Snyder in The New Yorker Trump’s skills and talents go unrecognized when we see him as a conventional candidate—a person who seeks to explain policies that might improve lives, or who works to create the appearance of empathy. Yet this is our shortcoming more than his. Trump has always been a presence, not an absence: the presence of fascism. What does this mean? When the Soviets called their enemies “fascists,” they turned the word into a meaningless insult. Putinist Russia has preserved the habit: a “fascist” is anyone who opposes the wishes of a Russian dictator. So Ukrainians defending their country from Russian invaders are “fascists.” This is a trick that Trump has copied. He, like Vladimir Putin, refers to his enemies as “fascists,” with no ideological significance at all. It is simply a term of opprobrium. Putin and Trump are both, in fact, fascists. And their use of the word, though meant to confuse, reminds us of one of fascism’s essential characteristics. A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meanings. He does not serve the language; the language serves him.
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A marketing problem? Really? “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them,” closed out each episode of a police procedural from the mid-twentieth century. It also approximates the hot takes this week and in coming months on why Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election to a fascism-curious, [your list of Donald Trump’s crimes and character flaws here], in obvious mental decline, etc. The world now faces a period of disruption to rival post-September 11 wars, the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a fresh land war in Europe. And maybe worse. The twenty-first century has been nothing if not disruption. Trump fosters it. He keeps rivals off balance with it and blames Others for it. MAGA finds its scapegoats primarily among immigrants but doesn’t limit itself to them. Where pundits find theirs for what happened on Tuesday confounds me. As after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016, the usual suspects will fall back on their usual simplistic answers. Remember “economic anxiety“?
Now that we’ve had a chance to catch our breath a little bit and get through the grieving process over last Tuesday’s election, the inevitable recriminations have begun in earnest. Social media is awash with accusations against the Biden administration, the Harris campaign, the left, the right and everything in between. The Democrats are out of touch with Real America, they don’t know how to talk to Latinos, men, young voters, anyone really except college educated women. Was it an expression of deep desire for fascism, misogyny and racism or a simple admiration for the reality show ringmaster who tells them what they want to hear? I suspect we will spend many years dissecting what happened that put Donald Trump back inthe White House this year. There is no doubt a kernal of truth in much of what people are saying. Any losing team has to look at their game plan and question where they went wrong.
Get ready for the deportation grift. It’s going to be epic: President-elect Donald Trump told NBC News on Thursday that one of his first priorities upon taking office in January would be to make the border “strong and powerful.” When questioned about his campaign promise of mass deportations, Trump said his administration would have “no choice” but to carry them out. Trump said he considers his sweeping victory over Vice President Kamala Harris a mandate “to bring common sense” to the country. “We obviously have to make the border strong and powerful and, and we have to — at the same time, we want people to come into our country,” he said. “And you know, I’m not somebody that says, ‘No, you can’t come in.’ We want people to come in.” As a candidate, Trump had repeatedly vowed to carry out the “largest deportation effort in American history.” Asked about the cost of his plan, he said, “It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not — really, we have no choice.
Watch what they watch, hear what they hear Brian Beutler wrote an excellent piece about the Democratic Party and the working class that you should read in its entirety. I think his analysis of the dysfunctional relationship is spot on. But the piece is called “Democrats PLEASE Try To Fix This Problem — If they ignore the media environment in their 2024 post-mortems, it will be the first major error of the second Trump era” and this is why: There may be much for liberals to learn walking in the shoes of working class or rural midwesterners, but few Democratic officials would find the experience shocking. They know, at least on an intellectual level, all the ways working class life can be a slog. The talking points they write don’t misdescribe the struggle.
It seems so: The most chilling moment of the election night carnage came a little before 1 a.m. ET. It wasn’t yet confirmed that Donald Trump would win, but the writing was on the wall. Assessing the newly transformed MAGA-friendly political landscape, the pro-Trump lobbyist and political commentator David Urban said on CNN: “Democracy is a luxury when you can’t pay your bills.” Democracy as a luxury. Democracy in good times only. Democracy when it suits you. This mindset – a precursor to fascist regimes in other countries – is why it feels like a white-wash to ascribe Trump’s victory to economic issues. It feels like a safe, socially acceptable reason to cite for rejecting Kamala Harris and the Biden baggage she carried. It’s easy for political reporters and TV commentators to slip into gentle analysis of the election results by focusing on the economic factors (to the exclusion of misogyny, racism, and host of other drives of the electorate). But it doesn’t necessarily follow that Biden-era inflation and post-pandemic backlash means jettisoning democracy. That’s a choice.
George Conway responded: Bill is right There are plenty of micro-explanations and micro-excuses for what happened in the presidential election of 2024. And on the margins, any number of them—indeed, almost certainly, a combination of them—made the difference. But their impact was only on the margins. Don’t get me wrong—small margins and the factors that move them do matter, a lot, in elections—particularly in America in the 21st century. They deserve careful analysis, but only to a point. For the bottom line is that these considerations are not what we must focus on first and foremost today. What deserves the lion’s share of our attention are the facts that a major political party could have even considered nominating Trump despite his manifest criminality, moral depravity, psychological derangement, and cognitive deficiencies and deterioration—and that nearly half the country would have voted for him no matter what he did or said and no matter whom he had run against. That was the ultimate problem in this election, and remains so. We suffer from a deep sickness in our national polity.
For all the childless cat ladies a little ray of sunshine. It’s from last January but it illustrates that humans aren’t all bad: BLASDELL, N.Y. — Ten Lives Club has now received over $270,000 in donations in support of Buffalo Bills kicker Tyler Bass, and the organization shared that every dollar will be going right back to saving more cats. “I was crying on the phone today, I just can’t believe it,” said Ten Lives Club Public Relations Manager, Kimberly LaRussa. “I’m just so happy for the cats.” These kittens were born the day before the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills playoff game and have never known a day without Tyler Bass helping them out. These three kittens have now watched over $270,000 in donations come in since Monday night. “We are all speechless at Ten Lives Club and can’t believe this is happening,” Kimberly said. “I hope it brings him a smile to know how many cats he is saving right now,” Kimberly said. Kimberly shared this has been their largest amount ever received by far, topping even their largest fundraiser ten times over.
A Public Service Pronouncement Please don’t spread conspiracy fantasies about the election, okay? TikTok and X are rocking with these two videos below (at least). They are — let’s not be polite about it — bullshit. Before I even debunk them, let’s be clear again: This is bullshit, a live-fire exercise in a little bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing. The TikToks allege that these people looked up their ballot status on Vote dor org and found nothing: “Please go check your ballot status. I just checked mine and my vote did not count! ” Look, I’ve been doing election work a long time. What typical voters don’t know about the election process could fill libraries. Item #1: The video above has (of now) 1.2M engagements and 2k comments on TikTok, and 206k views on X. Her followup video notes that she’s in Washington state (voting there is virtually all by mail). She reports that her ballot status shows only “ballot mailed” and “ballot received, but not that it’s reviewed and accepted. “As far as I am concerned, no. It doesn’t mean that it’s accepted,” says thewindwitch.
Planting a flag in red America If you don’t show up to play, you forfeit. Step into many fast food joints in rural America and the TV is likely tuned to Fox News. Drive across rural America east and west and radio is dominated by RW talk. Democrats have let this situation stand for years without responding. Will they this time? Ryan Cooper argues that so-called “liberal media” was in the tank for Donald Trump. A lot of factors contributed to Donald Trump’s win, he writes: But the information environment—the combination of traditional journalism, social media, party propaganda, and so on—is preposterously biased and inadequate. Trump brushed aside any of about a thousand scandals that would have sunk any previous politician. Democrats need to take a long, hard look at what their information strategy should be, and more importantly, how their messaging can be reliably and consistently put in front of voters. Cooper recommends that “Democrats need a party publication—something to bypass the traditional media and deliver progressive messaging directly.” Fine idea. Not going to happen.