Many, many thanks to all of you who have contributed so far this year. I can’t tell you what it means to me, especially now when everything has been feeling a little bit bleak. It reminds me that none of us are alone in all this and gives me hope that we’ll be able to regroup and push back on what Trump and his henchmen have planned for us. Everybody with a blog or a substack is quoting Professor Timothy Snyder these days, especially his admonition not to “obey in advance.” Sadly, we’re watching so many do exactly that right now. Media figures, government officials, world leaders and CEOs are making the pilgrimage down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring (even, in some cases, holding their hands over their hearts to strains of the January 6th choir singing the national anthem!) Democrats are starting to signal that Trump is someone they can work with. It’s enough to make you crazy. It feels as if they’ve all completely given in to his noxious authoritarianism before he’s even started to implement his plans.
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The NY Times is reporting that Trump is conducting most of his business at Mar-a-Lago these days after dark, often over dinner with whichever CEO or dignitary has traveled to offer fealty and tribute that day. Of the more than 80 personnel announcements Mr. Trump has made since Election Day, 45 have been announced in social media posts and emails that he has sent after 6 p.m. Many have come after 10 p.m., prompting a wave of social media chatter and television coverage that sometimes continues throughout the night and into the early morning hours. One of his veteran staff members said Mr. Trump was known to leave voice mail messages in the middle of the night saying: “This is your favorite president.” He sometimes follows up the next day, suggesting the person might want to share the audio with his friends and family. Trump’s lovely spokesman Stephen Cheung says that Trump’s working night and day which is obviously bullshit. But several people close to Mr. Trump — along with aides who have come to expect emails, texts and phone calls to arrive well after bedtime — say he is often just getting started around dinnertime. That is usually when Mr.
I’ve been wondering about the problem of young people growing up in a time when Donald Trump is ubiquitous and seen as a normal political leader. The youngest voters were only 6 years old the last time we had a presidential election in which he wasn’t the candidate. He might as well be FDR to them. It became particularly worrisome to me when I heard about all those text messages being sent to Black kids and girls right after the election saying they were going back to the plantation or “your body my choice” and processions in the halls of high schools waving Trump flags. It’s just so ugly. This piece by a high school senior says it all: After Trump’s victory, it became okay to be young and a Trump supporter and anti-woke. It became okay to make offensive jokes, which in many cases were not jokes but just crude and rude insults. It became okay to support the oppression of marginalized groups. I attend a school that fits well into Middle American Republicanism in the Northeast. I won’t repeat the many things I’ve heard in class and the halls that would be classified as hate.
No defense except offense A call for a lefty demagogue has popped up for the second time in a week. This time from Jonathan Last at The Bulwark. Trumpism represents a break from the old politics for which America has few defenses. Trump has “extrapolated existing dynamics while also transforming the public’s attitudes toward violence, democracy, and the rule of law,” he writes. So now what? Setting aside his ‘druthers (and morality, for the moment), how do we win elections in this environment? Joe Biden’s (and Democrats’) theory of the case was, as I’ve complained, same-old, same-old. Govern and run on kitchen tables issues, insists Nancy Pelosi’s generation. Democrats did, and delivered for red, rural areas in particular where Democrats have bled support. Who noticed? And Trump? Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty are museum pieces, not guideposts, these days. A plurality of Americans is now more interested in pulling up the ladder behind them, Last suggests. (I’m reading between his lines.) They’d rather kick down than lift up latecomers to the threadbare American Dream. Making the pie higher is out. Zero-sum is in.
Following up on my earlier post Journalism is not how I describe to people what we do here at ye olde blog. At best, it’s advocacy journalism. Somehow (with your help and indulgence) we’ve managed to hang on since the aughts, post-Facebook and post-Twitter, while traditional journalism has lost ground to propaganda-inflected social media and cultural influencers. I wince at “influencers,” but suppose they get traction the same way Digby explained bloggers did in our heyday (2007): If you have something to say you can say it–and if it touches a chord, people will return time and again to read what you’ve written and discuss the issues of the day with others who are reading the same things. […] Each of us finds their niche. I’m a blogger pundit, a role for which I am eminently qualified, since, exactly like pundits on television and in newspapers, I have opinions, I write them down, and a lot of people read them. (Yes, that’s all there is to it. Sorry Mr. Broder.).
These billionaires are the worst people on earth: Meta Platforms has donated $1 million to president-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, the latest step by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to bolster his once-fraught relationship with the incoming president. The donation, confirmed by the company, is a departure from past practice by Zuckerberg and his company, and comes after an election campaign in which Trump threatened to punish the tech tycoon if he tried to influence the election against him. The contribution and efforts to court the incoming administration are emblematic of the balancing act for technology CEOs whose companies have often been the target of ire from Trump and other Republicans and whose workforces tend to lean strongly to the left. Now, with Republicans set to take control of the White House and both houses of Congress and calling for new regulation of tech, some executives are adopting a new posture toward Trump. They have more money than God, as masters of the universe they are safe and secure and yet they feel the need to kiss Donald Trump’s ass in the most obsequious way possible. What pethetic little men they are.
Run ads right now, every day On Meet the Press last weekend, Trump made this inane comment: He didn’t invent the word groceries. I don’t know what was rattling around his head when he said that. But he did use the word. A lot. And he promised that he was going to lower their cost over and over again. Yet in today’s TIME Magazine interview he said: If the prices of groceries don’t come down, will your presidency be a failure? I don’t think so. Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard. A quick reminder of his campaign promises: Trump before the election: vote for me, and I’ll lower the cost of groceries. Trump today, to Time magazine: actually, it's not that simple: “It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard." pic.twitter.com/nU36fg8y35 — Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) December 12, 2024 For the full Trump “weave” on the above of how he planned to lower the price of groceries, Philip Bump published the whole thing here.
The other day I just happened to watch one of the Bulwark podcasts and as it happened Sarah Longwell had just returned from participating in an event sponsored by the NY Times in which a number of media and political luminaries discussed the recent election. She seemed a little bit stunned as she explained that she couldn’t make herself sit there and take their nonsense so she aggressively confronted them, in particular Kevin McCarthy. I was hoping we’d get to see it because it sounded amazing. Here’s that moment: I would really love to see more people have the guts to do this. At the moment there’s not a whole lot of evidence that very many do. The Times article about the event said this: The 2024 presidential election isn’t over. While the vote count is official and President-elect Donald J. Trump will be the next occupant of the Oval Office, just about everything else, including how much of a mandate he has, why the Democrats lost and what the future of the two political parties — and the country — will look like, is still the subject of fierce debate. That came through strongly during a discussion on Dec.
And welcome to our annual victory celebration of the Great War on Christmas Yes, it’s that time of year again and the holidays have never been more welcome. If we ever needed a break it’s now. And here at Hullabaloo it’s the time of year I ask you, my loyal readers, to put a little something into the old stocking to keep us going for yet another year. This is a tough one, I know. Anyone can be forgiven for tuning out politics and spending their time doing something that doesn’t make them want to put their foot through the TV. Many people have cancelled their subscriptions to this site telling me that they just can’t stand to read about politics anymore and I totally understand it. For the first week after the election I pretty much only watched Netflix and Animal Planet. This is a grim time and we have to do whatever we can to keep our sanity. But it you are reading this it means that you are still engaging, at least with us, and I want you to know how grateful I am that you are. For me, it’s not possible to stop paying attention for long. It’s just who I am. I can’t look away.
Remember this? Probably not if you don’t watch Fox and I assume most of you do not. About that weaponization … If you spend much time watching Fox News, or if you look to social media sites such as X for information about American politics and the U.S. government, you have probably heard two specific claims over the past four years. First, that the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was fomented at least in part by government actors, including from the FBI. Second, that President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden took millions of dollars in bribes from a Ukrainian businessman. You’ve probably heard those claims because each offers a different lens into the purported corruption of the Biden administration and/or the governmental Deep State — and because right-wing media organizations such as Fox spent months amplifying them. That claim about the bribes, for example, was hyped by Fox host Maria Bartiromo alone hundreds of times. The agent provocateur allegations about the Capitol riot, meanwhile, were a staple of Tucker Carlson’s former Fox News show. Guess what? The DOJ inspector general released a report today showing it was all a lie.