Welcome Chaos Games With so much chaos this morning in Washington, D.C., I don’t know where to focus. Government shutdown looms, blares CNN unless that’s changed since I last hit Refresh. Kate Riga at TPM wonders just where “on the spectrum of incompetence to malice” the incoming Trump II administration will land. It appears Donald Trump has ceded the presidency to, in NewsHoundEllen’s view, a “likely illegal immigrant.“ David Rothkopf wonders how a great nation functions with three presidents at once. The official president is “currently MIA. Our president-elect has been acting since the first week of November like he has already taken office, meanwhile, but has also effectively appointed a shadow president in Elon Musk, who appears to be the one of the three with the most clout right now.” The rule of law is going on holiday except for punishing them what’s done Trump wrong: U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan says she has often reassured police officers traumatized by the violence of Jan.
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For Republicans, for Democrats, for the republic In yesterday’s Starting The Steal, we discussed the Republican legal challenge to losing the North Carolina state Supreme Court race in November. But today consider the national implications. Even a Republican gets it (sort of). Andrew Dunn of Longleaf Politics believes it a bad idea for Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin to fight his loss all the way to the GOP-controlled state Supreme Court he’s desperate to join. Republicans want to throw out 60,000 votes “on technicalities in voter registration.” Read more about that here and here. “I’m not sure who’s leading the push here — but it needs to end now,” writes Dunn: If the Supreme Court sides with Griffin, the fallout will be immediate and brutal. This isn’t just bad optics; it’s potentially a credibility-shattering disaster for the court, the party, and conservatism in North Carolina. Overnight, this becomes a national story about Republicans “stealing” a Supreme Court seat. The allegation would be impossible to defend against. And it wouldn’t end there.
Our new president is a different kind of MAGAmaniac Back in 2016, the whole country was left in shock when celebrity businessman Donald Trump managed to take over the Republican Party and win the presidential election. At the time there was quite a bit of resistance within the GOP establishment due to the fact that Trump had not run as an ordinary conservative but rather as a populist demagogue and they had no idea that their voters were so hungry for his message. Gone were all the usual paeans to small government and family values and even his strong advocacy for expanding the military was coupled with a discordant isolationist stance that harkened back to the pre-WWII America First movement. (Trump had no idea about that history — he thought he came up with it himself.) However he was all for tax cuts for the wealthy, which is the lifeblood of the Republican party. And he was reflexively hostile to anything his predecessor Barack Obama ever did which meant that he was willing to reverse much of the progress that had been made in the previous eight years, pleasing Republicans to no end.
And yet he’ll probably die being hated because he was old Those numbers are the envy of the world. The US under Joe Biden and the Democrats engineered a soft landing from a global economic catastrophe. I wonder if anyone will ever take the chance again. Doing the right thing turned out to be politically suicidal. Just as he did last time and he’ll seize credit for it. If you ever thought life was fair, think again. By the way, Democrats are gloomy about the economy, and Republicans are optimistic. I don’t think it’s just pure partisanship on the Dems part. They’re worried about the tariffs, tax cuts and deportation which isn’t irrational. If Trump carries out his plan the risk of killing this economy is very, very high. Of course, he’ll just blame the Democrats so… Here’s his latest: Biden is a ghost and the Democrats are nowhere to be found. Everyone knows it’s a GOP shitshow show. Let’s hope most people see the truth.
Superstition reigns: A group of high-level managers at the Louisiana Department of Health walked into a Nov. 14 meeting in Baton Rouge expecting to talk about outreach and community events. Instead, they were told by an assistant secretary in the department and another official that department leadership had a new policy: Advertising or otherwise promoting the COVID, influenza or mpox vaccines, an established practice there — and at most other public health entities in the U.S. — must stop. NPR has confirmed the policy was discussed at this meeting, and at two other meetings held within the department’s Office of Public Health, on Oct. 3 and Nov. 21, through interviews with four employees at the Department of Health, which employs more than 6,500 people and is the state’s largest agency. According to the employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they fear losing their jobs or other forms of retaliation, the policy would be implemented quietly and would not be put in writing.
This piece in The Atlantic takes a look at the election results with a fresh eye: Five days after last month’s election, Senator Chris Murphy rendered a damning verdict on his party’s performance. “That was a cataclysm,” the Connecticut Democrat wrote on X. “Electoral map wipeout.” Donald Trump had won both the popular vote and the biggest Electoral College victory—312 to 226—for any Republican since 1988; Democrats had lost their Senate majority and appeared unlikely to retake the House. The Democratic Party had lost touch with far too many American voters, Murphy concluded: “We are beyond small fixes.” Other prominent Democrats saw a similarly sweeping repudiation of the party’s brand. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Senator Bernie Sanders wrote in a statement issued less than 24 hours after the polls closed. At the time of those reactions, millions of votes had yet to be counted, and several of the nation’s closest House races remained uncalled.
“A moment of genuine madness.” — MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Max: Thunderdome. How do I get in there?Aunty Entity: That’s easy. Pick a fight! Two important points this morning. First, like it or not, the public wants Thunderdome. The press covers Thunderdome. Thunderdome draws eyeballs in this attention economy. Again, and again and again: How many Rocky movies did Stallone make? Brian Beutler responds both to ABC’s capitulation to Trump and congressional Democrats’ preference for Rep. Gerry Connolly over progressive star AOC for top Oversight Committee post. “Democrats should imagine how Fox News would fill its airtime if this were a Democratic transition, and then speak and react as if they were creating soundbites for a big, aligned, signal-boosting media company,” Beutler writes. “Democrats should be unashamed to fight [Trump]. In this conservative-dominated media environment? Attract eyeballs, for God’s sake! Pick a fight!
Advice for our times Donald Trump wants to create spectacles (Thunderdome), Josh Marshall observes. His professional wrestling instincts are not a mere joke. “That whole bombast is not only made to make people feel afraid, particularly the people they’re threatening directly, but to create this aura of power and uncheckable power and to knock people back on their heels and make them feel disoriented, demoralized, and all those things,” Marshall tells Greg Sargent’s Daily Blast podcast: It’s typical Trump to threaten 10 things a day. And his opponents, his enemies are feeling overwhelmed with all the different threats, and he doesn’t actually have to do anything. So it is really important for people both to be prepared for him to do all sorts of crazy stuff, but also to be attuned to that spectacle, which is his greatest power. Trump’s goal is an America cowed, Marshall says. Maybe he jails people. Maybe he just threatens. Maybe be actually does bring lawsuits, launch investigations. He doesn’t need to follow through on many for people to cower behind silence.
President-elect Trump held his first press conference since the election this week and seemed surprised that he is suddenly so popular with all the wealthy business titans who are making the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago like they’re the wise men and he’s the baby Jesus. He actually seemed to be a bit befuddled by his new found popularity among his billionaire pals: He’s not wrong. In his first term it was clear that political and business establishment leaders wanted nothing to do with him. And the media elites who are now elbowing each other out of the way to sit next to him and his major domo Elon Musk at the Mar-a-Lago dining table were openly hostile. A lot of this love coming from the moneyed elite is easy to understand. After all, he promised to eliminate regulation and give them all tax cuts, so what’s not to like? But it’s more than that. They all seem to be downright giddy at the prospect of getting up close and personal with the once and future president. It’s a far cry from the way they reacted during Trump’s first term, particularly among the media moguls.
She was not fired, she quit. And she quit at least partially because she didn’t approve of the Trump bootlicking. It’s much more complicated than that, of course. The government is falling apart for all the same reasons all the governments everywhere are falling apart and she’s in opposition to her former ally Trudeau on a number of issues. Chrystia Freeland used to be a journalist and a good one. She’s going to run for Prime Minister and I hope she wins. She will not put up with Trump’s bullshit. Meanwhile, Trump’s continuing on because he has the mind of a 12 year old bully: He’s trolling, of course. But it also illuminates how idiotically he sees the trade issue. If we buy things from Canada he sees that as a subsidy. Apparently all the goods we are buying are worth nothing? It’s right up there with his insistence that NATO has to pay us “dues” like some Florida fat cat Mar-a-Lago member. It’s so embarrassingly stupid I don’t even know how to explain it. I realize that by this time most people probably think this silly trolling stuff doesn’t matter and really don’t want to hear about it.