Rolling Stone is reporting today that Trump and Co have revived their plans to invade Mexico. I’m not kidding: Within Donald Trump’s government-in-waiting, there is a fresh debate over whether and how thoroughly the president-elect should follow through on his campaign promise to attack or even invade Mexico, as part of the “war” he’s pledged to wage against powerful drug cartels. “How much should we invade Mexico?” says a senior Trump transition member. “That is the question.” It is a question that would have seemed batty for the GOP elite to consider before, even during Trump’s first term. But in the four years since, many within the mainstream Republican centers of power have come around to support Trump’s idea to bomb or attack Mexico. Trump’s Cabinet picks, including his choices for secretary of defense and secretary of state, have publicly supported the idea of potentially unleashing the U.S. military in Mexico. So has the man Trump has tapped to be his national security adviser. So has the man Trump selected as his “border czar” to lead his immigration crackdowns.
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I just saw a great video from my old friend Cliff Schechter on his new YouTube channel, Cliff’s Edge. Is It Time to Start FIGHTING Dirty Against Donald Trump? After I watched it, I liked, subscribed and joined the channel as a paying member. I’d like folks to do the same. Then I called Cliff to talk about it. I’ve known Cliff for years and we talked about “fighting” on camera on RW media, and the opportunity for a lefty billionaire to buy a media outlet like CNBC and MSNBC. I hope it happens. If it DOES happen, we need to understand the fear of funders on the left to fighting back and what to do about it. One thing that I’ve seen is that people who consider themselves journalists in the mainstream media don’t see “fighting back” as their job. That’s the job of activists. That’s the job of Democrats. Many see their role as reporting the facts. (Or “documenting the atrocities” as Atrios would say.) I’ve written about what happens to journalists when they do report the facts, do the “both sides” bit, and talk to experts. They get threatened. Accepting death threats IS NOT part of the job!
In case you were wondering why all these people involved in sexual assault are being chosen for the Trump administration, this is why. And it is why those fucked up, incel bros voted for him: He “tells it like it is” — that they were asking for it. And he’s right that for millenia some men have told themselves that. Now read the Pete Hegseth police report. Listen to Matt Gaetz defend himself. It’s all a version of the same thing. When you’re a star you can get away with it. And Trump and his miserable, garbage cabinet and staff are proving it.
James Fallows has written a fascinating piece for Wired (temporarily out from under the paywall)about California and the future that I hope you will read with an open mind. An excerpt: California has at many points been held up as an American paradise. Now it’s widely seen as closer to hell. Runaway housing prices, tax burdens, homelessness, congestion, fire, drought, flood. The best sides of tech innovation, and the worst of tech-bro greed and narcissism. These are the state’s hallmarks. This perception is particularly rampant among Republicans: Polls show that two-thirds of Republicans say this one US state has done more damage than good for the country, and that almost half of them don’t consider it “American” at all. Beyond political party, fully half of adult Americans say in polls that California is in decline. As a recent headline put it shortly before Harris became the Democratic nominee, “California’s image will be a weapon” against her as a candidate.
Are they out to get you? Who they? During the runup to Nov. 5, there was a lot of talk about “vibes.” This was a vibes election more about what people felt than about what they think (or think they know). Jonathan V. Last has a Bulwark post about how out of synch people perceptions are with reality. It’s rather instructive. First, the results of a YouGov poll on how people perceive what percentage of the population various groups constitute: Now, the actual numbers: People make a consistent mistake in the same direction, Last observes. They wildly overestimate the number of people from recognized minority/interest groups of every kind and underestimate how numerically common their own group is.
Good news, bad news this morning First, good news courtesy of E.J. Dionne. Conservatives (with the most clout) have abandoned their opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. Why? They won’t admit it, but they caught that car and lost that fight: After gyrating from one position to another, Donald Trump simply gave up on being a pro-life candidate. The states, he said, would settle the issue, and he didn’t give a damn how they did it. The Republican Party followed along, drastically weakening the antiabortion provisions in its platform because it recognized that opposing reproductive rights after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was an electoral loser. And it is. Abortion rights prevailed in 7 out of 10 states where voters had a choice this year — in three carried by Vice President Kamala Harris (New York, Maryland and Colorado) but also in four won by Trump (Missouri, Arizona, Montana and Nevada). Reproductive rights won 57 percent of the vote in pro-Trump Florida, but the state had a 60 percent threshold for the referendum to pass.
A couple of days after the election this year I wrote that I thought a lot of the anti-incumbent movement these past couple of years had to do with unprocessed trauma from the global pandemic. Here in America we lost over 1.2 million people in a very short time from a deadly disease that humans had never seen before. Within just a few weeks in the spring of 2020, New York City alone had lost more than 15,000 people. All of our medical systems were strained, supplies were unavailable and the whole country, the whole world, was in a state of barely suppressed panic. I don’t think we’ve ever really dealt with exactly what happened and we are now in danger of doing it all over again. President Trump failed miserably at the most important thing he was tasked with doing — reassuring the public. Instead he lied, complained, pushed snake oil cures and worried more about the effects of the pandemic on his re-election prospects than the health of the American people. Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” lays out a terrifying narrative, from taped interviews with Trump himself, of just how inept and dishonest he was.
We survived it.
“The prosecutors will be prosecuted” The Special Prosecutor’s office in the Trump federal cases moved to dismiss both cases today. They say that the DOJ policy against prosecuting a sitting president so that’s that. TV pundits are sayhing that he will write a report which Merrick Garland can make public but that even if he does it probably won’t say much we don’t know because the intelligence community will not have had time to vet the sensitive information. How lucky. Trump and his henchwoman above have made it clear that they plan to seek vengeance against the prosecutors. I see no reason to believe they won’t do it. Trump had his DOJ fire Andrew McCabe on the day before he hit his 20 years in the bureau to deprive him of his pension. (The courts agreed that was unlawful and reinstated the pension.) The IRS audited James Comey and McCabe. He demanded prosecutions against his enemies including Hillary Clinton and was only thwarted because of the so-called “guardrails” that are no longer there. Pam Bondi sure as hell isn’t going to be one.