THE ATOMIZATION OF THE RESISTANCE

I won't be posting tomorrow because I've made plans to go to D.C. for a rally at the Washington Monument. When I made these plans -- which, for various reasons, I can't change -- I hoped that this would be the biggest anti-Trump demonstration in Washington so far. Sadly, the demonstration is unlikely to be "the big one," simply because there'll be hundreds of other demonstrations taking place simultaneously all over the country, including many right here in the New York metro area. Around here, there's going to be a rally in midtown Manhattan, another rally uptown at Columbia University, and yet another rally on Staten Island. A bit upstate and on Long Island, there'll be rallies in Mamaroneck, Hastings-on-Hudson, Mineola, Nanuet, Mount Kisco, and Stony Point. In New Jersey, there'll be rallies in Weehauken, Jersey City, Teaneck, Upper Montclair, Bloomfield, Glen Ridge, Maplewood, West Caldwell, Metuchen, Morristown, Red Bank, and Piscataway. There'll be a rally in Greenwich, Connecticut, and also in Stamford. And that's an incomplete list.

Is this a good idea?

On January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump's first inauguration, the Women's March in D.C. drew close to half a million people. There was also a very large rally in Manhattan. I know there were smaller rallies all over the country, but the protests weren't localized to this extent. I'm sure there weren't three rallies in New York City alone.

This bothers me because the media has spent much of its time since Election Day proclaiming that "the resistance" seems like a spent force, and one of its key metrics is the fact that there hasn't been a large national protest like the Women's March.

Discontent at congressional town halls and protests at Tesla dealerships -- which, obviously, are localized and relatively small -- has led journalists to conclude that there's some life in the resistance, as have the results of recent off-cycle elections, the crowds at rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Coertez, and even the response to Cory Booker's round-the-clock speech on the Senate floor. But the media still argues that the country is rallying around Trump now -- or at least was rallying around him until the "Liberation Day" tariffs -- in a way that it didn't during his first term. The Women's March impressed the media. Also, it helped plant the seeds for electoral victories in 2018 and 2020.

We need another big, undeniable, centralized protest. But we're in an atomized world now. When a major media outlet bends the knee to Trump, the response online is "Cancel your subscription to The Washington Post/Los Angeles Times/New York Times and subscribe to my one-person Substack instead." Many of these are great, but you need to subscribe to dozens of them to replace what you got from a legacy media outlet. It's as if we've all made a virtue of the isolation we experienced in 2020.

We need to break out of that. We need to band together -- and to be seen banding together -- to fight Trump.

ONE REASON WE'RE IN THIS MESS: THE RICH DON'T NEED A SURVIVAL INSTINCT

President Trump's tariffs are a disaster -- ask Paul Krugman, ask The Economist, ask U.S. stock markets, which are experiencing a huge selloff -- but they're a disaster that the world of business appearently didn't foresee:

Mike the Mad Biologist is right:

We know what JPMorgan's analysts believed: Trump is a fine fellow, and he's one of us -- he'd never do anything that would seriously hurt our interests. We were fine in his first term, so why worry now?

The signs were there, but they didn't think they needed to take them seriously.

They thought the "guardrails" would hold the way they (more or less) did in his first term -- even though the "guardrails" were mostly Cabinet members and others in his administration who challenged or thwarted his worst instincts, and he was making it clear that he planned to stock his second administration with people who would never challenge him. Also, he was afilliating himself with Project 2025, which had a stated goal of firing apolitical career government bureaucrats and replacing them with loyalists.

All the signs were there. Millions of ordinary people didn't put them all together and see the risks inherent in a second Trump presidency -- although, as Mike says above, some of us did -- but we're talking about analysts whose job it is to understand all information relevant to their task of protecting and increasing their clients' money. Why didn't they realize this was a possibility?

In part I think it's because, in the post-Reagan era, we've made it too goddamn easy for the rich to stay rich. They don't need to be on alert for signs of peril because they do okay even under the worst circumstances, and they often do extremely well even if they're only half-trying. Look at the 2008 crash and the Great Recession that followed -- the government made certain that most of them barely got their hair mussed, and many big firms came out richer.

Ordinary people who saw the warning signs knew that Trump could do great damage in their own lives, or in the lives of people they cared about. Rich people who missed the warning signs assumed they'd be fine no matter what, because they always are. That helps explain how we got into this mess.

NOW WHO'S LIVING IN AN IDEOLOGICAL BUBBLE?

Susan Crawford, the Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate who was endorsed by Democrats, beat the Republican Party's preferred candidate, Brad Schimel, by 10 points yesterday. The biggest loser in this race is, of course, Elon Musk.

Musk and groups he backed, including his America PAC, funneled $20 million into the election through splashy and controversial tactics, including doling out $1 million checks to Republican voters and paying people $100 each to sign a petition to quell “activist” judges.

In case you didn't notice, two of those million-dollar winners had links to the Republican Party, though I'm sure most voters didn't notice.

... Nicholas Jacobs ... identifies himself as the chair of the Wisconsin College Republicans....

[Ekaterina] Diestler is a graphic designer, according to LinkedIn, for a packaging company in the Green Bay area called Belmark Inc — which has strong ties to major Republican donors. Coupled with Jacobs’ affiliation, it raises questions about how the “spokespeople” for [Musk's] America PAC were selected.

Musk made it personal, showing up in the state to dispense checks and speak on Schimel's behalf. Republicans thought that was an awesome idea:

“I’m honestly shocked. I thought we had it in the bag,” said Pam Van Handel, chair of the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s Outagamie County. “I thought [Musk] was going to be an asset for this race. People love Trump, but maybe they don’t love everybody he supports. Maybe I have blinders on.”

Rohn Bishop, the mayor of Waupun, Wisconsin, and former chair of the Republican Party of Fond du Lac County, admitted that the race “throws up a bunch of warning signs for the midterm election.”

“I thought maybe Elon coming could turn these people to go out and vote,” Bishop said. Instead, he added, “I think [Musk] helped get out voters in that he may have turned out more voters against [Schimel].”

Democrats are regularly accused of being in an ideological bubble that prevents us from understanding people with different points of view, but who's in a bubble now? Anyone who can read a poll can see that Musk is unpopular. His unpopularity is made clear in survey after survey. Just yesterday, a national poll released by Marquette Law School delivered these results:

Approval of how Elon Musk is handling his work in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) stands at 41%, with disapproval at 58%. Musk’s personal favorability is 38%, with 60% unfavorable.

Imagine wanting a guy who's at 38%/60% approval to be your top campaign surrogate, just because your party likes him. That's bubble thinking.

But I suspect that Musk won't stop. I'm sure he'll continue donating heavily to Republican candidates. My guess is that he'll also keep giving away million-dollar checks and paying people to sign petitions wherever he thinks he can get away with it, though I imagine he'll ask right-wing celebrities (Kid Rock? Riley Gaines?) to hand out the checks on his behalf.

Democrats should seize the moment and introduce bills in Congress and in all fifty state legislatures banning Musk-style electoral bribes. In blue states, they should pass these laws quickly and with great fanfare. If Elise Stefanik were still planning to leave her upstate New York House seat, do you think Musk would have hesitated to conduct a similar giveaway in her district? That's why these bills are worth passing in blue America. Everywhere else, they'd be messaging bills. Democrats can draw attention to GOP opposition, saying, Why do Republicans support bribery in our elections?

They should do this now in case Musk lowers his profile by leaving the government. Politico now reports that the president is telling "his inner circle, including members of his Cabinet, that Elon Musk will be stepping back in the coming weeks from his current role." (We'll see if that's true.)

Democrats lost both House races in Florida yesterday, but the results were encouraging:

In the state’s conservative Sixth District, State Senator Randy Fine, a Republican, had won by 14 percentage points as of early Wednesday. In November, when turnout was much higher, then-Representative Michael Waltz — now the embattled national security adviser — won the same seat by more than 30 points.

And in the First District, a Democratic House candidate appeared to have won a county that Mr. Trump had carried last fall by 19 percentage points, though she lost the seat overall.

Michel Nevin writes:

We shouldn't assume that we'll have real elections in 2026, but if we do, the supposedly comatose Democratic Party could do well.

And that makes sense. Why are Democratic voters disgusted with the Democratic Party? Because we feel that Democrats won't fight. But in election campaigns, Democrats challenge Republican ideas and promise to fight for Democratic ideas. We want Democrats to be like that all the time. But if they're like that in campaigns, and we believe they're serious about fighting after they're elected, we'll vote for them.

After that, though, they need to deliver. They could do more now: Immediately following Cory Booker's 25-hour speech on the floor of the Senate, Democrats granted unanimous consent for the confirmation of Trump appointee Matthew Whitaker as ambassador to NATO. Even if, in this case, Whitaker's approval was inevitable, they shouldn't have stopped fighting. Why be considerate of Republicans who are enabling totalitarianism?

"WE ARE GOD IN HERE"

Most critiques of the Trump administration share a common narrative: Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dismantling critical parts of the government so they can give tax breaks to themselves and their rich friends. But what's actually happening seems much stranger.

Hamilton Nolan points out that, in fact, the policies of Donald Trump are quite like to make rich people poorer.

Generally speaking, throughout the history of modern America, the government has worked on behalf of business.... The Democratic Party tends to lean a little more towards shared prosperity and regulation, and the Republican Party tends to lean more towards raw unfettered capitalism, but both have operated in service of the basic mandate of “protect and increase America’s wealth.” ...

Trump is doing something different: He is making decisions that will clearly harm the American economy, in both the short and long term. He is breaking things that are useful to business interests.

For instance, he's destroying the rule of law. Why?

The rule of law is a necessary ingredient for long term growth of businesses. Love “free” markets? Then you love the rule of law: it offers predictability of rules, and predictable enforcement of those rules. It is the thing that allows businesses to make long term investments and sign contracts and trust that those things will be governed by a transparent set of rules that all sides of the transaction understand.... The Trump administration is not just weakening the rule of law—it is replacing it with gangsterism, which is to say, the opposite of the rule of law.... The world’s biggest and most complex corporations have been reduced to paying bribes in order to directly beg the president for their priorities, at the club the president owns. Trump is trying to make the Fed a part of his own political operation, endangering financial markets for short term political gain. And he is seriously flirting with defying federal courts and plunging the nation into a constitutional crisis that it may not recover from any time soon....

... Trump ... is busy replacing the world’s most sophisticated corporate legal regime with a system in which you must grovel at his toes in a ridiculous red hat in order to get anything done.

And as for tariffs:

Trump’s affinity for tariffs is not the act of a man doing a favor for business interests. It is the act of a guy who has a weird idea in his head and has clung to that idea for decades because he believes he is the smartest man in the world.

Nolan can't fathom why Trump is doing this, though I think he comes close when he writes, "This is interesting in the same way that the methods and predilections of a prolific serial killer are interesting."

Trump isn't the only one giving off serial killer vibes. So are Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy Jr.:

Thousands of federal employees at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were notified early Tuesday morning that they were subject to a reduction in force, or RIF ... shuttering programs that directly serve and inform the American public.

The effect was felt across the CDC, as workers in the Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice (DEHSP), the Division of Population Health, the Division of HIV Prevention, the Division of Reproductive Health, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, and the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control all received RIF notices today.

Dozens of other programs throughout the CDC’s national centers for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion; HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention; Environmental Health; Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; and the Global Health center were also impacted.

Jamelle Bouie has said that he thinks Kennedy is practicing eugenics.

I think there's truth in that, and Musk has his own ideas about who's fit and unfit:

Interesting observation https://t.co/xHD5VeS1IC

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 1, 2024

But there's a sadism about the way all of this is being done that isn't an inevitable part of eugenicism. And why does Musk -- a businessman whose best-known company sells consumer products -- happily work with a president who's giving consumers more and more reasons every day not to make major purchases? Why doesn't he seem to care whether his potential customers die in preventable ways?

These folks seem to be behaving like people who imprison and enslave the innocent in locked basements. They're going to elaborate lengths to make us suffer, for the pure power trip of it. While we often say that "the cruelty is point," cruelty appears to be so motivating to these men that it overrides other motives, like keeping the system healthy enough to sustain itself. The sadism -- the joy of forcing us to accept all of this pain and suffering -- seems to be what really matters.

A phrase that keeps coming to mind is one I used to see back in the 1980s in Amnesty International fund-raising letters: We are God in here. The phrase appeared in a statement Amnesty provided for a 1984 congressional hearing on torture:

With the government's support the torturer controls everything, even life itself. An Argentine woman, Graciela Guena, remembers the guards telling her, "We are God in here," as they repeatedly applied electric shock to her body. She lay handcuffed to the springs of a metal bed, her cries echoed by the screams of other victims and the laughter of their torturers. "They called us 'the walking dead,'" she said, "reminding us constantly that the only thing to be decided was the time of death."

"We are God in here" certainly comes to mind when I read this story:

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.

The case appears to be the first time the Trump administration has admitted to errors when it sent three planeloads of Salvadoran and Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador’s grim “Terrorism Confinement Center” on March 15.

... in Monday’s court filing, attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had been deported accidentally. “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring Abrego Garcia back now that he is in Salvadoran custody.

They're not admitting error because they regret what they've done. They're admitting an error they refuse to undo because they want us to see that we can't hold them accountable. (Obviously, one phone call to El Salvador's Trump-fanboy president, Nayib Bukele, could get this prisoner returned.) They are God in here -- "here" being the entire United States, and wherever else their power extends.

Obviously, in many regimes, sadism of this kind is meant to keep society going on the regime's terms. That's true here, but the sadism also appears to be an end in itself. They want us to suffer. Our suffering makes them happy. Destruction for the hell of it makes them happy. It's why they're doing all this.

I don't know what specifically happened in the childhoods of Trump and Musk (or people like Russell Vought) to make them this way. I sometimes think that Kennedy, in his childhood, experienced the assassinations of his uncle and his father and now wants to get back at the world by dealing death. Whatever motivates these people, I think we need to look beyond history and political science to understand it.