Tuesday, June 17, 2025

REPUBLICANS HATE DEMOCRATS, AND MEDIA LIBERALS CONSIDER THAT AN ACCEPTABLE PREJUDICE

I told you a couple of days ago that people on the right were portraying Vance Boelter, the Minnesota assassination suspect, as a Democrat (or a leftist or Marxist, which on the right are synonyms for "Democrat") despite ample evidence that he's a right-wing, anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ Trump supporter. In a couple of updates to that post, I noted that this narrative was being advanced by well-known right-wingers, including two U.S. senators, Mike Lee and Bernie Moreno.

There's more, as Axios notes:
Elon Musk, sharing a post that claimed "the left" was responsible for the Minnesota shootings and a string of other crimes, wrote, "The far left is murderously violent."

Right-wing commentator Benny Johnson described Boelter as a "Tim Walz associate." Far-right activist Laura Loomer claimed Walz was "friends" with the suspect and called for the governor to be "detained by the FBI and interrogated."
Walz was one of two Democratic governors who named Boelter to the state's Workforce Development Board, but as Axios notes, citing Minnesota's Star-Tribune,
The board has around 60 members ... many of whom are not politically connected or would have meaningful access to the governor. The paper added there are more than 130 such boards, advisory councils, task forces and commissions.
President Trump says he won't phone Walz, telling reporters, “I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out, I’m not calling him.” And in other expressions of contempt for Democrats and groups associated with Democrats, Donald Trump Jr. picked this moment to link pro-immigrant sentiment to election fraud and to advance a debunked anti-trans group slander:
... Trump Jr made ... baseless comments about the trans community during a discussion with right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson.

“In leftist states and in blue states, they don’t want to enforce [the law] because they understand that’s their voter base, no different than immigration, so rather than follow the law, they’d rather let them get away with it so they vote for more Democrats again,” he said....

Trump Jr continued: “Just like the radical transgender movement is per capita the most violent domestic terror threat in America, probably the entire world, because you have all these shooters or murders or attempted murderers in such a tiny population of a country, yet they’re beyond reproach.”
And a couple of days after a Florida sheriff went viral for this rant...

Brevard County Sheriff Sheriff Wayne Ivey: "If you throw a brick, a firebomb, or point a gun at one of our deputies, we will be notifying your family where to collect your remains at, because we will kill you graveyard dead."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) June 14, 2025 at 10:30 AM

... there's this:
An image apparently shared on the Facebook page for the Adams County sheriff depicting a blood-covered truck with the words “Protester Edition,” is going viral and prompting outrage.

The meme shows a white Dodge pickup with the front half stained with splotchy red and was posted on the personal page of James Muller over the weekend, according to screenshots.

But mainstream pundits don't talk about this as a problem unique to one party -- either they denounce political polarization across the board or they single out Democrats as the people more likely to have contempt for their political opponents, wringing their hands as they quote Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" remark yet again and stereotyping all liberals as EV-driving elitists who sneer at laborers and farmers with dirt under their fingernails.

Our pundits don't react with horror to group slanders and even eliminationist jokes directed at Democrats and others on the left. The pundits might vote Democratic (and drive electric vehicles themselves), but they've been subject to nearly half a century of right-wing ref-working, so they agree that liberals are bad and Republicans are the only true Americans, although they'll also grant humanity to swing voters who have become disillusioned by Democrats, as we know from a dozen or more New York Times focus groups.

Pundits don't feel moral outrage in response to Trump's contempt and the sheriffs' bloodlust because, at least subconsciously, they feel the president and the sheriffs are punching up -- snooty lefties deserve to be taken down a peg. Trump and the sheriff are seen as avengers speaking on behalf of the downtrodden working class, not as power-mad fascists.

I wouldn't say that contempt for liberals and leftists is "the last acceptable prejudice" -- in Trump's America, there are many, many acceptable prejudices -- but this one has been acceptable all our lives.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:27 AM 0 comments

Monday, June 16, 2025

TRUMP RENEWS L.A.-BASED REALITY SERIES, ANNOUNCES TWO SPINOFFS

The big news story this morning is the arrest of the Minnesota shooter, Vance Boelter, but the news with the greatest impact is a policy adjustment announced last night at Truth Social. AP reports:
President Donald Trump on Sunday directed federal immigration officials to prioritize deportations from Democratic-run cities, a move that comes after large protests erupted in Los Angeles and other major cities against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Trump in a social media posting called on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials “to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.”

He added that to reach the goal officials ”must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.”

Trump’s declaration comes after weeks of increased enforcement, and after Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and main architect of Trump’s immigration policies, said ICE officers would target at least 3,000 arrests a day, up from about 650 a day during the first five months of Trump’s second term.
The AP story implies that the announcement was a defiant response to Saturday's demonstrations. That might be true -- if Trump has a core principle, it's one he learned from his great mentor, Roy Cohn: When you're attacked, never apologize and always go on offense. In response to the demonstrations, and to polls showing his support on immigration slipping, he's doubling down.

He also wants to be perceived as not retreating after his recent announcement that he's pausing ICE raids on farms, hotels, and restaurants, which upset some of his richest backers.

The press is focusing more on the policy shift and less on the Truth Social post itself. I believe that America is in trouble because the voters for the country's dominant political party respond well to this kind of presidential rhetoric:
Every day, the Brave Men and Women of ICE are subjected to violence, harassment, and even threats from Radical Democrat Politicians, but nothing will stop us from executing our mission, and fulfilling our Mandate to the American People.
Republicans run America because they've persuaded tens of millions of Americans that Democrats are history's greatest monsters. When Trump refers to "Radical Democrat Politicians," he's talking about all Democrats -- they're all radicals, as far as he and his voters are concerned. You may not see Democratic politicians engaged in "violence, harassment, and even threats" against ICE agents "every day," but Trump's voters (and Trump himself) think they have. They're sure they see it every day on Fox News.
In order to achieve this, we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens.
Referring to this passage, Axios says that Trump "echoed baseless claims he made during the 2024 presidential election" -- but they're not just claims he made in 2024. Obviously he said the same things in 2020, but he also made similar claims after the 2016 election, when he insisted that he would have won California, a state he lost in a landslide, if it weren't for illegal votes. And it's not just Trump -- a large percentage of the Republican Party regularly accuses Democrats of cheating on elections, something that's been true at least since President George W. Bush fired U.S. attorneys two decades ago because they wouldn't pursue cases involving nonexistent Democratic election fraud.

Trump continues:
These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities — And they are doing a good job of it! There is something wrong with them. That is why they believe in Open Borders, Transgender for Everybody, and Men playing in Women’s Sports — And that is why I want ICE, Border Patrol, and our Great and Patriotic Law Enforcement Officers, to FOCUS on our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities, and those places where Sanctuary Cities play such a big role. You don’t hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland!
Here we have the core belief of the Republican Party: Democrats deliberately weaken America because they hate America. The GOP has been saying this since the days of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The party's media spokespeople -- on talk radio a generation ago, on Fox News and podcasts now -- say it every day as if it's established fact. This decades-long demonization of one of our major political parties has corroded democracy in America. It's a much greater crisis than, say, Democratic attempts to downplay President Biden's age-related impairment, or the fact that some progressives use the word "Latinx," but there's no Jake Tapper out there decrying this as a major threat to the Republic, even though it's the greatest threat to the Republic, and the reason at least 45% of Americans think the Trump/GOP dictatorship is perfectly acceptable.

You might see Trump's sudden change of subject -- what the hell do trans people have to do with immigration? -- as a sign of mental impairment, but it just means that his brain is wired like the brains of millions of other Fox viewers. A generation ago, the digression might have been about "Sharia law" or the subject of some other Fox-driven panic. Now it's trans people.

Trump writes:
I want our Brave ICE Officers to know that REAL Americans are cheering you on every day.
If you don't agree with Republicans on this issue, you're not a real American. You shouldn't be allowed to vote. You shouldn't have citizenship. As Republicans say:


Real Americans are enjoying the footage from L.A. the way normal people enjoy a horror movie: they're watching what terrifies them most -- people who disagree with them politically -- and there seems to be violence and chaos (even if they never process the fact that it's confined to a few blocks of a large, sprawling city, and even if they don't grasp that the tear gas smoke they see is coming from the cops, not the protesters). Then, after this series of delicious scares, their hero arrives to kill the monsters.

In their America, it's great TV. No wonder Trump is renewing Police State: L.A. and announcing two new spinoffs, Police State: Chicago and Police State: New York.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:02 AM 0 comments

Sunday, June 15, 2025

YOUR RIGHT-WING NEIGHBORS THINK THE MINNESOTA SHOOTINGS WERE LIBERAL-ON-LIBERAL VIOLENCE (updated)

I'm puzzled by one aspect of what we're learning about Vance Boelter, the suspect in the shootings of two Democratic state legislators from Minnesota. What I don't understand is how he managed to get himself appointed to state boards twice. The New York Times explains that this wasn't a case of Democratic governors knowingly appointing a Republican:
The suspect identified by the authorities, Vance Boelter, 57, was appointed several times by Minnesota governors to the Workforce Development Board...

Mr. Boelter was appointed to the board in 2016 by Mark Dayton, a Democrat who was then the governor. More recently, he was appointed by Gov. Tim Walz, also a Democrat. The board has 41 members who are appointed by the governor, and its goal is to improve business development in the state.

A state report in 2016 listed Mr. Boelter’s political affiliation as “none or other,” and another report in 2020 listed him as having “no party preference.” Voters do not declare political affiliation when they register in Minnesota.
What puzzles me is why someone who seemed to drift from job to job was in a position to get government appointments. Boelter doesn't exactly seem like a pillar of the community:
State reports and his LinkedIn profile indicate that he was recently a general manager of a 7-Eleven in Minneapolis and, before that, had worked as the general manager of a gas station in St. Paul. A report in 2017 listed him as an executive at an energy company.

More recently, he had said on LinkedIn that he was the chief executive of a company called Red Lion Group, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, dedicated to creating “good jobs for local people,” according to its website.

In a video posted online, seemingly for an educational course, Mr. Boelter said he had picked up work at funeral homes to help pay his bills....

The website for Mr. Boelter’s security company makes expansive claims about his work experience, which could not immediately be verified, including that he had been “involved with security situations” in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and that he had worked for “the largest U.S. oil refining company, the world’s largest food company based in Switzerland and the world’s largest convenience retailer based in Japan.”

I.R.S. tax forms show that Mr. Boelter and his wife once led a Christian nonprofit called Revoformation Ministries. An archived version of the group’s website described Mr. Boelter as becoming an ordained minister in 1993.
Boelter is married, but the Times says he stayed "several days a week" at the Minneapolis apartment of a childhood friend, David Carlson, who has said that Boelter is a Trump supporter.

KARE 11 TV in the Twin Cities reports that Vance Boelter's best friend says Boelter voted for Trump and is "a strong supporter"

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) June 14, 2025 at 7:24 PM

In an unearthed sermon, Boelter rails against gay and trans people:


And yet your right-wing neighbors think Boelter, who reportedly had a hit list targeting "prominent pro-choice individuals in Minnesota, including many Democratic lawmakers who have been outspoken about pro-choice policy positions," was a Democrat attacking fellow Democrats for betraying the liberal cause.

It's true that Melissa Hortman, who was killed along with her husband, voted for a bill that took healthcare away from undocumented immigrants:
... Hortman ... made headlines earlier this week for being the only Democratic vote in the state House to vote to repeal taxpayer-funded healthcare coverage for adult illegal immigrants.

"I know that people will be hurt by that vote and I’m – we worked very hard to try and get a budget deal that wouldn’t include that provision," she said following the vote that she said was done in order to move the budget forward in a split legislature....
However:
Sen. John Hoffman and his wife were also shot on Saturday and are hospitalized following surgery.

... Hoffman voted against the proposal....
On the right, it's now widely believed that 100% of political violence in America is the work of liberals and leftists. All political violence is left-wing and everyone on the left is violent.

So here are some comments in response to an ABC News Facebook post about the shooting:
The party of love and acceptance till you disagree with them with the slightest thing. Then you become target number.

****

Both just sided with republicans on a bill.... Go figure......
(Not true, as noted above.)
She was also recently the only Democratic senator to vote against healthcare for adult illegal immigrants.
I guess they didn’t like that .
I wish we could ask JFK Junior, his opinion on the ordeal
(Many right-wingers believe that Hillary Clinton was involved in the John F. Kennedy Jr.'s death, which happened in 1999, because she didn't want him to run for the New York Senate seat she won the following year. Among those who find this idea credible is football star Aaron Rodgers.)

There's more blame-the-left talk in the comments at Gateway Pundit:
the minute i saw targeted doxxing/killing, i knew it wad the Democrats, didnt matter the target was one, knew they did something their own didnt like.

****

Thats this "Democracy" they cherish so much, mob rule.

****

99.9% of any of this "predicted" violence is nothing more than standard Marxist revolution tactics and will be carried out by Marxists. First and foremost targets will be those marxist-leftists who break rank and threaten their coalition. Notice how they tend to vote in a complete block, with no dissent? There's a reason ..

****

Bolsheviks taking out the disloyal.

****

100%. They have to have unbroken ranks because if 1 leaves more will leave. Look how much they hate Tulsi and RFK jr. It is their version of self discipline. When this phase of Marxist revolution occurs, the violence goes off the charts.
(So why haven't there been assassination attempts against Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy Jr.?)
You cross the dim party, and they won't just try to cross you back, they'll X you out if possible.

****

Do the Klintons ring a bell?🤔

****

So does Seth Rich
Democrat who crossed a line
A right-wing podcaster weighs in:


No liberal or leftist has tried to shoot and of the numerous Democratic senators who have voted for President Trump's horrible Cabinet appointees. No Democrat tried to shoot Chuck Schumer or the other Democrats who voted to advance the GOP's spending resolution in March. There have been no assassination attempts on Democrats who've left the party this year (former Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, DNC fundraiser Lindy Li, Kentucky state senator Robin Webb, Florida state legislators Jason Pizzo, Hillary Cassel, and Susan Valdés), nor does anyone seem to be taking shots at Democrats who incessantly denounce their own party: John Fetterman, Rahm Emanuel, James Carville, Jared Golden, and even pre-military occupation Gavin Newsom.

I'm not a huge fan of liberals and progressives who say that all political violence in America is right-wing -- the recent murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington and the Molotov cocktail attack in Colorado on a group seeking to draw attention to Israeli hostages in Gaza make it clear that some politically violent people aren't on the right. But I don't see a lot of conspiratorial thinking on the left when these incidents take place -- at least not the kind that attempts to rewrite the ideological histories of the perpetrators.

But much of the right believes that all political violence is committed by people who are on the left, overtly or covertly. That's cult thinking.

*****

UPDATE: Here's a wingnut Saturday Night Live alum spreading this craziness:



*****

UPDATE: Now Republican senators are spreading the lie. (The post directly below includes is a doorcam image of the shooter in a latex mask.)

This is an egregiously shameful tweet from a US senator

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) June 15, 2025 at 1:46 PM

It’s not just Mike Lee — Bernie Moreno is pretending that a registered Republican evangelical anti-abortion Trump voter who assassinated a Democrat and had more on his hit list is a representative of “the extreme left”

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— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) June 15, 2025 at 3:56 PM

And no pundit who clutches pearls whenever a Democrat strays a millimeter over the line will ever call them on this kind of routine group libel. (And yes, this is about Democrats -- to Republicans in 2025, "Marxists" and "the extreme left" are synonyms for "Democrats.")
Posted by Steve M. at 10:37 AM 0 comments

Saturday, June 14, 2025

TRUMP'S MUDDLED, ON-AND-OFF MILITARISM WON'T SPLIT THE GOP AT ALL

In The New York Times, Tyler Pager and Luke Broadwater tell us that President Trump's approach to the conflict between Israel and Iran could divide the right:
As Israel pummels Iran with waves of airstrikes, President Trump is navigating the divides within the Republican Party over whether the United States should get involved in another foreign conflict.

On one side are the isolationists who fear that Israel could pull the United States into another Middle East war. And on the other are the Iran hawks and Israel supporters who have been calling for just this sort of military action for years.

Mr. Trump appears caught between the two sides, veering back and forth as he tries to distance the United States from Israel’s assault while celebrating the success of the attacks and warning Iran that more is coming.

“This, right now, is going to cause, I think, a major schism in the MAGA online community,” Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist and podcaster, said Thursday on his podcast.
Not really, Charlie. I'll explain below.

Trump's thoughts about the use of military force have always been somewhat mysterious. On the one hand, he seems like a rage-driven, reckless idiot who would happily nuke Tehran or Beijing -- or Chicago or Sacramento -- just to show us all who's boss. On the other hand, he has often seemed to shy away from the use of military force, or at least using military force the way a normal president would, against a foreign enemy. Yet now he's acting like a strongman obsessed with the military, but only in domestic contexts. Elsewhere in the Times, Peter Baker suggests, with good reason, that that seems peculiar:
When President Trump first sought to stage a military parade in Washington, a four-star general argued against it, telling him that “it’s what dictators do.” Mr. Trump was unbothered by the comparison, and so on Saturday tanks will roll down the streets of the nation’s capital for the first time in decades.

Nor was Mr. Trump evidently concerned about being accused of authoritarian excess for deploying troops to Los Angeles to quell protests against his immigration crackdown. If anything, he seemed to revel in the moment, vowing to “hit” anyone who so much as spit at a police officer and even threatening “very big force” against protesters in Washington.

Yet as a real war broke out this week in the Middle East, Mr. Trump seemed reluctant to get involved, declining to join Israel in its aerial blitz against Iran’s nuclear facilities despite years of chest-thumping threats of “obliteration” against the Islamic regime. While he authorized U.S. forces to help defend Israel from Iran’s subsequent retaliation, in keeping with past practice, Mr. Trump made clear that he would not target Iran himself, at least for now, and instead urged it to return to the negotiating table.

The seemingly disparate postures of recent days — strongman at home, peace-seeker abroad — speak to Mr. Trump’s complicated relationship with the military. He has ordered more troops to Los Angeles and Washington than he currently has stationed in Syria and Iraq combined. He seems more willing at the moment to use the military against Americans than against Iranians. He celebrates a show of force on U.S. soil even as he denounces “endless wars” outside its borders.
I agree that Trump has a "complicated relationship with the military" -- a complicated psychological relationship. He always wants to be the tough guy, and being the commander in chief of a huge, powerful military makes him happy, but something about warfighting gives him the heebie-jeebies. It easy to say that he was a Vietnam-era draft dodger and leave it at that, but so were George W. Bush and (most notably) Dick Cheney. They were willing, even eager, to send other people's kids to die in combat. Why isn't Trump?

I think he can't bear the notion that if he were to deploy troops in combat, people other than himself -- generals, dead and wounded servicemembers, risk-taking medal winners -- would steal his spotlight. I also imagine that he's discussed various military incursions with generals, including crackpot ideas like bombing Mexican drug cartels, and the leaders of the service branches have told him how they think those campaigns would unfold: slowly (over a period of months or years) and with setbacks along the way. Trump doesn't want that. He wants a war that's all winning, and that takes about as long as a special two-part episode of a reality TV series.

Early in his time as a presidential candidate, I imagine that advisers who have actually thought through their isolationism (Steve Bannon?) gave him ways of describing his own fears that made them sound like a right-wing ideology. He benefited from the fact that the Bush-era war on terrorism was unpopular, even among GOP voters. He also benefited from the fact that Democrats in the Clinton, Obama, and Biden years haven't lived up to the right's stereotype of the party as a collection of hippie pacifists. At some point in the construction of Trump's rhetoric on this subject, someone undoubtedly tossed out the phrase "Peace through strength." Boom -- Trump and his people had created the illusion of a coherent belief system.

But will Trump's cooperation with Israel alienate genuine isolationists in Trump's coalition? And on the other hand, will his decision to defer to Netanyahu upset the hawks?

Nahhh. Some MAGA pundits will be upset, as will anti-Semites in the MAGA rank-and-file, but most of his people will be fine with whatever he does. For GOP base voters, the correct military policy is usually "whatever a Republican president wants to do" and "whatever is the opposite of what Democrats want to do." They loved Ronald Reagan when he was saber-rattling against the Soviet Union and they loved him when he was negotiating with the Soviet Union. They hated Russia until they realized that Trump didn't, and they really turned pro-Russia when Joe Biden began offering miltary aide to Ukraine. They hate Muslims, but loved George W. Bush (at least during his first term) and still love Trump no matter how much they've cozied up to the Saudis. In short, GOP voters have no coherent foreign policy views apart from "GOP good, Democrat Party bad."

Congressional Republicans might have better-constructed ideologies, but do any of them ever abandon Trump? Do hawks like Lindsey Graham break with him when he attacks Volodymyr Zelenskyy? It never happens.

As for the domestic deployment of troops, in L.A. and in today's parade, I think it's exactly what the GOP base wants. Republican base voters don't want the military to fight for principles. They want the military to make them feel good. They want the troops and tanks to make them feel tough. They know the protesters in L.A. aren't armed, and that's perfect -- Trump is punching down, which means it's a feel-good war. (See also Reagan in Grenada and George H.W. Bush in Panama.) They think the parade owns the libs. That's all they want from the military.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:49 AM 0 comments

Friday, June 13, 2025

EVERYONE KNOWS THAT ONLY REPUBLICANS ARE NORMAL!

They're engaging in totalitarian repression, obviously, but they claim they're freeing people:

Kristi Noem: "We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city." Sen. Alex Padilla is then forcibly removed!

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— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) June 12, 2025 at 2:06 PM

Obviously, this is just a lie Kristi Noem is telling while downplaying the administration's desire to crush California under Donald Trump's jackboot. But why this lie?

Noem is from the extremely red state of South Dakota, and she's a politician from the Fox News era. The voters who made her governor before she got her current job live in a right-wing bubble, so they believe that every sane American is a Fox News Republican, and no American really wants to be governed by Democrats.

This is one of the key lies that drive 2020 election trutherism. People who think Trump won the 2020 election believe that Joe Biden couldn't possibly have won 81 million votes.


Republicans struggle with the idea that anyone could possibly want to live in a place where people are of very different ethnic backgrounds, speak different languages, and have different religious beliefs (or non-beliefs), just as they struggle with the idea that anyone could be unalterably gay or bi or pan or trans just because they aren't. They struggle with the idea that anyone would want to live in a city where you can do most of your errands in a fifteen-minute radius, because they're used to long drives whenever you have to run errands. Increasingly, they're selling the message that everyone wants a marriage consisting of a male breadwinner and a stay-at-home "tradwife" who gives birth to large numbers of children, after marrying young (and preferably as a virgin), and they can't believe anyone really wants a life that's different from that.

Noem says she wants to liberate L.A. from "socialists." I realize that Republicans use "socialist" and "communist" to mean "anything we don't like," but please note that the annual GDP of the Los Angeles metropolitan area is more than a trillion dollars, which doesn't sound very socialist to me. That's about eighteen times greater than the GDP of South Dakota, and while the L.A. metro area is much more populous than South Dakota, maybe that's in large part because there's simply more economic opportunity in the alleged socialist hellhole than in the rural bastion of Republican freedom.

I guess we're expected to see the handcuffing of Senator Alex Padilla as a restoration of Californians' true preferences -- they can't possibly want him to question Noem, even though he was elected in 2022 with 61% of the vote and Trump lost California in 2024 by a 58%-38% margin. But no one could possibly dislike Trump, could they? (Before the 2024 election, Trump repeatedly claimed that he won California, a state he lost by even larger margins in 2016 and 2020.)

If there are legitimate midterm elections in 2026 and Democrats do well, I assume that Republicans will try to invalidate the outcome with the vigor they applied to Trump's 2020 loss, only this time with control of the federal government. Or maybe elections will be suspended under martial law, on the stated assumption that Democratic cheating is inevitable. After all, no one really wants to vote Democratic, right?
Posted by Steve M. at 11:20 AM 0 comments

Thursday, June 12, 2025

IS TRUMP ABOUT TO CHICKEN OUT ON ANTI-IMMIGRANT RACISM?

I didn't see this coming, though I suppose I should have:

Wait did he actually tweet this? Because this is like directly contradicting Stephen Miller.

[image or embed]

— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) June 12, 2025 at 10:33 AM

Yes, he really posted this at Truth Social. He actually acknowledged that undocumented workers are hard to replace (though I'm sure he made up the bit about criminals applying for the jobs) and said it would be better to focus on rounding up immigrants who've committed crimes.

This shouldn't be completely surprising because Trump has always listened intently to other old rich white guys, especially old rich white guys who, like him, are in real estate and hospitality, or are in industries familiar to Trump from the world of New York business. An April 2017 New York Times story about the people Trump turned to for advice listed quite a few people in this category: Carl Icahn, a famous New York real estate developer; Steve Roth, head of the New York real estate firm Vornado; Richard LeFrak, the son of a famous New York real estate developer; Stephen Schwarzmann, the CEO of the Blackstone Group; and so on. We should have realized that hospitality moguls would complain to Trump, as would agribusiness moguls, and he'd take the complaints seriously.

We also should have realized that Trump is so ignorant he didn't realize he'd be upsetting these corporate chieftains when he greenlighted Stephen Miller's "arrest them at work" strategy.

I believe Trump is also too ignorant to realize that the vast majority of immigrants he's targeted are hard workers rather than criminals -- Fox News has persuaded the rubes that nearly all of them are criminals, and Trump is one of those rubes. If Trump wants his administration to concentrate on rounding up murderers and gangbangers, he may learn, to his surprise, that locating dangerous criminals and building cases against them is difficult, dangerous, and time-consuming. He won't get his quick daily fix of arrests and deportations if his administration focuses on criminals.

So the administration will probably go right back to accusing every young male immigrant with a tattoo of being a gangbanger psychokiller. That seems the most likely direction in which the administration's policy will go, if there are real changes.

Trump might also be looking at polls showing his numbers dropping on immigration -- he's at 37% approval, 52% disapproval on immigration in a recent Washington Post survey, and he's at 43%/54% in a new Quinnipiac poll.

If we survive the Trump era and his presidency is generally seen as a failure, I warn you that right-wing propagandists will eventually tell us that Trumpian conservatism didn't fail -- Trump failed conservatism. During Elon Musk's anti-Trump temper tantrum, he lamented that the Trump/GOP Big Beautiful Bill would lead America "into debt slavery"; in the future, if Trump really does rein Stephen Miller in, we can expect immigration hard-liners to say that Trump wasn't tough enough on the undocumented, just as he wasn't tough enough on the debt. (Heaven forbid the GOP should raise taxes on rich people.)

Everyone on the right believes that right-wing radicalism can never fail -- it can only be failed. It's possible that Trump will go down in right-wing history as a president who failed the True Cause.
Posted by Steve M. at 1:11 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

TRUMP CAME INTO OFFICE WISHING A MF'ER WOULD

Two commentators I respect, Anne Applebaum and Jamelle Bouie, believe that Donald Trump is militarizing Los Angeles out of weakness. I don't think that's true.

Under the headline "This Is What Trump Does When His Revolution Sputters," Applebaum writes:
Revolutions have a logic. The revolutionaries start with a big, transformative, impossible goal. They want to remake society, smash existing institutions, replace them with something different....

Inevitably, a crisis appears....

[Trump's] revolutionary project is now running into reality. More than 200 times, courts have questioned the legality of Trump’s decisions.... Judges have ordered the administration to rehire people who were illegally fired. DOGE is slowly being revealed as a failure, maybe even a hoax....

Now Trump faces the same choice as his revolutionary predecessors: Give up—or radicalize. Find compromises—or polarize society further. Slow down—or use violence. Like his revolutionary predecessors, Trump has chosen radicalization and polarization, and he is openly seeking to provoke violence....

The logic of revolution often traps revolutionaries: They start out thinking that the task will be swift and easy. The people will support them. Their cause is just. But as their project falters, their vision narrows. At each obstacle, after each catastrophe, the turn to violence becomes that much swifter, the harsh decisions that much easier. If not stopped, by Congress or the courts, the Trump revolution will follow that logic too.
Bouie's latest column bears the headline "Trump Wants to Be a Strongman, but He’s Actually a Weak Man." He writes:
The White House clearly believes its actions are a show of strength, but ... they are not. The immediate recourse to repressive force; the inability to handle even modest opposition to its plans; the threats, bullying and overheated rhetoric — it betrays a sense of brittleness and insecurity.

Power, real power, rests on legitimacy and consent. A regime that has to deploy force at the first sign of dissent is a regime that does not actually believe it can wield power short of coercion and open threats of violence....

Americans are not enamored of his signature legislative package, the Big Beautiful Bill. They don’t like his tariffs, nor do they like the actual implementation of his deportation plans. Overall, more Americans say that Trump is fighting against them than say that he is on their side....

The White House wants us to think that Los Angeles is an advance, a forward march for its agenda. But there is the strong possibility that it is actually a tactical retreat to safe ground in the face of a poor strategic landscape.
I don't agree with Bouie that the troop deployment is a response to Trump's poll numbers (which, overall, aren't all that bad). I also don't believe it's a response to frustrations in enacting his agenda, as Applebaum believes. I think Trump would be doing this even if he were at 80% approval. I think he'd be doing it even if his administration's actions were being upheld by every federal court.

Trump reentered the White House like a guy walking into a bar looking for a fight. He's just been waiting for an excuse, because that's how this particular form of toxic masculinity works.

What's the favorite Greek phrase of every right-winger in America, particularly the gun owners?


It's "Molon Labe," translated as "Come and Take It." In recent years, laws in most of America have become more and more accommodating of gun owners, and the Supreme Court has invented an individual constitutional right to gun ownership -- but the gun community preemptively threatens critics if they dare to grab guns. (No one is grabbing guns.) The gun community wants a fight.

That's how this mindset works. It's the mindset that led to the hit country song "Try That in a Small Town":
Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk
Carjack an old lady at a red light
Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store
Ya think it's cool, well, act a fool if ya like
Cuss out a cop, spit in his face
Stomp on the flag and light it up
Yeah, ya think you're tough

Well, try that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the road
'Round here, we take care of our own
You cross that line, it won't take long
For you to find out, I recommend you don't
Try that in a small town
"I recommend you don't"? Bullshit. You're begging someone to do this. You're looking for someone to intimidate.

The (somewhat dated) hip-hop version of this is "I wish a motherfucker would" (sometimes expressed as "I wish a n***a would"). The 1980s right-wing-backlash version is Clint Eastwood's most famous movie line, "Go ahead, make my day." In every case, the message is the same: I'd kill you if you tried to fight me, and that would be fun. So come at me, bro. I'm begging you.

Trump would have been disappointed if his political opponents hadn't given him an excuse to deploy troops. He wants everyone to see him as America's alpha male, which is why he scheduled this coming weekend's military parade weeks ago. This isn't desperation. Trump is in his happy place.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:09 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, June 10, 2025

GOSH, IF ONLY THERE WERE A WAY TO TEST THE PREMISE THAT THE L.A. PROTESTS ARE AN "80-20 ISSUE" FAVORING REPUBLICANS

It will not surprise you to learn that Republicans are working the refs, trying to spin President Trump's response to the Los Angeles immigration protests as a smashing success for the White House. It will also not surprise you that many Democrats -- as usual -- are refusing to take their own side in an argument.

Politico Playbook tells us:
Whatever your take on Donald Trump’s decision to send in the National Guard — plus, as of last night, 700 Marines — to help quell anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, the view from those close to the president is clear: This is a huge political opportunity, they believe, and Trump has seized it with both hands.

“We couldn’t script this any better,” one gleeful person close to the White House tells my Playbook colleague Dasha Burns. “Democrats are again on the ‘20’ side of an 80-20 issue. ... It’s the same thing that won [Trump] the election.”

In the eyes of the White House, Trump already had a clear mandate from voters for the mass deportation effort that was driving those ICE raids in LA. And aides believe the chaotic scenes that followed — masked protesters pelting police with rocks, setting fire to cars and waving Mexican flags on abandoned freeways — will only bolster public support for Trump’s hard-line approach. Indeed, every time a Dem speaks out against the president’s actions in LA, the White House is happier still.

And guess who’s the ultimate foil? Enter California Gov. Gavin Newsom. “Newsom is playing the part,” the same gleeful person tells Dasha. An administration official separately made the same point, highlighting the “jarring contrast” between Trump’s approach and the “Dem posture on immigration,” and claiming that the party is “fine with [protesters] burning the city down.”
I assume that the "gleeful person" is either Steve Bannon or Newt Gingrich, but the identity of this anonymous interviewee doesn't matter -- someone from the GOP is out there providing solidly pro-GOP spin, and there's no Democrat to offer a counterargument. I know you'll say that Politico is a right-wing rag and of course it would publish pro-GOP spin, but I've read Politico enough to know that an equally cocksure argument from the other side would have made its way into this piece if any Democrat could have manged to provide one. But of course no Democrat did. (The piece offers "balance" by pointing out that Newsom has, in fact, condemned violence, and that his target audience is California voters and 2028 Democratic primary voters.)

What infuriates me is the unchallenged assertion that this is an "80-20 issue" favoring Republicans, because we already know it isn't.

YouGov has been polling this, and while the public appears to disapprove of the protests, the numbers are underwhelming:



A small plurality opposes the protests. But does that mean Trump's approach to immigration has 80% approval? Hell no:


Does it mean Americans want Trump to seize control? Absolutely not:


And does the public see the protests as riots? Nope:


A CBS poll taken last week, just before the protests began making headlines, finds general support for deportations, but a lot of nuance. Here's a key result:


In the CBS poll, 54% of respondents said they supported the deportation program, but only 42% said that it's making Americans safer (30% said it's making us less safe), and 39% said it's making the economy weaker (32% said it's making the economy stronger). And this is a key finding:


Nothing Trump is doing -- on immigration or any other subject -- is favored by 80% of the public. And much of it is highly unpopular.

Does any Democrat say this? Newsom's anti-Trump pushback has been impressive.

Newsom: I told the president, just get it over with. Arrest me. Move on. If you need someone’s head to scalp, then do it with me. But stop messing with these kids. Stop messing with four-year-olds. Kids in elementary school

[image or embed]

— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) June 9, 2025 at 8:14 PM

But then there's this:


And these messages were posted by a liberal history professor and a long-time Republican who's anti-Trump:


Why? Why do this? When Trump allies speak, their messaging is 100% pro-Trump. Why can't Trump critics be advocates for their own side? Why must they echo right-wing critiques of the protest movement? Given the way most Americans consume news these days, I'm guessing that it might not register on many voters that the protestors are waving Mexican flags (and that they should see this as a moral outrage) until they start hearing about the flags from both sides. (Compare this to the war on "woke" language: I'm sure most voters have now heard the word "Latinx" far more often from cenrist Democratic language police than they have from actual "woke" Democrats.)

I'll say it again: If your critique of Democrats/liberals/progressives echoes right-wing critiques, shut up. You're just an extra megaphone for the right, which doesn't need any help getting its messages out.

And with all the fretting about Democrats' inability to win over young male podcast listeners, I have to ask: Don't you think those guys might see some of these protesters as badass?

At the ICE raid and subsequent community resistance in Paramount, California this morning, this skater kid ate dozens of munitions from Border Patrol agents, walked away slowly and flipped them off.

[image or embed]

— Jeremy Lindenfeld (@jeremotographs.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 5:59 PM

Just before the previous clip, the skater kid was practically taunting the Border Patrol agents by dancing around their munitions shots.

[image or embed]

— Jeremy Lindenfeld (@jeremotographs.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 6:47 PM

Yeah, this guy too -- maybe this guy especially:


Hand-wringing Trump critics think America won't vote for a candidate who's linked to controversial protests, and they cling to this belief even though America just elected the guy who did January 6.

And if you think Republicans can get away with this and Democrats can't, remember what Rebecca Traister wrote a few months ago:
In 2020, millions protested racist police violence, sparking a reckoning in which people lost jobs for racist infractions from their past and present. A few Democratic lawmakers did join calls to “defund the police,” and more signaled that they understood the need for criminal-justice reform. Democrats not only won back the White House, but they did so by turning Arizona and Georgia blue and in the process securing two crucial Georgia Senate seats.
It didn't matter how many burning dumpsters in Portland were put on an infinite loop on Fox News every night -- Biden won, and he won by getting more votes than either candidate got in 2024. So please stop the tone policing and stick up for your own side.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:01 AM 0 comments

Monday, June 09, 2025

A FEW DISORGANIZED THOUGHTS ABOUT THE CURRENT JACKBOOTED THUGGERY

Is what we're seeing in California all about suspending democracy? Seth Abramson thinks so.

Donald Trump has become convinced that Republicans cannot win the midterms, and that a blue wave would effectively end his presidency and confront him with two years of investigations and impeachment proceedings. He needs martial law as an excuse to cancel the midterms. So America is on a clock now.

— Seth Abramson (@sethabramson.bsky.social) June 8, 2025 at 4:32 PM

Do I believe that Democratic midterm victories "would effectively end" the second Trump presidency? No -- Trump will just keep issuing executive orders and use the right-wing media to discredit any Democratic investigations, while he relies on the fact that Democrats will never be able to get 67 Senate votes to convict him if he's impeached.

Do I believe that President Trump is prepared to cancel elections in 2026 and/or 2028? Sure, if he thinks the result will make him look like a loser.

If you were reasonably certain that we'd have genuine elections in 2026 and 2028, I hope you realize now that we really might not.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) June 8, 2025 at 10:36 AM

However, I don't believe he's already given up on winning them legitimately. Trump is a lifelong believer in the Power of Positive Thinking. And while a recent poll from AtlasIntel shows Democrats with a nine-point lead in 2026 congressional elections, other polls see the race very differently -- John McLaughlin, one of Trump's pollsters, has Republicans leading by 4.

Deploying the National Guard and/or the military is simply what Trump believes presidents should do -- like an eight-year-old boy, he thinks being in charge of the U.S. means you can and should use all your toy soldiers to vanquish your enemies all the time. The idea of doing this delights him so much that he even recommended it last October as a response to hypothetical unrest on Election Day, when Joe Biden would still be president. CNN reported:
Former President Donald Trump suggested using the military to handle what he called “the enemy from within” on Election Day, saying that he isn’t worried about chaos from his supporters or foreign actors, but instead from “radical left lunatics.”

“I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical left lunatics,” Trump said told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo in an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures.”

“I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen,” he added.
If you believe that what's taking place now was done to prepare America for martial law in November 2026, the question that follows is: Why so early? And why prepare Americans for anything? Shock and awe has been Trump's M.O. since Inauguration Day. He doesn't lay groundwork. He just acts.

It seems far more likely to me that Stephen Miller was simply frustrated by what he saw as the slow pace of anti-immigrant cruelty, and he decided to up the ante by ordering his goons to be more aggressive and provocative. Trump was on board because immigration is his best issue, according to polls, and he hates brown people, too, though I don't think he dines on hate the way Miller does. (ABC's Terry Moran is right about that.) It's also possible that Miller is frustrated because his wife has followed Elon Musk back to Texas, where she's working as his PR flack.

In any case, Miller's decision to make the raids more intrusive and provocative could have happened at any time, and I believe Trump would have responded the same way. If he decides to cancel elections in 2026, he'll just do it, with no advance warning.

*****

Here's a series of posts that reveal a major divide in America:

Worth bearing in mind that illegal entry is a misdemeanor and being unlawfully present in the country is not even a criminal offense, but a civil one. This is the equivalent of saying we need to torch the Constitution & send in the SWAT team to catch jaywalkers & people with overdue library books.

[image or embed]

— Julian Sanchez (@normative.bsky.social) June 9, 2025 at 1:15 AM

What Miller and Mike Cernovich are saying here is what Trump says every time he asserts that a crackdown on immigrants is necessary because otherwise "we won't have a country."

To the GOP's exurban and rural base, America is a white Christian heterosexual monoculture -- anyone who doesn't fit the mold threatens our national identity. As a New York City resident for nearly half a century, and a Bostonian before that, I find this preposterous. I'm sure the Angelenos who are facing down Miller's stormtroopers feel the same way.

It's often said that snooty urban elitist Democrats don't understand Republican voters' culture views, and while there may be some truth to that, they don't understand ours either. From our perspective, America has a strong and enduring culture that isn't threatened by immigration -- we like burgers, we like football, we like guns, we invented rock music and R&B and jazz and hip-hop and Hollywood. And our cities have strong identities, too. Being multi-ethnic is a big part of that identity. There's nothing more New York than drunk Wall Streeters stumbling out of club and ordering chicken over rice with white sauce and hot sauce from a halal cart. If you're from L.A., plug in your own equivalent.

Republicans voters think America is the greatest country in the world -- and also believe it's so fragile that a few immigrant landscapers can completely dismantle it. But some of us realize that it's not a national emergency to pass a person on the street who's not speaking English, just as it's not a national emergency to share the country with people who are trans or Muslim, or members of some other group to which we don't belong. Twenty years ago, Republicans would warn that Muslims want to force everyone in America to practice "Sharia law"; now, they warn that schools are forcing children to be trans. Monoculture-dwelling Republicans want to force the rest of us to be cis, straight, and Christian, so they think we want a similar level of conformity. But we don't agree with them that the country will die unless everyone is the same.

*****

A Bluesky user noticed this:

I see signs that Trump and Musk are already in an agreement. Just look at Musk's posts and note the ones he deleted that were against Trump and his dystopian government.

— Aurea (@mariaurea.bsky.social) June 9, 2025 at 7:52 AM

It's true -- and Musk's olive branch is a series of tweets and retweets on immigration:


We know that Musk has deleted some tweets critical of Trump, and that aides to both men spoke on Friday. Musk clearly wants Daddy to love him again (or at least not to withdraw federal contracts from his companies). Whatever is going on, it's clear that Musk doesn't believe he has the upper hand and is suing for peace, hypocritically using immigrant-phobia to try to get back on Trump's good side. We'll see if it works.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:38 AM 0 comments

Sunday, June 08, 2025

TRUMP'S SECOND TERM AS SEEN BY HIS BASE: THE WORSE, THE BETTER

At a moment when President Trump is deploying National Guard troops in California over the governor's objections, in order to contain a "rebellion" against the administration's sadistic immigration crackdown that's really just a normal series of protests, it's odd to read this Axios story about Trump's economic policies:
President Trump's second term has been a payday for the powerful, exposing a disconnect in his promise to deliver for "the forgotten man" of America's working class.

Why it matters: The populist paradox at the heart of MAGA — a movement fueled by economic grievance and championed by a New York billionaire — has never been more pronounced.

* Trump's blue-collar base remains fiercely loyal, energized by his hardline stances on immigration, trade and culture — and patient that his economic "Golden Age" will materialize.

* But so far, the clearest financial rewards of Trump's tenure are flowing upward — to wealthy donors, family members, insiders and the president himself.
But does Trump even want the economy to get better for ordinary people? Does he want the streets to be peaceful as Stephen Miller's goons round up immigrant workers?

Trump has completely reversed the decline in his approval rating that resulted from his announcement of the "Liberation Day" tariffs. When he partly suspended those tariffs, he appeared to be solving a problem, even though it was a problem of his own creation. Right now, his stormtroopers are deliberately provoking pro-immigrant protesters, which means that his administration is creating the unrest that his call-up of National Guard troops is meant to quell. Whether it was all planned this way or not, that's the formula that's working for Trump economically, and possibly in other areas: he stirs fears, then rides to the rescue, appearing to clean up a mess he made.

That's similar to the formula of Fox News: terrify viewers with scary talk about urban crime, or immigrant crime, or drag queen story hours, or a trans woman spiking a ball too hard in a volleyball match. Offer a remedy (and always the same remedy: incessant lib-owning and the election of more Republicans). Voilà: Fox viewers feel their lives are improving when there appears to be a solution to problems they weren't even thinking about until Fox started scaring them.

The Leninist slogan was "The worse, the better." The second Trump term has begun to operate on that principle. America isn't great again, and shows no signs of becoming great again, but the awfulness of current conditions appear to be why Trump's voters approve of what he's doing. See how hard he's fighting in the midst of all the chaos? He must really love us! But it's his chaos.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:10 AM 0 comments

Saturday, June 07, 2025

THE RETURN OF KILMAR ABREGO GARCIA ISN'T THE BIG WIN IT APPEARS TO BE

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is headed back to the U.S., and The New Republic's headline reads:
Trump Brings Kilmar Abrego-Garcia Back, Completely Caving
That's wrong. If Trump were completely caving, he'd be returning every renditioned immigrant imprisoned in El Salvador and other countries without due process. Instead, the message of this is: Okay, you sick liberal freaks, you wanted this one depraved gangbanger brought back to America to face charges? Well, just to get you to stop whining, we brought him back -- and boy, do we have charges for him to face.

The charges:
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi ... told reporters that a federal grand jury indicted Abrego Garcia on May 21 in Tennessee over allegations he conspired to transport thousands of migrants without legal status from Texas across the U.S. between 2016-2025. The two-count indictment accuses Abrego Garcia "of conspiracy to unlawfully transport illegal aliens for financial gain" and "unlawful transportation of illegal aliens for financial gain." ...

The 10-page criminal indictment unsealed today alleges that Abrego Garcia is "a member and associate of the transnational criminal organization, La Mara Salvatrucha, otherwise known... as MS-13." The indictment also details that he participated in more than 100 trips smuggling individuals from Texas to Maryland, including unaccompanied minors and alleged members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13.
The government is claiming that Abrego Garcia transported thousands of migrants? We previously knew that there was one incident that appeared suspicious. As The New York Times reported early last month,
According to records released last month by the Department of Homeland Security, Mr. Abrego Garcia notified immigration officials in late October 2022 that he wanted to move to Houston to be closer to his parents. Just five weeks later, he was driving back to Maryland — with eight passengers — when a highway patrol officer in Tennessee pulled him over for speeding.

In Homeland Security’s version of the trooper’s account, Mr. Abrego Garcia explained that he had left Houston three days earlier and was transporting people in his boss’s car to work in construction in Maryland. But there was no luggage, and the passengers all gave Mr. Abrego Garcia’s home address as their own — leading one officer to suspect the possibility of human trafficking.

In the end, Mr. Abrego Garcia was let off with a warning citation for driving with an expired license.
The indictment says that Abrego Garcia transported immigrants, and sometimes guns, or a regular basis. Why didn't we know about this before? The Times now tells us,
Two people familiar with the investigation said it made a significant leap forward when an imprisoned man recently came forward offering information about Mr. Abrego Garcia....
Does anyone else find this suspicious? A prisoner steps forward, and suddenly there's evidence that Abrego Garcia is a professional trafficker working with six co-conspirators, according to the indictment. Who is this prisoner, and what, if anything, did the prisoner get in return for making these accusations? The Times notes:
... there was concern and disagreement among prosecutors about how to proceed. In recent weeks, a supervisor in the federal prosecutor’s office in Nashville resigned over how the case was handled, these people said.
ABC concurs:
The decision to pursue the indictment against Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee, sources briefed on Schrader's decision told ABC News. Schrader's resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons, the sources said.
This reminds me of the Bush administration's pursuit of the so-called War on Terror. Recall that false accounts from informants like the pseudonymous "Curveball" were used as evidence that Saddam Hussein was producing weapons of massive destruction; later, when Americans were torturing prisoners of war, the result was misinformation rather than usable intelligence:
A seasoned counterterrorism agent reportedly told Vanity Fair that following false leads generated through torture has caused waste and exhaustion and consumed "[a]t least 30 percent of the F.B.I.'s time, maybe 50 percent, in counterterrorism." According to another former intelligence official "[w]e spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms" because of the CIA's insistence that coercive interrogation techniques be used against Abu Zubaydah.
But Bush got himself reelected in 2004, and while he left office a pariah in 2009, anger about the torture program was limited to non-Republicans apart from John McCain, and it's never been politically possible to empty the prison at Guantanamo. That's why I'm skeptical that this will blow up in Trump and Bondi's faces.

I assume that Abrego Garcia's traffic stop will be sufficient to lead to a conviction at least on one charge, and the administration will blame Democratic messaging if the other charges don't stick (assuming they aren't quietly dropped between now and the trial). The return of Abrego Garcia will be sold as an act of extraordinary magnanimity, and our side will be partly to blame for that -- we haven't vividly made the case that every removed person deserves due process, that it's reasonable to demand due process for all of them, and that the allegations against other renditioned immigrants are as flimsy as those against Abrego Garcia, or even flimsier. Regrettably, there's been only one Chris Van Hollen, a senator persistent enough to get a meeting with Abrego Garcia. We needed more meetings and more efforts to humanize the disappeared. To the average American, it will appear as if the Trump administration gave critics everything they asked for. Congressional critics should have pushed harder and demanded more.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:38 AM 0 comments

Friday, June 06, 2025

THE TRUMP-MUSK WAR IS ALREADY OVER, AND TRUMP (AND THE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL) WON

The feud between Elon Musk and Donald Trump has gone on for about a week, and Musk already wants to kiss and make up:


Trump is telling the media that he's not interested:
Speaking on a phone call Friday morning shortly before 7 a.m., ABC News asked him about reports he had a call scheduled with Musk for later in the day.

"You mean the man who has lost his mind?" he asked, saying he was "not particularly" interested in talking to him right now.

He said Musk wants to talk to him, but he's not ready to talk to Musk.
However:
People close to Trump have described him as more sad than angry at Musk. One adviser who was with Trump on Thursday night said he seemed "bummed" about the breakup. And that's the way he sounded on Friday morning.
I wouldn't rule out a private conversation over the weekend, followed by a reconciliation. When have you known Trump to "more sad than angry at" someone who defied him this way? Maybe he feels that way about Putin -- but that gives you an idea of how Trump looks at Musk. He doesn't see him as a subordinate from whom he expects absolute loyalty. He clearly sees him as a big mover and shaker (and sees himself as an even bigger man because Musk does his bidding, or used to do it, which is also how Trump wants to see Putin).

But Musk has lost this war already, and I'm somewhat surprised. If you go to Musk's feed on X, you see that most of his tweets and retweets are about the fact that the Big Beautiful Bill will increase the national debt.


Many congressional Republicans have been saying the same thing. A large segment of the congressional GOP wants -- and has always wanted -- to cut more, more, more. GOP voters feel the same way, at least in the abstract. (Polls show that GOP voters don't want Medicaid cut, for instance.) But congressional Republicans are rallying around Trump, as The Wall Street Journal reports:
Rep. Troy Nehls (R., Texas), a vocal President Trump defender, stared into television cameras that circled him outside the Capitol steps and addressed Elon Musk: “You’ve lost your damn mind.”

“Enough is enough. Stop this,” he said....

In the fight between the Republican titans, most GOP lawmakers sided with Trump. Rep. Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.) said Musk is “going off the deep end” with his call for Trump’s impeachment and suggested Musk is losing his sway with the MAGA crowd....
It appears that Musk has made it less likely that the "cut more" crowd will prevail:
Musk’s attacks had raised the possibility that conservatives could extract more cuts from such programs as Medicaid, but that new push appeared to stall as Musk’s fight with Trump stretched deeper into Thursday.

“He hasn’t moved a vote,” said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R., La.) of Musk.

White House aides argued Musk’s broadsides would weaken the position of Republican critics of the megabill, who had initially viewed Musk’s spotlight on deficits as helpful to their cause.
Republicans are angry at Musk for bringing this up:


Fox News reports:
House GOP lawmakers are accusing Elon Musk of going "too far" after he suggested President Donald Trump was "in the Epstein files."

"Hopefully we never have to answer questions about tweets like that from Elon again," said Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, calling Musk's comments "not helpful."

"Elon crossed the line today," Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, told Fox News Digital....

Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, said Musk had "gone too far."

"There's just no need for this," Nehls said. "Those conversations should be taking place behind closed doors."
But can't Musk just take his money and start a third party that will destroy the GOP? Well, sure, he's thinking about it, as is at least one Techworld billionaire.


But Republican voters will overwhelmingly side with Trump:


Poll results here. I think it's possible that this party could draw as many disaffected Democrats (and apolitical voters who always or sometimes lean Democratic) as it does Republicans.

In the modern GOP, either you're a Trumper in good standing or a you're a traitor to America, Christianity, and common decency. There's no middle ground. Trump is God. I was thinking about calling this post "You Come at God, You'd Best Not Miss," but God is God -- in the GOP, it's unthinkable that Trump is capable of meaningful error. There's no way Musk could come out of a fight with God looking like the good guy.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:55 AM 0 comments
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