Advice for our times Donald Trump wants to create spectacles (Thunderdome), Josh Marshall observes. His professional wrestling instincts are not a mere joke. “That whole bombast is not only made to make people feel afraid, particularly the people they’re threatening directly, but to create this aura of power and uncheckable power and to knock people back on their heels and make them feel disoriented, demoralized, and all those things,” Marshall tells Greg Sargent’s Daily Blast podcast: It’s typical Trump to threaten 10 things a day. And his opponents, his enemies are feeling overwhelmed with all the different threats, and he doesn’t actually have to do anything. So it is really important for people both to be prepared for him to do all sorts of crazy stuff, but also to be attuned to that spectacle, which is his greatest power. Trump’s goal is an America cowed, Marshall says. Maybe he jails people. Maybe he just threatens. Maybe be actually does bring lawsuits, launch investigations. He doesn’t need to follow through on many for people to cower behind silence.
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President-elect Trump held his first press conference since the election this week and seemed surprised that he is suddenly so popular with all the wealthy business titans who are making the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago like they’re the wise men and he’s the baby Jesus. He actually seemed to be a bit befuddled by his new found popularity among his billionaire pals: He’s not wrong. In his first term it was clear that political and business establishment leaders wanted nothing to do with him. And the media elites who are now elbowing each other out of the way to sit next to him and his major domo Elon Musk at the Mar-a-Lago dining table were openly hostile. A lot of this love coming from the moneyed elite is easy to understand. After all, he promised to eliminate regulation and give them all tax cuts, so what’s not to like? But it’s more than that. They all seem to be downright giddy at the prospect of getting up close and personal with the once and future president. It’s a far cry from the way they reacted during Trump’s first term, particularly among the media moguls.
She was not fired, she quit. And she quit at least partially because she didn’t approve of the Trump bootlicking. It’s much more complicated than that, of course. The government is falling apart for all the same reasons all the governments everywhere are falling apart and she’s in opposition to her former ally Trudeau on a number of issues. Chrystia Freeland used to be a journalist and a good one. She’s going to run for Prime Minister and I hope she wins. She will not put up with Trump’s bullshit. Meanwhile, Trump’s continuing on because he has the mind of a 12 year old bully: He’s trolling, of course. But it also illuminates how idiotically he sees the trade issue. If we buy things from Canada he sees that as a subsidy. Apparently all the goods we are buying are worth nothing? It’s right up there with his insistence that NATO has to pay us “dues” like some Florida fat cat Mar-a-Lago member. It’s so embarrassingly stupid I don’t even know how to explain it. I realize that by this time most people probably think this silly trolling stuff doesn’t matter and really don’t want to hear about it.
There’s already trouble in GOP paradise even before Trump takes office. Government funding is about to run out and they need to either pass a budget or punt with a continuing resolution. Otherwise we’re looking, once again, at a government shutdown. There are some Republicans who relish that because they just love to be transgressive. But Speaker Johnson just wants to get past it however he can until Dear Leader can come in and magically make everything work perfectly. The problem is that the House Republicans are in disarray with some wanting just a clean extension until March while others want to shoot the moon with massive cuts (as usual.) Johnson can’t get anything done unless he gets cooperation from at least a few Democrats as a result. Grab some popcorn. They’re already at each others’ throats.
A big shout-out to everyone who has contributed to the annual fundraiser this year. I’m blown away by your generosity and kindness. In times like these it matters more than ever that we all stick together and I am so very grateful that you are sticking with me. Things are already getting weird in DC. As I wrote earlier, the infighting over the budget has already begun with the co-President Elon Musk threatening GOP members with primaries unless they agree to shut down the government until the congress comes in (apparently failing to understand that they will have an even smaller majority in the House than they do now.) We’re back to the tried and true GOP strategy of “if I hold my breath until I turn blue I will get what I want” and it doesn’t ever work out. So stay tuned for that. But the Trump Vengeance and Retribution Tour has officially begun as well, which will probably dominate the news once the new congress convenes. And the opening salvo is a House investigation into … Liz Cheney, who is apparently enemy #1.
Bret Stephens of The NY Times has written a fatuous piece abandoning his “Never Trump” status (which, I admit, I didn’t even realize he had obtained. Really?) Anyway, he says Trump’s not bad and never was and everyone is being hysterical. This is something I’m hearing from a lot of people. I’m not going to offer a gift link to it because it’s really not worth it. Unless you have amnesia of the last 10 years it’s anything but persuasive. Instead I want to direct you to the Bulwark’s JV Last’s response which he has posted outside the paywall so you can click over to read the whole thing. Here is a small piece of it. It’s really good: He goes on to discuss everything we’re already seeing for Trump II and I think people are very much underestimating his intentions. Whether he’ll be able to accomplish his toxic agenda is yet to be determined. Never Trumpers and the rest of us who saw what Trump was, and see what he is today, are taking quite a bit of incoming from a number of different directions. We are outside the mainstream right now.
The House is scrapping Mike Johnson’s year-end spending plan after Republicans had a shit-fit led by chief cheerleader the Real President of the United States, Elon Musk. They are back to the drawing board with the government set to shut down on Friday night. At the end of the day he told his puppet and vice-puppet to bless his efforts publicly and it was done: Musk spent Wednesday stirring Republicans into a frenzy over the stopgap spending bill filed by Johnson — one loaded up with $100 billion in disaster aid funding, billions more in farm assistance and dozens of other side deals that pushed the final product past 1,500 pages. His daylong flurry of dozens of postings on his X account appears to have succeeded: President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance came out against the bill this evening, calling instead for a pared-back measure coupled with a debt-limit increase. Not even disaster funding? Man, that’s cold. Musk knows nothing about policy, budgets or politics.
If you want to know where they get their information,here’s the breakdown:YouTube 90%TikTok 63%Instagram 61%Snapchat 55%Facebook 32% (down from 71%)WhatsApp 23%X 17% (down from 33%)Reddit 14%Threads 6% I have to wonder about the Youtube use. It could just be music or some other very specific interest there but if they ever get caught up in something and go down the Youtube rabbit hole it’s very dangerous. That site is full of disinformation and it’s very compellingly presented. I don’t know what to do about it exactly. YouTube is extremely valuable. I use it constantly myself. But if you don’t know what you’re looking at it can be disorienting and destructive. I use Tik Tok much less, but I go there enough to see how much fun it is and understand why the kids like it so much. And from what I gather it’s full of disinformation too. If we weren’t working overtime to destroy the education system we might try something like this:
The AP reports: A former FBI informant pleaded guilty on Monday to lying about a phony bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden and his son Hunter that became central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress. […] Smirnov will get credit for the time he has served since his February arrest on charges that he told his FBI handler that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had paid President Biden and Hunter Biden $5 million each around 2015. Smirnov had been an informant for more than a decade when he made the explosive allegations about the Bidens in June 2020, after “expressing bias” about Joe Biden as a presidential candidate, prosecutors said. […] No evidence has emerged that Joe Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes as president or in his previous office as vice president. While Smirnov’s identity wasn’t publicly known before the indictment, his claims played a major part in the Republican effort in Congress to investigate the president and his family, and helped spark a House impeachment inquiry into Biden.
Trump only cares about his agenda of deportation, revenge, tariffs and personal profits. He’s fine with Elon doing whatever as long as it doesn’t interfere with his own agenda. The Daily Beast reported in his last term that when pressed about the rising deficit, he would say: “Yeah, but I won’t be here,” the president bluntly said, according to a source who was in the room when Trump made this comment during discussions on the debt. The episode illustrates the extent of the president’s ambivalence toward tackling an issue that has previously animated the Republican Party from the days of Ronald Reagan to the presidency of Barack Obama. But for those who have worked with Trump, it was par for the course. Several people close to the president, both within and outside his administration, confirmed that the national debt has never bothered him in a truly meaningful way, despite his public lip service. “I never once heard him talk about the debt,” one former senior White House official attested. He never talked about it when he ran for reelection both times either.