Next stop, Hell A couple of lines rattle around behind my eyes this morning. “The Last Days of Pompeii” is one. Another is “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” “The Trump people are living in a bubble and it’s affecting their ability to understand the world around them,” Digby wrote yesterday, reacting in part to this passage from Anne Applebaum: Europeans can also see that this alternative reality is directly and profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda. I don’t know whether the American president absorbs Russian narratives online, from proxies, or from Putin himself. Either way, he has thoroughly adopted the Russian view of the world, as has Vance. They’ve gone down a rabbit hole and mean to take the country and the world with it. The Russians are certainly playing Trump and his circle, but there’s more to it. Republicans as a party have habituated themselves to lying and to living inside the bubble of lies they tell. This tendency predates the rise of Trumpism.
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It’s not a joke anymore “This is not a joke anymore,” and normal is not dead. Yet. (CBC): The man behind an iconic Canadian beer ad is back, 25 years later, with a new patriotic rallying cry. But this time, it’s not about selling drinks. Jeff Douglas, from Truro, N.S., became a national sensation after starring as flannel-wearing Joe Canadian in Molson Canadian’s 2000 ad “The Rant,” which was a huge success for the beer company and popularized the slogan, “I am Canadian!” On Wednesday, a new video appeared on YouTube featuring Douglas, back on stage in flannel, this time defending Canada from attacks by U.S. President Donald Trump, before launching into a similar string of boasts about his home country. After my post below, I needed this. You probably do too: For reference, here’s the original Molson ad from 2000. (h/t ER) * * * * * Have you fought the coup today?Choose DemocracyIndivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the BrinkYou Have PowerChop Wood, Carry Water
Perfectly sane, perfectly normal. Lol. Yeah right. Uh huh. At least it didn’t get under his skin or anything… He’s fine though. Don’t spend even a minute worrying that this manchild has the nuclear codes.
Here’s a fascinating look at the DOGE actions by Harvard political scientists Ryan Enos and Sam Fuller. I urge you to read the whole post which but here’s the essence of their findings and it should give us some heart: Trump’s actions, matters of complex questions relating to civic and constitutional norms, are incredibly unpopular: they are not supported by an overwhelming majority of Democrats (unsurprising), a significant majority of Independents (more surprising), and nearly half(!) of Republicans (extremely surprising). And, particularly among Republicans, if you cut through the partisan blinders and remind people these actions are illegal and unconstitutional, people are even more likely to disapprove of his actions. We see this in data that comes from questions we asked about Trump’s actions on the most recent Harvard CAPS/Harris poll.1 In particular, we asked people how much they support the following authoritarian actions (full questions can be seen at the end of the post): Responses were on a five-point scale from “strongly support” to “strongly oppose”.
Trump is going to make Ukrainians pay and pay hard for failing to immediately surrender to his “brilliant”, “savvy” friend Vladimir Putin three years ago: U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is planning to revoke temporary legal status for some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled the conflict with Russia, a senior Trump official and three sources familiar with the matter said, potentially putting them on a fast-track to deportation. The move, expected as soon as April, would be a stunning reversal of the welcome Ukrainians received under President Joe Biden’s administration. He’ll be deporting everyone under temporary immigration statuses including Afghans, Cubans, Haitians, etc. But I think the deportation of Ukrainians in the middle of the war is a Trump bully tactic to try to force Zelensky to lick his boots. It’s just cruel. The Trump administration last month paused processing immigration-related applications for people who entered the U.S. under certain Biden parole programs – placing Ukrainian Liana Avetisian, her husband and her 14-year-old daughter, in limbo.
If you think that they aren’t going after Social Security, think again: he newly installed caretaker at the Social Security Administration acknowledged this week that Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is calling the shots as the agency races to slash thousands of jobs and shrink its budget, telling a group of advocates, “Things are currently operating in a way I have never seen in government before.” In a meeting Tuesday with his senior staff and about 50 legal-aid attorneys and other advocates for the disabled and elderly, acting SSA commissioner Leland Dudek referred to the tech billionaire’s cost-cutting team as “outsiders who are unfamiliar with nuances of SSA programs,” according to a meeting participant’s detailed notes that were obtained by The Washington Post. “DOGE people are learning and they will make mistakes, but we have to let them see what is going on at SSA,” Dudek told the group, according to the notes. “I am relying on longtime career people to inform my work, but I am receiving decisions that are made without my input.
The details of what’s happening with the economy are frankly a bit beyond my ken so I was grateful to see this easy explainer from Josh Marshall today. (And you should subscribe if you can. His site is super valuable right now.) The Atlanta Fed has again lowered its projection for first quarter 2025 GDP. It had been predicting growth of 2.3%. At the end of last week that was revised to 1.5% contraction and this morning they were again down-revised 2.8% contraction, or in other words 2.8% negative growth. To be clear these aren’t final or official stats. We’re only two-thirds of the way through the quarter. They are a prediction based on current indicators. But if it’s not clear that would mean a steep move into recession. And the numbers which presage that outcome are largely tied to general economic uncertainty and various collective economic decisions based on the expectations of a dramatic ramp up in U.S. tariffs and tariff retaliation. Normally, you wouldn’t expect that an administration would be able to manage such a stark reversal six weeks into a presidency. The first three weeks of the quarter weren’t even under Trump.
Lech Walesa, former hero of the right wing: Your Excellency, Mr. President, We watched the report of your conversation with the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, with fear and distaste. We find it insulting that you expect Ukraine to show respect and gratitude for the material assistance provided by the United States in its fight against russia. Gratitude is owed to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed their blood in defense of the values of the free world. They have been dying on the front lines for more than 11 years in the name of these values and the independence of their homeland, which was attacked by Putin’s russia. We do not understand how the leader of a country that symbolizes the free world cannot recognize this. Our alarm was also heightened by the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation, which reminded us of the interrogations we endured at the hands of the Security Services and the debates in Communist courts. Prosecutors and judges, acting on behalf of the all-powerful communist political police, would explain to us that they held all the power while we held none.
What is going on here? Republican officials are behaving like junior high bullies everywhere they go these days. They seem to have lost all restraint and are letting their ids run wild. And it’s not just one or two. They’re all doing it. WTF?
Police-state tactics Lech Wałęsa knows from police state tactics (via The Daily Beast): Legendary Polish anti-Communist Lech Wałęsa has slammed Donald Trump’s Oval Office attack on Ukraine’s Volodymr Zelensky, comparing it to Soviet secret police tactics. Wałęsa, 81, signed a letter along with 38 other Poles who had been held captive by the Communist regime, telling Trump that the Friday spectacle filled them “with horror and distaste.” The former Polish president previously revealed that he met Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2010, and attached a photo of the two of them to the letter, which he posted on Facebook on Monday.