A Trumpist feature, not a bug It is no secret by now that patriarchy will not go quietly, as Digby noted on Tuesday, calling it “the oldest organizing principle in human history.” There are some very deep forces at work in our changing world, many of which refuse to change. Vigorously. People I’ve called rump royalists never bought into the Declaration’s flowery prose about people being “created equal.” It’s surprising that more don’t do spit-takes at its very mention. They would just as soon see the return of feudalism if they could craft a more consumer-friendly version consistent with global consumer capitalism. (They’re working on it.) Misogyny, promimently on display in Trump 2.0 cabinet picks, is one facet of that patriarchal organizing principle. Consistent with both is the elevation to the cabinet of what Greg Sargent dubs “a Murderer’s Row of Billionaires.” By one count, there are eight among Trump’s picks so far. Sargent discusses the takeover of the White House by the ultra-wealthy with Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
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Compared to whom? Gen Zers have grown up amidst endless economic and political crises — fallout from September 11, the financial collapse of 2008, the Great Recession, the Covid-9 pandemic, January 6, etc. — that led to a grimmer view of their futures. Axios reports that their struggles have pushed them right while setting impossibly high expectations for financial security: Catch up quick: Financial services company Empower surveyed more than 2,200 Americans in September and the Gen Z respondents — born between 1997 and 2012 — said they would need to make more than $587,000 a year to be “financially successful.” That’s three to six times the amount reported by other age groups surveyed, and almost nine times the average U.S. salary tracked by the Social Security Administration. So what’s going on here? Costs are certainly up, especially housing costs. People living with their parents into their late 20s or needing rommates just to get by certainly influences one’s sense of economic stability. But the statement above about “influencers” stands out.
Politico published a fatuous piece today exhorting Democrats to stay with Elon’s hellhole because … well, I guess they think that hapless lefties battling an onslaught of Nazis and other assorted assholes all day will somehow convert people to their cause? Apparently, some Democrats I otherwise respect think this is true as well. Two days after the election, Patrick Dillon, a longtime Democratic strategist and current Biden administration official, announced on X that he was leaving the platform… Dillon, who currently serves as adviser to Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, is of course not alone. You may well have seen it in your timelines already: a growing drumbeat of Democrats and left-leaning types announcing why they’re leaving the platform. In just the few weeks since the election, that has included former CNN anchor Don Lemon, basketball star LeBron James, author Stephen King, actress Jamie Lee Curtis and MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace. But the situation is a bit more complicated for Democratic lawmakers, strategists and the like who might have come to dislike X but have also grown to depend on it to shape minds and win elections.
I don’t know about you but that does not look good to me. In fact, I think this, from about 1965, actually looks better: But it’s not all aboutthe food right? It’s about the company:
Politico is really on a roll today: Two members of Congress offered very different views Sunday morning of whether the Justice Department and FBI have been biased against Republicans in recent years. In consecutive appearances on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) discussed President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Kash Patel to lead the FBI. The agency is now led by Chris Wray, a previous Trump appointee whose term has yet to expire, but who will presumably be fired if he doesn’t resign. “Obviously, in recent years, we have seen the FBI and the Department of Justice weaponize in a way that it has become completely political,” Lawler said in his interview, also discussing Trump’s pick of Pam Bondi to be attorney general. “That’s not good for the American people. It’s not good for our system of justice. The lack of confidence that Americans have in the Department of Justice and the FBI is terrible.” Though Trump talked about “retribution” during the 2024 campaign, Lawler said he believed “revenge” was not the order of the day.
I used to see these t-shirts and hats that said “Free Melania” and I wondered why anyone would think she was being held prisoner. She didn’t care for the routine of being First Lady and has a separate life from Donald. But she is clearly one of them. Just another rich, creepy weirdo. So, apparently, is Cheryl Hines: Seriously, this is what it’s come to: Actress Cheryl Hines, the wife of former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., posted a video promoting her beauty products featuring her husband showering half-naked in the background… Hines held up a bottle of spray and a tin of body cream as she covered most of Kennedy, who President-elect Trump nominated to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). 49% of America wanted a reality show instead of politics. It looks like they’re getting exactly what they asked for.
Now you see it, now you don’t Before the 2024 election itself disappears down the memory hole, take a moment to consider the disappearance of voter fraud as a campaign issue. Democrats would cheat. There would be massive corruption in the election. Migrants Democrats were importing through Joe Biden’s open southern borders would tip the scales for Kamala Harris. Nearly 9 in 10 Trump voters believed voter fraud would play a major role in 2024. Etc. Then Donald Trump won. Voter fraud vanished like ground fog at sunrise. It was morning in MAGAstan. Politico and Morning Consult ran a poll: In polling just days before the election, Trump supporters expressed little confidence in the election outcome, with a whopping 87 percent substantially or somewhat agreeing with the statement that voter fraud was a “serious issue” that could determine the outcome of the election. Among Harris supporters, roughly half expressed similar worries. That partisan divide disappeared after Election Day. Shocked? Views on the economy flipped as well, considered a “very important” issue ahead of Nov.
A rule of law turned inside out The whole world will watch Donald Trump and his gang of thieves defenestrate the “rule of law” in Putinesque style. Michael Tomasky considers the implications of Trump nominating Kash Patel to run the FBI inside what Trump likes to call the Department of Injustice. Trump 2.0 aims to make the name a reality. Patel’s only real qualification is that he is a “one-thousand-percent Trump loyalist,” Tomasky writes: Etc., etc. For all the raising of alarms, the punditry is short on countermeasures. I’m reminded of the anti-nuclear movement’s Helen Caldicott and her rapid-fire, scare-them-straight speech about the horrifying effects of nuclear weapons. Even her allies grew weary of the scare tactics: “We knew it was past when someone interrupted the speech one evening, actually interrupted it, and said, ‘We know all that, but what can we do?’” From his remove in England, Brian Beutler recommends Democrats find some actual leaders, stat, while they still have time to define the incoming Trump regime.
Hunter Biden was set to be sentenced and probably put in jail this week on a trumped up charge that was brought solely because he was Joe Biden’s son. He lied on a form about being on drugs and he paid his taxes late. He entered into a plea deal in which he would admit guilt and get probation, a fair sentence, and the prosecution blew it up in court. He could have faced years in jail for crimes that no one who hadn’t also committed much more serious crimes would have ever been prosecuted. Biden pardoned Hunter tonight and he did the right thing. There is a lot of discussion over on BlueSky decrying this saying that Biden has destroyed the argument that presidents shouldn’t use abuse the pardon power and Trump will now be able to say he can pardon all the J6ers. First of all, Trump doesn’t need any excuse to pardon his henchmen. He already pardoned Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and Jared Kushner’s father whom he just named to be the Ambassador to France! Even Dinesh D’Souza and Joe Arpaio! Roger Stone is his best friend. The others are close political allies and in laws.
Once upon a time there was a Trump toadie who wrote a fatuous children’s book about a good king being persecuted by an evil queen named Hillary Queenton until one day a virtuous wizard comes to his rescue and saves the day: One might not think too much of such a silly little project except the “writer” of those books, Kash Patel, has been nominated to run the FBI in the new Trump administration. The story is a thinly veiled narrative of Patel’s original claim to fame, working for former congressman Devin Nunes’s House Intelligence Committee investigation into the origins of the Russia probe back in 2016. They weren’t written to entertain kids. They were written to cozy up to Trump and demonstrate his loyalty by literally portraying him as a king. Trump hired Patel to join his National Security Council after the Nunes report came out where he quickly established himself as a direct conduit to Trump feeding him whatever he thought he wanted to hear. According to Trump’s Russia and Ukraine expert on staff, Fiona Hill, Trump even thought Patel was the man in charge of Ukraine in the White House when he had nothing to do with it at all.