Good news, bad news this morning First, good news courtesy of E.J. Dionne. Conservatives (with the most clout) have abandoned their opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. Why? They won’t admit it, but they caught that car and lost that fight: After gyrating from one position to another, Donald Trump simply gave up on being a pro-life candidate. The states, he said, would settle the issue, and he didn’t give a damn how they did it. The Republican Party followed along, drastically weakening the antiabortion provisions in its platform because it recognized that opposing reproductive rights after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was an electoral loser. And it is. Abortion rights prevailed in 7 out of 10 states where voters had a choice this year — in three carried by Vice President Kamala Harris (New York, Maryland and Colorado) but also in four won by Trump (Missouri, Arizona, Montana and Nevada). Reproductive rights won 57 percent of the vote in pro-Trump Florida, but the state had a 60 percent threshold for the referendum to pass.
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A couple of days after the election this year I wrote that I thought a lot of the anti-incumbent movement these past couple of years had to do with unprocessed trauma from the global pandemic. Here in America we lost over 1.2 million people in a very short time from a deadly disease that humans had never seen before. Within just a few weeks in the spring of 2020, New York City alone had lost more than 15,000 people. All of our medical systems were strained, supplies were unavailable and the whole country, the whole world, was in a state of barely suppressed panic. I don’t think we’ve ever really dealt with exactly what happened and we are now in danger of doing it all over again. President Trump failed miserably at the most important thing he was tasked with doing — reassuring the public. Instead he lied, complained, pushed snake oil cures and worried more about the effects of the pandemic on his re-election prospects than the health of the American people. Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” lays out a terrifying narrative, from taped interviews with Trump himself, of just how inept and dishonest he was.
We survived it.
“The prosecutors will be prosecuted” The Special Prosecutor’s office in the Trump federal cases moved to dismiss both cases today. They say that the DOJ policy against prosecuting a sitting president so that’s that. TV pundits are sayhing that he will write a report which Merrick Garland can make public but that even if he does it probably won’t say much we don’t know because the intelligence community will not have had time to vet the sensitive information. How lucky. Trump and his henchwoman above have made it clear that they plan to seek vengeance against the prosecutors. I see no reason to believe they won’t do it. Trump had his DOJ fire Andrew McCabe on the day before he hit his 20 years in the bureau to deprive him of his pension. (The courts agreed that was unlawful and reinstated the pension.) The IRS audited James Comey and McCabe. He demanded prosecutions against his enemies including Hillary Clinton and was only thwarted because of the so-called “guardrails” that are no longer there. Pam Bondi sure as hell isn’t going to be one.
This is what happens when people think politics is just another Reality TV Show and they were just voting someone off the island. I don’t know who people think will be compelled to do these jobs that nobody wants to do. But these are the same people who think slavery was no biggie so perhaps prison labor? What else can they do? Otherwise, wages are going to have to go up if there’s a labor shortage. That’s how this works. Housing costs are already too high for most people. Good plan, Republicans. Excellent.
Via CNN: “Tariffs can’t be inflationary because if the price of one thing goes up, unless you give people more money, then they have less money to spend on the other thing, so there is no inflation.” As James Fallows explained: This is from the guy who is supposedly “the smart one” in the new Trump lineup. To spell this out: By the “logic” of future Treasury Secretary, by definition NOTHING can ever be inflationary. Gas goes to $15, you just spend less on … eggs. So it’s no biggie? It appears that Besset believes in the creed of Milton Friedman that “inflation” can only happen because of increases in the money supply. Ok. But that assumes that when prices go up from these tariffs, people will understand that it isn’t inflation so they will happily stop spending money on the things they want and simply substitute for things they don’t want. Good luck with that. If there’s one thing we have learned over the past couple of years it’s that people are freaked out by price hikes, period. I don’t think anyone’s going to care whether that fits the academic definition of inflation.
Brian Stelter has the story: Elon Musk has called MSNBC “the utter scum of the Earth.” He has said the channel “peddles puerile propaganda.” Just a few days ago he said, “MSNBC is going down.” And now he is posting memes about buying the channel. Conventional wisdom holds that Musk — the world’s richest man and key Donald Trump ally — and his friends are just joking. But Musk’s posts are adding to the anxiety that MSNBC staffers are feeling about the reelection of Donald Trump and the recently announced spinoff of Comcast’s cable channels. I spent Sunday on the phone with sources to gauge what might be going on. I learned that more than one benevolent billionaire with liberal bonafides has already reached out to acquaintances at MSNBC to express interest in buying the cable channel. The inbound interest was reassuring, one of the sources said, since it showed that oppositional figures like Musk (who famously bought Twitter to blow it up) would not be the only potential suitors.
I’m just going to leave this here. If you have a few minutes, listen to Project 2025 author Russell Vought, Trump’s budget chief, talk about what he plans to do in the new administration. He’s not just a faceless bureaucrat. He’s got a vision. A Christian Nationalist vision.
Jamelle Bouie sent this along in his newsletter today and I thought is was perfect for the moment: Most Americans who know of Frederick Douglass know that he lived to see the destruction of chattel slavery and the liberation of Black Americans from the despotism of human bondage. Less well known is the fact that Douglass would also live long enough to see the slave stand free, stand a brief moment in the sun, and move back again toward slavery, to paraphrase W.E.B. Du Bois in his book “Black Reconstruction.” Douglass died in 1895 as the counterrevolution to Reconstruction and the agrarian rebellions of the 1880s and 1890s took final shape. In 1890, Mississippi imposed its Jim Crow Constitution. Other states in the South soon followed suit. In 1896, the Supreme Court would affirm “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, a landmark ruling that would stand until 1954, when it was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education. In 1894, at Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington D.C., Douglass delivered the last great speech of his career.
Trump seems to genuinely believe that he can rule the world through tariffs by using them as a cudgel to make foreign countries stop laughing at us. But there’s another reason he loves them. They give him power over American businesses and a massive opportunity for corruption: The sweeping tariffs that President-elect Donald J. Trump imposed in his first term on foreign metals, machinery, clothing and other products were intended to have maximum impact around the world. They sought to shutter foreign factories, rework international supply chains and force companies to make big investments in the United States. But for many businesses, the most important consequences of the tariffs, enacted in 2018 and 2019, unfolded just a few blocks from the White House. In the face of pushback from companies reliant on foreign products, the Trump administration set up a process that allowed them to apply for special exemptions. The stakes were high: An exemption could relieve a company of tariffs as high as 25 percent, potentially giving it a big advantage over competitors.