegates) must sign the petition. Once a discharge petition reaches 218 members, after several legislative days, the House considers the motion to discharge the legislation and takes a vote after 20 minutes of debate. If the vote passes (by all those who signed the petition in the first place), then the House will take up the measure.
Democrats should have some discipline: all 215 of them should sign the petition. Maybe Ogles and two other Trump-crazed Republicans (Greene? Boebert?) will sign it too.
It's more likely that they won't, and then Democrats can troll them: Hey, we thought you Republicans loved Trump! This is a bill making it possible for him to run for a third term! Why don't you want to bring it to the floor?
They won't because they don't want it to fail -- and it will fail unless 72 Democrats vote for it. (To state the obvious, Democrats should support the discharge petition but oppose the bill.)
It's a small thing, and it might not have any impact, but why not try it? At least try to have some fun reminding Republicans that the rest of America doesn't love their orange god as much as they do, and therefore no one outside their party wants Trump to be eligible to run again.
It’s still uncertain precisely how long the duration will be, but we’re getting fast emerging information that there appears to be an indefinite halt on the various meetings, review panels and so forth that keep the pipeline of medical research funding going in the U.S. This article in Science gives a broad overview. Put simply this just turns off the spigot of funding for a huge amount of cancer research as well as research across various other health fields and diseases.... This comes after a similar halt to the weekly MMWR report which CDC sends to hospitals and doctors every week with information on flu, COVID and other infectious diseases.
I think we’re at the point in this where you can’t yet categorically say that this is being done for RFK Jr.-adjacent anti-research nuttery, but basically all signs point in that direction.
Yes, it seems as if they're clearing the way for Robert Kennedy Jr. at the Department of Health and Human Services. But the right has had its eye on federal science agencies for a while. Mandate for Change -- the Project 2025 manifesto -- has some thoughts about all this:
When our Founders wrote in the Constitution that the federal government would “promote the general Welfare,” they could not have fathomed a massive bureaucracy that would someday spend $3 trillion in a single year.... Approximately half of that colossal sum was spent by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) alone—the belly of the massive behemoth that is the modern administrative state.
HHS is home to Medicare and Medicaid, the principal drivers of our $31 trillion national debt. When Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law these programs, they were set on autopilot with no plan for how to pay for them. The first year that Medicare spending was visible on the books was 1967. From that point on through 2020—according to the American Main Street Initiative’s analysis of official federal tallies—Medicare and Medicaid combined cost $17.8 trillion, while our combined federal deficits over that same span were $17.9 trillion. In essence, our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem.
But the folks at Project 2025 don't just hate Medicare and Medicaid. There's more:
HHS is also home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the duo most responsible—along with President Joe Biden—for the irrational, destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed upon an ostensibly free people during the COVID-19 pandemic.... Under COVID, as former director of HHS’s Office of Civil Rights Roger Severino writes in Chapter 14, the CDC exposed itself as “perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government.”
This isn't Kennedy's "all vaccines are bad" argument. It's the "but mah freedum!" argument advanced by the right as soon as it became clear that the COVID pandemic would interfere with right-wing billionaires' God-given right to make profits at all times.
There's more:
Nor is the CDC the only villain in this play. Severino writes of the National Institutes of Health, “Despite its popular image as a benign science agency, NIH was responsible for paying for research in aborted baby body parts, human animal chimera experiments”—in which the genes of humans and animals are mixed, “and gain-of-function viral research that may have been responsible for COVID-19.”
Let me explain "baby body parts." Back in 2015, a right-wing group called the Center for Medical Progress released a surreptitiously shot video in which a Planned Parenthood doctor discussed the sale of fetal tissue -- a completely legal practice as long as the tissue was used for research and the money exchanged covered only costs, such as the cost of transporting the material. I wrote about this at the time. The right tried to make it a massive scandal, and conservative commentators made certain to use the phrase "baby body parts" -- those exact words, in that order -- whenever possible.
We're in the United States of America & THIS is what we're protecting? An abortion business that harvests baby body parts? #JayLive#ProLife
The message got through to Robert Lewis Dear, who killed three people in an attack on a Colorado Planned Parenthood office in November 2015, although he didn't get the phrase exactly right:
In one statement, made after the suspect was taken in for questioning, Dear said "no more baby parts" in reference to Planned Parenthood, two law enforcement sources with knowledge of the case told NBC News.
Clearly the right still thinks "baby body parts" is a good propaganda phrase.
As for "human animal chimera experiments," those with long memories might recall that in his 2006 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush vowed to pursue a ban on human/animal hybrids. Republicans have been proposing legislation to ban such hybrids for years. This is a big deal for them.
The Project 2025 report goes on to warn about "The incestuous relationship between the NIH, CDC, and vaccine makers" (Dr. Anthony Fauci is prominently mentioned), and, of course, about time-tested culture-war subjects:
HHS also pushes abortion as a form of “health care” ... Severino writes that the “FDA should...reverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs because the politicized approval process was illegal from the start.” ... Severino writes that the HHS “Secretary should pursue a robust agenda to protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology.” The next secretary should also reverse the Biden Administration’s focus on “‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage,” replacing such policies with those encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.
So this is an agenda that predates not only Donald Trump's unholy alliance with Robert Kennedy, but also Trump entry into politics. It's the same agenda the right has had since at least the Reagan era. Let's see how far the Trump administration pursues it.
This story from Punchbowl News makes me feel as if a moment is being squandered:
Now that former President Joe Biden is gone, Democrats are in desperate search of a winning message — and a leader.
And nowhere is that dilemma more evident than the internal Democratic debate over immigration....
During a weekly meeting with House Democratic chiefs of staff on Tuesday, an aide for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries played a recent clip of the New York Democrat being asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether he’d support funding Trump’s mass deportation plans.
Jeffries responded by saying Democrats want to focus on bringing down the cost of living and hit Republicans for their lack of an agenda on that issue....
Once again, Democratic leaders seem to be saying that Trump won on economic issues, so they should never talk about anything but economic issues, no matter what's going on in the country, because they think "The economy is the #1 issue" means "Voters literally have no interest in any other issue." In fact, this makes it look as if Democrats just want to change the subject whenever possible, which, for some reason, they think is a good look for them. (Jeffries did go on to say that Trump's immigration policy should "focus on the removal of violent felons.”)
It gets worse:
There was also some anxiety over an upcoming weekly call, led by Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.), with district directors. Some aides were surprised that this week’s agenda is about Black History Month — not immigration or other priorities — during the first week of the Trump administration.
Black History Month? When the country is on fire?
Look, it's good for Democrats to talk about what's happening to people of color in America. But too often they retreat to this middle-school-civics-class rehash of black history. We saw this a lot in the Biden years: Biden crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge! Biden at the Ebenezer Baptist Church! Biden commemorating the 1964 Civil Rights Act at the LBJ Library! It's all fine, but it feels like a retreat to the past, not an engagement with the present.
You can say that this is because the party is run by very old people, but Congressman Neguse, the House assistant Democratic leader, is 40 years old. The party seems to be elevating young people who act like old people.
House Democratic leaders are bashing President Trump and his allies in the Capitol for supporting blanket clemency for those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021....
“House Republicans are celebrating pardons issued to a bloodthirsty mob that violently assaulted police officers on January 6, 2021. What happened to backing the Blue?” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) posted Tuesday on Threads.
“Far right extremists have become the party of lawlessness and disorder,” he continued. “Don’t ever lecture America again.”
Attorneys general from 22 states sued Tuesday to block President Donald Trump’s move to end a century-old immigration practice known as birthright citizenship guaranteeing that U.S.-born children are citizens regardless of their parents’ status.
I really thought January 20 would end with news channels auto-repeating video of immigration raids. The raids haven't happened -- they would have been very popular, unfortunately -- but now the news is an assault on birthright citizenship, which is the reasons many Americans, undoubtedly including some Trump voters, are citizens now. I'll remind you again that in the latest Wall Street Journalpoll, 64% of respondents opposed ending birthright citizenship and only 31% approved.
Trump's executive order doesn't end birthright citizenship for children of all immigrants, but for once the GOP could be hurt by the fact that that nuance isn't clear to most Americans. And those who look more closely might be shocked by this:
President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship declares that babies born to many temporary residents of the United States — not just those in the country illegally....
If the courts do not block the order, babies born to women living legally, but temporarily, in the United States — such as people studying on a student visa or workers hired by high-tech companies — will not automatically be recognized by the federal government as U.S. citizens if the father is also not a permanent resident.
Aides to Mr. Trump had told reporters on Monday morning that the order would apply to “children of illegal aliens born in the United States.” In fact, the language in the order Mr. Trump signed, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” goes much further.
“It’s a shocking attack on people in this country who are here lawfully, played by the rules and are benefiting the country,” said David Leopold, the chair of the immigration practice at the law firm UB Greensfelder.
Democrats have been afraid to do 2017-style "resistance," but I believe most of the public would welcome denunciations of these policies. Perhaps, as a New York Times story asserts, "It is unclear how much is left in Washington to restrain" Trump. But Democrats could make a lot of noise and help drive Trump's poll numbers down. That would sting. Maybe he'd even change course on a couple of issues. And maybe the Leonard Leo courts would recognize that the public doesn't want the federal judiciary to be a rubber stamp for Trump.
So Democrats should prioritize pounding the table right now. That's the urgent need. I'm pretty sure the party's district directors can figure out how to commemorate Black History Month without a lot of guidance from Washington.
I've seen many harrumphy responses to President Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship, like this one from Vox's Zack Beauchamp:
Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional immigration order
The 14th Amendment of the US Constitution makes it achingly clear: Anyone who is born in the United States is a citizen....
The precise wording of the amendment — “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” — is fairly straightforward. Trump’s argument is that undocumented migrants and immigrants with temporary visas are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, but the case is legally absurd.
The only people inside the US nowadays who are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the country are diplomats, as they enjoy diplomatic immunity from American law. Undocumented and temporary migrants, who can be arrested by American police and deported by American courts, are very much “subject” to American jurisdiction — which means their children would clearly be American citizens.
This is not merely my interpretation of the law, but also red-letter Supreme Court precedent. In the 1898 case US v. Wong Kim Ark, the Court ruled definitively that the 14th Amendment applies even to the children of migrants who are ineligible to be naturalized. So Trump isn’t just offering an implausible interpretation of the amendment’s text; he is ordering federal officials to ignore the law as defined by the Supreme Court and listen to him instead.
But Imani Gandy is absolutely right:
Modern Republicans, very much including the Federalist Society Six on the Supreme Court, subject anything that advances the interests of the Republican Party to two tests:
1. Can we do this without setting off a backlash that negates the gains for our side?
2. Will this harm anyone we care about?
Test #1 is surprisingly elastic -- even the 2022 Dobbs decision seemed like a reasonable risk to the FedSoc Six, and although it appeared at the time as if they'd miscalculated, their party now controls the entire federal government, so I guess they got away with it. As for test #2, the conservative movement clearly believes many extraordinarily dangerous things -- limitless AR-15s, vaccine denialism -- will harm only people in the lower orders, and not anyone they know or anyone who attends their children's or grandchildren's schools. So that's not much of a check on their behavior either.
No one they care about will be harmed if they uphold the executive order, which reads in part:
It is the policy of the United States that no department or agency of the United States government shall issue documents recognizing United States citizenship, or accept documents issued by State, local, or other governments or authorities purporting to recognize United States citizenship, to persons: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.
Now all the FedSoc lower-court judges and Supreme Court justices need is a professional-sounding argument from anyone anywhere in the right-wing legal establishment that calls this seemingly settled law into question. And here it is -- a 2018 blog post at the Heritage Foundation site ("Originally published by Fox News in 2011") titled "Birthright Citizenship: A Fundamental Misunderstanding of the 14th Amendment."
Critics erroneously believe that anyone present in the United States has “subjected” himself “to the jurisdiction” of the United States, which would extend citizenship to the children of tourists, diplomats, and illegal aliens alike.
But that is not what that qualifying phrase means. Its original meaning refers to the political allegiance of an individual and the jurisdiction that a foreign government has over that individual.
The fact that a tourist or illegal alien is subject to our laws and our courts if they violate our laws does not place them within the political “jurisdiction” of the United States as that phrase was defined by the framers of the 14th Amendment.
This amendment’s language was derived from the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which provided that “[a]ll persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power” would be considered citizens.
Sen. Lyman Trumbull, a key figure in the adoption of the 14th Amendment, said that “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. included not owing allegiance to any other country.
As John Eastman, former dean of the Chapman School of Law, has said, many do not seem to understand “the distinction between partial, territorial jurisdiction, which subjects all who are present within the territory of a sovereign to the jurisdiction of that sovereign’s laws, and complete political jurisdiction, which requires allegiance to the sovereign as well.”
(That would be the same John Eastman who was indicted in Georgia and Arizona for his help in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.)
By 2000, Von Spakovsky had made a name for himself in a small network of conservative organizations dedicated to voter fraud and elections security. In a lengthy blogpost on the Federalist Society’s website in February 2000, he mused about mail-in voting, permanent absentee voting and the spectre of non-US citizens registering to vote. Especially concerning, wrote Von Spakovsky, were voting reforms that streamlined the voter registration process – like the National Voter Registration Act, which made it easier for voters to register while applying for a driver’s license.
“All of these ‘reforms’ have increased the opportunity for election fraud,” he wrote.
Voter Integrity Project, a Virginia-based organization that Von Spakovsky advised, advocated purging voter rolls, even awarding the company responsible for erroneously scrubbing thousands of disproportionately minority voters from Florida’s rolls before the 2000 election, an honor for “innovation”.
Later, when George W Bush was elected president, Von Spakovsky – at that point a prominent blogger and activist focused on the topic of voter fraud – was hired to the voting section of the civil rights division of the Department of Justice; in 2002, he was promoted to oversee the section....
In 2005, Von Spakovsky was rewarded for his performance in the Department of Justice – with an interim appointment, by Bush, to the Federal Elections Commission, where he worked for two years.
But the Senate never confirmed his appointment. Six former justice department staff made the unprecedented decision to pen a letter to the committee on rules and administration objecting to his full appointment.
During his tenure in the voting section, they alleged, Von Spakovsky had “played a major role in the implementation of practices which injected partisan political factors into decision-making on enforcement matters and into the hiring process”.
Von Spakovsky and Eastman are partisan hacks, which means their arguments, or arguments similar to theirs, will be treated as the work of disinterested scholars who seek nothing but pure Truth.
So I'm calling it now: This case will reach the Supreme Court and the Court will rule in Trump's favor. Established law? Roe was established law. Chevron deference was established law. Sections 4(b) and 5 of the Voting Rights Act were established law. Leonard Leo's minions don't care.
So we woke up to this, a story the incoming Trump administration gave as an "exclusive" to Bari Weiss's Free Press:
The White House strikes out at gender ideology and pronouns. Also: ends housing of biological men in women’s prisons; self-ID on passports; and more.
... an expansive executive order [Trump] will sign tomorrow afternoon [is] called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
Trans people will be to this administration what Jews were to the Nazis. This is horrifying, and I hope the analogy goes only so far. But whatever else Trump and his allies do, their brutality toward trans people and the immigrants they intend to round up will be horrifying.
*****
And yet, on economic issues, the second Trump presidency might seem very familiar. Billionaires are winning. Steve Bannon is losing:
He has about an hour and a half left.
Bannon lost. There'll be plenty of H1-B visas. As for the rest, here's a story from Politico Europe that portrays all of the globalists MAGA voters hate as thrilled to have Trump in office again:
The Davos Man is back
... and he’s running America.
DAVOS, Switzerland — Long maligned as out-of-touch plutocrats, thousands of World Economic Forum regulars are descending on the exclusive Swiss ski resort of Davos this week with a spring in their step, electrified by Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 return to the White House.
They’ll hear from the man himself Thursday, with Trump expected to address the forum via video just days after he’s inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States. WEF officials say they expect a “broad footprint” from the new administration to jet in later in the week — tech billionaire and Trump buddy Elon Musk may even drop by.
Meanwhile in Washington, after mounting a historic political comeback in part by railing against globalist elites, Trump is packing his Cabinet and coveted administration advisory slots with deep-pocketed figures from the finance, tech and crypto worlds. Among them: Cantor Fitzgerald boss and Davos regular Howard Lutnick (Trump’s pick for Commerce Secretary); billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who has been advising Trump during the interregnum at Mar-a-Lago; and crypto backer Paul Atkins as Securities and Exchange Commission boss.
It gives an early taste of the close ties between business and government that look set to define the second Trump presidency.
And it’s a signal: The Davos Man has come in from the cold.
This dovetails nicely with an exchange Michelle Goldberg and Ross Douthat had in a New York Times roundtable published yesterday:
Douthat: You should never underestimate the Republican capacity to just do “deregulation and tax cuts” in response to any political eventuality.... Musk seems to have drunk deep from the elixirs of Paul Ryanism on budgetary matters, congressional Republicans are still congressional Republicans, and so there will be ... deregulation and tax cuts, or the extension of the last round of Trump tax cuts, at the very least. (Whether Musk can magically make deep spending cuts happen as well — there one should be skeptical.) ...
Goldberg: I agree with Ross that deregulation and tax cuts will likely be the central accomplishment, if you want to call it that, of the new administration. It’s fascinating to me that, after all the talk about Trump dethroning Paul Ryanism, his movement is now full of people dreaming about even more aggressive forms of economic austerity.
And maybe Trump's voters won't care if they're still hurting economically after four more years of Trump, as long as they get to watch their non-elite enemies suffer.
*****
There might not be much bread, but there'll be plenty of circuses. Trump had a rally at the Capital Arena in D.C. yesterday, and he's planning to go back for another rally tonight:
Mr. Trump is planning to return to Capital One Arena on Monday, after he becomes president, and his aides are considering whether to have him sign some of the executive orders from a desk placed onstage.
Maybe he'll hold a rally there every night. It'll be like a Vegas residency.
Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis is angry about a New York Times story that describes some of the ways Trump intends to assert himself:
But the story should serve as a warning to Democrats about the risks inherent in their strategy of "say nothing and hope Trump destroys himself":
Interviews with more than a dozen people who have recently spoken with Mr. Trump describe a president-elect who views his power much differently than he did on the eve of his first inauguration in 2017. Back then he was on the defensive; the resistance to his presidency was fierce after his shock win and he was more deferential to Washington veterans, heeding their advice on whom to pick and what to prioritize. Now, he smells weakness all around — on Capitol Hill, in the C-suite and in the news media.
He's not even worried about Democrats.
The way Mr. Trump sees it, his biggest concern as he heads into a second term is not the Democrats. He is far more worried about his own party. So tight are the G.O.P.’s congressional majorities that it would take only a handful of disobedient Republicans to kill his chances of fulfilling his major campaign promises.
But congressional Republicans won't be disobedient. Trump is wrong about that. He's absolutely right about the weakness and fearfulness of Democrats and the media, and while he's stupid in many ways, this is the one kind of intelligence he has in abundance: an instinct for taking advantage of other people's weakness and fecklessness.
This is not a call for Democrats to be "angry about everything," although that actually worked eight years ago. It's a call for Democrats to express open, visceral outrage at, say, a Cabinet nominee who thinks polio vaccines are bad. Stop looking over your shoulders and asking yourselves whether rural white voters or podcast bros will be angry at you if you say polio vaccines are good! "Polio is bad" is not a controversial opinion!
I like this idea from Jason Linkins of The New Republic:
... liberals need to get into the business of identifying the problems that real Americans face ... and more forcefully blame Trump for those problems’ continued existence. They need to raise a hue and cry over everything under the sun that’s broken, dysfunctional, or trending in the wrong direction; pile line items on Trump’s to-do list, wake him up early and keep him up late. Every day, get in front of cable news cameras and reporters’ notepads with a new problem for Trump to solve and fresh complaints about the work not done.
... Democrats should already be planning to hang all the foreseeable albatrosses around his neck, and gaming out how they’ll swiftly nail Trump to the wall for the crises that catch him by surprise.
And when Trump gets plutocratic, call him "Donald J. Romney" or "Mitt Trump." That'll piss him off. Maybe lowering his poll numbers a bit could save a few trans people and immigrants from the brutality Trump has in store for them.
