SUPPORT FOR ANDREW TATE IS REPUBLICAN NICHE POLITICS

It's hard to overstate the loathsomeness of Andrew Tate and his brother, Tristan, who just flew to Florida from Romania, where they're accused of human trafficking and money laundering. Michelle Goldberg writes:

The Tate brothers, British-American dual citizens, have been accused of luring women to Romania and then forcing them to work as pornographic webcam performers. They are also being investigated for rape and human trafficking in Britain and were to be extradited there when the Romanian cases concluded.

Though they maintain their innocence, Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist and the more famous of the two, has regularly boasted about abusing and pimping women. His method, he’s often said, was to seduce women and then pressure them into the sex trade. He offered to teach his technique to other men in online courses where students could earn “pimping hoes degrees.” Women who live in his compound, he said in one video, aren’t allowed to go out without him. Some are tattooed “owned by Tate.” He left a voice note for a British woman who accused him of rape saying, “The more you didn’t like it, the more I enjoyed it.”

Goldberg doesn't mention the fact that Andrew Tate is probably the most admired person in the world among young males between the ages of 12 and 30. She does cite Tate's admiration for Donald Trump. If young men around the world really are becoming more politically right-wing, the brutal misogyny of Tate and his imitators is one of the main reasons.

When I learned that the Tates were on their way to America, I assumed they'd be warmly welcomed by the Republican Party as a whole. But there's been a mixed reaction:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Andrew Tate is not welcome in the state, shortly before the Internet personality and his brother touched down in Fort Lauderdale Thursday....

DeSantis said his government had "no involvement" in the Tates' travel to the U.S. and that decisions to "rebuff" their entry were under the federal government's discretion.

"But the reality is, is no, Florida is not a place where you're welcome with that type of conduct," DeSantis said at a press conference.

One Republican group invited the Tate brothers to speak, while other Republicans denounced him:

The Tampa Bay Young Republicans tweeted an invitation to Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan to come speak to their group, drawing swift criticism....

“You’ve lost your way boys,” was podcaster Megyn Kelly’s take....

Rachel Streve, the former chair of the Houston Young Republicans, tweeted that she understood the draw because “controversy’s a cheap thrill,” but this was “rolling out the red carpet for a pair of self-styled pimps and predators,” making her ponder “what broke in your heads to greenlight this.” ...

The TBYR tweet was denounced by Florida Young Republicans Chair Brandon Ludwig....

The Florida YRs followed up with a tweet stating “We rebuke and condemn” the TBYR invite for the Tate brothers “in the strongest possible terms,” adding that TBYR “has a long history of controversy and we believe this most recent action is worthy of its charter being revoked.”

Former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis tweeted:

No. Their entire brand is repugnant and should not be welcomed.

Free speech absolutism isn’t mutually exclusive with discernment!

— Jenna Ellis 🐊 (@realJennaEllis) February 28, 2025

Does this mean that the GOP is fully distancing itself from the Tates? Of course not. It means that the Tates are now a niche recruiting tool.

Over the years, I've told you how Republicans practice niche politics. Extreme, irrational, dangerous ideas are allowed to flourish on the right. "Mainstream" Republicans might reject these ideas, but they show up in communications channels that abut or overlap with "mainstream" GOP communications channels. The really extreme stuff leads gullible people to the GOP, while mainstream Republicans can reassure more sophisticated voters that the party isn't really like that. It's win-win for Republicans.

Remember when some Republicans couldn't stop talking about their certainty that Barack Obama had a fake birth certificate and was actually born in Kenya? That was birtherism. Many Republicans, including Donald Trump, eagerly adopted it in 2011 and 2012. Other Republicans, including 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, rejected it. And then there were GOP responses that could be sorted into other categories, as Adam Serwer noted at the time:

Ironic Post-birtherism: Making humorous or ironic references to the idea that the president was not born in the United States as an attempt to signal solidarity with or otherwise placate those who genuinely believe the president was not born in the United States. Examples: Tim Pawlenty, Rep. Raul Labrador.

Pseudo-birtherism: An umbrella term that encompasses all the various modes of belief that involve embracing fictional elements of the president's background, from the belief that he is a secret Muslim to the idea that he was raised in Kenya. Includes highbrow forms of birtherism like the "Kenyan anti-colonialism" thesis and theories that his name was legally changed to "Barry Soetero," as well as the idea that Obama's "real father" was one of the handful of random black celebrities you can name off the top of your head. Examples: Newt Gingrich, Andrew C. McCarthy.

This allowed voters to pick any response to birtherism that seemed correct to them, in the belief that that response represented the real Republican Party. Conspiracy-minded voters could embrace undiluted birtherism. Romney Republicans could tell themselves that the party rejected crackpottery. And people in the middle could tell themselves that Obama might not be lying about his place of birth, but he sure acts like a left-winger from the less developed world, doesn't he? Please note that all of the responses led to support for the Republican Party.

Trump's 2020 election lie worked the same way. Some people believed crazy theories about fake ballots made from Chinese bamboo and electronic vote rigging by means of satellites directed from the U.S. embassy in Rome (or the Vatican). Others said that the baroque conspiracy theories were a bit much, but the Deep State sure did suppress that Hunter Biden story in 2020, wouldn't you say?

The GOP welcomes QAnon fans while "responsible" Republicans distance themselves from QAnon. It welcomes Alex Jones fans while most Republicans distance themselves from Jones. It welcomes overt white supremacists while some in the party -- although fewer and fewer in the age of Trump -- decry them.

Inevitably, there's extremism creep. When COVID vaccines were first approved, then-president Trump boasted about them, and every governor in America, Republican as well as Democrat, embraced them -- yes, even Ron DeSantis. But the party became increasingly anti-vaccine, the way it became increasingly birtherist and conspiratorial about the 2020 election.

That's probably what will happen in the case of the Tates -- they'll continue to be denounced by some Republicans, while others embrace them. Maybe Trump will dine with them at Mar-a-Lago or invite them to the Oval Office, or maybe they'll just be seen hunting with Don Junior and hanging out with Elon Musk (who's a fan). Tate-averse Republicans will feel represented by the Tate denouncers in the party, while Tate's fans will conclude that the GOP is the Party of Tate. After a while, unless there's a serious backlash, Tateism will become mainstream in the GOP. But "mainstream" Republicans won't leave in disgust, because the embrace of Tate will seem to them like a phenomenon happening only in the fever swamps. They'll tell themselves that the party isn't really like that. It will be a comforting lie.

MEASLES IS SPREADING AMONG UNASSIMILATED FOREIGN LANGUAGE SPEAKERS -- J.D. VANCE, YOUR THOUGHTS?

At The Bulwark, Will Saletan writes about the ethnic bigotry of J.D. Vance, which Vance portrays as a concern about assimilation:

ON TUESDAY, JD VANCE rebuked Americans of Ukrainian ancestry who oppose his betrayal of Ukraine. The rebuke is instructive. It shows us how Vance, Donald Trump, and many of their followers think about immigration and foreign policy. They’re hostile not just to illegal immigration but also to legal immigration from certain countries. And they’re willing to target ethnic minorities in the United States by raising insinuations of dual loyalty.

Saletan is responding to this Vance tweet:

Here’s what Vance tweeted on Tuesday:

Saletan goes on to write:

YOU MIGHT INFER from Vance’s tweet that he has a particular beef with uppity Ukrainian Americans. But his problem with immigrants is much broader. It’s part of a long-term pattern of denigrating ethnicities and ancestries.

Saletan cites not only Vance's racist lies about Haitians in American eating pets and complaints that other (presumably brown-skinned) immigrants don't speak English, but also the following:

● In 2021, Vance claimed that waves of “Italian, Irish, and German immigration” around the turn of the twentieth century led to “ethnic enclaves” and “higher crime rates” in America. To fix that, he boasted, “One of the cool things that we did in the 1920s is we just sort of slowed down immigration a little bit.”...

● In August 2024, Vance defended his 2021 remarks about Italian, Irish, and German immigrants. “When you have these massive ethnic enclaves forming in our country, it can sometimes lead to higher crime rates,” he repeated. “What we want is an American immigration policy that promotes assimilation.” ...

● Later in October, while discussing Muslims on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Vance warned about a “large influx of immigrants who don’t necessarily assimilate into Western values but try to create, I think, a religious tyranny at the local level.” He added: “If you think that won’t happen at a national level, you’re crazy.”

So you'd think Vance would be horrified by the measles outbreak in Texas.

The Mennonite population being affected by a measles outbreak in West Texas is part of a larger, loosely affiliated group of churches worldwide with varied beliefs and leadership structures — and with sometimes strained or distant relations with health officials and other public authorities....

Some Mennonites have largely assimilated into mainstream culture and dress.... Other Mennonites maintain traditions similar to the Amish, with tight-knit, separatist communities marked by such things as limited technology, nonviolence, male leadership and traditional dress, including women’s head coverings.

Women's head coverings usually make right-wingers see red, but apparently not in this case.

While it’s not immediately clear which Mennonite community has been affected, the Gaines County area includes a community with a distinctive history....

Old Colony Mennonites migrated first to the Russian Empire, then to Canada, then to Mexico, fleeing government pressures to assimilate.... As economic conditions deteriorated in Mexico, some moved to such areas as Gaines County and other communities in Texas and nearby states in the 1980s and 1990s. All along, they have preserved their Low German dialect and other cultural distinctions.

They still speak a foreign language! In America! Isn't "Speak English or die" the usual right-wing response to communities like this?

The Hill quotes a spokesperson for the state health department:

“Most of the cases are in a close-knit, under vaccinated Mennonite community in Gaines County. The important nuance here is that it is their lifestyle and not the church that is the reason for many people being unvaccinated,” the spokesperson told The Hill in a statement.

“The Mennonite church allows for free choice on vaccination and it is not widely against vaccination,” they added. “Mennonite families don’t seek traditional health care regularly so they are not prompted to vaccinate their children on a schedule and many attend small private schools in their community so they are not required to get vaccinated for school.”

Small private schools? You mean, like madrassas?

To most right-wing racists, the distinction between this group and the communities they despise is simple: this community is white and the others aren't. But Vance's ethnic bigotry seems to be more extreme than most. As Saletan notes, he complains even about “Italian, Irish, and German immigration” a century or so ago. He's a British Isles chauvinist, or maybe a Scots-Irish chauvinist. But he won't say a negative word about these unassimilated, German-speaking separatist Mennonites because they're Christian and culturally conservative in most ways, so he thinks their very existence owns the libs.

And that's all that matters. It's why he never said a word, as far as I know, when polio appeared in an undervaccinated ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York State in 2022: The ultra-Orthodox are politcally and culturally conservative, so their lack of assimilation (and lack of Anglo-Gaelic genes) isn't a problem for him. Vance is an ethnic bigot, but even his bigotry is in bad faith.

BUT YOU SAID THIS PRESIDENCY WAS THIRTY DAYS FROM COLLAPSE

Do-nothing Democrats in Congress who heard us begging them to do something to slow the progress of second-term Trumpism told us not to worry -- they had a plan. The plan was to withhold votes when "fractious" House Republicans were struggling to pass money bills. Republicans have a tiny majority in the House, and the party has 53 senators. If Republicans ultimately want to pass a budget under reconciliation rules, which requires a simple 51-vote majority in the Senate and thus no Democratic votes, they need to unite. Do-nothing Democrats and nearly every elite political reporter and pundit in America told us that this would be a heavy lift, because extremely-far-right Republicans would demand bigger budget cuts and Republicans in swing districts would reject some cuts as extreme. This would be Democrats' big chance to show that Republicans can't govern!

Well, so much for that:

The House on Tuesday narrowly passed a Republican budget resolution that calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and a $2 trillion reduction in federal spending over a decade, clearing the way for major elements of President Trump’s domestic agenda.

The nearly party-line vote of 217 to 215 teed up a bitter fight within the G.O.P. over which federal programs to slash to partially finance a huge tax cut that would provide its biggest benefits to rich Americans.

It won't be "a bitter fight." We were told that this would be "a bitter fight" among House Republicans, and it wasn't.

It came after a head-spinning hour in which Republican leaders tried to put down a revolt among conservatives who wanted deeper spending cuts, failed to do so, canceled the budget vote and then reversed course minutes later and summoned lawmakers to call the roll....

A group of centrist Republicans from competitive congressional districts who had initially balked at the plan over concerns that it would lead to deep cuts to Medicaid, which provides health care to more than 70 million Americans, ultimately fell in line and voted yes.

Of course they all fell in line. If they didn't do it last night, they would have inevitably done it in the next few days.

Republicans may disagree with one another on some things, but they hate us more. Also, opposition to government debt and hatred of "big government" has been core parts of the Republican brand for half a century, even though previous Republican presidents and Congresses haven't actually shrunk the government's size and have greatly increased the debt. (This budget framework would also increase the debt, because of the size of the tax cuts.)

Republicans vote in lockstep on nearly everything -- look at President Trump's Cabinet confirmations -- so this should be no surprise. Now the far-rightists get to tell their voters that they pleased Daddy Trump. The moderates avoid primary challenges funded by Elon Musk -- GOP members of Congress were terrified of primary threats even before Musk's money was a consideration -- and they avoid death threats from Trump supporters. And they all get closer to Grover Norquist's goal of making government so small they can drown it in the bathtub, a goal millions of Americans share, even if they're not right-wing, because most Americans have fallen for decades of propaganda that tells us government is extraordinarily wasteful.

Republicans still need to flesh out these budget numbers, and finalize an approach that reconciles this bill with the Senate's bill. There's an opportunity for Democrats and citizen activists to draw the public's attention to horrible budget cuts and plutocrat-skewed tax cuts. When we see how much they want to cut from Medicaid, for instance, it's possible that public outrage will compel them to back off.

But I doubt it. I've seen this movie before, in Wisconsin in 2011. There were massive protests against the "budget repair bill" and other Republican legislation early in Governor Scott Walker's term. Republicans ignored the anger and did as they pleased. They had Fox News and Koch network money on their side. An effort to recall the governor failed. They got what they wanted, and they got away with it.

We need to fight, because I could be wrong about the inevitability of all this. We might at least persuade Republicans to back off from some of the worst cuts to popular programs like Medicaid.

But I'm gloomy -- and another reason I'm gloomy is that this shifts the focus away from the unpopular Elon Musk and the obviously extralegal way he's been attacking government agencies. For perhaps the first time in the second Trump term, Musk is not the main character. Congressional Republicans are now giving Musk's meat-ax cuts an aura of legality.

Some weak polling has led many observers to believe that the Trump administration is on the verge of collapse. I predict that the budget process could actually lead to an improvement in Trump's poll numbers, even if the final bill includes provisions voters strongly oppose. He and congressional Republicans will be seen as doing something about "big government."

I hope I'm wrong. I hope that, for once in their lives, the American people can get angry about right-wing policy while it's still theoretical. But I suspect that the public won't truly hate Trump and congressional Republicans until we're all living in the miserable, mean-spirited, fifth-rate America they're creating for us.

CARVILLE AND JEFFRIES WANT US TO BE PATIENT WHILE REPUBLICANS DISMANTLE EVERYTHING

I forced my way through that James Carville op-ed in The New York Times, and once again I'm struggling understand why so many D.C. Democrats seem determined to gaslight us about something Democrats did successfully. The point of gaslighting is to make yourself look better, but D.C. Democrats gaslight to make themselves look worse.

... in the first Trump Administration ... Democrats tried and failed at the art of resistance politics. We voiced outrage on social issue after social issue. We spun ourselves up in a tizzy over an investigation into Russia. We fought Mr. Trump at every corner, on every issue imaginable and muddied up our message in an unwinnable war. We were saved only by his lousy governing and a lot of effort on our side finding good candidates to run for the House and Senate in 2018. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is retreat on the immediate battlefield — and advance in another direction.

No, the Democrats didn't just get lucky. The resistance worked! It fired voters up and flipped the House in 2018. It drove Donald Trump from office and won full congressional control in 2020. It kept Trump's poll ratings under water for the entirety of his first term. It pushed back on efforts to repeal Obamacare, separate immigrant families, and embrace the racist right at Charlottesville and elsewhere.

D.C. Democrats such as Carville have decided that the 2024 election was lost during Trump's first term, not as a result of public discontent on inflation and other issues during the presidential term of Joe Biden, whose lack of communication skills made him incapable of persuading skeptical voters that he could govern. Despite Biden's struggles, his vice president barely lost the election, and Democrats fell just short of winning a House majority, yet D.C. Democrats like Carville treat the 2024 election results as a 1932-style rout.

Carville's advice in this op-ed is that Democrats should meet the current constitutional crisis by doing ... nothing.

With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight, and make the American people miss us....

Our first major test in the art of strategic retreat comes in a few weeks, as the Trump administration must get a budget passed that raises the debt ceiling. There are deep internal Republican divides over the budget: Republicans don’t know what they want to include, they don’t agree on an agenda, and they do not have a clear path forward.

... the most radical thing we can do is nothing at all. Let the Republicans disagree with themselves publicly. Do not offer a single vote. Do not insert yourself into the discourse, do not throw a monkey wrench into the equation. Simply step away and let ‘em flirt with a default. Just when they’ve pushed themselves to the brink, and it appears they could collapse the global economy — come in and save the day. Be the competent party and not the chaos party....

This equation must be applied for the remainder of this year. Let the Republicans push for their tax cuts, their Medicaid cuts, their food stamp cuts. Give them all the rope they need. Then let dysfunction paralyze their House caucus rupture their tiny majority. Let them reveal themselves as incapable of governing, and at the right moment, start making a coordinated, consistent argument about the need to protect Medicare, Medicaid, worker benefits and middle class pocketbooks. Let the Republicans crumble, let the American people see it, and wait until they need us to offer our support.

The first problem with this is Carville's assumption that Republicans can't unite to ram through horrible policies. I know there's party infighting, but most Republicans vote in lockstep on most issues.

The bigger problem is that bad budget policies are just a small part of what horrifying in Washington right now. The Constitution and the rule of law have effectively been suspended by the Trump administration, and the court pushback is slow and partial. Carville wants to believe that what matters is how Republicans want to govern, but what they're doing right now is de-governing. Until now, we've had a democracy in which elected leaders pass laws that remain in force even when control of Congress or the White House changes hands; we've had a government that attempted to keep Americans safe, to maintain a system of justice under law, to keep the food edible and the water drinkable, to keep schools and libraries and parks and the post office functioning, to sustain scientific research, to maintain global stability through both hard and soft power. The current administration wants to get rid of all that -- Trump because he's always dreamed of being a dictator, the billionaire donors behind Trump because they hate paying taxes to help the less well off, Russell Vought and his cabal because they want right-wing Christian churches to have more power than the government, and Elon Musk, presumably, because he believes most of us are inferior to what he regards as his caste of techno-Übermenschen, the people who are fit to join him in someday colonizing Mars while we Untermenschen rot and die, as we deserve to. They're destroying America root and branch, but Carville just wants to focus on the few areas where Republicans are still coloring within the lines, because he's an old man and he can't comprehend how radically -- and perhaps irreversibly -- America has changed in the past month.

Hakeem Jeffries is not an old man, but he has the same problem. Last night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow tried to explain to Jeffries that many Americans don't believe he understands the stakes.

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Maddow said:

The other thing that Americans are stressed out about, though, right now is that policy doesn’t feel like it's the main conversation right now. It feels like we are in the middle of a ketamine-fueled middle-of-the-night autocratic power grab that is rendering Congress irrelevant, that's rendering policy irrelevant, and that's rendering the rule of law an afterthought, if not a joke, to those who are planning on staying in power indefinitely without benefit of further elections. I mean, it is not about a -- I mean, it is about a bad budget. That's one of the things you have to contend with. But the fight here feels like it's on a different scale than the kinds of legislative point-counterpoint stuff that I think Democrats and Republicans are used to fighting over. And I think what Americans are sort of clamoring for is to hear from you personally, as the senior Democrat in Washington, in the House, where the margins are so narrow, to hear from you that you understand the scale of the threat and you have ideas about how to interrupt what feels like something that we have not experienced since the Civil War in terms of the threat to our republic.

Jeffries responds by noting that House Democrats have formed something called the Rapid Response Task Force and Litigation Working Group (could there be a clunkier name?), which is coordinating with state attorneys general and others to file lawsuits against the administration. I'm pleased that House Democrats are working on litigation, but what about the "rapid response" part of this? To me, that implies a campaign to push back on Trumpism in public. I learned the full name of this group from a Jeffries press release announcing its formation; that press release says that "it’s an all hands on deck effort simultaneously underway in Congress, the Courts and the Community." So where's the outreach to "the Community"?

Specifically, where's the rapid outreach to "the Community"? The press release is dated February 10. More than two weeks later, there's no Rapid Response Task Force website. There's no Rapid Response Task Force page on YouTube, TikTok, X, or Bluesky. Go search. You won't find them.

On Friday, Carville told Mediaite's Dan Abrams that the Trump administration "is in the midst of a massive collapse, in particularly a collapse in public opinion," and that the collapse will happen "in less than thirty days." He says this again in the Times op-ed:

It won’t take long: public support for this administration will fall through the floorboard. It’s already happening: Just over a month in, the president’s approval has already sunk underwater in two new polls.

But in other polls -- including the most recent polls from Emerson, The Economist/YouGov, Harvard/Harris, and Morning Consult -- Trump's numbers are in positive territory, in some cases over 50%. Trump's net job approval is +0.7 according to FiveThirtyEight, +1.8 according to RealClear Polling, +1.7 according to VoteHub. These aren't great numbers for a president a month into office, but they're a long way from "collapse." And remember, Trump had worse numbers in his first term and never reached the point of "collapse." He nearly won the Electoral College in 2020 -- and might have won it if his presidency hadn't been effectively framed by the resistance that Carville disdains.

The angry people attending congressional Republicans' town halls understand what Trump, Vought, and Musk are dismantling, but much of the public believes that the administration is simply overcoming government sclerosis and cutting waste. Those poll numbers might not slip into solidly negative territory for a while. And it will take even longer if Democrats sit on their hands, as many congressional Democrats seem to be doing, and as Carville recommends.

IS THE GOP'S PLAN FOR GUTTING MEDICAID ALSO ITS PLAN FOR GUTTING DEMOCRACY?

The Republican Party intends to cut at least $880 billion from Medicaid in this year's budget. Jason Sattler thinks he knows how this will be accomplished, if it happens:

The GOP now has its ideal model for denying Americans the Medicaid they deserve from Georgia, which, under Republican leadership, expanded Medicaid in the worst possible way with all the paperwork “requirements” that were embedded in the 2017 proposed cuts and will be in the 2025 bill.

ProPublica reports on the results:

... Only 6,500 participants have enrolled in the first 18 months of the program — roughly 75% fewer than the state had estimated for year one....

“Thousands of others never finished applying, according to the state’s data, as reports of technical glitches mounted,” ProPublica reported. “The state also never hired enough people to help residents sign up or to verify that participants are actually working, as Georgia required, federal officials and state workers said.”

Here's how the combination of onerous requirements and bad tech works in practice, according to ProPublica:

Paul Mikell lives in an area outside Atlanta without reliable internet service — and he doesn’t have the income for a phone plan with unlimited data. It takes him more than an hour each month to upload the employment documents necessary to reconfirm his eligibility, often using the free Wi-Fi at his public library.

Sometimes, Mikell said, the task has stretched days, even a whole week, because the Pathways verification portal freezes or crashes. One time, he said, he waited eight days for customer support to retrieve a password and restore his access.

I'm sure this is the future for Medicaid recipients if President Trump and congressional Republicans get their way. I assume that most white people who struggle to navigagte this system will assume that it works just fine for non-whites (and immigrants). They'll conclude that the president they love, Donald Trump, tried to fix it, but the wily Deep State is difficult to defeat. They won't blame him.

I wonder if this is also how Republicans intend to make voting next to impossible for millions of Americans.

Republicans don't believe in the social safety net, so they're happy to remove anyone they can from the Medicaid rolls, regardless of race. In Georgia, they clearly assume that they're not harming enough of their own voters to put their jobs at risk. But the Republican plan for voting that's been introduced in Congress seems a bit risky for the GOP. The Center for American Progress explains:

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act has been reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. This legislation would require all Americans to prove their citizenship status by presenting documentation—in person—when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information. Specifically, the legislation would require the vast majority of Americans to rely on a passport or birth certificate to prove their citizenship. While this may sound easy for many Americans, the reality is that more than 140 million American citizens do not possess a passport and as many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name.

Remember, you'd have to do all this every time you re-register to vote -- for instance, after moving.

Why would Republicans want to do all this when many of the people who'd struggle to register are their own voters?

Nationwide, approximately 69 million women could not use their birth certificate to prove their identity or citizenship status under the SAVE Act....

[A] Pew survey found that ... Democratic and Democratic-leaning women are twice as likely as Republican and Republican-leaning women to have kept their maiden name, with only 7 percent of conservative Republican women reporting that they kept their last name. So while the legislation would unfairly disenfranchise women as a whole, the requirement to present a birth certificate would disproportionately disenfranchise conservative and Republican women....

Nationwide, approximately 146 million American citizens do not possess a passport....

In seven states, less than one-third of citizens have a valid passport: West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. And only in four states do more than two-thirds of the citizens have a valid passport: New York, Massachusetts, California, and New Jersey. In West Virginia, the state with the lowest rate of citizen passport possession, only about 1 in 5 citizens—or 20.7 percent—possess this documentation....

Overall, data shows that high rates of passport ownership are predominantly concentrated in blue states, while low rates of passport ownership are overwhelmingly concentrated in red states.

I would have expected a Republican voting bill to target Democratic voters much more efficiently than this.

It may be that the SAVE Act is seen as just a messaging bill. Republicans know that they probably can't get seven Democratic votes in the Senate to break a filibuster, and then they can say that they tried to prevent voter fraud and fraud-loving Democrats prevented them. But why write the bill this way in the first place?

If it's somehow enacted, I assume the plan is to look the other way as Republican-run states make it easy for some voters to overcome the hurdles, while leaving other voters to struggle. Maybe there'll be plenty of voter registration navigators in red districts and not nearly as many in blue districts. Otherwise, I'm a bit puzzled.

For decades, since long before Trump entered politics, Republicans have railed against nonexistent electoral fraud and passed bills to give their party an edge in voting -- but always in a way that's meant to seem fair if you don't look at it too closely. (Most people don't.) I suspect that by 2026 the Trump administration will discard this approach and simply cancel the midterms, citing a mythical national emergency or something, or will refuse to recognize midterm results if they don't go the GOP's way. And while I firmly believe that the 2024 election wasn't rigged, for reasons I explained a few months ago, it's possible that there's a plan, undoubtedly involving Elon Musk and his child soldiers, to rig the next election.

But apart from that, the GOP plan for voting is both awful and not certain to accomplish the party's goals, unless it's meant to be accompanied by a two-tiered system of registration in GOP-controlled states, which is probably the case.

BRAVO, PETER BAKER: DECADES TOO LATE, YOU'VE DISCOVERED HOW RIGHT-WING MESSAGING WORKS

In The New York Times, Peter Baker has breaking news: The way our Republican president governs is based on lies.

Wow. Really? Did you folks know that?

Here's Baker's headline:

In Trump’s Alternative Reality, Lies and Distortions Drive Change

Baker writes:

The United States sent $50 million in condoms to Hamas. Diversity programs caused a plane crash. China controls the Panama Canal. Ukraine started the war with Russia.

Except, no. None of that is true. Not that it stops President Trump. In the first month since he returned to power, he has demonstrated once again a brazen willingness to advance distortions, conspiracy theories and outright lies to justify major policy decisions.

It will be good if Baker's readers genuinely grasp the power of lies in U.S. politics over their Sunday brunches. But I wish they'd noticed this a long time ago -- I wish Baker had noticed this a long time ago -- because Republicans have been making policy out of lies, or at least trying to, for decades, and they've used lies to make millions of Americans despise Democrats and look at Democratic policy ideas with deep suspicion.

Remember when Ronald Reagan delivered a speech in which he implied that we needed to support the Nicaraguan contras because the left-wing Sandinista government was an imminent threat to the U.S. mainland? In 1986, Reagan said:

Defeat for the contras would mean a second Cuba on the mainland of North America. It'd be a major defeat in the quest for democracy in our hemisphere, and it would mean consolidation of a privileged sanctuary for terrorists and subversives just 2 days' driving time from Harlingen, Texas.

Reagan was a tad less shameless than Trump, so he conceded that an actual invasion of the United States by Nicaraguan troops was unlikely:

Now, I don't think any of us are going to try and sell the idea that just a little Nicaragua could represent a threat to the United States....

But if so, why did he say this? Why did he plant the idea in the first place? But Reagan told a lot of whoppers. Remember when he said trees cause more pollution than automobiles? Good times.

In the following decade, we heard many lies about Bill Clinton -- that he was once a Russian agent, that he was a murderer with a "body count," that Whitewater was a major financial scandal, that the Clinton healthcare plan was radical and Marxist, and so on. We went to war in the following decade because the George W. Bush administration deceived us in a very Trumpian way about the nonexistent ties between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and about an Iraqi weapons program that no longer existed.

More recently, Republicans attacked imaginary "death panels" in Barack Obama's healthcare plan. They laid the groundwork for overturning Roe v. Wade by arguing that early-stage fetuses have heartbeats that, in fact, aren't heartbeats. They blamed school shootings on the lack of prayer in schools (our mayor here in New York City still believes that one), or on anti-depressants; they said the majority of school shooters are trans. They prevent popular gun safety measures from being enacted in part by making these false arguments.

They've been lying about Democratic voter fraud since the Bush years. Now they lie about the COVID vaccines Trump helped to develop.

And then there's the ur-lie, the one that undergirds all the other lies: that Democrats are communist America-haters who gratuitously tax and spend for no reason other than to destroy America and exercise social control. All the money they take in is frittered away on wasteful, needless programs -- you could cut nearly all of it and no one would miss it.

That lie goes back to the pre-Reagan era. Is anyone old enough to remember Senate William Proxmire -- a Democrat -- and his "Golden Fleece Awards," which helped create the impression that the people running our government, especially when they're liberal, spend money like drunken sailors, as Ronald Reagan was fond of saying?

We now have an opportunity to learn that that's a lie -- that while there's some waste and fraud in government spending, the government spends money on programs that bring Americans real benefits, and the workers involved are mostly good people trying to do a good job. This guy believed the lie:

He went to work for the federal government believing it needed serious reform. He thought super-genius Elon Musk would carefully bring about reform. And now he sees that Musk is "coming in with a wrecking ball and destroying people's lives."

He believed this in large part because, like everyone else in America, he's been given the impression that government spending is massively wasteful, and we just need to empower a persistent, capable person to get to the bottom of it.

Of course our system is unprepared to combat Trump's lies. The conservative movement and the Republican Party are built to defend lies. Under Trump, they're in their comfort zone.

GOVERNMENT BY GRIEVANCE

When I first learned about the Trump military purge, I assumed it was primarily intended to lay the groundwork for the miltarization of the American homeland -- troops firing on peaceful protesters, martial law, you know, that sort of thing. This seemed omnious:

I think the administration will at some point begin to use the miltary to curtail Americans' freedoms in blatantly unlawful ways. But it feels as if this purge was primarily about grievances: President Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth don't like "woke," which to them (and the rest of the administration) means "permitting any non-white or non-cis-male person to have a top job in government," so women and people of color were purged.

And Hegseth is a big fan of war crimes:

Mr. Hegseth did not say why he was firing the judge advocates general. But in his Senate confirmation hearing last month, he criticized military lawyers for placing needless legal restrictions on soldiers in battle — putting “his or her own priorities in front of the war fighters, their promotions, their medals, in front of having the backs of those making the tough calls on the front lines.”

This is a cause Hegseth seems to take personally. Also, being an advocate for war criminals helped make Hegseth semi-famous within the right-wing mediasphere, while drawing Trump's attention:

On November 10, 2019, just before Veterans Day, Fox News aired an hour-long special, “Modern Warriors,” featuring one of its political commentators and hosts, Pete Hegseth.... Hegseth introduced to viewers a Navy SEAL named Eddie Gallagher, who’d recently beaten a rap for, as Hegseth put it, “mistreating an ISIS terrorist” in Iraq in 2017. Hegseth called Gallagher a “war hero.”

In fact, Gallagher had been tried for murder (and a raft of other crimes). His alleged victim was a seventeen-year-old named Khaled Jamal Abdullah, who had been captured by American troops in Mosul and killed while gravely injured. Gallagher’s own platoon had turned him in, describing him, according to a video obtained by the New York Times, as “freaking evil” and “perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving.” They reported that Gallagher had stabbed the teen in the neck and had also, in separate incidents, shot civilians including an old man and a young girl.... Gallagher was acquitted of the murder after another SEAL, who’d been granted immunity, took the stand at Gallagher’s trial and unexpectedly confessed to killing Abdullah himself. Gallagher was convicted of just one minor charge.

In mainstream military circles, Gallagher’s reputation was ruined, but he became something of a cause célèbre among the MAGA faithful....

Hegseth also championed the case of First Lieutenant Clint Lorance, who’d been sentenced to nineteen years at Fort Leavenworth for ordering his soldiers to fire on three unarmed civilians riding a motorcycle, killing two of them, in Kandahar. Like Gallagher, Lorance’s own men had turned him in for murder.

In early 2019, Hegseth reportedly privately nudged President Trump to grant clemency to Gallagher, Golsteyn, and Lorance. On “Fox & Friends,” Hegseth also made repeated public appeals for pardoning the three men....

Trump had already ordered that Gallagher be moved out of pretrial confinement in the Navy brig. After Gallagher’s commander demoted the SEAL as part of his punishment, Trump reversed the decision. The President also pardoned Golsteyn and Lorance, and a third Army officer, Michael Behenna, who’d been convicted of taking a detainee to a remote location and shooting him dead.

So I think this is less about freeing the military to commit war crimes against U.S. civilians -- though the administration undoubtedly sees that as an additional benefit -- than it is about these past grievances.

General C.Q. Brown, the black Joint Chiefs chair who's been dismissed, is a four-star general, while Dan Caine, the white man who'll replace him, is not, and lacks other qualifications statutorily required of a Joint Chiefs chairman:

General Caine retired with three stars, as a lieutenant general. By statute, anyone picked to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is supposed to have served as a combatant commander, as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or as the top uniformed officer of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps or Space Force.

Obviously, that's meant to send a signal that the administration believes white men deserve qualification points just for being white men. On the other hand, Caine seems sort of qualified. A while back, when I learned that Trump want to fire General Brown, I assumed his replacement would be a wildly unqualified MAGA culture warrior whom Trump would ram down the Senate's throat -- the military equivalent of Hegseth or Kash Patel. I thought it might be crazy old Mike Flynn, or possibly retired general Jerry Boykin, who in 2003 wore his uniform to deliver a church address in which he talked about a battle with a Muslim warlord in Somalia and said, "I knew that my god was a real god and his was an idol." Boykin endorsed 2020 election trutherism and has also called for banning mosques in America. He has said that Jesus will return to Earth carrying an AR-15. He's now the executive vice president of the Family Research Council. Either Boykin or Flynn would have been the real fuck-you pick, if that was Trump's plan.

Caine hasn't been a culture warrior, as far as I can tell. He apparently got the gig because he kissed up to Trump.

In recent years, Mr. Trump has publicly lauded General Caine for telling him that the Islamic State could be defeated far more quickly than his advisers had suggested. The details of the story, which could not be independently verified, have shifted over time. In one version, Mr. Trump said the general claimed it would take a week to defeat the group; in another, he said four weeks.

Mr. Trump has also claimed that General Caine, during their meeting in Iraq in December 2018, donned a “Make America Great Again” hat, in defiance of military guidelines that active-duty troop should not wear political paraphernalia. General Caine has told aides that he has never worn a MAGA hat.

Trump wants to believe -- and wants you to believe -- that America was doing nothing to defeat ISIS before he became president. He wants you to think he got the job done in a very short time. In fact, the slow process of degrading ISIS began in 2014, while Barack Obama was president. Trump built on Obama's work. But Trump will never admit that (assuming he even understands it). I'd say that Caine was picked because Trump hates Obama and associates Caine with his own belief that he succeeded where Obama failed.

I wonder whether Caine will prove to be insufficiently criminal-minded for Trump's taste. I could easily see him being replaced by a far-right whackjob in the not-too-distant future. For now, this is horrible, but I don't think it's a prelude to an imminent military crackdown in America.

TRUMPISM IS STILL A DICK THING

Exit polls tell us that Donald Trump won the male vote by 12 points, while losing the female vote by 8. A survey of 18-29-year-old voters found that the gender gap among young voters was even wider:

Young women preferred Harris to Trump by a 17-point margin: 58% to 41%. But young men preferred Trump by a 14-point margin: 56% to 42%.

We generally ascribe this to the specific choices made by the Trump and Harris campaigns. Trump aligned himself with mixed martial arts, pro wrestling, and bro podcasters. Kamala Harris never went on Joe Rogan's podcast and focused her attention on winning women's votes.

But the campaign is over and Trumpism is still a sausage party.

Trump's poll numbers are beginning to decline -- but among women, they're already in the toilet. Trump isn't spending every day carefully targeting the male demographic, but men are still sustaining him.

Look at the numbers from a recent SurveyUSA poll. Trump's overall approval rating in this poll is 51%; disapproval is 45%. But there's a massive gender gap: Trump is at 62%-36% approval among men (+26) and at 40%-56% among women (-16) - a difference of 42 points.

In the same survey, Elon Musk's numbers are 52%-41% (+11) among men, 32%-57% (-25) among women. That's a 36-point gender gap.

A Quinnipiac poll in which Trump is in negative trritory overall (45%-49%) has a similar gender skew. Trump's job approval is 57%-38% (+19) among men, 34%-60% (-26) among women -- a 45-point gap. Men have a favorable opinnion of Musk, 49%-39% (+10); among women, his rating is an abysmal 28%-61% (-33) -- a 43-point gap.

On Trump's handling of the economy, men approve (55%-34%), while woman disapprove (33%-62%). There are similar gaps on every issue: foreign policy (54%-38% vs. 34%-58%), the federal workforce (53-39% vs. 29%-60%), the Gaza conflict (46%-41% vs. 31%-53%), the war in Ukraine (48%-34% vs. 32%-54%), and trade (54%-37% vs. 30%-60%).

MAGA is male.

Trump's poll numbers are dropping, and concerns about what Trump and Musk are doing is starting to make even Republican members of Congress sweat:

In an R+18 district: Speaking at a business luncheon yesterday in Westerville, Ohio, GOP Rep. Troy Balderson “described President Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders as ‘getting out of control’ .... [and] expressed some pushback to the idea of sole decision-making power lying with Trump and billionaire advisor Elon Musk,” the Columbus Dispatch’s Samantha Hendrickson reports. “‘Congress has to decide whether or not the Department of Education goes away,’ Balderson asserted. ‘Not the president, not Elon Musk.’”

In deep-red Georgia: Last night in Roswell, Georgia, an overflow crowd packed into a town hall forum for GOP Rep. Rich McCormick, barraging him with pointed questions and accusatory comments about DOGE’s cuts. His staff “seemed caught off guard by the massive crowd of hundreds that gathered,” reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein. (This is a district Trump carried by 22 points just three months ago.)

... “Attendees set the tone early, with one accusing McCormick of ‘doing us a disservice’ for supporting the budget-slashing initiatives by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency that have torn through all corners of federal government,” Bluestein reports.

But notice that it's mostly women who cheer the (female) anti-Trump speaker at the beginning of this clip. It's mostly women who give her a standing ovation starting at 1:26:

The town hall crowd peppers Rep. Rich McCormick with boos and catcalls as he struggles to answer a pointed question from a resident who says she’s a descendant of Patrick Henry who pressed him on whether Trump was moving toward “tyranny.” #gapol https://t.co/gicXVC7AFJ pic.twitter.com/BkSIaxtgQb

— Greg Bluestein (@bluestein) February 21, 2025

What could persuade men, or at least some men, that the administration is bad? Maybe mistreatment of veterans? Some Republicans are worried about that:

Republican lawmakers are growing particularly uneasy with cuts impacting veterans, who are given preference in the federal hiring process and have been disproportionately affected by the dismissals. GOP members are also concerned that federal services for veterans could be affected.

Republicans have quietly warned the White House to reinstate many of the 1,000 employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs who have been dismissed in recent days.

Senate Veterans Affairs Chair Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) said in an interview that he and his staff have been communicating their concerns with the White House legislative affairs team, along with Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins.

“Certainly on the veterans side, we’re asking for information from the administration,” Moran said. “We are being reassured that no one at the VA who has any direct care responsibilities are being terminated or laid off, and we’re just looking for the positions and circumstances in which it’s occurring.”

But do men care? Who do most American men think is a real man -- a soldier or Marine who lost a leg in Afghanistan and now works for the VA, or Elon Musk waving around a chainsaw? Deep down, I think most men in America would choose the chainsaw, just the way they voted for the draft dodger in the long, phallic tie who does the fist dance.

Even in the worst-case scenario -- a severe recession or depression, Medicare and Social Security broken beyond repair, bird flu rampant, unsafe food in supermarkets, planes frequently falling from the sky -- I think men will abandon Trump last. That sucks, because they're pretty much all he's got now.

D.C. DEMOCRATS POLL-TEST EVERY MESSAGE WHILE TRUMP JUST DOES EXTREMELY UNPOPULAR THINGS

We know how Democrats in Washington are responding to the Donald Trump coup. They're gathering in private sessions to workshop responses that won't offend Trump voters. No matter what's going on, they change the subject to the economy, the one issue they believe works for them. And they agree with supposedly liberal pundits who tell them they lost the 2024 election on "wokeness," which is assumed to be wildly unpopular.

Where is all this caution getting them? Is their abandonment of the word "Latinx" -- which hardly any Democrat actually used -- making them more popular? No, not at all. From a new Quinnipiac poll:

Twenty-one percent of voters approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, which is an all-time low, while 68 percent of voters disapprove and 11 percent did not offer an opinion....

In today's poll, 40 percent of Democrats approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, while 49 percent disapprove and 11 percent did not offer an opinion.

While Democrats are cautiously avoiding any statement that might give offense, and gaining no popularity as a result, President Trump is openly embracing Vladimir Putin. How does the public feel about that? From the same Quinnipiac poll:

An overwhelming majority of voters (81 percent) think the United States should not trust Russian President Vladimir Putin, while 9 percent think the United States should trust him.

And in a new Washington Post/Ipsos poll, there's this:

The president’s least popular action is his decision to pardon all those convicted of crimes in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. More than 8 in 10 oppose the pardons for those who were convicted of violent crimes, and 55 percent oppose the pardons for those convicted of nonviolent crimes.

In fact, a great deal of what Trump has done in his first month in office is unpopular, according to the Post poll:

About 6 in 10 oppose shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development....

... almost 6 in 10 Americans say they oppose laying off large numbers of federal government workers or making it easier to fire longtime government employees. Also, more than 2 in 3 oppose blocking federal health agencies from communicating with the public without approval from a Trump appointee....

More than 6 in 10 Americans oppose tariffs on Canadian goods, and nearly 6 in 10 oppose them on Mexican products....

Americans also see negative consequences from these actions. About 7 in 10 say tariffs on products from Mexico, Canada and China will increase prices for those goods. Pluralities also say the tariffs would hurt U.S. workers and U.S. manufacturers.

But Trump's overall job approval (45%) in this poll is better than his approval on these issues. Disapproval is 53%, which makes this one of Trump's worst recent polls. Trump is at 44%-51% in a recent survey Ipsos conducted for Reuters, at 45%-51% in a Gallup poll, and at 45%-49% in that Quinnipiac poll -- but other polls have him in positive territory: 51%-45% according to SurveyUSA, 48%-42% according to Emerson, 50%-47% according to YouGov. In the FiveThirtyEight and RealClear polling averages, Trump is in slightly positive territory.

Being on the wrong side of an issue terrifies Democrats, but Republicans know they can get away with it if they never exude doubt, if they attack Democrats as the real out-of-step party, and if they appear to be on the popular side on other issues. In these polls, voters say they like Trump's crackdown on undocumented immigrants who've committed crimes. Many want to believe that DOGE is a genuine effort to cut fat from the budget. And it's quite likely that some voters have positive feelings toward Trump because he's clearly doing something, and letting us know that he is. Joe Biden acccomplished a lot in four years, but most voters never heard about most of it from him or his surrogates. He was the least eloquent president in the history of mass communication, and he and his party seemed to believe that Americans would just learn about his accomplishments through osmosis. He never had a good elevator pitch for his presidency, as Barack Obama did when some voters were lukewarm about his first term. "General Motors is alive and bin Laden is dead" -- that was good. Biden had nothing comparable. "Democracy is on the ballot" was abstract, not concrete.

Republicans have always known that they can get away with unpopular positions -- on guns, on abortion, on taxing rich people -- if they denigrate Democrats and have a few popular positions.

This is a long way of saying that Democrats should be throwing a lot of ideas at the wall -- some won't stick, but some will. They need to talk about their policies, but right now they need to be the unswerving opposition, which is what Republicans are every time there's a Democratic president.

And they need to stop being afraid. Voters cut Republicans some slack because Republicans successfully denigrate Democrats and because Republicans always appear ready to fight for what they believe in. Democrats should learn from this.

DOES A ONE-PARTY AMERICA START HERE?

The Washington Post reports that congressional Republicans are begging Co-Presidents Musk and Trump to restore funding to their states that Congress lawfully appropriated and the co-presidents are illegally withholding:

Even as many Republicans praise the ultimate goal of streamlining the federal government, some GOP senators spanning the ideological spectrum from Katie Boyd Britt (Alabama) to Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) have lobbied the Trump administration to reconsider its cuts or pauses to federal grants that support biomedical research and labs, or for programs supporting Native American tribes.

("The ultimate goal" of all this is not, of course, "streamlining the federal government." It's to create a series of daily Two Minutes' Hates directed at government "bureaucrats," many of whom are derided as "woke" or otherwise guilty of wrongthink, while persuading gullible Americans that the cost savings will be massive and the lost services will never be missed. Obviously, Elon Musk also wants to direct money into his own pocket, as does Donald Trump, and they want to make the rich richer, but they could have done all that without DOGE. The main point of this is Cultural Revolution-style public shaming.)

The aggressive move to cut spending unilaterally “negates Congress’ hard-won power over appropriations,” said Jessica Riedl, a budget expert with the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, who predicted lawmakers were “afraid” to more forcefully grab back their appropriations power given Trump’s popularity with the GOP base.

“Eventually Congress is going to have to take back its power of the purse rather than nicely asking the administration for favors,” she said.

“Eventually Congress is going to have to take back its power of the purse"? Nahhh. Republicans in Congress won't do that. They think their guy is winning. They fear him, but mostly they want to stay on the winning side.

I think Jessica Riedl is wrong and Tommy Tuberville is right:

But Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama), a close Trump ally who supports the cuts, said last week that begging for funds may be the new normal, suggesting that lawmakers could lobby Musk to save spending they’ve allocated for their states as he slashes and cancels contracts at agencies.

“If we have to lobby for, ‘hey wait a minute what about the bridge in Birmingham?’ or ‘there’s a bridge in Mobile or whatever.’ I think that could be very possible,” Tuberville told reporters.

This is probably America's future.

Want NIH money for universities in your state? Kiss the ring and the money will restored. I think that will extend to everything. I am 99% certain that under the current regime, federal disaster relief will be dispersed only to red states and states Trump believes are gettable for Republicans. And we'll just get used to this, because what choice will we have? The courts might say that Trump can't do this, but he'll just ignore them.

And if we still have real elections, this will become a key issue: Do you vote for (presumably Democratic) candidates who say they'll "stand up to Trump"? Or do you vote Republican because it's the only way to keep the money flowing?

I see this as a real issue in this year's two gubernatorial elections. One is in the purple state of Virginia, where Democrats have two-seat majorities in both houses of the state legislature, but the governor is a Republican. I'm sure much of northern Virginia is furious at the federal workforce cuts, which have hit the area's residents very hard. But will voters believe that because they're being held hostage by Trump, their only recourse might be to give him the governor he wants? (Although I don't see the current term-limited governor, Republican Glenn Youngkin, pleading for restoration of the cuts.)

New Jersey, where the other gubernatorial election will take place, is generally seen as a solid blue state -- but Chris Christie won there twice not long ago, and the current governor won reelection by only 3 points in 2021. Kamala Harris won the state by only 6 points.

I think anger at Trump will lead to Democratic victories in those states this year. But in the future, if Trump really turns the money spigot off to Democratic states while ensuring that it's open for Republican and swing states, voters' calculus might change.

(I'm writing this on the assumption that there will still be real state and local elections even if, as I expect, elections for D.C. offices are suspended or tampered with.)

In solid blue states like Illinois and California, eventually there'll be real suffering. FEMA money will be cut off, the universities will be starved, funding for education and highways will be curtailed, and eventually Republican candidates will run on a platform of "making [name of state] great again" by working with President Trump (or President Vance, or maybe just Elon Musk, who might be the permanent government overlord for the next couple of decades, even as the nominal president changes). And these Republican candidates might win as a result.

This is a nightmare scenario, obviously. Maybe it won't come to pass. But I think it's worth trying to imagine a possible future in which only red states get federal money, and blue states are starved.

If this happens, I think there will eventually be a serious secession movement. There might be a Civil War II. I'm ready. If you put it to a vote, I'd vote to secede right now. I'm not sure America is redeemable.

MUSK IS GREEDY, BUT HE'S ALSO AN IDEOLOGUE AND A SICKO

Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York Times has published a good story about Elon Musk and Donald Trump's appalling cuts to science programs.

President Trump’s plan to shrink the size of the federal work force dealt blows to thousands of civil servants in the past few days. But the cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services — coming on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic, the worst public health crisis in a century — have been especially jarring. Experts say the firings threaten to leave the country exposed to further shortages of health workers, putting Americans at risk if another crisis erupts....

The firings have ... excised the next generation of leaders at the C.D.C., the N.I.H., the Food and Drug Administration, and other agencies that the [Department of Health and Human Services] oversees. “It seems like a very destructive strategy to fire the new talent at an agency, and the talent that’s being promoted,” said Dr. David Fleming, the chairman of an advisory committee to the C.D.C. director. He added, “A lot of energy and time has been spent in recruiting those folks, and that’s now tossed out the window.” ...

On Monday, eight officials who led health agencies under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — including the heads of the C.D.C., the N.I.H. and the F.D.A. — issued a joint statement denouncing the cuts. It listed a string of initiatives, from combating the opioid epidemic to bringing primary care to rural communities, that are “vital to the economic security of our nation” and are carried out by public servants....

About 700 staff members were cut at the F.D.A., including lawyers, doctors and doctorate-level reviewers in the medical device, tobacco, food and drug divisions.

The cuts over the weekend have touched all manner of health workers. They are not only scientists and disease hunters but also administrators who oversee grant proposals, analysts figuring out new ways to cut health care costs and computer specialists who try to improve the government’s antiquated systems for tracking health information.

Trump superfans and many normie American's who aren't MAGA believe that Musk's Department of Government Efficiency is just that, an arm of the government aimed at making government more efficient by fighting waste, fraud, and abuse. Americans seem divided on the question of whether Musk is doing this well: In an Economist/YouGov poll, 49% of respondents agree that "Elon Musk is cutting waste and fraud," while 51% believe that "Elon Musk is cutting useful programs." Clearly, the people in the former category think Musk is doing what he claims to be doing -- looking for wasted tax money -- and acting in good faith, while even some people in the latter category undoubtedly believe he's sincere but makng cuts in a misguided way.

Most of the Times readers who commented on Stolberg's story seem to be horrified. Some have an alternate theory about what Musk wants -- and, obviously, they have a point:

It doesn’t matter how many federal employees they cut. It won’t come close to covering the cost of their tax cuts for the wealthy.

****

Most telling is that these cuts aren't actually designed to save money or improve performance - they're merely justifying high-end tax cuts that still won't be paid for.

****

None of this will put even the tiniest dent in the federal budget and the ripple effects will last for years. It's just redirecting government expenditures into private pockets.

But there's more going on than just an effort to line the pockets of Musk and his fellow billionaires.

Musk, who desperately craves approval, experienced a new wave of right-wing adulation when he became "red-pilled" and began retransmitting right-wing ideas and memes. This echoes the life story of Trump, who found a right-wing fan base on Fox in the early 2010s, at a time when he was long past his 1980s heyday and his TV ratings on The Apprentice were slipping.

One reason Musk is doing this is that he craves right-wing praise. He's absorbed the ideology of Project 2025 and of RAGE (Retire All Government Employees), one of the pet ideas of the tech bros' favorite pseudo-philosopher, Curtis Yarvin. He's doing what J.D. Vance -- a Yarvin fan -- proposed in 2021:

“Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

I've been going to protests and wondering how to get across to ordinary Americans how bad all this is, and I can't quite imagine how to make the point that Republicans are extreme ideologues who have ideas that are strange and bad. One of their strange, bad ideas is that you're "the enemy," and therefore don't belong in government at any level, if you're not a zealous advocate of their other strange, bad ideas. In the sciences, these ideas include vaccine denialism and total denial of the existence of climate change. In other areas, they include a belief that no history of American race relations should ever be taught in schools, that abortion should be illegal under all circumstances, that gun proliferation is awesome, and that regulation of business is communism.

But in order to argue that Trump and Musk want to purge the government of everyone who's not an extremist right-wing weirdo, you'd have to explain to the public that conservatism and the Republican Party aren't normal and haven't been normal for a long time. During the presidential campaign, Tim Walz tried to tell us that Republicans are "weird," but the campaign shut that message down. It could have been an effective entry point for a lot of Americans. As it is, Americans seem to believe that the GOP is the Normal Party and the Democratic Party is the party of ideological weirdos, in part because D.C. Democrats apparently agree with Republicans that both of these things are true.

As a result of all this, the most effective line of attack against Musk is probably that he's cutting too much out of pure greed. But we shouldn't take the other argument, the one about ideological bizarreness, off the table. Maybe we need to start calling these guys weird again.

And we should also point out that Musk is a bully. In The Washington Post, Pranshu Verma reports:

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette works at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group focused on reducing bureaucratic waste. He also happens to be blind. So when he criticized Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service in testimony on Capitol Hill last week, Musk unleashed an online attack Hedtler-Gaudette described as “surreal” in its juvenile bigotry.

First, Musk retweeted a post on X noting that the “blind director of watchdog group funded by George Soros testifies that he does not see widespread evidence of government waste” and added two laughing/crying emojis. The tweet garnered more than 21 million views, and sparked dozens of hateful messages to Hedtler-Gaudette’s account.

“He couldn’t see s--- … perfect excuse for being unable to perform your job,” one poster said. “The dei blind guy can’t see fraud. U can’t make up this garbage,” another wrote. One person even called for posters to surface Hedtler-Gaudette’s bank account.

The episode illustrates how Musk’s unparalleled online reach has given him a powerful tool to attack individuals who criticize DOGE, with one post able to spark hundreds of blistering responses from his followers.

As a society, we simply accept the fact that right-wingers will abuse and threaten their targets, and that online right-wingers with large followings will summon armies to do the abusing and threatening. Musk gets emotional satisfaction from doing this -- this doesn't help make him rich, but because he's a sick fuck, it makes him happy. I wish we could get across to the public how deranged this practice, and how common. (The popular X account Libs of TikTok is entirely devoted to this kind of trageting.) Trump, of course, also enjoys cruelty. But I think the vast majority of Americans have no idea that sadism is a key aspect of the DOGE purge. We need to find a way to get that across.

NORMIES DIDN'T VOTE FOR MARTIAL LAW

A passage from this CNN story left me disheartened yesterday, until I got angry:

[Illinois congressman Sean] Casten, like several of his House Democratic colleagues who spoke to CNN, said he has been surprised and heartened by how many constituents have been calling into tele-town halls, and by the responses he has been hearing: “In three weeks, the public mood has gone from apathy to fear to anger. And I think the next thing in that cycle is action.”

But Casten said that activist leaders have told him and colleagues that they fear protests against Trump might eventually be used as a predicate for declaring martial law. Other House Democrats echoed this privately, and several left-leaning activist group leaders told CNN directly that their own safety concerns for participants have risen since the president’s blanket pardons for January 6 rioters.

Timothy Snyder's words -- "Do not obey in advance" -- are the obvious repsonse to this.

But why not obey in advance when you assume a crackdown is inevitable? Because maybe it isn't inevitable, or isn't inevitable now. Maybe the president isn't prepared to declare martial law yet.

Also, Trump is in power not because his base voted for him -- we know the base will be delighted if there are tanks in the streets -- but because a certain percentage of normies who don't worship him thought he'd make America calm, stable, and prosperous -- no inflation, less crime, fewer border crossers. They didn't vote for Trump out of a desire to live in a militarized dystopia.

Trump might believe that cracking down on protesters will be popular -- and maybe you believe that, too. You might recall the 1970 Gallup poll in which 58% of respondents blamed the student demonstrators themselves for the four deaths at Kent State University on May 4 of that year, while only 11% blamed the Ohio National Guard troops who did the shooting.

But we live in a different America now. Most Americans have some form of skepticism about power and authority. They think the system is rigged, even though they don't agree on who rigged it. It's no longer the case that normie Americans automatically trust the people in power and believe that prostesters are insolent rabble-rousers who deserve whatever they get.

Look at these results from Pew. The right-wing media demonized Black Lives Matter for years after the 2020 George Floyd protests, and yet BLM retained majority support:

The right's message all through the summer and fall of 2020 was that every George Floyd protest was a city-destroying carnival of violence, and that Democrats loved the chaos -- and then Joe Biden got 81 million votes and Democrats took both houses of Congress.

Trump can try to make himself a military dictator, but I'm certain he won't have popular support for that. And how likely is it that he'll have the troops to crack down on everyone everywhere?

And he might not declare martial law. He might be saving martial law for a later date -- my guess is he doesn't want to do it until the 2026 midterms. He might not get the full cooperation of the military, where he hasn't purged every non-MAGA officer yet.

We need to speak up as long as we can. I think the many protests that are taking place today will be large and noisy. That's good. They can't arrest us all, and they don't really seem ready to shoot us yet.