CONFRONTED WITH A VULNERABLE TRUMP, DEMOCRATS JUST KEEP BERATING THEMSELVES

A new Fox poll suggests that President Trump is out of step with public opinion on a range of issues:

Voters have concerns about the recent government spending cuts executed by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), even as they see the need for such an effort.

Most think the national debt is a crisis or major problem, and nearly 6 in 10 feel a great deal or almost all of government spending is "wasteful and inefficient," according to a new Fox News national survey.

Yet a slim 51% majority opposes substantially shrinking the number of government employees, some 56% disapprove of the job the Trump administration is doing identifying and reducing wasteful spending, and another 65% worry that not enough thought and planning has gone into the cuts....

Forty percent approve of the job Elon Musk is doing working with DOGE, while 58% disapprove....

When asked about funding for specific federal programs, majorities think the government should increase funding for Social Security (63%), Medicare and Medicaid (58%), and medical research (53%)....

Voters also have doubts about tariffs, as majorities think the measures will make products that they buy more expensive (69%) and hurt the economy (53%)....

On the overall economy, a growing number of voters think it is in bad shape, many think inflation is out of control, and most believe a recession is at least somewhat likely.

Views of the economy have soured since President Donald Trump began his second term, as 79% of voters give it negative marks....

And yet:

Nearly two months into his second term, President Donald Trump’s approval rating matches his all-time high.

Congressional Republicans also enjoy record ratings, while views of congressional Democrats tumble near an all-time low, according to the latest Fox News Poll.

Trump's numbers aren't great in this poll -- 49% job approval, 51% disapproval. That's approximately where he is in the polling averages (Nate Silver: 47.5% approve, 49.7% disapprove; RealClear: 47.9% approve, 48.8% disapprove). We're not seeing the "massive collapse" that James Carville told us would take place "in less than thirty days." (Carville said that on Friday, February 21, which was 27 days ago.) But Trump's numbers are slipping.

Why aren't they slipping more, while Democrats' numbers are cratering? (The number for congressional Democrats are 30%/66% in the Fox poll, echoing similar numbers in a February Quinnipiac poll.) In part it's because Americans have turned extremely anti-immigrant, and Trump gets high marks (in this and other polls) for his brutal crackdown on immigrants. In part it's because for years Americans have bought the lie that government is massively wasteful, and they believe DOGE is a sincere effort to cut waste, although they're squeamish about how the unlikable Musk is going about it. That seems to be enough to make up for the fact that they're very unhappy with how Trump is handling the economy, which is their #1 issue. (In most recent polls, including the Fox poll, respondents disapprove of Trump's handling of the economy by double-digit margins.)

I think a significant reason that voters haven't fully turned against this presidency is that Trump and Musk keep telling us all what an awesome job they're doing. For millions of Amnericans, that enthusiasm is contagious.

Meanwhile Democrats, whose numbers are abysmal, keep telling voters how much they suck. For instance, yesterday in The New York Times, Michelle Cottle published a column about Jason Crow, a House Democrat from Colorado who's been tasked with recruiting candidates for future races (assuming there'll be any). Here's the lede:

For Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a Democrat who may just hold the key to his party winning back the House in 2026, the path to victory starts with understanding how Americans live their lives, down to the most personal details.

“A lot of communities divide the world between when you shower: before work or after work,” he told me, chowing on a burrito at a corner table in Milly’s Community Cafe in Aurora, Colo., at the heart of his district outside Denver. Many who shower later — working-class folks living paycheck to paycheck — have tuned out Democrats, he said. “They’re not listening to us because they don’t believe that we respect them and see them.”

He’s not wrong. How the Democratic Party wound up in the political wilderness has myriad answers. But one of the clearest and, for many Democrats, the most vexing, is that the party became identified as the champion of cultural elites.

A few paragraphs later, Crow elaborates on his "We suck" message:

“You go into rural areas, you go into red areas, you hang out with the people that I grew up with, and they just straight-up think that a lot of Democrats don’t respect them — that they’re the deplorables,” he said, nodding to Hillary Clinton’s criticism of Donald Trump’s supporters in 2016. “I still hear that word come out of so many places when I’m talking to people, when I’m trying to earn their trust.”

I should note that if Crow's account of these conversations is accurate, then the conventional wisdom is wrong. We're told endlessly that the people doing the most damage to the Democratic Party are progressives who say things like "Latinx" -- but if Crow is right, then the word that did the most damage to Democrats was "deplorables," and it was uttered by the moderate Hillary Clinton.

But why is Crow agreeing to do an interview with a columnist for the most influential mainstream news outlet in America if the point of the interview is to give him an opportunity to bash his own party? Trump is increasingly unpopular, Musk is very unpoular, and instead of talking about them, Crow is punching himself in the face?

Here's what Crow should have said to Cottle:

Is this going to be another story about how awful Democrats are? Because if it is, this interview is over. I'm not doing this if that's your angle. I will talk about the damage Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing to the economy, to programs like Social Security and the Postal Service that Americans need, to the rule of law, and to America's safety in a dangerous world, which these guys are making more dangerous by alienating allies and cozying up to dictators. If you want to talk about all that, let's talk. Otherwise, I'm not interested.

But it's obvious that Crow wanted to talk to Cottle about how much he thinks Democrats suck, just like Gavin Newsom and Rahm Emanuel and John Fetterman. And then they wonder why the party's poll numbers are scraping the bottom.

AN IMPEACHMENT DRIVE WOULD END IN FAILURE. IT MIGHT BE WORTHWHILE ANYWAY.

Last night I had an argument at Bluesky with Gabe Garbowit, a former staffer for Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota. Garbowit is a passionate advocate of impeachment. He wants every Trump critic to work for an impeachment of President Trump, and -- this is where I disagree with him -- he believes an impeachment could end in a Senate conviction.

That is ... not going to happen. An impeachment, which is the congressional equivalent of an indictment, requires a simple majority in the House, but a conviction requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate. That's 67 votes, at a time when the Democratic caucus has 47 members. In 2021, after January 6 -- an insurrectionist riot seen on national television that was intended to overturn the results of a free and fair election -- only 7 Republicans voted to convict Trump, 4 of whom aren't in the Senate anymore. Where are the 20 Republicans who'd vote to convict now? (Actually, the number would probably need to be 21, because we can expect John Fetterman to vote for acquittal.)

But after arguing with Garbowit last night, I looked back and remembered that I'd agreed with him a couple of weeks earlier when he posted this:

I think a push for impeachment could be useful not because it would be likely to remove Trump from office, but because it would frame the issue this way:

* Trump has violated the law and the Constitution, in ways that we can list (and it's a long list).

* There is a constitutional remedy for the lawlessness of Trump and his administration.

What I thought when I read the earlier Garbowit post was: Yes, there should be a well-maintained web page listing all of Trump's impeachable offenses since January 20, and it should be the basis for a House effort to impeach Trump that, ideally, would be sponsored by every Democrat in the House. I know that won't happen, but even if 75 or so House members sponsored the impeachment resolution -- and sponsored another resolution, presumably with an expanded list of impeachable offenses, every time the original resolution fails -- it might become a rallying point for anti-Trump citizens.

It's certainly an idea that ordinary Trump critics have arrived at spontaneously:

Republicans at a GOP town hall in Spokane, Washington, raised the Canadian flag and called on Trump to be impeached. #3E

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— Anonymous (@youranoncentral.bsky.social) March 19, 2025 at 2:51 AM

I'm not sure that this town hall attendee is actually a Republican, but here's what she says:

I've been in Spokane for 39 years from New Jersey. I've never been involved in politics before, but this is getting really scary. So the things that frighten me is the way this insane president talks about Canada as the 51st state, taking Panama by force, and buying Greenland. How does this person qualify as sane? Why is he not being impeached?

This category of Trump crazy talk isn't really impeachable, but voters believe in the idea of impeachment as a check on a lawless president -- and that should be encouraged.

If we talked about this more, there'd be "Impeach Trump" chants at every GOP town hall, at every Democratic town hall, at every anti-Trump political rally. Democratic challengers to Republicans in swing districts would generate energy by saying that they're ready to impeach Trump even if the GOP incumbent isn't. Maybe you doubt that we'll have fair elections in 2026 -- I certainly have my doubts -- but this could have value now. Eventually the Very Smart pundits who act as gatekeepers for what is acceptable in our political conversation will have to start talking about impeachment, the way they're now talking about an anti-Tesla movement that a few weeks ago seemed like the work of a few scruffy malcontents.

Of course, Trump and Republicans would publicize every failed vote in the House -- and they'll all fail as long as Republicans hold the majority. But there's something to what Rebecca Traister wrote last week:

I have been thinking a ton about the rise of the Tea Party, and how starting in 2010, this hyper-conservative faction of the right knocked off a bunch of moderate Republicans and decided to start voting—over and over again—to defund Planned Parenthood. This tactic was absolutely batshit according to most political metrics: first, Planned Parenthood was massively popular; more popular than either party or any presidential candidate. If you had polled Americans and taken your milque-toast cues from the results—as Democrats have been doing since the Clinton administration—you would never have launched an attack against one of the most beloved entities in the country and expected to gain from that. Second, and this was of course part of the strategy, these votes were destined to fail. Obama was in the White House, Democrats controlled the Senate (at least in theory). Yes, that meant that there was no chance that the constant agitating to defund Planned Parenthood was going to work and that Republicans would have to pay the electoral price. But through a Just Win Baby lens, the insistence on continuing to vote on a losing measure, over and over and over again, should have been a sign of weakness. It definitely wasn’t.

In being willing to fight and get beaten on something—even a massively unpopular thing that no one really wanted—the Tea Party was using muscles that Democrats have allowed to atrophy: right wing lawmakers were showing their base, and their opponents, an eagerness to bare their teeth, sustain injury, risk humiliating defeat, and in doing so, present themselves as warriors on behalf of some principle, idea, piece of policy that (to them) was worth losing for.

Continuing to fight for something makes it seem like a reasonable idea. That's how Republicans have moved many unreasonable ideas into the mainstream.

Maybe Democrats should try that.

"ANGRY MODERATE" SOUNDS OKAY TO ME

I often disagree with Ezra Klein and the people he chooses to interview, but I think his latest interviewee -- David Shor, a Democratic data consultant -- makes a few good points. for instance, I'm pleased to see that Shor, who tested ads on voters to determine how much they affected voting intentions, doesn't believe "wokeness" was the major reason Democrats lost in 2024.

From the convseration (Klein is in bold):

If you look at punditry about the election, that if everybody agrees on anything, it’s that the election was a huge verdict on wokeness.

Famously, one of Trump’s higher testing ads was “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” I’m not saying you’re saying diversity, equity and inclusion programs are popular. But I’m not seeing it emerge as a major explanation for 2024 here.

I’m curious how you think both about the election and about the role it’s playing in the postelection narrative.

The “they/them” ad that everybody talks about was a good ad, but in our testing it was a 70th percentile ad.

When you look at Donald Trump’s best-performing ads, it was basically the economy, gas prices, immigration and crime. There has definitely been an overemphasis on D.E.I., wokeness and trans issues.

I assume that when Shor calls this "a good ad," he means that it was effective -- but he doesn't think it was greatly effective. Among his interviewees, it shifted support for Trump less than ads about other subjects, particularly the economy.

Which would suggest that the commenter here who said last week, "Last November, Kamala Harris lost because of her unabashed left-wing positions on social issues" was wrong.

Shor does note that 49% of voters in his surveys thought Harris was more liberal than they were; 39% thought Trump was more conservative. Shor says that there was a similar gap in 2016, but Trump was seen as more ideologically extreme than Joe Biden in 2020. However, note how the numbers change over time:

But in our polling, we would ask: Do you think that Joe Biden is too liberal or too conservative? And we saw that over the course of 2021, as his approval ratings dipped, the perception that he was too liberal also went up.

So Trump seemed ideologically extreme when he was in office, on his way to defeat, and the same thing happened to Biden, on his way to a likely defeat, and an actual defeat for his party. It seems to me that, for many voters, ideologically extreme really means not making my life better.

And while voters imply that they want ideological moderation, Shor's surveys got this result:

Klein says:

On the one hand, we see lines like ["what is needed is a major change and a shock to the system"] outpolling the incremental change. On the other hand, if you look at the new split-ticket ratings for who overperformed in the election, very moderate House Democrats did very well.

There does seem to be a tension there between two forms of political wisdom.... Voters want huge, massive change. And the optimal political strategy is Joe Manchin, Jared Golden, Ruben Gallego or Susan Collins — who are not the people who promise unbelievably shocking change. They are moderates who kind of tack between the parties a little bit and try to represent a center that wants something a little bit less dramatic than either side is offering.

How do you reconcile them?

Shor replies:

... I think what this is really saying is that voters were very angry about the state of things. And what they wanted tonally was someone who acknowledged that anger. Ruben Gallego did a lot of criticism of the status quo and was able to outperform.

So people want an angry moderate.

I think that’s exactly right.

I don't agree with this completely -- I don't think every Democrat needs to tack to the center -- but I would like the Democrats who think the thing to do now is to punch left, people like Gavin Newsom and James Carville, to take it seriously. Progressives and moderates ought to be downplaying their differences on, say, trans rights, while coming together angrily on the need to preserve and strengthen Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and also questioning the way the economic status quo hurts ordinary people, a message that moderate voters clearly agree with.

How hard is it for moderate and progressive Democrats to find common ground when the Trump administration is doing things like this?

The Social Security Administration is considering adding a new anti-fraud step to claims for benefits that the agency acknowledges would force millions of customers to file in person at a field office rather than over the phone, according to an internal memorandum.

The change would create major disruptions to Social Security operations, the memo said, and could cause particular hardship for elderly and disabled Americans who have limited mobility. The proposal also comes as Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service has announced plans to cut thousands of agency jobs and close dozens of regional and local Social Security offices.

Those applying for retirement and disability benefits by phone would be required for the first time to authenticate their identity through an online system that the memo refers to as “internet ID proofing.” But if a claimant can’t verify their identity online, they would have to provide documentation in person at a field office, according to the memo....

The memo estimates that 75,000 to 85,000 customers per week would be diverted to local field offices because many of the elderly and disabled people that Social Security serves would be unable to complete a new identity verification requirement online.

Progressive and moderate Democrats need to form a popular front in opposition to policies like this. In this moment of crisis, they should be focusing on areas of agreement, not disagreement -- or, to put it another way, they should be focusing on areas of shared disagreement with Trump and the GOP. And they should be looking for agreement on policies for the future that make life in America seem less precarious, on the off chance that we have free and fair elections in the future.

WHY I DON'T HATE THE TRUMP VOTER WHOSE WIFE COULD BE DEPORTED

This USA Today story is getting a lot of attention:

He voted for Trump. Now his wife sits in an ICE detention center.

Bradley Bartell and Camila Muñoz had a familiar small-town love story, before they collided with immigration politics.

They met through mutual friends, had a first date at the local steakhouse, married after two years and were saving to buy a house and have kids. Muñoz was already caring for Bartell's now 12-year-old son as her own.

But last month, on their way home to Wisconsin after honeymooning in Puerto Rico, an immigration agent pulled Muñoz aside in the airport.

"Are you an American citizen?" asked the agent. She answered no, she wasn't. She's from Peru. But she and her husband had taken the legal steps so that one day she might get U.S. citizenship.

Millions of Americans, including Bartell, had voted for President Donald Trump's promise to crack down on "criminal illegal immigrants." But eight weeks in, the mass deportation effort has rapidly expanded to include immigrants whose application for legal status in the country is under review.

Muñoz came to the U.S. legally, on a temporary visa. She overstayed that visa at the height of the COVID pandemic. She has applied for a green card. Bartell thought she wouldn't be a Trump target.

"I knew they were cracking down," he said. "I guess I didn’t know how it was going down."

He imagined the administration would target people who snuck over the border and weren't vetted.

But his wife, "they know who she is and where she came from," he said. "They need to get the vetting done and not keep these people locked up. It doesn’t make any sense."

I'm seeing a lot of responses like this:

The wildest part is that the dude is like "I guess I didn't know" and "they need to get the vetting done," and not even renouncing Trump. He disappeared your wife! On your honeymoon! This movement is a scourge that will destroy every last piece of your humanity

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— Hemry, Local Bartender (@bartenderhemry.bsky.social) March 16, 2025 at 6:11 PM

I don't want to defend Bartell, but I think his bewilderment is understandable, and isn't entirely his fault.

In part, Bartell did what a lot of people do: he encountered a con artist named Donald Trump and fell for the con. Trump has spent his life trying to make people believe that his entirely selfish acts -- by which I mean literally everything he does -- will actually be awesome for the people he's conning. Bartell is hardly the first person to be fooled.

But beyond that, I think Bartell accepted the common belief that Republicans are decent people acting in good faith to strengthen America and improve the lives of ordinary people, driven by an ideology that's centrist and commonsensical. Bartell is a white man from Wisconsin. I think the majority of white American heartlanders believe this. (It's not clear whether he shares the equally common belief that Democrats are ideologically extreme weirdos who actively seek to harm the country and make ordinary Americans' lives miserable.)

The belief that Republicans care about America and sincerely want to make the country better is so widespread that even many Democratic politicians fall for it. Here's Chuck Schumer in his recent New York Times Magazine interview:

Look, I talk to a lot of these Republican legislators. I’ve worked with them. Some of them are Trump devotees. But many of them don’t like him, don’t respect him and worry about what he’s doing to our country. Right now he’s so popular they can’t resist him. I mean, so many of them came to me and said: “I don’t think Hegseth should be defense secretary or R.F.K. should be H.H.S. But Trump wants him. He won.” The Republicans would like to have some freedom from Trump, but they won’t until we bring him down in popularity. That happened with Bush in 2005. It happened with Trump in 2017. When it happens, I am hopeful that our Republican colleagues will resume working with us. And I talk to them. One of the places is in the gym. When you’re on that bike in your shorts, panting away next to a Republican, a lot of the inhibitions come off.

Which, of course, recalls this, from 2012:

This has been a Dem pipe dream forever: "I believe that if we're successful in this election, when we're successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there's a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that," Obama said www.huffpost.com/entry/obama-...

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— Joe Sudbay (@joesudbay.bsky.social) March 16, 2025 at 11:14 AM

Republicans and the right-wing media equate Republicanism and Americanism while demonizing Democrats as extreme, which is what you'd expect. Regrettably, many Democrats and liberal commentators do the same thing, fixating on the areas where some Democrats, or those perceived to be allied with Democrats (e.g., academics), might be out of step with ordinary Americans, all while ignoring or downplaying the long-standing extremism of the GOP (on taxes and economic inequality, on guns, on the minimum wage, on abortion, and now, increasingly, on free speech, on the need for a government social safety net, on social services like the post office, and, in the Trump era, on due process and the rule of law). I'm talking to you, Gavin Newsom and John Fetterman, but not just you.

Donald Trump talked like an extremist all through the Biden years, and yet, as Adam Serwer says above, anyone who anticipated the extreme acts that have imprisoned Camila Muñoz and others, based on Trump's own promises to act in an extreme fashion, or who anticipated his other assaults on the rule of law, was deemed to be a hysteric. That's a failure to take Trump seriously, but it's also a failure to take people like Stephen Miller and the authors of Project 2025 seriously.

It should be understood that America's Republican Party isn't analogous to the Tories in Britain or the Christian Democrats in Germany -- it's analogous to Nigel Farage's Reform party in Britain or AfD in Germany. But the GOP is still almost universally discussed as if it's a party with mainstream ideas. That notion trickles down to people like Bradley Bartell, and they vote accordingly.

IF YOU'RE A DEMOCRAT, STOP PUNCHING LEFT

I'm back. Thank you, Yas and Tom, for some urgent posts while I was away.

Right now, I don't understand why any Democrat is talking about anything apart from the need to mount a massive opposition to Trumpism. Here's a news story about an 82-year-old Seattle man named Leonard A. (Ned) Johnson who was declared dead by Social Security, even though he's very much alive, at a time when headlines are reading, "DOGE Has 10 Staffers at Social Security in Hunt for Dead People":

Johnson’s strange trip through the netherworld began in February, when a letter from his bank arrived addressed to his wife, Pam.

“We recently received notification of LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s passing,” it began....

“We received a request from Social Security Administration to return benefits paid to LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account after their passing.”

“There’s nothing you need to do — we’ve deducted the funds from LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account.”

... It itemized how $5,201 had been stricken from their bank account.... That was for payments he’d received in December and January.

Ned found that his February Social Security check hadn’t been paid, and he’s yet to receive his March check, either. His Medicare insurance had been canceled.

Johnson fought back.

He called Social Security two or three times a day for two weeks, with each call put on hold and then eventually disconnected. Finally someone answered and gave him an appointment for March 13. Then he got a call delaying that to March 24. In a huff, he went to the office on the ninth floor of the Henry Jackson Federal Building downtown. It’s one of the buildings proposed to be closed under what the AP called “a frenetic and error-riddled push by Elon Musk’s budget-cutting advisers.”

It was like a Depression-era scene, he said, with a queue 50-deep jockeying for the attentions of two tellers.

Johnson waited four hours, then was told the situation would be resolved. Then:

... on Thursday this past week, the bank called to say it had returned the deducted deposits to his account.

However:

As of Friday morning he hadn’t received February or March’s benefits payments.

This isn't an isolated event. Here's another story, about a 66-year-old Oklahoma retiree whose Social Security benefits were also terminated:

The man, James McCaffrey, who was born to an active-duty U.S. soldier at an overseas Army base, said because of recent comments from DOGE leader Elon Musk, he’s worried his benefits were cut because of his foreign birthplace....

McCaffrey said he started to think something was often when he received an unexpected Medicare bill.

“It said that I needed to pay $740 before the 25th of this month or I was going to lose my Medicare,” McCaffrey said.

That seemed odd, since his Medicare payment is normally deducted from his Social Security check....

“The first person I talked to at the Social Security Administration told me that I was not an American citizen,” McCaffrey said.

His problem was eventually resolved -- but there must be other people going through what Johnson and McCaffrey have experienced who are too frail or too busy to fight.

If you're a Democrat right now, you shouldn't be palling around with Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, the way Gavin Newsom is. You shouldn't be putting the Democratic imprimatur on a medium-term continuing budget resolution, like Chuck Schumer and his group of appeasers. You shouldn't be constantly punching left, like John Fetterman:

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who announced days ago that he would vote for a House-passed funding bill to avoid a government shutdown, said he doesn’t care about firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) harsh criticism of Democratic senators who will vote to advance the controversial bill....

“I hope you can relay how little I care about her views on this,” Fetterman said when asked about Ocasio-Cortez’s comments that Senate Democrats who vote to advance the bill are betraying their Democratic House colleagues.

Maybe Fetterman, who's married to an immigrant, could say something about Fabian Schmidt, a green card holder who was tortured when he flew in to Boston after visiting his family in Luxembourg:

“It was just said that his green card was flagged,” said Astrid Senior, his mother. She said she didn’t hear from her son directly until Tuesday, when she learned he’d been hospitalized.

Senior described Schmidt being “violently interrogated” at Logan Airport for hours, and being stripped naked, put in a cold shower by two officials, and being put back onto a chair.

She said Schmidt told her immigration agents pressured him to give up his green card. She said he was placed on a mat in a bright room with other people at the airport, with little food or water, suffered sleep deprivation, and was denied access to his medication for anxiety and depression.

“He hardly got anything to drink. And then he wasn’t feeling very well and he collapsed,” said Senior.

He was transported by ambulance to Mass General Hospital....

On Tuesday, Schmidt was transported to the regional headquarters for ICE in Burlington, Massachusetts, and then transferred to the Wyatt [detention] facility [in Central Falls, Rhode Island]

Oh, and here's a doctor on an H-1B visa -- you know, the visas Elon Musk and Donald Trump vigorously defended late last year -- who was also detained at Logan Airport:

A Rhode Island doctor who traveled home to Lebanon to visit family was prevented by U.S. Customs officials from reentering the country on Thursday at Boston's Logan International Airport and told she was being deported back to her home country....

Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 35, had been studying and working in the U.S. for the last six years and had been in Rhode Island, working for Brown Medicine in the Division of Kidney Disease & Hypertension, since last July....

... lawyer Thomas S. Brown, who handles immigration and visa issues for doctors affiliated with Brown Medicine ... said there had been some “wrinkle” with her visa application that had been “relatively easy” to work out....

“She was clear to return. She had the visa, she had the right passport. Everything was looking good," he continued.

A federal court order that would have halted the immediate deportation of a Rhode Island doctor was issued Friday evening while the doctor’s departing plane sat on the tarmac at Boston's Logan Airport....

But the plane ultimately took off, carrying Dr. Rasha Alawieh out of the country for reasons still unclear....

Maybe appeaser Democrats, for some reason, believe that voters will like them more if they punch their own party-mates rather than Trump. But we can see clearly that the "Let's not fight" approach is extremely unpopular. A Quinnipiac poll made that obvious a month ago:

Twenty-one percent of voters approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, which is an all-time low.... The Quinnipiac University Poll first asked this question of registered voters in March 2009.

... 40 percent of Democrats approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, while 49 percent disapprove....

Forty percent of voters approve of the way the Republicans in Congress are handling their job, which is a record high, while 52 percent disapprove and 8 percent did not offer an opinion.

And a new NBC poll confirms this:

The Democratic Party has reached an all-time low in popularity in the latest national NBC News poll....

Just over a quarter of registered voters (27%) say they have positive views of the party, which is the party’s lowest positive rating in NBC News polling dating back to 1990. Just 7% say those views are “very” positive....

The slump is partially driven by fed-up Democrats.... And now, in a reversal from Trump’s first term, self-identified Democratic voters say they want their party to hold the line on their positions even if it leads to gridlock, rather than focus on finding areas of compromise with the president.

Almost two-thirds of Democrats, 65%, say they want congressional Democrats to stick to their positions even if that risks sacrificing bipartisan progress, and just 32% want them to make legislative compromises with Trump.

Stand up and fight back -- or quit and let someone else do the fighting that you won't do. Talk about what Trump and his regime are doing now, not about a fellow Democrat who might have said "Latinx" once five years ago.

Free Mahmoud

 

"It's part of a wider strategy to obfuscate MAGA antisemitism and an increasingly fascist regime" Gift link to the piece.

Somebody I respect, I don't actually remember who, was warning us against trying to show that Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian with a graduate degree from Columbia University who was kidnapped from New York over the weekend by ICE, and spirited away to Louisiana for deportation proceedings, was innocent of whatever wrongthink he's suspected of, on the grounds that it doesn't matter. He's clearly not charged with any crime, which would be a problem, but he has a right in the United States of America to hold any thoughts whatever, and associate with whomever he wishes to associate with, whether they're good people or bad, if only because that's what the First Amendment says, and if I were to use Mahmoud Khalil's personal behavior as evidence that he doesn't "deserve" to be deported I'd be suggesting that other people in a similar position might indeed "deserve" it, but the First Amendment isn't about what you deserve. It's about what you are owed, your unalienable rights, even if you are a bad person or have bad friends. It's "the thought we hate", as Justice Holmes said, that needs the most protection of all, because that's where it's easiest to not care about people's rights and let the cops do whatever they want with them.

On the other hand, it isn't just about him.  It's about what ICE and the Trump regime have in mind, what they are trying to accomplish, which isn't really about the thought they hate. That's just an excuse. If you look more closely at the case of Mahmoud Khalil, if you try to figure out what he's accused of and whether or not he might have done something that merits deportation, you get a clearer picture of what they're really up to, and how it threatens all of us.

That there was something very funky about the case was evident right from the beginning:

Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia until this past December, was inside his university-owned apartment Saturday night [March 8] when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered and took him into custody, his attorney, Amy Greer, told The Associated Press.

Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that instead, according to the lawyer. (AP)

How did the ICE agents not know whether the man they were picking up had a student visa or not? (He had finished his masters' degree—in public administration, at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, and of course gotten married, which favored his getting the green card.) Or, given the swiftness with which they changed their story, were they making stuff up?

The Canadian Peril

It turns out that believing six impossible things before breakfast (or reading or hearing them, anyway, and being expected to believe them) is a lot more exhausting than it sounds. Every day we're inundated with can't-possibly-be-real-but-is news, starting with the impossible election result back in November. And amid all this unreality one of the unrealest developments is Trump's desire to annex Canada, which is a) way beyond batshit crazy and b) 100% guaranteed not to happen, but c) maybe it could?

I mean, the messaging is consistent enough to make it clear that Trump really does want this.

Lutnick: "The best way to actually merge the economies of Canada and the United States is for Canada to become our 51st state ... Canada is gonna have to work with us to really integrate their economy, and as the president said, they should consider the amazing advantages of being the 51st state."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 12, 2025 at 6:27 AM

Again, I want to stress that this is absolutely not going to happen. Unless it does. But in the weird and scary world that is Trump's mind--a place where mice get taxpayer-funded sex change operations and 'asylum' means 'insane asylum'--it's...a pretty good deal for Canada! They'd be crazy not to take it!

And the thing that makes this a terrifying possibility (and again: it's actually not a possibility at all, unless it is), that renders the prospect of war with Canada (and just writing the phrase 'war with Canada' makes me feel like I've gone insane) no longer inconceivable (honestly I feel like Vizzini, all the actually-happening shit I think of as inconceivable), is that in that weird scary mind of Trump's there's no such thing as sovereignty. His native language is one in which the word does not exist.

This absence is at the core of Trump's worldview. When he talks about American "ownership" of Greenland*, he thinks of it as like buying a property to develop, and Denmark saying no is just a business negotiation. And maybe we have to play hardball, like you do in business, but really this would all be easier if we could just agree on a price.

And when Putin invaded Ukraine it can't have been a violation of any principle of international relations because there isn't any such principle. It was a hostile takeover, that's all. These things happen in business. It was a smart move! Ukraine has minerals, it's a natural target for acquisition! And the reasonable US response to it is for us to get a piece of the action.

Panama Canal? Why not? It's just reneging on a contract, people in business renege on contracts all the time, especially if they're Trump. Military action in Mexico? Sure they'll squawk, but so what? Big corporations take advantage of smaller companies. That's how the world works.

And...Canada. Wouldn't they be much happier as a subsidiary under the corporate umbrella of the United States? And if they don't think so, well...maybe it has to be a hostile takeover.

To be clear, this is absolutely bonkers. But then so is [gestures broadly and manically]. And the one thing that might give him pause--that every prior president at least recognized as existing even when they violated it, at least had the decency to invent rationalizations for violating it, like Kirk coming up with reasons to violate the Prime Directive--just isn't there.


*Gerardus Mercator has a lot to answer for.

 

Showtime

Hi folks!

This may be more obvious than I think, but this week's votes on a continuing resolution to keep the government going past Friday's debt ceiling deadline until September are a kind of confession of failure on the part of House Republicans, and Speaker Mike Johnson in particular, retreating from the effort to use reconciliation rules to put through the huge package of tax cuts and spending cuts they passed on February 25 for fiscal year 2025. Never mind, said Johnson: Elon and Donald can do it, or something like it.

But Johnson said those cuts would be reserved for legislation to fund the government in fiscal year 2026, which begins on October 1.

"We will actually be able to change the way this is done and incorporate all the extraordinary savings that DOGE is uncovering through fraud, waste and abuse, the other revenues that President Trump is bringing about because of his policies," Johnson told the Fox News program "Sunday Morning Futures."

Although as you know DOGE hasn't uncovered any fraud, waste, or abuse at all that they're able to publicly identify, and their own estimate of how much money they've managed to save so far—$105 billion—would be pretty pathetic as an attack on a $2 trillion deficit, if it were accurate, which it clearly isn't anywhere near. While the revenue that President Trump is "bringing about because of his policies" means tariffs, and it's pretty hard to estimate, what with Trump changing his mind up to three or four times in a given day (just announced he's doubling the tariffs on steel and aluminum he's landing on Canada on Wednesday, from 25% to 50%), but the best guesses seem to make it around $120 billion a year, which also isn't much, though the rise in consumer prices it will bring on, focused on the areas of electronics and clothing, motor vehicles and food, will cost us around $1600-$2000 a year per household. Not only a tax on Americans, whatever Trump may imagine, but a very regressive tax, mostly felt by those with lower incomes (the lower your income, the higher the proportion of it that you end up spending on stuff like food and clothing, or really anything).

Not to mention the effect of the retaliatory tariffs other countries are imposing on us, which will have a big effect on farmers (as Trump tariffs did in 2018-19, when they had to be massively bailed out and still haven't recovered). They will also hit workers in the manufacturing and energy sectors (where Trump has his "working-class base" to the extent he really has one) hard.

DOGE cuts will also cost a bunch of money, most notably those at the Internal Revenue Service, already seriously weakened by years of attacks from Republican Congresses:

Unlike with other federal agencies, cutting the IRS means the government collects less money and finds fewer tax abuses. Economic studies have shown that for every dollar spent by the IRS, the agency returns between $5 and $12, depending on how much income the taxpayer declared. A 2024 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the IRS found savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that “would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling,” in the words of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

A good example of where spending saves money in the long run by preventing harm would be the freezing of funds to combat wildfires, which is literally going to cause people's houses to burn down, but it's far from the only one. The money that the US spends on scientific research in health has a direct economic impact—$40 billion spent by the NIH immediately generates $94.18 billion in economic activity—before you even start considering the value of the lives saved and made more productive by medical progress. Even the exrtremely inexpensive USAID programs, especially the health and food initiatives (which also benefit US farmers and many thousands of nonprofit as well as for-profit contractors), have a dividend in terms of international good will which contributes to cooperation in questions of security and trade relations, which is why the Chinese work so hard to compete with us in their Belt and Road initiative. Building and repairing transportation infrastructure, improving energy efficiency and use of renewable fuels, subsidizing childcare and eldercare, all this stuff isn't merely virtuous: it pays off, big time, for the country as a whole, though perhaps not personally for Trump and Musk (as in, the encouragement of cheaper EVs makes competition for Tesla).

SEE YOU SOON (Also: More Gavin Newsom News)

I'm doing some traveling this week, so I won't be posting for a few days. I'll be back on Sunday. While I'm away, there should be some guest posts (thanks, Yas and Tom), so stop by.

I'll leave you with this news about Gavin Newsom:

1. The second guest on California Governor Gavin Newsom’s new podcast is conservative radio host Michael Savage. Savage is a longtime family friend. Part 1 of 2

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— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yasharali.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 9:42 PM

Let me remind you that even by the standards of Limbaugh-era talk radio, Savage is an extraordinary hatemonger. Bill Moyers had his number more than twenty years ago.

Well, let’s look at the record: Michael Savage is known to speak on the air of non-white countries as — you may want to cover your children’s eyes — as “turd world nations.”

Open your door to immigrants, he has said, and “the next thing you know they are defecating on your country and breeding out of control.” He has said that while Latinos, in particular, “breed like rabbits” and whites don’t, homosexuals “are part of the grand plan to cut down on the white race.”

When student volunteers distributed food to San Francisco’s homeless, Mr. Savage said “the girls can go in and maybe get raped because they seem to like the excitement of it. There’s always the thrill and possibility they’ll be raped in a dumpster while giving out a turkey sandwich.”

When the Million Mom March called for gun control, Mr. Savage said children killed by guns “are not kids, they’re ghetto slime.”

... Michael Savage says: “We need racist stereotypes right now of our enemy in order to encourage our warriors to kill the enemy.”

Gavin Newsom is dead to me.

FASCISM COMES, AND NOT JUST TO MAHMOUD KHALIL

Mahmoud Khalil hasn't just been arrested. He's been disappeared:

UPDATE—Mahmoud's attorney says they do NOT know where he is. They were first told he was sent to an ICE facility in Elizabeth, NJ. But when his 8-month-pregnant wife tried to visit him, she was told he's not there. They've received reports he may be sent as far away as Louisiana.

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— Prem Thakker ツ (@premthakker.bsky.social) March 9, 2025 at 3:58 PM

America used to have laws. As The New York Times reports, they're no longer in effect:

The immigration agents who detained Mr. Khalil told him his student visa had been revoked, Ms. Greer said, even though he does not currently hold such a visa. Revoking a green card is quite rare, said Elora Mukherjee, the director of the immigrants’ rights clinic at Columbia Law School, and in a vast majority of cases where it does happen, the holder has been accused and convicted of criminal offenses, she said.

If the government was to revoke Mr. Khalil’s green card “in retaliation for his public speech, that is prohibited by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” Ms. Mukherjee said....

Jodi Ziesemer, the director of the immigrant protection unit at the New York Legal Assistance Group, said the revocation process is typically lengthy. A green card holder can be detained, but not deported, during that process, she said.

Well, clearly a green card holder can be treated any way the Trump regime wants him treated, because the Trumpists are the law now.

Question for the one-joke class clowns in comments (you know who you are): If Democrats are no better than Republicans when they're in office, why does it seem obvious that Republicans are much worse, particularly in this area? Do you honestly believe that President Harris would have unilaterally suspended every immigration law on the books in the United States that she didn't like? Or every law, period?

It's not just Khalil. Here are a couple of other immigration/travel horror stories I'm seeing. Hat tip to Joshua Holland for the first one:

A second German tourist is being held in a detention centre after having her Visa revoked by the U.S. It’s the same detention centre holding Jessica Brösche, the German tattoo artist who spent 8 days in solitary. She’s been held for 6 weeks. The U.S. is not a safe place to travel anymore

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— Kelly (@broadwaybabyto.bsky.social) March 9, 2025 at 4:59 PM

From a translated version of the story, which is from the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger:

Lucas Sielaff, a 25-year-old German, is being held in deportation custody at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in California. It is the same facility where the German tattoo artist Jessica Brösche is being held. Both had their entry permits for the USA (ESTA) revoked at the same Mexican land border.

Jessica Brösche has been in prison for almost six weeks. Lucas Sielaff for two....

Lennon Tyler speaks quickly but firmly into her phone. "Lucas was arrested on February 18th at the border near San Ysidro," she says. Tyler lives in Las Vegas, her partner in Bad Bibra, Germany, near Erfurt. He was visiting his fiancée and drove with her and her dog to Mexico for a visit to the vet.

On the way back, according to his fiancée, the border officials asked him where he lived. Actually, a standard question. But: "There was a misunderstanding. He answered that he lived in Las Vegas. I corrected him immediately. His English isn't very good, so he thought it was about where he wanted to go. He doesn't live in the States."

An officer from the US Customs and Border Protection then led him into a room. "They didn't let me see him or help him with the language. They didn't allow him to have another translator either," says Lennon Tyler....

Jeff Joseph, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, described Brösche's case to CNN as "quite unusual." Normally, travelers who enter the United States with an ESTA and are rejected would withdraw their application and return directly to their home country, rather than being deported or remaining in custody for a longer period. Brösche's extended stay in Otay Mesa was "extremely worrying."

A screewnwriter posted this, presumably in reference to Brösche:

Tourists in the US being held indefinitely for carrying work equipment (tattooing equipment, in one case)... How long before directors and screenwriters visiting L.A. for meetings - traditionally done on an ESTA tourist visa - start being held incommunicado for months for traveling with a laptop?

— Debbie Moon (@debbiemoon.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 6:23 AM

And why is this happening? Was this person caught at the border with subversive-looking art supplies?

Becky Burke is known in the British comics scene as writer/artist creator R.E. Burke.... She had been taking a four-month backpacking trip across North America until she was detained by I.C.E eleven days ago....

Her father Paul Burke posts to social media, under the title Urgent Appeal: Help Bring Becky Home

"Our daughter Becky, a 28-year-old British tourist, has been caught up in the recent immigration crackdown in the US. What was meant to be a life-changing four-month backpacking trip across North America has turned into a nightmare. Becky has now been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for over ten days, with no clear timeline for her release.

"On February 26th, Becky attempted to cross the Canadian border for the next leg of her journey. Unfortunately, due to an incorrect visa, she was denied entry into Canada. When she tried to return to the US, she was refused re-entry and classified as an "illegal alien." Despite being a tourist with no criminal record, she was handcuffed and taken to a detention facility in Tacoma, Washington...."

Here's a photo of the dangerous radical:

I'm looking at her work. It's about friendship, relationships, mental health issues, period pain, sourdough bread.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by R. E. Burke (@r.e.burke)

Maybe she once crashed on the floor of some Pacific Northwest anarchist. Or maybe she just looked radical.

And maybe I'm uninformed and this always happened to a certain percentage of people who crossed our borders. But what's happening now seems worse.

In any case, the treatment of Mahmoud Khalil is indefensible -- and Jamelle Bouie was right when he posted a Bluesky account of what's happening to Khalil:

re the previous repost: if they can disappear permanent residents they can disappear citizens

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) March 9, 2025 at 6:25 PM

And they will. You know they think they have the right.

1: DAMAGE YOUR OWN PARTY'S BRAND. 2: ???? 3: GET ELECTED.

The recent podcast chat between Gavin Newsom and Charlie Kirk was worse than you knew, reports Natasha Lennard of The Intercept (free to read here). I'm sure you knew about this:

Newsom told Kirk that he finds the participation of trans women in sports to be “deeply unfair.” “I completely agree with you on that,” he told Kirk, a man who called trans people a “throbbing middle finger to god” and “an abomination.”

But also:

Newsom showered Kirk with affirmation and only the most meagre of pushbacks; one listener counted that the governor used some variation of the word “appreciate” 52 times in reference to Kirk’s views. Newsom denigrated the use of gender pronouns in introductions, mocked the term “Latinx,” and decried calls to defund the police as “lunacy.” In a particularly disturbing segment, the governor effectively disavowed Democratic support for trans people accessing gender-affirming health care in prisons — a constitutionally protected right under the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Newsom described as “brilliant” the popular Trump campaign ads with the tagline “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” One of the ads featured a clip of former Vice President Kamala Harris, when she was California attorney general, voicing support for adhering to a law ensuring medically necessary gender-affirming care be provided for trans people in prison.

“Issues of people who are incarcerated getting taxpayer-funded gender reassignment … that is a 90/10 issue,” he said, referencing the perceived unpopularity of the issue with voters. The “90/10” number appears to have been pulled from thin air; I can’t find it anywhere.

Even if you agree with some (or all) of the things Newsom is saying, understand this is not merely a "Sister Souljah moment," or a series of Sister Souljah moments. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton did attack a rapper who had said, "if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?" He did distinguish himself from death-penalty opponents in his party by presiding over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a man who'd been left so mentally damaged by a self-inflicted gunshot wound that he had no idea his last meal was his last meal.

The difference is that Clinton also ran as an opponent of the Republican status quo. He strongly denounced the sitting president, George H.W. Bush, and presented himself as a change agent. What we're getting these days from Democratic Democrat-bashers like Newsom (and John Fetterman and others) is predominantly Democrat-bashing. The Republican-bashing is secondary or nonexistent.

Maybe these politicians are correct when they conclude that attacking their own party will make them more popular than other party members. But if you're five points more popular than the rest of your party but your party's numbers are extremely low -- and you're a big part of the reason that they're low -- are you sure you're getting a net gain?

Democrat-bashing is all the rage among people who claim to oppose Republicans. This, from a recent New Yorker daily newsletter, is typical:

Democrats are afraid of being proud to be Democrats. Democrats might attack Donald Trump or Elon Musk, but they're afraid to criticize the Republican Party as a whole, and they preface attacks on this monumentally unfit and depraved chief executive with We're happy to work with the president on areas of agreement. Democrats praise any Republican who deviates from Republican orthodoxy (Liz Cheney, for instance), but rarely praise members of their own party, and rarely make the simple assertion that Democratic ideas and policies are better than Republican ideas and policies, which seems to be the least you should expect from a political party.

When Republicans bash Democrats every day and Democrats agree with them the party deserves bashing, are results like those seen in a mid-February Quinnipiac poll any surprise?

57% of registered voters have an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party, the highest percentage since Quinnipiac started asking the question in 2008....

43% of voters have a favorable opinion of the Republican Party, the highest since 2008.

Remember that Republicans didn't wash off the stink of George W. Bush (lowest approval rating: 25%) by bashing themselves. They did it by attacking Barack Obama and asserting the superiority of their own ideas via the Tea Party.

In the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump bashed Jeb Bush and his other primary opponents, but not as much as he bashed Hillary Clinton. You knew who his main enemy was. You knew in the 2024 campaign that his main enemies were Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

That's the approach Democrats have to take: Republicans are the enemy, not fellow Democrats. Obviously! Maybe it would be effective to stir a 10% Sister Souljah solution into the batter. But 90% Sister Souljah is what they seem to be offering, and that's a recipe for failure.

TRUMP WANTS US TO BELIEVE HE'S REINING MUSK IN, WHETHER OR NOT IT'S TRUE

Imagine you were a poll-obsessed Donald Trump, and you were concerned that Elon Musk's weak popularity numbers risked dragging you down. Now imagine that you also wanted Musk to stay in the administration and continue doing what he's been doing -- because you have a schoolboy crush on his money and dictatorial brutality, and because he's done the dirty work you want done, which frees you up to play a lot of golf -- but you also tell yourself every day, I'm the king -- me, not Elon. Elon reports to me. What would you do?

One thing you might do is ask your aides to spoon-feed a story to the media conveying the impression that you've reined Musk in. The story might read something like this Politico report:

President Donald Trump convened his Cabinet in person on Thursday to deliver a message: You’re in charge of your departments, not Elon Musk.

According to two administration officials, Trump told top members of his administration that Musk was empowered to make recommendations to the departments but not to issue unilateral decisions on staffing and policy. Musk was also in the room.

Maybe you'd feed some juicy details -- real or exaggerated -- to Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman at the Times. Details like this:

Marco Rubio was incensed. Here he was in the Cabinet Room of the White House, the secretary of state, seated beside the president and listening to a litany of attacks from the richest man in the world....

You have fired “nobody,” Mr. Musk told Mr. Rubio, then scornfully added that perhaps the only person he had fired was a staff member from Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency....

Mr. Musk was not being truthful, Mr. Rubio said. What about the more than 1,500 State Department officials who took early retirement in buyouts? Didn’t they count as layoffs? ...

Mr. Musk was unimpressed. He told Mr. Rubio he was “good on TV,” with the clear subtext being that he was not good for much else. Throughout all of this, the president sat back in his chair, arms folded, as if he were watching a tennis match.

After the argument dragged on for an uncomfortable time, Mr. Trump finally intervened to defend Mr. Rubio as doing a “great job.”

Or this, about a Musk exchange with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy:

Literally the dumbest people in the world are in charge of decisions like this. pic.twitter.com/T6jOrUqDJt

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) March 7, 2025

All of it leading to this conclusion:

The meeting was a potential turning point after the frenetic first weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term. It yielded the first significant indication that Mr. Trump was willing to put some limits on Mr. Musk....

The president made clear he still supported the mission of the Musk initiative. But now was the time, he said, to be a bit more refined in its approach.

From now on, he said, the secretaries would be in charge; the Musk team would only advise.

Here's how you know that Trump wanted this out: When the story broke, he didn't say, "The fake news is lying again." He and his subordinates didn't offer an alternate narrative. Instead, he backed up the reporting. From Politico:

Trump posted about the meeting on Truth Social after this story posted, promising to hold similar meetings every two weeks.

“As the Secretaries learn about, and understand, the people working for the various Departments, they can be very precise as to who will remain, and who will go,” he wrote. “We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’ The combination of them, Elon, DOGE, and other great people will be able to do things at a historic level.”

The president later told reporters he wants Cabinet members to “keep all the people you want, everybody that you need.”

But he also said he wanted cuts, and that Musk would remain a power center: “If they can cut, it’s better. And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.”

So Musk still has the last word, according to Trump. If he were planning to cut Musk loose, he wouldn't have said this.

Maybe The Atlantic's Jonathan Lemire is right to say that "Trump’s first public effort to put a leash on Musk appears to mark the end of DOGE’s opening chapter, and a potential early turning point in Trump’s new administration." But I doubt it.

Trump probably believes that he's fully in charge and Musk should respond to a public humiliation the way Trump subordinates generally do, by sitting and taking it.

Or it's conceivable that both Trump and Musk realize it's useful for Trump to suggest that Musk is being reined in. I don't think that's the case -- I can't imagine that Musk is happy with reports that Trump seemed to side with other people rather than him. But for all his arrogance, Musk might accept a certain degree of dominance from Trump, who, as I've pointed out, is the same age as his father. Musk does sometimes give the impression that he likes thinking of Trump as "Daddy." And I think Musk wants to keep doing this work, which (understandably) makes him feel extremely powerful, and gives the him an opportunity to hurt people who, in his opinion, are lesser beings who shouldn't be surviving and breeding.

A follow-up story at Politico tells us that federal workers don't believe anything's changed:

None of the more than a dozen federal workers POLITICO spoke to reported being told by their supervisors or labor unions that anything had changed directly due to Trump’s Cabinet meeting and subsequent comments.

“I don’t really expect them to necessarily start implementing what they say they will,” said David Casserly, an employee at the Department of Labor who said he was speaking in a personal capacity. “I’ll believe it when I see it.” ...

“It’s total bullshit. I don’t know what else to say,” quipped a second Labor Department employee. “I don’t trust a word of it,” said a third federal worker, who described it as Trump “attempting to insulate himself a bit from the court losses and the shift in public opinion, but I don’t think it will change anything.” ...

“Zero optimism and zero trust,” said one Agriculture Department employee.

They're right. Nothing will change in a meaningful way. Trump is an ignorant Fox News viewer who, like all ignorant Fox viewers, genuinely believes that Musk is primarily cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. (Trump includes alleged vestiges of "wokeness" in these categories.) I think Trump truly believes that Musk and his team are operating in good faith and that the cuts Cabinet appointees have complained about are unfortunate errors.

Trump thinks this media leak will recalibrate the coverage, and that's all he wants. He doesn't want the process to change in any meaningful way. He just wants the public (and his Cabinet secretaries) to stop grumbling about it.

THE COWARDICE OF QUISLING DEMOCRATS IS ACTING LIKE A MUTE BUTTON FOR GENUINE RANK-AND-FILE RAGE

Today I made the mistake of reading the New York Times newsletter known as "The Morning." Under the headline "The New Resistance," Lisa Lerer writes:

How should Democrats resist Trump this time around? The answer isn’t clear. Eight years ago, liberal voters flooded the streets, week after week, to protest Trump’s actions on immigration, climate change and women’s rights. This time, they’re much quieter and far less unified. They lack a galvanizing leader. They’re divided over ideology, strategy and tactics. Elected Democrats aren’t sure how to battle a president whom more voters wanted than didn’t. And many of their supporters are demoralized and resigned, choosing to tune out the news altogether.

Let me start with some grade-school math: It's not true that Trump is "a president whom more voters wanted than didn’t." He won the two-party vote, but when all candidates are included, he won only 49.8% of the overall vote. In fact, more voters wanted a candidate other than Trump.

But that's a minor point. What's important is that many Trump opponents are active, engaged, and furious. People who were tuning out the news in late November are demonstrating now. The protests may be small, but they're numerous -- not just "week after week" but day after day. Many are happening in red states, as you'll see a minute or so into this video:



There's been so much anger at town halls hosted by Republican memnbers of Congress that the party is telling its members not to host town halls anymore.

You might argue that the people who attend these demonstrations and town halls are an unrepresentative subset of the anti-Trump electorate -- just a bunch of rabble-rousing lefties. But in the comments sections of Lerer's own paper, where the remarks are often more centrist than leftist, I'm seeing a rising sense of disgust and alarm. Here are some of the most recommended comments in response to a recent (and fairly strong) anti-Trump column by Tom Friedman:

So far, the Trump administration has been busy implementing Project 2025, which is a plan to dismantle democratic institutions. That seems like something our enemies would like to do.

****

There are three reasons why [Trump] might be doing this:
1. He's a Russian asset.
2. He's gaming the market so that he and his oligarchs can get a huge payback when the market crashes.
3. He wants the economy to crash so he can implement emergency powers and then Martial Law.

****

Trump is dismantling this country piece by piece. The ultimate goal is an authoritarian state with sham elections or none at all. With all the changes being made, it would not surprise me if we don't even get a voice at the midterms.

****

At the current rate of dismantlement I doubt the federal government will be able to properly function within a year. Most Americans take public services for granted, blissfully unaware that these services are the foundation of their society. It might take a while, but all Americans will come to the realization that they've been sold out by the Trump/Musk regime.

You might think that Lerer and her paper are trying to manufacture consent by telling us that there's no dissent to see here and we should just move along. But you don't have to be part of America's mainstream media to think Americans are accepting all of this quietly. Here's what a Marxist professor from Belfast says:

But ordinary liberals aren't "in a fugue state, refusing to believe the arc of progress is bending against them." We know what's happening. We're frightened, horrified, and furious.

The people who are "in a fugue state, refusing to believe the arc of progress is bending against them" are Democratic officeholders, including the ten Democrats who voted with Republicans to censure Congressman Al Green for his protest at President Trump's speech Tuesday night, as well as the party's leaders in the House:

Leadership is "very unhappy" with those who went beyond traditional protest tactics like outfit coordination and refusal to clap, a senior House Democrat told Axios.

They're people like California governor Gavin Newsom, who just threw trans people under the bus on his new podcast, speaking to his first guest, right-wing propagandist Charlie Kirk.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said it’s “deeply unfair” for transgender girls and women to compete in female sports, breaking with fellow Democrats who have generally supported allowing trans student athletes to play on school sports teams that align with their gender identities.

When Democratic officeholders display this kind of cowardice, they aren't just perceived as speaking for themselves -- they're seen as speaking for us. When they won't fight, observers think that we don't want to fight.

When Democratic politicians try to align themselves with the GOP and Trumpism, does it ever occur to them that they could be trying to board a sinking ship? Trump is breaking even in the polls, but much of his agenda is very unpopular. Elon Musk's numbers are terrible. Consumer confidence is down. The stock market is struggling. And this is before the likely closures of post offices, interruptions of Social Security payments, removal of special-needs kids from public schools due to lack of federal funding and mandates, and other likely societal upheavals. If you're Gavin Newsom or a Democrat who voted to censure Al Green, wouldn't you look at this and think that maybe you'll be better off in a couple of years having a reputation as an unswerving opponent of Trump, the way long-time opponents of the Iraq War looked a lot better by 2008 than those who said, "Oops, I made a mistake when I supported the war"?

Obviously, there might not be real elections in the future, in which case only Republicans will be allowed to wield power in D.C. for the foreseeable future. But if that happens, Gavin Newsom will probably be no more welcome in the regime's inner circle than Al, Green. So where's the potential advantage?

If you're assuming we'll have free elections in the future, at least hedge your bets. At least recognize that the wheels are falling off the Trump/Musk bus, and voters (if we still have voting) might be eager to reject Trumpism resoundingly.

But that's not what Democratic officeholders are thinking. And as a result, it seems as if the rest of us are thinking that too.