Donald Trump is very proud of his talent for nicknames. In a recent interview in New Hampshire he explained, “I do a lot of names for people, some people say I’m very good at that.” I suppose that’s true. His followers do seem to love it when he bestows some juvenile nickname on one of his rivals. This seems to be the extent of his “branding” expertise which makes some sense since his success at that was due to him slapping his own name on everything in sight, from meat to ties to con games and buildings. Put a name on it and it sticks, I guess. When he first ran for office his penchant for silly nicknames was jarring but it’s so common now that nobody much notices the fact that he really seems to have lost his touch since the halcyon days of “Li’l Marco” “Pocohontas” and “Lyin’ Ted.” His nickname for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was “Ron DeSanctimonious” or sometimes “Ron DeSanctus” neither of which made much sense. I’m not sure he even knew what the words meant.
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I’m still working on the manuscript, but I just got the proof for the cover for my upcoming book about Southern music, and I’m very pleased with how it turned out. The book, “LARGE TIME: On the Southern Music Beat, … Continue reading
David Rule and Iain de Weymarn Technologies such as distributed ledgers create the possibility of new forms of digital money, whether privately-issued ‘stable coins’, tokenised commercial bank deposits, or central bank digital currencies. Authorities are considering a world where digital money circulates alongside existing forms of money. In the past, the nature of money has often changed. Prior … Continue reading New money, old money
“Journalists seem bored by the biggest story of our lifetimes” Donald “91 Counts” Trump hopes to be reelected president so he can prevent himself from facing justice. Meanwhile, he misuses the justice system’s very due-process features intended to prevent an innocent person from being wrongly convicted to stave off facing a jury of his peers, journalist Mark Jacob tells Greg Sargent. “These are not the actions of an innocent man,” says Jacob, criticizing the press for whitewashing this as politics as usual. Sargent writes: Over the weekend, The New York Times published a news analysis titled, “The Biden-Trump rerun: A nation craving change gets more of the same.” This has become a constant refrain in the press: One of the candidates is running on an explicit set of promises to destroy American democracy, yet the press keeps calling this a “rematch” of 2020, almost as if it’s all a sporting event. Trump “wants to be a fascist dictator of the United States,” and the press treats it like old news, Jacob complains.
A random social media poster: Also, he’s just given himself a new nickname: Honest Don. I need a drink and it’s only 9am.
It’s not benign. It’s dangerous. I’ve been following Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s increasing influence on the American far right for some time as he hosted the likes of former Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson and held CPAC meeting in Budapest. (They’re doing it again in April with Orban once again doing the hosting duties.)He was the darling of a certain faction of the conservative coalition even before Trump won and whose election in 2016 super-charged the “illiberal democracy” ideology here in the US which we now know as MAGA. He likewise hopes to consolidate the European far-right into a MAGA-style movement throughout the continent. Orban CPAC appearance got a thunderous ovation last year and just last week he came to meet with members of the Heritage Foundation which is busily putting together “Project 2025” for the second Trump term. One imagines he had quite a few tips for them. He wrote the book on how to turn a modern country into a repressive autocracy without becoming a full-fledged police state.
Here’s that interview with the former Trump employee. It’s a doozy: It’s only Monday…
Trump starts eating his own First they came for, etc. (Politico): Donald Trump’s newly installed leadership team at the Republican National Committee on Monday began the process of pushing out dozens of officials, according to two people close to the Trump campaign and the RNC. All told, the expectation is that more than 60 RNC staffers who work across the political, communications and data departments will be let go. Those being asked to resign include five members of the senior staff, though the names were not made public. Additionally, some vendor contracts are expected to be cut. In a letter to some political and data staff, Sean Cairncross, the RNC’s new chief operating officer, said that the new committee leadership was “in the process of evaluating the organization and staff to ensure the building is aligned” with its vision. “During this process, certain staff are being asked to resign and reapply for a position on the team.” The overhaul is aimed at cutting, what one of the people described as, “bureaucracy” at the RNC.
Brian Beutler had a keen insight in his newsletter today (you can subscribe here) into what’s driving some of Trump’s decisions right now and it seems pretty obvious to me that he is right. Trump is desperate for money and he is open for business, even on Social Security and Medicare which is extremely risky for him: Trump appeared on CNBC Monday—his first mainstream or quasi-mainstream interview in many weeks—and, when prodded over whether he’d reconsidered his position on entitlements, said he will indeed consider cutting the country’s two big retirement programs for seniors. Just like a fusty old Republican. “So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements,” Trump said. “There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do,” he added, before lapsing into blather. If you’re deep in the weeds on this stuff or a certain kind of know-it-all you can argue there’s nothing new here.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont on CBS urged his supporters to vote for President Biden despite the widespread opposition among them to Biden’s continued backing of Israel. “The fight continues to change Biden’s policy in Gaza, but the contrast between Biden and Trump is day and night,” he said. “The election of Trump would be a disaster for this country and, in my view, the world.” I agree with that. It’s both. Apparently, this needs to be said too: Of course Hamas is not a progressive organization. It’s a political organization and you may agree with some of its aims. But it’s also an authoritarian, fundamentalist Islamic group dedicated to violence. Fundamentalist religious organizations are by definition not progressive. I can’t believe that anyone would think they are. Biden is moving on Gaza. Probably not enough but he is moving. Sanders is right. It’s fine to protest (although I think “genocide Joe” is pretty crude and not exactly accurate, “genocide Bibi maybe.) But if you care about Gaza you have to do everything you can to make sure Biden is re-elected.