I DON'T BELONG TO AN ORGANIZED RESISTANCE -- I'M A DEMOCRAT

President Trump will deliver his State of the Union address next week. As The New York Times reported a few days ago, the Democratic response a year ago was scattered and occasionally laughable:

Democrats knew in real time last year that they had bungled their response to President Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress, making themselves a distraction rather than offering a cohesive message of resistance to his policies.

Representative Al Green, a liberal septuagenarian from Texas, was ejected from the chamber (and later censured) after disrupting the speech with a cane-waving tirade.

Actually, Green's protest was one of the first signs of life from a Democratic member of Congress in the second Trump presidency, and a lot of us were happy to see it.

The paddles that some Democrats waved with short messages on them — “Save Medicaid,” “Musk Steals” and one that just read “False” — were widely panned as a hokey and incoherent response.

Yes, that was just sad.

As Stephen Colbert said in response to the paddles:

“That is how you save democracy. By quietly dissenting — or bidding on an antique tea set, it was hard to tell what was going on.”

And some Democratic women protested by wearing pink. So it was kind of a mess -- a little rage, a lot of gentility. Surely Democrats will have a tighter, more coordinated response this year, right?

Nahhh. Last week, Axios reported:

In a meeting of House Democrats' whip team ... [House Minority Leader Hakeem] Jeffries said there were "two options" for how to approach the State of the Union....

The first option: Lawmakers can boycott the event....

The second: They can sit in "silent defiance," which was Democratic leadership's preferred tactic for last year's speech.

And Jeffries is such a strong, firm leader that everyone has agreed to this approach, right? Again, nahhh:

Some House Democrats say they plan to defy instructions from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) not to protest President Trump during his State of the Union address on Feb. 24....

[Some] said they may walk out mid-speech, with Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) telling Axios: "The only question for me is which of his disgusting lines prompts me to get up and leave, because at some point I will."

Some of the boycotters will be attending a competing event:

A counterrally, dubbed the “People’s State of the Union,” will be held at 8:30 p.m. on the National Mall.... The rally, which will feature “everyday Americans most impacted by Trump’s dangerous agenda,” is hosted by liberal group MoveOn Civic Action, progressive media company MeidasTouch and other coalition partners.

Speakers at the event include Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), as well as Reps. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), Becca Balint (D-Vt.), Greg Casar (D-Texas), Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), according to a press release.

And there's an alternate alternate event as well:

Another counterprogramming event, billed as the “State of the Swamp,” is planned at the National Press Club. The event will be hosted by Defiance.org, a website launched by Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official and fervent Trump critic.

Among the attendees at that event will be Senator Ron Wyden and Representatives Eric Swalwell, Jason Crow, Seth Moulton, and Dan Goldman.

So: not exactly cohesive.

Will the two rallies get lost because they're overlapping with the actual Trump speech, as well as each other? Or am I misunderstanding how the press and social media work now? Is the point that there'll be lots of clips for people to watch the next day, from multiple sources, and it doesn't matter what people see in real time? Or maybe people are expected to be watching multiple screens simultaneously?

In any case, it seems as if it will be just as messy and incoherent as last year, though it will be a lot angrier (which is good).

Oh, and:

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger will deliver the official Democratic response to President Donald Trump's State of the Union address on Feb. 24.

And:

... Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., will be giving the Spanish-language response to Trump’s speech.

Spanberger -- a moderate, and not exactly a dynamic speaker -- was apparently chosen (by Jeffries and his nebbish counterpart in the Senate, Chuck Schumer) because she won't rile anyone up:

In a statement Thursday, Jeffries said Spanberger "stands in stark contrast to Donald Trump, who will lie, deflect and blame everyone but himself for his failed presidency on Tuesday evening."

... A person familiar with the decision emphasized that Spanberger’s 2018 victory from red to blue in addition to her relentless focus on affordability in flipping the Virginia governor's mansion serve as a playbook to success that Democrats hope to emulate in 2026.

"Focus on affordability"! That sound you hear is me banging my head on my laptop repeatedly.

If Democrats wanted to put on a united front against Trump, they could have had Spanberger delivering her rebuttal at the rally on the National Mall immediately after Trump's speech ends. One of the reasons State of the Union rebuttals tend to get poor grades is that they're usually delivered in a silent room with no audience, following a speech delivered to an audience that's half full of pumped-up presidential loyalists. The president gets multiple standing ovations. The rebutter gets silence. Why not change it up?

Or, instead of having the traditional speech by a rising party star, why not announce that the rebuttal will be given by the “everyday Americans most impacted by Trump’s dangerous agenda” who'll be speaking at the rally -- a group that, as the Times says, includes "people who have been negatively affected by Mr. Trump’s economic and health care policies, as well as federal workers who lost their jobs and immigrants who have been targeted by the Trump administration"?

A few weeks ago, I watched this clip of an interview with Kaden Rummler, a 21-year-old Californian who was permanently blinded in one eye by a "less lethal" ICE projectile during a protest following the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis. Rummler is interviewed by Chris Wolfe of KTLA.

The Trump-Vance administration just used your taxes to pay for an ICE agent to do this to a 21-year-old kid, who was only protesting because another ICE agent killed a mother of three, who was only there because ICE agents are kidnapping your neighbors

[image or embed]

— Prem Thakker ツ (@premthakker.bsky.social) January 15, 2026 at 3:23 PM

WOLFE: What can you tell us about your injuries now and the prognosis? Will you be blind in that eye for life?

RUMMLER: From what I've heard the doctors say, and everyone else, yes, I will be blind for life. They said my globe[?] was ruptured. I had, like -- my lower lid was, like, cut up, and they had to take skin from my temple to fix it. Um, there's a lot to it. I don't remember all the things that they said. I have fractures in my skull that they can't fix, and I can't sneeze or cough 'cause it's dangerous, too. Um, I remember also when they shot, there was pepper in it, and I had pepper down my throat. It made it hard to breathe for a long time. They pulled a piece of plastic the size of a nickel out of my eye. They said I had shards of metal, glass, and plastic all throughout my eye, and behind my eye, and in my skull. They also said that I had a piece of shrapnel metal about -- a few millimeters away from my carotid artery, and they said it was a miracle I survived, 'cause if it got any closer, if it hit the-- I would have died that night.

WOLFE: So are we blind right now?

RUMMLER: Yeah.

WOLFE: You see nothing out the eye?

RUMMLER: Nothing out of this eye. It's, uh, it's black.

It occurred to me then that the best State of the Union rebuttal might be a series of clips like this, perhaps introduced by a Democratic elected official. But rebutting Trump with ordinary people's speeches at the Mall rally might have been even better.

ON WAR, TARIFFS, AND TRUMP'S BRAIN

It looks as if President Trump is about to start a war with Iran, or at least launch a limited strike accompanied by a threat of more if Iran doesn't bend the knee, as The Wall Street Journal reports:

President Trump is weighing an initial limited military strike on Iran to force it to meet his demands for a nuclear deal, a first step that would be designed to pressure Tehran into an agreement but fall short of a full-scale attack that could inspire a major retaliation.

The opening assault, which if authorized could come within days, would target a few military or government sites, people familiar with the matter said. If Iran still refused to comply with Trump’s directive to end its nuclear enrichment, the U.S. would respond with a broad campaign against regime facilities—potentially aimed at toppling the Tehran regime.

As the Financial Times notes, this might not motivate Iran to make a deal:

The litmus test for Tehran is that talks and any subsequent deal must guarantee Iran will not be attacked; that the US will abide by the deal and lift sanctions...

(Imagine being stupid enough to think that Trump will abide by any deal. The Iranians have to be smarter than that.)

... and that it will not insist that Iran give up the right to civilian uranium enrichment. Yet none of these compromises seem to have been on offer in the last two rounds of talks. Instead, the US is demanding that Iran surrender not only its nuclear programme but also its missiles and regional proxies.

... There is an emerging consensus in Tehran that Iran will not win anything at the negotiating table. It will instead have to accept war, prepare to manage it, and hope that conflict eventually leads to the change it is seeking — by exhausting the US to the point that it abandons the pursuit of future aggression and agrees to a more favourable nuclear deal.

... even if the US launches a massive strike and succeeds in impeding Iran’s ability to retaliate against US forces or Israel, Tehran may still retain the ability to use its regional proxies, and target oil facilities and energy supply routes. It could even decide to launch much of its arsenal against the US and its allies before the US is able to destroy it, thus quickly escalating the war.

So this could get ugly.

Nick Catoggio of The Dispatch can't understand why this is happening now:

And so here we are, on the precipice of the largest war that the United States will have waged in nearly 25 years without any clear objective for the mission. “President Trump hasn’t decided ... whether the aim would be to halt Iran’s already-battered nuclear program, wipe out its missile force, or try to topple the regime,” the Journal noted surreally in its report on America’s military build-up. War as Mad Libs: We must attack Iran because [casus belli TBD].

Michelle Goldberg knows why:

... I assume Trump is driven by the same self-aggrandizing impulse that made him slap his name on the Kennedy Center. He wants to put his stamp on the world, to be the president who rid the globe of three regimes that bedeviled his predecessors: Venezuela, Iran and Cuba, which he’s subjecting to a devastating fuel blockade. “He is now enamored with the idea that he will be the president on whose watch a number of regimes that have been viscerally anti-American for a long time will no longer be,” said [Rob] Malley [President Biden’s special envoy for Iran].

That's an explanation for Trump's wars, his building spree, and even the tariffs -- which I don't believe are going away even though the Supreme Court struck them down today:

The Supreme Court blocked President Donald Trump’s signature economic and foreign policy Friday morning in a fractured 6-3 split decision.

Trump cannot use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to override Congress’s power of the purse, using the emergency declaration to levy widespread global tariffs, the majority held.

Trump believes he's right about tariffs and all sensible people are wrong. He wants to impose them as part of his legacy. They're the economic equivalent of his ballroom and his arch (and his wars).

That's why, as I've said many times, he'll just impose whatever tariffs he can through alternate pathways. As The New York Times notes today:

But even while battling in court, the president began to explore alternatives to the 1977 law. Mr. Trump’s top trade negotiator Jamieson Greer said last month that the administration would move quickly to replace any emergency tariffs invalidated by the court with other levies. The president has already used other statutes to set tariffs, including national security-related ones on some specific goods and industries.

In November, the Times listed a few of those statutes:

... the administration could use Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act to put in place a 15 percent global tariff for 150 days.... That law says a president can impose tariffs to deal with “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits....

In the meantime, the administration could start multiple trade investigations under a legal provision known as Section 301.... Section 301 allows the president to issue broad tariffs in response to unfair trading practices, after first conducting an investigation....

Another alternative is Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows the president to impose tariffs on national security grounds.

On that last one, we're told:

Those levies typically require investigations that can take several months to carry out, a period that would prevent the president from arbitrarily raising and lowering tariffs, as he has done with IEEPA.

LOL -- imagine Trump refraining from using this authority because a painstaking investigation hasn't been carried out.

As I've said a few times, I think all of this is happening not just because Trump is a megalomaniac, but because he had a health scare last year that led him to believe he could die soon. I wrote this last month:

After all of Trump's talk about "heaven" in 2025, and his recent Wall Street Journal interview about his health, I assume he's afraid of death (though that doesn't mean he's actually dying) and is trying to go out with a bang -- he wants to die knowing he was the most consequential person on earth, if not the most consequential person of all time. Hence the renaming and building and redecorating. He's trying to preen and bomb his way to a legacy.

He also wants to make sure he doesn't die before punishing all his enemies and hoovering up all the cash he possibly can -- Whoever dies with the most toys wins, amirite? And that's how policy is decided when you elect an ignorant, corrupt narcissist to the presidency and the other two branches of government defer to him 99% of the time.

NO ELITE ACCOUNTABILITY = AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

Here are some of today's headlines:

* Former Prince Andrew Arrested in Britain Over Epstein Ties

* Epstein files hand French prosecutors trove of new leads

* South Korea’s former president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

* Epstein’s Files of ‘Shame’ Blast Through Europe and Beyond, Scorching Politicians, Royals and Other Elites

From that last story:

... former British Ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson ... was fired last year after it came to light that he maintained a friendly relationship with Epstein for years after the financier’s 2008 prison term for sexual offenses involving a minor. Now, police are investigating whether he passed on sensitive government financial information – including some documents meant for the prime minister only – to Epstein during the financial crisis, while he was the UK’s Secretary of State for Business. If charged and found guilty, Mandelson could face a life sentence....

Across the English Channel, French officials have launched a tax fraud and money laundering investigation into Jack Lang, a former French culture minister, and his daughter, Caroline.

There are legal investigations in quite a few other countries. But in America? No one in Washington is stepping down. No one in politics is in legal jeopardy. Prominent figures in business, law, and academia have left positions in disgrace, but no one appears to be under criminal investigation.

(And, of course, our president was never held accountable for his attempt to subvert democracy in 2021, unlike the former presidents of South Korea and Brazil.)

I think it's only a matter of time before American pundits begin arguing that America's utter lack of legal accountability for elites is a good thing, actually.

They'll say that instead of succumbing to moral panics, "wokeness," and guilt by association, American law enforcement is right not to define dynamic, capable, accomplished people by their worst moments. We should be pleased! Societies with a culture of shame are weaker! We don't want to be like (insert retching sounds) Europe, do we? Stodgy, hidebound, politically correct, past-its-prime Europe? Who wants that?

Maybe we'll hear this from the Atlantic writer who told us that the recently releases Epstein files "bolster the case that although terrible crimes were committed, there never was a larger conspiracy to begin with," or maybe we'll hear it from the folks, mostly on the right, who keep calling the Epstein matter a "moral panic." Right-wingers already believe that Donald Trump shouldn't have been held accountable for the attempted coup he inspired. Why wouldn't they say the failure to launch investigations of bigwigs in the Epstein files is a good thing, too?

YES, UNDER PRESIDENT VANCE, AMERICA REALLY MIGHT MAKE BEING TRANS ILLEGAL FOR ADULTS

On Monday, I wrote a post questioning whether we can maintain a united front against the Republican Party in 2028. I wrote the following about Gavin Newsom, a flawed politician who really might be the Democratic presidential nominee that year:

I don't intend to vote for Newsom in the primaries. I understand why people don't like his stance on trans rights and other issues....

Yes, I could imagine Newsom signing legislation that banned trans youth from competing in school sports nationwide, just as Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act. But Gavin Newsom won't support a complete ban on transitioning. I think a Republican 48th president might do that. I think we could live to see the criminalization of trans people under continued Republican rule. We won't see that even with a bad Democratic president.

Well, here you go: Yesterday, Erin Reed, a trans journalist, reported this:

On Tuesday, the president of the billionaire-backed Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, appeared on the influential far-right PBD podcast to discuss gender-affirming care.... the conversation turned towards what the Heritage Foundation was working on when it comes to the future of transgender people. It was during this shift that Roberts darkly announced that his solution to being transgender was simple: "You outlaw it," and that the organization was working to ban gender-affirming care at all ages....

... when asked if transgender adults should have their medication taken away, Roberts endorsed the idea, stating, "We like that idea, too. One of the reasons is that we not only work in coalitions, but we often work toward an ultimate goal via incremental steps—sometimes people will call us radical incrementalists. We're willing to take a quarter of the enchilada if we can keep working there. So if that's the kind of thing that policymakers can agree on left and right, Heritage would be fully supportive of that, knowing that ultimately we have an ideal position that would be much stronger than that."

If you know what happened to abortion rights in the decades after Roe v. Wade, you can see where this is going. Maybe receiving trans medical care as an adult won't be made illegal in the next Republican presidency. But that's what the right wants to do, and they won't stop fighting until they get what they want, unless we stop them.

No Democrat wants this. Soon, the overwhelming majority of Republicans will demand this.

But we don't just need to vote for Democrats, even bad or disappointing Democrats, to prevent this and other erosions of rights and decency. We need to push back on anti-trans messaging from the right and the left-center.

This week, the influential left-centrist online magazine The Argument published results of a poll on trans issues under the headline "The Trans Rights Backlash Is Real." The Argument's pollster, Lakshya Jain, cites numbers like this:

... 52% of voters now support legislation requiring trans people to use bathrooms corresponding with their biological sex, while just 33% oppose such a bill.

This is a sharp and dramatic change from the way things stood at the beginning of the Trump era, when Americans consistently rejected the concept of bathroom restrictions for trans people. In a Pew Research Center poll from September 2016, 51% of Americans said that trans people should be allowed to use public restrooms of the gender they identify as. Months later, the Public Religion Research Institute released a similar finding showing 53% of Americans were opposed to laws that would require trans people to use bathrooms corresponding to their birth sex.

Both Jain and The Argument's editor, Jerusalem Demsas, say they're not recommending that liberals beat a full retreat on trans issues. They note that nearly two thirds of respondents in their poll "want to ban discrimination against transgender people in hiring and housing. Not a single subgroup–including Trump 2024 voters—opposes such legislation."

So they call for a partial retreat, defending what the public supports and not defending what the public opposes. Demsas writes:

If you care about building durable protections, you have to build them in the world as it actually exists, not the world you wish you could rhetorically enforce into being.

But as G. Elliott Morris said in a different context last fall:

Public opinion is not static.... It changes over time and it’s unpredictable what it will be in the future. You don’t want to base all of your political strategy over what the polls say today, because there’s no election today. The election is going to be a year and a half from now. Or I guess, in our case, a year and two months from now. You want to base all of your political calculus on what you think opinion will be a year and two months from now. Or also maybe on your values, beliefs.

(Emphasis added.)

Morris was discussing immigration -- another issue on which Democrats were urged to meekly accept the right-wing backlash and meet the public where they were:

In March, a lot of this backlash I was referencing against Democrats talking about immigration, especially [Kilmar] Abrego Garcia, was predicated on this idea that Trump was doing well in his immigration net approval. So don’t talk about that. You don’t want to raise this issue of immigration because he does well on it. The counter argument was like, look, you’re never going to change how people feel about the president if you don’t engage with him.

if you don’t fight him on this. And as soon as we saw Democratic representatives and senators start fighting him on Abrego Garcia, on deportations in general, especially after the events in LA in, gosh, June, I believe, you saw his immigration numbers fall.

And then the Trump administration started the War on Minneapolis. Here's what's happened to Trump's approval on immigration:

So I'll argue in favor of supporting a candidate who's bad on trans issues if that candidate wins the primaries -- but we also need to try pushing publc opinion back to where it was before the massive right-wing (and centrist) anti-trans campaign began. Demsas writes that "the path to civil rights has never run through making disagreement illegal" -- as if we live in a world where "the woke mob" is silencing anti-trans voices -- but there's a lot of ground between this imagined "You must comply" pro-trans regime and complete acquiescence whenever polling on an aspect of trans rights become more than 50% anti-.

We need to emphasize the humanity of trans people, and counter the right's stereotyping of them as sick, violent monsters. The alternative in an America in which they'll soon literally be illegal. And maybe we could even push Gavin Newsom a bit further to the left in the process.

RANDY FINE MIGHT BE THE FUTURE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

People who should know better believe that the Republican Party might moderate after Donald Trump leaves office, but here's a story about a Republican who's been in Congress for less than a year and is already an emerging superstar hatemonger:

Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., prompted calls for his resignation from Democrats and a major Islamic civil rights group after suggesting in a social media post that he'd choose dogs over Muslims.

"If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one," Fine posted to the social media platform X on Sunday.

Shortly afterward, he added a photo of a post from Nerdeen Kiswani, the co-founder of the pro-Palestinian group "Within Our Lifetime," in which she called dogs "unclean" and said that "NYC is coming to Islam." Kiswani later told NBC News in an email she made the comment satirically.

Fine wrote in the follow-up post, "For context, this is the leader of one of the key mainstream Muslim groups that supported Mamdani," referring to Zohran Mamdani, New York City's new mayor.

Here's a little background: On January 25, New York City had its biggest snowstorm in five years. Parts of the city received nearly 15 inches of snow. Temperatures were well below freezing for a week after the storm, and only briefly cracked 32F for another week. So the snow has lingered, which is unusual here. It's finally begun to melt in the past few days.

There's an unpleasant amount of scattered trash and dog poop on top of the snow piles. This isn't pleasant, but I've lived here nearly fifty years -- it always happens here when snow lingers for a while. The New York Post -- which hates our new mayor and wants to blame him for this -- has fixated on this problem. Here's a story the Post ran on February 11 (cover your eyes if you're sensitive to the sight of dog waste):

The next day, Kiswani posted these tweets:

Congressman Fine knows how to ring the Pavlovian bell that makes right-wing rageoholics drool: He not only attacked Kiswani, he linked her to Mayor Mamdani:

For context, this is the leader of one of the key mainstream Muslim groups that supported Mamdani. pic.twitter.com/zcIs4tVyly

— Congressman Randy Fine (@RepFine) February 15, 2026

(Kiswani, in fact, has been critical of Mamdani since he was inaugurated.)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez weighed in:

This is genuinely one of the most disgusting statements I have ever seen issued by an American official.

It should not stop shocking us that the Republican Party openly embraces this. Fine should be censured & stripped of committees. To ignore this is to accept and normalize it. https://t.co/OPHd5jtM2b

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 17, 2026

Fine took her on as well:

Rep. Randy Fine: "People should know Democrats like AOC are saying 'we are going to get rid of your dogs.' Americans need to keep that in mind when they go and vote in November."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 17, 2026 at 8:09 AM

Fine hits every pleasure center in GOP rageoholics' brains:

Look, here's my view: It's not enough for Democrats to think anyone who wants to come here illegally should be able to do that. They also think they should be able to get whatever free stuff they want. Now they're demanding that we change our values and how we live as Americans.

My post was in response to a major Muslim leader saying dogs should be forbidden from New York City because to some Muslims it bothers them. Well, if they're going to make us choose between our dogs and them going home, the choice is easy, and people should know Democrats like AOC are saying, "We are going to get rid of your dogs."

You mean this AOC?

(That's Deco, AOC's French bulldog.)

Apart from the bigotry and the Democrat-bashing, this plays on GOP voters' misunderstanding of how diverse communities work. Kiswani wasn't really saying dogs should be banned in the city, but even if that had been her point, and even if she were a top Mamdani adviser, it wouldn't matter. New York is a very dog-friendly city. We wouldn't tolerate a ban on dogs -- some of were angry in 1978 when a law went into effect requiring dog owners to clean up after their pets. But we can tolerate unpopular opinions -- we don't expect everyone to think the same way, just as we don't expect everyone to have the same set of religious beliefs or the same dietary habits or the same dress code. We know some of our neighbors eat halal (or kosher), but we know they don't expect us to. Do some Muslims or some Jews (or the Amish men who come up from Pennsylvania to sell produce) dress according to their customs? Fine, but there's no pressure on us to do the same.

I think many Republican voters can't understand this. The places they live are monocultures. They'd like to impose their monocultural values on the rest of America. They assume that our Muslim mayor wants to impose what they consider a bad monoculture on us, but he doesn't, and we wouldn't allow him to (and wouldn't have elected him if we thought that's what he wanted).

Fine, meanwhile, seems like a rising GOP star. He's Jewish and wears a yarmulke, which might limit his stardom, but he's a hardcore hater:

... he privately wrote “Go blow yourself up!” to a Florida Muslim after they challenged his social media posts, calling on an Islamophobic trope that Muslims are prone to violence or suicide bombings.

In December 2023, as Palestinians awaited much-needed humanitarian aid, Fine mocked them, posting on his X account, “Stop the trucks. Let them eat rockets. There are plenty of those. #BombsAway.”

... In November 2024, Fine warned Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) that they should “consider leaving before [he] gets there,” followed by “#BombsAway,” an open threat against two Muslim members of Congress....

In May 2025, Fine suggested on national television that the United States should use nuclear weapons against Gaza, invoking the atomic bombings of Japan as a model for dealing with Palestinians. When asked to explain this genocidal rhetoric, he doubled down with a racist and dehumanizing response, claiming that half of Gaza’s population is “married to their cousins” and has “mental defects,” and that “you’ve got to have a mental defect to interpret the comment that way.”

I could see him winning the Senate seat of the aging Rick Scott in 2030. I could see him running for president and being a credible candidate in the GOP primaries. And if he doesn't have a successful career in electoral politics, I expect to see him topping the podcast charts someday. He's a star on the rise.

HERE'S WHY I'M A 2028 ELECTION DOOMER

If we have free elections in November, I expect Democrats to do well. I think they'll retake the House fairly easily and might retake the Senate.

But I'm pessimistic about 2028. President Trump and his party might or might not succeed in rigging the 2028 election, but even if that contest is fair, I question whether Democrats (and the independents whose votes they'll need to win) will be able to unite around a candidate.

It's possible that the party's 2028 nominee will be a progressive -- maybe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Under those circumstances, I expect plutocrats who sometimes fund Democrats -- Bill Ackman, Mike Bloomberg -- to spend millions trying to elect the Republican candidate (almost certainly J.D. Vance, who has a massive lead in early polling, with Marco Rubio as his running mate). I also think America won't elect a woman, especially a young, slight woman. Many normies appear to believe that the president needs to be physically intimidating. (How can she stand up to China?)

But it's more likely that someone a bit more mainstream will be the nominee. Gavin Newsom seems to be making his presence felt more than any other contender -- and that's leading to a lefty backlash:

Progressive Twitch streamer Hasan Piker ... said he would be unlikely to back Newsom in a hypothetical matchup against Vice President JD Vance in the 2028 race during an interview on the I’ve Had It podcast with Jennifer Welch....

“At that point it doesn’t even matter,” he said. “My policy on this is the same as my refusal to endorse Kamala Harris. The reason why I did not endorse Kamala Harris is she did things that were not only unproductive but also unconscionable. I still stand on that. I still talk about it all the time because people constantly bring it up.”

That makes sense to quite a few online influencers.

On this subject, I'm with Will Stancil, who responds to another influencer here:

The reason people are concerned about lefties saying “I won’t vote for a moderate Dem” isn’t because they want Newsom. It’s because lefties keep not voting for moderate Dems! I think all the scolding about it being years til the primary would hit a little harder if WE DIDN’T JUST GO THROUGH THIS

[image or embed]

— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) February 16, 2026 at 1:24 AM

I don't intend to vote for Newsom in the primaries. I understand why people don't like his stance on trans rights and other issues. I'm appalled that he cozies up to the likes of Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, and Charlie Kirk.

But he's not a fascist. J.D. Vance is a fascist. Marco Rubio, as he just made clear in his "Vance Lite" speech to the Munich Security Conference, is a fascist. (Today Rubio traveled to Hungary to meet with Viktor Orban and told him, "Your success is our success.") All the other candidates who show up in the first tier in 2028 polling for the Republicans -- Donald Trump Jr. (who won't run), Ron DeSantis, Robert Kennedy Jr., Tucker Carlson -- are authoritarians. They are candidates who will make common cause with Vladimir Putin, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, and the Heritage Foundation. It will not be possible to nudge them to the left if elected, any more than it's possible to nudge Trump to the left. They don't like democracy. They don't believe in compromise or power-sharing with their political opponents.

And on the issue that Newsom critics always raise first: Yes, I could imagine Newsom signing legislation that banned trans youth from competing in school sports nationwide, just as Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act. But Gavin Newsom won't support a complete ban on transitioning. I think a Republican 48th president might do that. I think we could live to see the criminalization of trans people under continued Republican rule. We won't see that even with a bad Democratic president.

And on every other issue, Vance or another Republican president woiuld be immeasurably worse than any Democrat. What's maddening to me is that the Republicans in my lifetime who were elected president when the left abandoned the Democratic Party are some of the worst and cruelest presidents of all time: Richard Nixon in 1968, George W. Bush in 2000, Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024.

That list makes me despair, because the left used to reject Democrats only when they'd been in power for a couple of terms. Nixon and Dubya were elected after eight years of Democratic rule. So was Trump in 2016.

But our national memory of Trump's awfulness faded after a mere four years in 2024. And now we have progressives who want to argue that there isn't a dime's worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans while a Republican is subjecting us to the worst and most authoritarian presidency of all time. It's not even amnesia anymore.

I get it. Fighting the powerful is hard. The left scores very few victories against right-wing extremism or the plutocracy. So, perhaps on an unconscious level, leftists think: We can't hurt the right-wing power structure, but we can beat a Democrat. That's an attainable goal. That's a power progressives actually have: the power to hurt the Democratic Party. So they wield it in order to feel they can make something happen.

I know a lot of you don't think Vance can win the general election, or even win the nomination. On the latter, here's my reply:

You all keep telling me that Vance is too boring to win the 2028 nomination, but I'm going to keep telling you that the GOP base can see what a hate-filled asshole he is every day. The base *loves* that. He's not leading in the primary polls just because of name recognition.

[image or embed]

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) January 8, 2026 at 2:15 PM

And in the general, I'm sticking with what I said earlier this month:

... mainstream outlets may very well portray J.D. Vance ... as a thoughtful, soft-spoken Republican who wants to move the GOP away from its worst instincts....

We'll get insipid, soft-focus profiles of Vance, and he'll be portrayed as a turn of the page after Trump -- more so than loudmouths like Gavin Newsom and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or whoever emerges as the Democratic nominee.

And I know that the online left is a small sliver of the overall electorate -- but I also know that swing states are often won by small margins.

Do we need better Democrats? Sure. Should we reject the Democrats if they let us down in many ways? Not when the alternative is a 48th president who's the U.S. equivalent of Orban or Farage. And that really will be our choice.

IT WOULD BE GOOD TO KNOW JUST HOW BATSHIT CRAZY TRUMP'S ELECTION CONSPIRATORIALISM IS

Kristi Noem said something alarming on Friday:

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said President Donald Trump’s administration is working hard to “make sure we have the right people voting” heading into the 2026 midterms.

Noem made the comment during a press conference in Arizona on Friday....

The secretary said elections are one of the “critical infrastructure responsibilities” that fall on her and the DHS.

Noem's department has limited electoral responsibilities. DHS is tasked with "protect[ing] the security and resilience of our nation’s election infrastructure from both cybersecurity and physical security threats," but it has no role to play whatsoever in combatting election fraud. I didn't make that up -- that's according to a fact sheet on DHS's own website, which is marked as "archived" but was most recently updated in February of last year, after Donald Trump was sworn in as president again.

Noem said this:

Kristi Noem: "When it gets to Election Day, we've been proactive to make sure we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 14, 2026 at 9:51 AM

And elections is another one of those critical infrastructure responsibilities that I have as well. And I would say that many people believe that it may be one of the most important things that we need to make sure we trust, is reliable, and that when it gets to Election Day, that we’ve been proactive to make sure that we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country through the days that we have, knowing that people can trust it.

It's obvious that if you were to ask Noem what she means by "have the right people voting," she'd say she merely wants to ensure that everyone who is voting is a U.S. citizen who's properly registered to vote. She'd say "the right leaders" are candidates chosen through a clean electoral process. She'd swear on a stack of Bibles that she doesn't want to take the vote away from any legitimate voter.

But we also know she's articulating a near-universal belief in the Republican Party: that every Democratic electoral victory -- or at least every Democratic victory in a competitive race -- is the result of fraud, that if only legitimate voters are voting, only Republicans will win. Whether Noem herself actually believes this is probably irrelevant -- she and her party have been selling this lie for decades, and she knows that millions of GOP voters believe it, and will support voter suppression measures based on this belief.

We never hear this belief openly articulated by Republicans in top positions (apart from President Trump) because the mainstream press doesn't really understand how conspiratorial the thinking of the average GOP voter is on this subject. Remember, these are the same reporters who told us during the Barack Obama presidency that GOP voters didn't really believe Obama was born in Kenya. Here's a sneering Dave Weigel post published by Slate exactly fifteen years ago:

The non-partisan-but-usually-hired-by-Democrats firm Public Policy Polling is out with more data on what Republicans -- well, 400 "Republican primary voters nationwide" -- think about Barack Obama's citizenship. They have their doubts!

A 51% majority of national GOP primary voters erroneously think President Obama was not born in the U.S. 28% know that he was.

Another way of putting this is slightly more than one in four Republicans believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States. Does that mean that 72 percent of Republicans think Obama should be disqualified from the presidency? No. It suggests that birtherism has become another screen for extreme partisanship.

Republican voters don't really believe this nonsense! It's just a tribal shibboleth! But they did believe it -- and now they believe Trump won the 2020 election. They also believe that President Joe Biden let in 25 million undocumented immigrants (he didn't) so they could vote for Democrats upon arrival (House Speaker Mike Johnson in 2024: "We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.")

I want to hear some specifics from the Conspiratorialist in Chief. I think it would be a service to America if a journalist would ask the president this question:

Mr. President, you've often expressed doubts about the 2020 election. According to official records, Joe Biden won more than 81 million votes in that election. How many of those 81 million votes do you believe were legitimate?

I think it would be valuable to know just how batshit crazy Trump's beliefs are on this subject. I imagine he'd say that a majority of Biden's votes were fraudulent. He might say that Biden only won a few hundred or a few thousand legitimate votes.

Of course, I'm imagining how this would play in a country that still had a capacity to respond to delusional right-wing extremism with shock, outrage, and a determination to re-establish a reality-based government. I realize that we don't live in that kind of country.

But -- after Noem and other officials confirmed that they agreed with Trump's absurdly low estimate of Biden's legitimate vote (which would happen), and after polls showed that the majority of Republican voters also agreed with that estimate (which they would), maybe our political culture would understand just how extreme and out of touch with reality America's dominant political party is.

There are other areas where myth replaces fact for Republicans. I think Republican voters (and some in the middle) continue to support the Trump administration's immigration agenda because they believe nearly every undocumented immigrant in America is a violent felon. A journalist should ask Trump to estimate the percentage of immigrants he believes are violent felons. I'm sure he'd provide a very high number, probably something like 99% -- as would most Republican voters.

The degree to which Republicans have succumbed to disinformation in the Fox News era is something we need to confront. But I don't think that reckoning will ever happen.

JANET MILLS WILL DIE ON THE HILL OF SCHUMERISM

A few days ago, G. Elliott Morris wrote about the Democratic Establishment's fondness for liberal-bashing left-centrism:

After every Democratic loss, the same argument returns: the party needs to move to the center, or it will die. The post-2024 version has been especially loud, with elites in politics and the press uncritically adopting the theory that Democrats lost the last election because of progressive policy positions.

... in many Democrats’ eyes, [Bill] Clinton is the model Democrats should follow today. By publicly rebuking the left (Clinton’s “Sister Souljah Moment”), moving to the right on entitlements, and holding the line with southern whites, the usual explanation goes, Clinton broke 12 years of national Republican rule ushered in a new era for the New Democrats.

But, Morris tells us, this belief is at odds with the data:

According to the American National Election Studies (a quadrennial academic survey of the American public) voters perceived Bill Clinton as more liberal than Michael Dukakis, and also rated Clinton as less favorable.

... The Sister Souljah narrative assumes voters rewarded Clinton for tacking right — but political scientists have found voters didn’t even perceive Clinton as particularly moderate.

Morris writes, "I see Democrats endlessly relitigating an ideological debate that the electorate isn’t having," by which he means this:

Instead of poring over troves of polling data and statements of issue positions, voters mostly react to national conditions and (only the most significant) moments in campaigns. The data does not support the case that Clinton won in 1992 because he ran to the center. But it does show a huge increase in the percentage of Americans who lost faith in the Republican Party to handle the economy.

The 1992 election took place before Morris was born, but I remember it, and he's right: normal people didn't see Clinton as a center-left candidate -- they saw him as the first major-party candidate to have emerged from the 1960s counterculture, a pot-smoking hippie horndog...

... who had cleaned himself up and now seemed, at least to those who warmed up to him, like a smart, articulate, vigorous man in early middle age who might be able to extricate America from Poppy Bush's stagnation.

In the 1992 campaign, Clinton expressed support for the death penalty (and, as a sitting governor, carried it out), and chastised Sister Souljah, the rapper and activist, for saying, "If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?" -- but unlike today's anti-progressive Democrats (Rahm Emanuel, John Fetterman, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, and others), he didn't spend the campaign flamboyantly drawing attention to his disagreements with the left.

*****

In Maine, it appears that Governor Janet Mills, Chuck Schumer's handpicked candidate for the Senate seat currently occupied by Susan Collins, is trying to draw attention to the fact that she's AWOL in the fight against the White House immigration war. Drop Site News reports:

On January 24, the morning that federal agents murdered VA nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, more than 500 Mainers packed into the former St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church ... for the state’s first large-scale ICE protest, an “ICE THEM OUT” rally. That week, masked federal agents launched “Operation Catch of the Day,” a mass deportation campaign aimed at the nearly 6,000 Somalis who live in Maine....

The Lewiston event featured many of the state’s prominent Democratic politicians.

Speakers included [Senate candidate Graham] Platner, as well as gubernatorial candidates Shenna Bellows, Troy Jackson, Hannah Pingree, and Angus King III; Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline and Portland Mayor Mark Dion, the leaders of Maine’s two largest cities; and Rep. Chellie Pingree.

Gov. Mills was notably absent.

There's more:

The day ICE launched its Maine operation, Mills was caught jetting off to California. Dinner invitations obtained by Axios reveal Mills planned to attend a trio of big-money Senate fundraisers in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley on Wednesday, and the East Bay on Thursday. The Wednesday invitation described an “intimate dinner” in San Francisco’s financial district....

On January 30, six days after Mills was a no-show at the Lewiston rally, a city-wide service worker strike took place in Portland, Maine’s largest city. Almost 200 businesses shut their doors to protest ICE. Thousands of people marched through the city....

At this event, one of the largest protests in Portland’s history, Mills was again absent. That evening, Mills was photographed dining at Scales, an upscale seafood restaurant in Portland’s gentrified Old Port District. The pictures from Mills dinner have now been viewed millions of times across platforms.

Mills is so conspicuously absent from the fight that Adam Jentleson -- the president of the Searchlight Institute, a center-left think tank that has begged Democrats not to say "Abolish ICE" -- has criticized her cowardice:

What the hell? She’s the governor, total failure of leadership. https://t.co/fwjqsbLBd5

— Adam Jentleson (@AJentleson) January 24, 2026

She could show up and call for ICE reform rather than its abolition, as Jentleson recommends. But she's making a great show of being out of the picture altogether.

This is probably what Chuck Schumer thinks she should be doing. It's the conspicuous-rush-to-the-center strategy that G. Elliott Morris tells us isn't really effective.

There hasn't been much polling of this race, but a couple of surveys conducted late last year suggest that Graham Platner, Mills's key opponent in the primary, would do slightly better against Susan Collins than Mills would. Platner is campaigning as a leftist.

Dismantling ICE is the moderate position.

Unmask these thugs, arrest them, and make them answer for these horrors.

— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) January 7, 2026

We'll see whether the Mills/Schumer approach is the right one. I think Mills -- a septuagenarian like Schumer (and Clinton) -- simply doesn't understand the moment.

ONCE AGAIN, REPUBLICANS ARE THE ODDBALLS

There's a lot of news today and I've been struggling in vain to find a Big Idea that ties current stories together, so I'll abandon that effort and just respond to these results from the recent AP-NORC poll by restating a simple fact:

Once again we get the same results we've gotten over and over again in other recent polls: at least two-thirds of independents agree with nearly every Democrat on major issues -- and a majority of Republicans are on the other side.

I'll keep saying it: Democrats are the normal people in America. Republicans are the out-of-touch, beyond-the-pale extremists. A majority of them think it's fine for America to take Greenland by force or coercion. Large majorities of them think Trump's arbitrary and onerous tariffs are just fine, and think ICE and the Border Patrol are doing a terrific job in Minneapolis and elsewhere.

They are not normal Americans. People who are dissatisfied with Donald Trump's presidency are normal Americans. Our political culture needs to wake up to this fact.

I'm not a real journalist, but maybe some people who really are journalists -- independent or otherwise -- need to conduct some safaris to the heartland to find the many Americans who aren't upscale, overeducated city-dwelling white liberals but who loathe Donald Trump anyway. They're there. They're everywhere. There are millions of them, and they're invisible.

Even a shellacking of the Republicans in the midterms might not get the point across -- pundits will say the vote was merely "thermostatic," or they'll fixate on winnable races Democrats lost. Even when Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, he was seen as the candidate who represented the zeitgeist, much more so than when Joe Biden won the most votes of any presidential candidate in American history four years later, and despite the fact that Biden's popular-vote margin was three times greater than Trump's in 2024. (Even Hillary Clinton's popular-vote win in her 2016 Electoral College loss was greater than Trump's popular-vote win eight years later.)

Democrats represent the zeitgeist now. It's time for the political world to acknowledge that.

IN EL PASO, TRUMP'S COWBOYS WANT TO CREATE AN AIRBORNE MINNEAPOLIS

In my post yesterday, I was obviously wrong to speculate that a war with Mexico was about to start. I say this even though it's clear that President Trump desperately wants to invade Mexico, as he said in two separate Fox interviews last week. One was with Sean Hannity:

President Donald Trump suggested in a new interview that the U.S. military could launch land strikes on drug cartels in Mexico.

“We’ve knocked out 97% of the drugs coming in by water. And we are going to start now hitting land, with regard to the cartels,” Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity in an interview aired Thursday night.

“The cartels are running Mexico, it’s very sad to watch and see what’s happened to that country,” Trump said.

The other was with Larry Kudlow:

Speaking in an interview with Fox Business host Larry Kudlow, Trump said his administration initially focused on disrupting drug shipments at sea, claiming those efforts reduced drug flows by roughly one-third. He said the strategy is now shifting to land-based operations to prevent traffickers from adapting by rerouting shipments.

“Now we’re going to start on land,” Trump said, arguing that hitting trafficking networks on land would stop smugglers from simply moving operations back to boats.

I'm sure you know by now that air traffic was shut down in and around El Paso after a U.S. anti-drone laser was fired at a target that turned out to be a party balloon. CBS News (which still seems to be functioning as a legitimate news organization) reports that tests of anti-drone technology have been underway for months, and the Department of Defense/War has insisted that the tech doesn't endanger commercial air traffic:

The Pentagon had undertaken extensive planning on the use of military technology near Fort Bliss, a military base that abuts the El Paso International Airport, to practice taking down drones.

Two sources identified the technology as a high-energy laser.

But the folks at the Pentagon had to act like cowboys:

Meetings were scheduled over safety impacts, but Pentagon officials wanted to test the technology sooner....

The airlines were under the impression that the airspace closure was put into place out of an abundance of caution because the FAA could not predict where U.S. government drones might be flying. The drones have been operating outside of their normal flight paths. The airlines were also aware of the apparent impasse between the FAA and Pentagon officials over the issue because the Pentagon has been using Fort Bliss for anti-cartel drone operations without sharing information with the FAA, the sources said

An aviation industry official told POLITICO that the restriction was put in place because the Defense Department has been using drones & testing some counter-drone techn in the airspace, which neighbors Mexico, without sharing critical safety info on such operations w/ the FAA https://t.co/kvHdiuby2b

— Oriana Pawlyk (@Oriana0214) February 11, 2026

But it wasn't the military that deployed the weapon that endangered commercial air traffic, as The New York Times tells us:

The abrupt closure of El Paso’s airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft, according to multiple people briefed on the situation.

To me this feels a little like Minneapolis: Wannabe macho men in the Trump administration are choosing to act in ways that recklessly threaten public safety, while refusing to coordinate their actions with other parties that have a stake in the matter. And, of course, the macho men include immigration agents.

To some extent, this is part of the Trump/GOP War on Democrats, as Forbes notes:

Local officials, primarily Democrats, criticized the abrupt closure, and said local officials were not given proper warning. “I want to be very clear: this never should have happened,” El Paso Mayor Renard Johnson said in a statement on social media. “You cannot restrict airspace over a major city without coordinating with the city, the airport, hospitals, and community leadership. That failure to communicate is unacceptable.” Johnson said emergency flights were grounded during the closure, forcing medical flights to reroute to Las Cruces, New Mexico, a city about 45 miles northwest of El Paso. Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M., also said he would demand answers from the FAA about “why the airspace was closed in the first place without notifying appropriate officials.”

The Pentagon and CBP kept the FAA out of the loop and then the FAA kept local officials out of the loop. The notion that we'll fight over some issues but work together on others is antiquated and passé. It's a war of all against all now. I'm sure that'll make America great.

I THINK WE'RE ABOUT TO INVADE MEXICO (OR ARE WE?) (updated)

I'm leaving this post in place with updates, despite the fact that I seem to have guessed wrong. Or maybe I didn't?

*****

WTF?

The Federal Aviation Administration is closing the airspace around El Paso International Airport in Texas for 10 days, grounding all flights to and from the airport.

A notice posted on the FAA’s website said the temporary flight restrictions were for “special security reasons,” but did not provide additional details. The closure does not include Mexican airspace.

There are also FAA restrictions in New Orleans and, as El Paso Matters notes, in "a large patch of southern New Mexico west of Santa Teresa."

We didn't even close down air traffic for this long after 9/11. Flights began taking off again on September 13.

I think we're going to war, folks.

Here's an NBC story from November:

The Trump administration has begun detailed planning for a new mission to send American troops and intelligence officers into Mexico to target drug cartels, according to two U.S. officials and two former senior U.S. officials familiar with the effort.

The early stages of training for the potential mission, which would include ground operations inside Mexico, has already begun, the two current U.S. officials said. But a deployment to Mexico is not imminent, the two U.S. officials and one of the former U.S. officials said....

Under the new mission being planned, U.S. troops in Mexico would mainly use drone strikes to hit drug labs and cartel members and leaders, the two current U.S. officials and two former U.S. officials said. Some of the drones that special forces would use require operators to be on the ground to use them effectively and safely, the officials said....

Unlike in Venezuela, the mission being planned for Mexico is not designed to undermine the country’s government, the two current and two former U.S. officials said.

This won't work -- nothing we've done in the so-called War on Drugs for the past 55 years has worked -- but it will probably give Trump a poll bump.

Pressure from Europe prevented Toddler Trump from playing toy soldiers in Greenland -- he has to do something to have fun, right?

So brace youselves, folks. I think this is what's coming.

UPDATE: How will an assault on Mexico poll? The idea of military action against Mexico was fairly popular in September 2023:

About half of Americans support sending U.S. military personnel into Mexico to fight drug cartels, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll, though there is less backing for sending troops without Mexico's approval....

According to the seven-day Reuters/Ipsos poll, which closed on Thursday, 52% of respondents said they supported "sending U.S. military personnel to Mexico to fight against drug cartels," while 26% were opposed and the remainder were unsure. Republicans were supportive by a 64% to 28% margin; Democrats were narrowly opposed, 47% to 44%.

When asked if the United States should do so without the permission of the Mexican government, however, the numbers changed dramatically. Some 59% of poll respondents opposed unilateral action, while 29% were supportive. Fifty-one percent of Republicans opposed unilateral action, compared to 40% who supported it.

But now -- and this is probably tied to Trump's general unpopularity -- it's much less popular. According to a Politico poll conducted last month, only 32% of Trump 2024 voters support military action against Mexico. That number will go up, obviously, when it happens. But overall, 59% of poll respondents oppose military action against Mexico and only 19% support it. Opponents include 49% of Trump 2024 voters.

And according to a Quinnipiac poll published last month:

Voters 57 - 37 percent would oppose the United States taking military action to attack suspected illegal drug facilities in Mexico, if this meant acting without the permission of the Mexican government.

I think support for this action will increase once it happens, but it will be a quick sugar rush for the GOP, and it's unlikely to last. When Trump uses the military, he never follows through. He likes to do a quick strike and then walk away -- planning for "the day after" is, I guess, for haters and losers. Assuming this attack happens, many Americans might forget Trump did it by summer, and it could be mostly forgotten by Election Day.

*****

UPDATE: WTF, again?

The Federal Aviation Administration lifted the closure of airspace around El Paso International Airport on Wednesday morning—an abrupt shift after previously grounding flights to the Texas airport for 10 days over what Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said was a “cartel drone incursion.”

In response to a drone incursion, that rank amateur Sean Duffy was going to close down air traffic for a week and a half? For longer than we shut it down after 9/11?

Or was the shutdown based on a test? The New York Times says:

Another person familiar with the situation had described the cause of the shutdown as a test of anti-drone technology. It is unclear if the closure was directly related to the presence of drones or how the technology was deployed.

Maybe this is the true story -- the members of Trump's cabinet generally knows nothing about their subject areas, and think it's unmanly to actually learn things. So Duffy or a subordinate might have genuinely thought a ten-day shutdown was an appropriate response to an incursion that I'm sure isn't unprecedented.

Or maybe we were going to war and it never occurred to these morons that shutting down a major airport for a week and a half would be a news story, so they didn't realize that the Mexican cartels would be tipped off. Who knows?

WHEN TRUMP LEAVES OFFICE, YOU'LL BARELY NOTICE THE DIFFERENCE IN THE GOP

Here's a disheartening headline in The New York Times:

Without a Border ‘Invasion,’ Texas G.O.P. Turns to an Old Enemy, Islam

Republican politicians and strategists in Texas are amping up anti-Muslim rhetoric as a way to energize Republican voters after several elections when the border was the animating force.

As I was saying yesterday, Republicans can't successfully run on their real agenda -- making the rich richer -- so they run on culture-war issues and wager that their voters won't notice that the party never makes their lives better (a successful bet in recent decades, in Texas and many other states). When one issue isn't enraging and motivating voters, there are others waiting in the wings. That's what's happening in Texas now.

The attacks on Islam are a notable shift for a party that has spent the last several election cycles focused on the Mexican border. Warnings of migrant “caravans” and a criminal invasion have lost their sting with a Republican in the White House and new policies that have halted most border crossings.

Attacks such as ...?

Ads for Senator John Cornyn of Texas have touted his fight against “radical Islam.” Texas Republican lawmakers created a “Sharia-Free America Caucus” in Congress. Gov. Greg Abbott has labeled one of the nation’s largest Muslim rights groups a terror organization.

A “Save Texas from Radical Islam” dinner north of Dallas last month featured Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Trump, the conservative commentator Glenn Beck and the Dutch right-wing leader Geert Wilders — and attracted party activists and Texas House members. The State Senate is weighing legislation requested by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to ensure Texans “are never held under the heel of ‘Sharia law.’”

Just on Monday, the state’s hard-right attorney general, Ken Paxton, announced he would investigate a proposed real estate development in Kaufman County, east of Dallas, as a “potentially illegal ‘Sharia City.’”

Paxton, of course, is running for Cornyn's Senate seat, and many polls show him beating Cornyn in the primary and winning the general election. But in case you think Cornyn is one of the "good" Republicans, check out this nakedly Islamophobic ad he's running:



Some Republicans in Texas are worse:

Islam came up repeatedly on Thursday night at a gathering of several dozen party activists and voters who had come to a restaurant in The Colony, a suburb of Dallas, to support a far-right challenger to the area’s conservative Republican state representative ... Lt. Col. Larry Brock, an Air Force veteran who served two years in prison for entering the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Mr. Brock spoke for several minutes about Islam.

“We should ban the burqa, the hijab, the abaya, the niqab,” he said, referring to different head and body coverings worn by some Muslim women. “No to halal meat. No to celebrating Ramadan. No, no, no.”

The author of the Times story, J. David Goodman, doesn't fully understand what Texas Republicans are afraid of:

The state party put a resolution on its primary ballot asking whether Texas should “prohibit Sharia law,” a term that refers to Islamic religious rules but has long served as a catchall to signify expansions of Muslim culture and religion that opponents say threaten American values.

No, this isn't just fear of "expansions of Muslim culture and religion." These people believe that Muslims want to replace current laws in America with Muslim religious law. They think Muslims want to force your wife and daughters to wear burqas, while banning pork and bacon. (They probably believe Muslims want to turn America into an Islamic theocracy because many of them want to turn America into a Christian theocracy.)

Now here's a little perspective, from a Texas Monthly story on the same subject (free to read here):

Conservative Christians run the state government. Muslims in Texas represent an estimated 2 percent of the population. What little political power the community wields is concentrated in a handful of suburban enclaves in North Texas and greater Houston. The Muslim population, if generalizations can be made about such a diverse group, tends to be socially conservative and politically mixed.

Nevertheless:

[Bo] French, who is running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, has called on Donald Trump to “round up every Muslim in America” and deport them. He has warned that if nothing is done, Texas could end up like Dearborn, Michigan, the Arab-majority city. (No matter that it voted for Trump in 2024.)

Valentina Gomez, a twentysomething Colombian immigrant running for a Central Texas congressional seat after moving to the state from Missouri, where she lost an election in 2024, released footage of herself incinerating a Quran with a blowtorch. “Vote for me so we can kick every dirty Muslim out of Texas,” she said in a separate social media post.

And one congressman sees A Conspiracy So Vast:

“We’ve gotta be much more aggressive,” Central Texas Congressman Chip Roy told Glenn Beck in late December, in regard to cracking down on Islamic groups. He mused—vaguely, conspiratorially—that there existed a “criminal organization” connecting antifa, George Soros, and Muslim organizations in Texas. “It’s all connected,” he said, “it’s all connected.”

One thing I'd like you to notice is that this is not being driven by Donald Trump or the White House. As I regularly point out, the GOP wasn't a mellow, moderate party until Trump came along. Trump accelerated the extremism, but it was always there, and it was on the rise independently of Trump. Fox News, talk radio, and newer media and social media outlets have created increasing amounts of ragebait in order to keep voters angry at Democrats and loyal to Republicans. This would have happened even if Trump had never entered electoral politics, and it will keep happening when he's gone, unless we somehow manage to turn the GOP into a pariah party that's shunned by decent people.

What's happening in Texas is in part a reaction to local matters, particularly this:

In September, Abbott signed into law House Bill 4211, which took aim at sharia compounds—fantastical concoctions. This was in response to a ferocious conservative campaign against EPIC City, [a] proposed master-planned community near Dallas.... Created by the East Plano Islamic Center, a prominent Collin County mosque, and rebranded late last year as the Meadow, the residential development would reportedly include more than a thousand homes, a faith-based K–12 school, a community college, and a place of worship. The issue exploded in early 2025, after [right-wing online commentator Amy] Mek labeled the development a “402-acre sharia city.”

... EPIC’s critics didn’t argue for a more inclusive project. Instead, they sought to scuttle the development by creating the impression that it would function as a no-go zone for non-Muslims, a sort of Lone Star caliphate. This was a stretch, to say the least—the developers stressed that the community would comply with Fair Housing Laws and pledged to allow people of any faith. They were flooded by death threats and hate mail.

The Times story reports:

Mohamed Ebeida, a research scientist who immigrated from Egypt, said often when he and his children would go to pray at the Plano center on Fridays, protesters told them they were “going to hellfire.”

“Do you want a society where every group alienates each other?” he said.

No, they want as society where they alienate everyone they don't like, and their enemies don't get to push back. They don't want to share power, but stirring up hate is how they win and retain power.

WE'RE RACIALLY DIVIDED SO REPUBLICAN VOTERS WILL REMAIN DISTRACTED

Here's a response to Bad Bunny's joyful Super Bowl halftime show:

Beyonce and Ricky Martin performed at Bush's 2000 inaugural is a thing I think about a lot when considering how much more culturally isolated and extreme the right has become.

— Zeddy (@zeddary.bsky.social) February 9, 2026 at 10:16 AM

In the 2000s, a number of Establishment Republicans -- George W. Bush, John McCain, Lindsey Graham -- wanted comprehensive immigration reform and wanted it to be identified with their party. They hoped this would win them favor with Hispanic voters. But the right-wing messaging that resonated most with their own voters was anti-immigrant. Bush's immigration push died in 2007.

Immigration reform wasn't the GOP's main goal. Its main goal was to cut taxes on the rich, cut regulations for big corporations, and slash the social safety net. It's an agenda that's not easy to sell to voters -- so, over the years, the GOP has distracted voters from this agenda by stirring up anger and hate. The GOP knew that Fox News, talk radio, and right-wing online publications were building party loyalty, and they gave propagandists more or less free rein to make voters angry at immigrants, Black people, white liberals, the media, gay people, feminists, entertainers, and gun-control advocates (that's a partial list).

For the most part, this permanent campaign of distraction was electorally successful. Even when Democrats scored big victories at the polls in 2008, Republicans came roaring back in the 2010 and 2014 midterms. And then Trump won two victories, and nearly scored an Electoral College win in 2020.

For the GOP, on balance, distraction has worked. Trump's major legislative wins have funneled huge amounts of money to the wealthy. And even if we have free and fair elections in November and Democrats do well, the GOP might still control the Senate as well as the White House and the Supreme Court.

Was building an electorate that hates half the country and cheers the brutalization of non-whites and their allies a worthwhile price for the wealthy backers of the GOP to pay? I think their answer would be "Oh, sure." They got their money. They don't care if the rest of us are at one another's throats.