Wednesday, June 18, 2025

JEB BUSH WAS RIGHT ABOUT TRUMP AND "CHAOS"

Jamelle Bouie believes that recent declines in President Trump's polling are occurring because Trump's policies are affecting more and more Americans personally.
In his influential 1922 book, “Public Opinion,” Walter Lippmann observed that political leaders hold their greatest sway over the public when the issue or interest in question is abstract to most people’s experience....

This was why, Lippmann explained by example, Prohibition was popular “among teetotalers” or why “governments have such a free hand in foreign affairs.” All but the most exceptional leaders, he concluded, “prefer policies in which the costs are as far as possible indirect.”
Maybe Lippmann was right in 1922, but I don't think he's right about modern America, where exurban and rural people are enraged by Fox News images of crime in Chicago or homelessness in San Francisco, cities they'll never visit, and shake their fists at images of young trans athletes from the sedentary comfort of their retirement communities.

Bouie believes that Americans are turning against Trump's immigration policy because more and more of them are directly experiencing the crackdown.
... Trump ... and his White House seem to think that the cost of their policies ... are indirect. Who cares about a few thousand protesters in Los Angeles, or even a few million undocumented immigrants, out of the more than 340 million people in the United States? But the reality is that to harden the border and more tightly police immigration — to remove as many unauthorized people as possible — is to necessarily subject American citizens to the scrutiny and violence of the state. External control requires internal suppression.
But how many Americans are personally encountering ICE agents? Some are seeing respected community members led away in handcuffs, but I think most Americans are still experiencing the crackdown as a media event. They do care about the protests in Los Angeles. But here's my hypothesis: an increasing number of Americans see the defiant protesters and burning cars and blame Trump.

It's widely believed that nonviolent protest is more persuasive than violent protest -- Erica Chenoweth, a highly regarded political scientist, has made that argument over the years. Much of the public thinks the L.A. protests aren't peaceful.


We've also been told that demonstrators in L.A. are alienating the public by waving Mexican flags.

But that clearly isn't helping Trump, whose overall approval rating has dropped five points in the past two weeks, while his approval on immigration has dropped by seven points. I think it's because he was elected to restore order, and what Americans are seeing is chaos. You and I knew how disruptive Trump's presidency would be, but he said Democrats were the disruptors, and many voters believed him -- they found inflation unsettling, they watched images of immigrants being bused north and west from the border, and they were told that crime was rising (it was, slightly).

Trump told them he'd fix all that, quickly. The MAGA base assumed that meant a war against everyone they hate, and they were ready for it. They love what he's doing. But the swing voters who put him over the top in November just wanted problems solved. They believed their lives would experience fewer disruptions under Trump, because he'd solve all the world's problems effortlessly, using his big deal-making brain. They wanted peace and prosperity. Now they're getting neither. It's not just that he's done nothing for them economically -- it's also the disruption day after day in the streets. You can't credibly call yourself a law-and-order president when there's no order.

Trump also promised to end all the wars instantly. How's that going?
More than half of those Americans who supported Donald Trump for president in 2024 don’t think the U.S. military should get involved in the conflict between Iran and Israel.

A new The Economist/YouGov poll conducted on June 13-16 found that 53% of Trump voters said the U.S. should not join the war, versus just 19% who said the U.S. military should. Sixty percent of all Americans surveyed agreed that the U.S. should not get involved.
Every subgroup in this poll is overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. involvement (click to enlarge):


Fear of World War III was a more signifcant factor in the 2024 election than many people realize. Trump and his supporters knew it. They ginned up that fear during the campaign.



Trump made big foreign policy promises, and now, instead of going from two wars to zero, we've gone from two wars to three.

Poor Jeb Bush. He called it in December 2015.


If you say you're going to clean up Dodge, some people will conclude it's your fault if Dodge is in flames.
Posted by Steve M. at 9:02 AM

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...


... 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

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

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.


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.)


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

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

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:


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

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:


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
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