Chris Hayes has this one right. Nobody should think they have the “one true analysis” of the election or the “one true path” going forward. Shit happens.
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Oh. My. God. When I heard this I thought it was a joke. It is not a joke. Trump nominating Pete Hegseth, Matt Gaetz and Tusli Gabbard is nothing more than a gauntlet thrown in America’s face: “waddaya gonna do about it?” Those on Trump’s enemies list should probably be looking for legal representation right away. Matt Gaetz will have no interest in doing anything but prosecuting them. Update — About those recess appointments: If Johnson and Thune must agree in order to stop Trump from doing this, I think he will do it. There is no universe in which Johnson doesn’t do what Trump wants whether Thune wants to resist or not. Fasten yout seatbelts.
Who’s your daddy? President-elect Donald Trump spoke with his mentor: During the call, which Trump took from his resort in Florida, he advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe, said a person familiar with the call, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. The two men discussed the goal of peace on the European continent and Trump expressed an interest in follow-up conversations to discuss “the resolution of Ukraine’s war soon,” one of the people said. Unlike Trump, Vladimir Putin is in control of himself. He waited to end the call before laughing out loud. Trump kids himself that he’s the world’s greatest dealmaker. What sort of deal might he accept for Putin’s ending his aggression in Ukraine? Half the country? The U.S. exiting NATO? Hardly, Trump’s on the verge of doing the second on his own. He understands how the NATO alliance works the way he understands tariffs. Putin’s got Trump’s number. He had it in Helsinki.
“Who Goes Nazi?” The Niemöller Countdown has started. The Krassenstein Brothers spell it out: BREAKING: Trump will appoint Tom Homan, a Project 2025 architect, as his Border Czar. But don’t worry—he says he won’t separate families; instead, he plans to deport them together. Does this include U.S.-born children of immigrants? Those born in the U.S., who have never even been to countries like El Salvador, will now have to be “deported” there if they want to see their parents again. View on Threads It’s now oh-so familiar. Donald Trump’s xenophobic litany dates from his golden escalator ride in 2015. The mad king doesn’t know the difference between seeking asylum and being committed to one (in Venezuela). So Trump’s incoming administration is poised to purge the country of immigrants. Heads up. They won’t stop there. Journalist Dorothy Thompon knew what she was witnessing as early as 1931. Greg Olear writes about it at his Substack: No American was more vociferously opposed to fascism than the foreign correspondent turned columnist and radio broadcaster Dorothy Thompson.
The New York Review of Books offered a Q&A with this person: In Joseph O’Neill’s first essay in our pages, he warned readers that “the Republican Party enjoyed a mystifying presumption of legitimacy,” contrasted with “the curious timidity of Democrats.” In that instance, he was describing the 2000 presidential election fiasco in Florida, but he has made clear in his subsequent writing to what extent that dynamic has dogged American politics ever since: from an article about Democrats’ failure to win statewide elections—“Their core mission is to practice a ceremonial innocence about the unshakable virtue of American conservatism—and to do so even as the worst, full of passionate intensity, are cleaning their clocks”—to his analysis of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s campaign. “What will they do?” he asked in October. “Stick with the cautious, timid posture we saw at the veep debate, or go on the offensive? It seems extraordinary that this is a question at all.” There’s a lot to it and I don’t agree with all of it.
He’s also a very sensitive guy: And Trump just loves him: Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club has been brimming in the last 48 hours with two kinds of people: those angling for a job in the president-elect’s incoming administration, and those trying to influence him into hiring their picks for the top spots. But the one person who has loomed over it all and has exerted a great deal of influence is Elon Musk, according to multiple sources. The tech billionaire has been seen at the resort in Palm Beach, Florida, almost every day since Trump won the election last week, dining with him on the patio some evenings and hanging out with his family Sunday at the golf course. Musk has been in the room when multiple world leaders have phoned Trump, and he’s weighed in on staffing decisions, with the SpaceX and Tesla CEO even making clear his preference for certain roles. In one instance, Musk was with Trump at Mar-a-Lago when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called to congratulate the president-elect the day after the election, according to a source briefed on the call.
I don’t think Trump will be celebrating suckers and losers day this way over the next four years. What’s in it for him?
“These studies reveal an interesting fault line. While most women get their news from TikTok, most young men get their news from YouTube, X, and Reddit.” You can do all the postmortems in the world but in the end it comes down to that. We are living in separate political realities. Over half of Trump voters say they don’t follow political news at all. It’s hard to say if that’s just because they don’t see Joe Rogan and Youtube as political news or if they genuinely just don’t consume any political news at all. It’s not unlikely that some people just follow what people in their families, workplaces or communities say as much as anything. Those who identify as evangelical Christian probably get a lot of political information from their churches, even though it’s not explicitly identified as that. All it takes is one Fox News junkie or a Rogan fan in any group to influence several people in their orbit.
I have already written about the incumbent rout all over the world theory. I’m persuaded that was probably the main driver of this election. It’s just sad that the Republicans are so far gone that they put up their previous loser, a convicted felon who attempted a coup d’etat, but that’s how we roll here in ‘Murica. We are so exceptional. I think the second point is just obvious. We have never had a woman president and a rank misogynist brute beat the two that we have managed to nominate. The racism is as American as apple pie and you don’t have to be a political scientist to know that it has an effect. But the third reason is something I think we need to explore much further. Our mediaecosystem is in deep, deep trouble and regardless of the macro political influences, we are going to be under threat of this fascist movement. Michael Tomasky at The New Republic wrote a very good piece on this. He notes that people are rightfully stunned that we would elect someone like Trump. Didn’t they know how unfit he is? And why didn’t they? The answer is the right-wing media.
Yes, they mean it “Blinded by the Right,” David Brock’s memoir of his time as a conservative operative contains anecdotes on Grover Norquist, the anti-tax radical (by G.W. Bush-era standards), once considered “field marshal of the Bush plan.” Among them, his fondness for rhetoric like Lenin’s “probe with bayonets, looking for weakness.” Lenin’s portrait hung in Norquist’s Washington living room, Brock writes. And another: “Grover Norquist sent out an invitation to a post election party at his Capitol Hill home. Quoting from the movie Conan the Barbarian, it said: ‘TO CRUSH ENEMIES, SEE THEM DRIVEN BEFORE YOU, AND HEAR THE LAMENTATIONS OF THEIR WOMEN.'” Brock added the all-caps. Norquist was tame by standards of the first Donald Trump administration. That was the Trump who deployed tear gas and rubber bullets outside the White House to clear the streets for a photo-op. His generals convinced him shooting protesters in the legs was uncool. Trump 2.0 really does mean to deport millions.