Trump is an ass Part DLXXXIV: According to the Trump-friendly cable news channel, Trudeau’s visit to Trump’s Florida home had the Canadian playing timid defense. Trump’s threat to impose sweeping tariffs on imports from Canada, the Fox report suggested, prompted a complaint from Trudeau that such a move would “kill the Canadian economy completely.” Trump offered that maybe Canada could just become a U.S. state, which prompted Trudeau to “laugh nervously,” Fox reported. That part’s probably accurate. When a leader who has repeatedly expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin starts coveting your nation’s land, it’s fair to be a bit worried. Trump’s suggestion to Trudeau was that he could become governor of this new state of Canada. When someone else present suggested that this would mean adding a state that would probably vote Democratic, Trump submitted that Canada could be annexed as two states: one conservative, one liberal. Coming from the guy who offerened to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland, I wouldn’t laugh too hard. Orange Julius Caesar is feeling his oats.
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Rolling Stone reports that Trump is NOT HAPPY that he’s not getting to wet his beak on some of the cash that’s been rolling in to an affiliated superpac. (Obviously, he IS wetting his beak with all the others.) “It’s my fucking money!” the 2024 Republican presidential frontrunner privately vented in October, referring to an alleged sum in the tens of millions of dollars, a source with direct knowledge of the matter tells Rolling Stone. Trump wasn’t talking about a business deal. Rather, he’s been grumbling about money donated to a think tank his former staffers and allies founded in 2021 to “advance the America First agenda.” For several months now, according to three people with knowledge of the situation, the former president has complained to an array of confidants and Republicans about the millions raised by the America First Policy Institute, a MAGAfied think tank launched near the start of his post-presidency.
Trump is certainly the most vindictive of all people in political life but he is not alone. Most of Trump’s picks have expressed a thirst for vengeance as well, including the failed AG nominee and Kash Patel, (I wrote about him here.) [T]here are at least eight other Trump choices for senior government posts who have made clear their desire to get rid of, target and even prosecute the undesirables, from attorney general to secretary of state to staffers set to work in the White House. […] Gaetz’s replacement as the pick for attorney general, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi (R), made similar if less-pitched comments last year on Fox News. She said that when Trump reclaimed office, “you know what’s going to happen: The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated. Because the deep state, last — first term for President Trump, they were hiding in the shadows. “But now, they have a spotlight on them, and they can all be investigated, and the House needs to be cleaned out.
A Trumpist feature, not a bug It is no secret by now that patriarchy will not go quietly, as Digby noted on Tuesday, calling it “the oldest organizing principle in human history.” There are some very deep forces at work in our changing world, many of which refuse to change. Vigorously. People I’ve called rump royalists never bought into the Declaration’s flowery prose about people being “created equal.” It’s surprising that more don’t do spit-takes at its very mention. They would just as soon see the return of feudalism if they could craft a more consumer-friendly version consistent with global consumer capitalism. (They’re working on it.) Misogyny, promimently on display in Trump 2.0 cabinet picks, is one facet of that patriarchal organizing principle. Consistent with both is the elevation to the cabinet of what Greg Sargent dubs “a Murderer’s Row of Billionaires.” By one count, there are eight among Trump’s picks so far. Sargent discusses the takeover of the White House by the ultra-wealthy with Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Compared to whom? Gen Zers have grown up amidst endless economic and political crises — fallout from September 11, the financial collapse of 2008, the Great Recession, the Covid-9 pandemic, January 6, etc. — that led to a grimmer view of their futures. Axios reports that their struggles have pushed them right while setting impossibly high expectations for financial security: Catch up quick: Financial services company Empower surveyed more than 2,200 Americans in September and the Gen Z respondents — born between 1997 and 2012 — said they would need to make more than $587,000 a year to be “financially successful.” That’s three to six times the amount reported by other age groups surveyed, and almost nine times the average U.S. salary tracked by the Social Security Administration. So what’s going on here? Costs are certainly up, especially housing costs. People living with their parents into their late 20s or needing rommates just to get by certainly influences one’s sense of economic stability. But the statement above about “influencers” stands out.
Politico published a fatuous piece today exhorting Democrats to stay with Elon’s hellhole because … well, I guess they think that hapless lefties battling an onslaught of Nazis and other assorted assholes all day will somehow convert people to their cause? Apparently, some Democrats I otherwise respect think this is true as well. Two days after the election, Patrick Dillon, a longtime Democratic strategist and current Biden administration official, announced on X that he was leaving the platform… Dillon, who currently serves as adviser to Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, is of course not alone. You may well have seen it in your timelines already: a growing drumbeat of Democrats and left-leaning types announcing why they’re leaving the platform. In just the few weeks since the election, that has included former CNN anchor Don Lemon, basketball star LeBron James, author Stephen King, actress Jamie Lee Curtis and MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace. But the situation is a bit more complicated for Democratic lawmakers, strategists and the like who might have come to dislike X but have also grown to depend on it to shape minds and win elections.
I don’t know about you but that does not look good to me. In fact, I think this, from about 1965, actually looks better: But it’s not all aboutthe food right? It’s about the company:
Politico is really on a roll today: Two members of Congress offered very different views Sunday morning of whether the Justice Department and FBI have been biased against Republicans in recent years. In consecutive appearances on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) discussed President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Kash Patel to lead the FBI. The agency is now led by Chris Wray, a previous Trump appointee whose term has yet to expire, but who will presumably be fired if he doesn’t resign. “Obviously, in recent years, we have seen the FBI and the Department of Justice weaponize in a way that it has become completely political,” Lawler said in his interview, also discussing Trump’s pick of Pam Bondi to be attorney general. “That’s not good for the American people. It’s not good for our system of justice. The lack of confidence that Americans have in the Department of Justice and the FBI is terrible.” Though Trump talked about “retribution” during the 2024 campaign, Lawler said he believed “revenge” was not the order of the day.
I used to see these t-shirts and hats that said “Free Melania” and I wondered why anyone would think she was being held prisoner. She didn’t care for the routine of being First Lady and has a separate life from Donald. But she is clearly one of them. Just another rich, creepy weirdo. So, apparently, is Cheryl Hines: Seriously, this is what it’s come to: Actress Cheryl Hines, the wife of former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., posted a video promoting her beauty products featuring her husband showering half-naked in the background… Hines held up a bottle of spray and a tin of body cream as she covered most of Kennedy, who President-elect Trump nominated to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). 49% of America wanted a reality show instead of politics. It looks like they’re getting exactly what they asked for.
Now you see it, now you don’t Before the 2024 election itself disappears down the memory hole, take a moment to consider the disappearance of voter fraud as a campaign issue. Democrats would cheat. There would be massive corruption in the election. Migrants Democrats were importing through Joe Biden’s open southern borders would tip the scales for Kamala Harris. Nearly 9 in 10 Trump voters believed voter fraud would play a major role in 2024. Etc. Then Donald Trump won. Voter fraud vanished like ground fog at sunrise. It was morning in MAGAstan. Politico and Morning Consult ran a poll: In polling just days before the election, Trump supporters expressed little confidence in the election outcome, with a whopping 87 percent substantially or somewhat agreeing with the statement that voter fraud was a “serious issue” that could determine the outcome of the election. Among Harris supporters, roughly half expressed similar worries. That partisan divide disappeared after Election Day. Shocked? Views on the economy flipped as well, considered a “very important” issue ahead of Nov.