Trump’s describing his ultimately abandoned pursuit of the Reform Party’s presidential nomination in 2000: Trump had inked a deal with Tony Robbins, the frighteningly upbeat motivational speaker, by which Robbins would pay Trump $1 million to give ten speeches at his seminars around the country. Crucially, Trump had timed his political stops to coincide with Robbins’ seminars, so that he was “making a lot of money” on those campaign stops. “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it,” Trump said. … That was then, this is now: I’m speechless. Tom has more below…
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Two sides of the same bitcoin… David Corn’s very skillful lede to his new piece: On Monday, the three wealthiest men in the world—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—are scheduled to be at the Capitol as honored guests for Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, seated where four years ago Christian nationalists, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, militia members, and other extremists, incited by his brazen lies about the 2020 election, violently attacked Congress to overturn American democracy and keep Trump in power. This transition—from brownshirts to billionaires—encapsulates what has gone wrong. It is a clear signal that the United States is broken. With the news that Trump launched that new shitcoin and has made at least $25 billion overnight, I feel very hopeless today. This is what it’s come to. Corn’s piece is very good. But gird yourself.
Are they all like this??? From Gizmodo: Marc Andreessen, the billionaire tech investor who co-founded Netscape, has recently been making the rounds on various podcasts to talk about how the Democrats were so very mean to him and forced him to become a supporter of Donald Trump. Andreessen’s obnoxious whining wouldn’t otherwise be notable, given how many guys in the tech industry have blamed backlash against “wokeness” on their support for the MAGA movement. But a new interview released by the New York Times on Friday is interesting, if only because the Times cleaned up its own transcript to make Andreessen sound like less of an idiot. Andreessen said that Hillary Clinton was really running the government between 2017 and 2021. The Times claimed he misspoke but as you read further it’s clear that he’s talking about some conspiratorial deep state BS about which either the Times is unaware or they decided to ignore. But even if Andreessen did misspeak he still sounds like a sophomoric fool, much like the rest of these tech bros who all seem to be in the grip of serious cases of arrested development.
Great Googamooga How the hell did we survive four years of this deeply insecure man-child once? How did Americans get crazy enough to give this unstable knot of personality defects four more years in the White House instead of in jail? Anne Applebaum’s account of her visit to Denmark has me waggling my head like a Lonney Tunes character. She writes that “a Danish prime minister cannot sell Greenland any more than an American president can sell Florida.” And yet Donald Trump apparently called Copenhagen on Wednesday and demanded Mette Frederiksen do a real estate deal with him. It’s Kafkaesque. Trump the Transactional seems to have generated a political crisis in Scandinavia even before his inauguration. “In private discussions, the adjective that was most frequently used to describe the Trump phone call was rough. The verb most frequently used was threaten. The reaction most frequently expressed was confusion,” Applebaum writes. It’s not as if anything Trump might want the U.S. to do in Greenland is not already doable. A former Danish diplomat related a story from 1957.
People who demand better won’t get it from Trump In a Seinfeld episode entitled “The Opposite” from 1994 (before my Gen Z friends were born, sorry), Jerry convinces George Costanza, perennial sad sack, that “if every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.” George tries doing the opposite of what his instincts tell him and his fortunes rapidly turn around. The United States after instituting The New Deal built the greatest middle class the world has ever seen. Then after social and political reforms of the 1960s opened more opportunity to Americans still lagging behind, business interests organized a quiet counterrevolution to do the opposite. The rich got their taxes cut under Ronald Reagan and fat cats got even fatter. Upward mobility stopped. Wages stagnated. President Bill Clinton loosened banking regulations opening the door for mortgage-backed securities and the subprime mortgage crisis. President George W. Bush, the supposed apotheosis of the grandees’ grand designs, cut their taxes even more and the economy crashed, impoverishing average Americans even more.
“MUST FIND THE LEAKER!” Trump posted, decrying the damage to Israel when its Iran attack plans were made public.
The post CIA Leaker of Israel Intel Pleads Guilty Days Before Trump Takes Office appeared first on The Intercept.
We’ve lost a true auteur. This tribute by Kyle Mclaughlin is one of the best I’ve ever read: Forty-two years ago, for reasons beyond my comprehension, David Lynch plucked me out of obscurity to star in his first and last big budget movie. He clearly saw something in me that even I didn’t recognize. I owe my entire career, and life really, to his vision.What I saw in him was an enigmatic and intuitive man with a creative ocean bursting forth inside of him. He was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get to. Our friendship blossomed on Blue Velvet and then Twin Peaks and I always found him to be the most authentically alive person I’d ever met. David was in tune with the universe and his own imagination on a level that seemed to be the best version of human. He was not interested in answers because he understood that questions are the drive that make us who we are. They are our breath. While the world has lost a remarkable artist, l’ve lost a dear friend who imagined a future for me and allowed me to travel in worlds I could never have conceived on my own.
In an age of constitutional hardball In my post below, Michael Steele hammers Democrats for trying to play nice with his former political party. An exasperated Steele says Republicans are “gonna shove those [bipartisan] plowshares up your behind!” The MAGA GOP is playing “constitutional hardball,” clinically defined by Mark Tushnet of Harvard Law School in 2004 as: … political claims and practices – legislative and executive initiatives – that are without much question within the bounds of existing constitutional doctrine and practice but that are nonetheless in some tension with existing pre-constitutional understandings. It is hardball because its practitioners see themselves as playing for keeps in a special kind of way; they believe the stakes of the political controversy their actions provoke are quite high, and that their defeat and their opponents’ victory would be a serious, perhaps permanent setback to the political positions they hold.
For all the media folderol about Donald Trump’s triumphant return to the White House, new polling shows that most Americans are actually feeling pretty meh about the prospects for any of his grandiose plans. The AP Norc poll shows that Trump’s 41% approval rating is only a few points higher than it was when he was ignominiously rejected four years ago and most people don’t have any confidence that he’ll be able to accomplish most of what he’s promised. For a man who erroneously insists that he won a landslide and claims that he’s been given a mandate for massive change, it doesn’t appear that most Americans actually support his agenda (other than eliminating taxes on tips) either: Members of both parties say they want compromise but considering recent history it’s pretty clear that the Republican party simply is no longer organized to do that. They are in the grip of an extremist faction, led by Trump himself, that is immune to any kind of concession. From all the reports coming out of the new Congress nothing has changed on that count.
The worst of the worst rising to the top: Mr. Miller was influential in Mr. Trump’s first term but stands to be exponentially more so this time. He holds the positions of deputy chief of staff, with oversight of domestic policy, and homeland security adviser, which gives him range to coordinate among cabinet agencies. He will be a key legislative strategist and is expected to play an important role in crafting Mr. Trump’s speeches, as he has done since he joined the first Trump campaign in 2016. Most significantly, Mr. Miller will be in charge of Mr. Trump’s signature issue and the one that Mr. Miller has been fixated on since childhood: immigration. And he has been working, in secrecy, to oversee the team drafting the dozens of executive orders that Mr. Trump will sign after he takes office on Jan. 20. “I call Stephen ‘Trump’s brain,’” said Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker who credited Mr. Miller — a private citizen at the time — with helping to rally Republican lawmakers to insert a sweeping border crackdown into a spending bill in 2023. In the four years since Mr. Trump has been out of office, Mr.