He really likes him I’ve always thought it didn’t make any sense that Donald Trump kept a copy of Mein Kampf on his nightstand because he doesn’t read. (He later said it was a book of Hitler’s speeches given to him by a friend.) I do think someone has told him that Hitler built the Autobahn which is why he thinks he’s just great: Huffington Post: John Kelly, Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, discussed the former president’s apparent dictatorial aspirations for a new book by CNN’s Jim Sciutto. “My theory on why he likes the dictators so much is that’s who he is,” Kelly said, according to an article published Monday about the forthcoming book by the CNN anchor and chief national security analyst. Kelly told Sciutto, “Every incoming president is shocked that they actually have so little power without going to the Congress, which is a good thing. It’s Civics 101, separation of powers, three equal branches of government.” “But in his case, he was shocked that he didn’t have dictatorial-type powers to send U.S.
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MAGA purges the RNC “The RNC is entering the 2024 election with a third of the Democratic National Committee’s reserves,” writes David Graham in The Atlantic. Graham noted last month that the Republican National Committee has ceased functioning as a political party. Today, it operates as another arm of the Trump Organization, now with loyalist Michael Whatley, immediate past chair of the North Carolina GOP installed as chair, and Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that “with the political equivalent of shock and awe,” Team Trump has begun a purge of the RNC staff. “The senior leadership has been almost entirely replaced or reassigned, while dozens of lower-ranking officials including state directors were either fired or told to reapply for their jobs.” The RNC is now eating its own. Given the RNC’s years of electoral losses post-2016, clearing out the dead wood makes sense, Graham writes, and presidential nominees typically take control of the party.
Chris Hayes makes the case for Biden recovery “These are just the facts,” Chris Hayes argued Tuesday night. In the wake of the pandemic inflation spike, I’ve experimented with store brands. Some are better than others. But many are just as good as the higher-priced, better-shelf-placement, name brands. Gas has come down to about $3/gal. Eggs are no longer $5/dozen. But that breakfast cereal I used to buy at about $3.69 a box is now about $6.39 and not budging. So, nope. You can’t eat GDP charts or statistics. And those persistently higher food prices are in your face each week. That makes it a harder sell for President Joe Biden that the economy has recovered under his administration. Even if it has. And it has. Chris Hayes made a valiant stab at making that case on Tuesday evening with a series of massive charts. Behold. Wages are up, and disposable income. Even if it doesn’t feel like it at the grocery store. The consumer price index is better “than any of our peer countries,” Hayes points out. “They would all trade places to be us.” View the segment below.
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.
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…